Oberlin, one of the colleges I’ve attended, was given a spanking in the far-right Frontpage Magazine. Frontpage’s problem? Oberlin is a left-wing school. Well, duh! In addition, the writer seems really bothered by Oberlin’s acceptance of queers and transsexuals:
At Oberlin, gay faculty wear their homosexuality as a badge of honor, championing their commitment to adding a “queer focus” to their subject matter in their personal biographies, which are displayed on the college’s official website for all to read.
Many of the paid, on-campus speakers at the school in recent years have been gay or transgendered and/or promoted promiscuous sex in some fashion.
My god, students exercise free speech! (Why does FrontPage put free speech in scare quotes?) That some faculty members are gay is acknowledged where all can read it! And they pay on-campus speakers even when those speakers are trans or queer! Oh, the humanity!
The article goes on to be appalled that students at college have sex. I was reminded of a year ago, when certain right-wing bloggers gloated that leftists don’t have any fun. I mean, which would you rather have, wild sex and high living at Oberlin College, or FrontPage Magazine’s spare lifestyle relieved only by anti-queer, anti-trans bigotry disguised as moral superiority?
Meanwhile, the Curmudgeonly Clerk curmudgeons:
What Curmudgeonly misunderstands is that this was a demonstration of safe sex techniques, something that might not come so naturally without instruction. And apparently, students – even the homosexual ones – do learn from the demonstration. As Oberlin student The Bitter Gay Grinch reports, “I was introduced to uses of rubber and other synthetic materials that I didn’t know to exist.”
* * *
I’m sorry to report that I didn’t have loads of sex as a college student (shy, conventionally unattractive folks generally don’t, even at Oberlin), although I certainly had more sex at Oberlin than I did in high school. Still, my (relative) lack of sex seemed to me a grevious injustice (hey, I was 18). Under the circumstances, my friends who talked about having a lot of sex quickly became tiresome.
Even at the time, the people who did have lots of sex seemed to be having a lot of soap opera, as well – the emotional baggage did not fit under the seat. I admit, I took some satisifaction in this where a better person would not have.
In retrospect, I don’t think it matters much; having lots of sex can be a good college experience, like traveling to Rome or taking lots of LSD. But in the long run, the Obies I know who had lots of sex (or at least talked as if they did) don’t seem any happier or wiser than those who didn’t.
* * *
The FrontPage article did raise one sex-related issue that’s of interest even to those of us who aren’t prudes or bigots:
After an alleged staff-on-staff rape outside the 2001 “Drag Ball,” even students protested what they saw as a dismissive attitude on the issue by the administration, which is very protective of the two events. Rather than ban the parties entirely, administrators backed the Student Union’s decision to ban alcohol at the events, under the assumption that those who attend the parties couldn’t legally or morally “consent” to sexual activity if they were drunk.
But it’s not clear that the administration has brushed aside these concerns. The Oberlin Review reports that the organizers have added “peacekeepers” to patrol the event. And, given the number of studies (including FBI statistics and studies by feminists such as Mary Koss) showing a correlation between alcohol and rape, eliminating the alcohol seems like a serious and appropriate response.
Banning popular campus events (and no party at Oberlin is more popular than the drag ball), on the other hand, would be a stupid response. Oberlin students are quite capable of organizing their own parties; it’s better that the party remain above-ground, since the underground version would doubtless include drinking and exclude the peacekeepers.
Finally, even if there are increased calls to the campus rape crisis center following an educational party about safe sex and consent, it doesn’t follow that the party causes rape. It’s plausible, for example, that there are increased calls because the parties succeed in making students more aware of the rape crisis line’s existence.
I’m not saying that Oberlin has necessarily done enough to combat rape on campus. However, I’m not silly enough to think that “banning parties” is a serious anti-rape measure; nor am I convinced that FrontPage would have any concern with rape at all if they weren’t able to use anti-rape concern as a front for homo- and trans- phobia.
Anyhow, I much prefer Oberlin’s “orgies” – emphasizing as they do safe sex, consent and screwing with gender conventions – to the drunken frat house moron-fests that are found on more conventional campuses.
* * *
For more discussion of Oberlin Orgies, check out Begging to Differ, Crescat Sententia (here and again here), The Curmudgeonly Clerk, The Bitter Gay Grinch and Naked House..
“After an alleged staff-on-staff rape outside the 2001 ‘Drag Ball,’ even students protested. . . .”
Not to stereotype or anything (well, okay, that’s exactly what I’m doing), here’s another conservative hallmark: the view of young adults as lazy, self-absorbed, amoral, spoiled children with little grip on the realities of the world. “*Even* students” had a problem with rape? As though finally, after countless travesties, they were reluctantly galvanized into action? Unless the students at Oberlin are a species completely alien to college students as a whole, they probably are engaged in more social and political activism and have higher standards for human behaviour than the population of the state at large.
What group makes up the majority of Take Back the Night marches? Where do those rallies and marches start? When a rape occurred at one of the local liberal-arts colleges here in town, the Colorado College, which was the group protesting that stringent-enough punishment had not been applied to the perpetrator and that enough protections had not been provided by the college for the students? These are individual examples and do not make a convincing case as a whole, but from all the evidence I have seen, college students are more interested in the rights and safety of women than any other group of people except those who have made a career of fighting for those rights.
“*Even* students” my ass. This is just another bias-betraying bolster casually inserted into the article for the benefit of the “Tch– kids these days, I tell you” crowd, and though its message is transmitted entirely by implication, it’s still a bald-faced LIE.
Shouldn’t these winger types be happy that faculty mention their “queer focus” in their personal bios; after all, doesn’t that allow their sons and daughters to avoid contamination by avoiding those classes? Isn’t that “market forces” at work — the holy grail of the rightwing? (Of course, they’re scared out of their wits that the “market forces” will demonstrate an acceptance of those faculty.)
Whoa! Things have really changed since I went to Oberlin! I remember we had some sex-positive speakers on campus, but nothing like what Bitter Gay Grinch describes!
I can’t decide if I would have liked such an event when I was there or not. I still remember the kerfuffle about Breastfest 1987…
I can’t compete with Oberlin. The highlight of my college debauchery in mid-1980’s East Village NYC was shelving library books at Parsons School of Design for my work-study job. Along with such “artsy” photo stories as Teenage Lust (crap) and a profile of the street prostitutes of Bombay-nka-Mumbai (not at all crap), there was the large coffee-table volume of vintage gay-boy-on-motorcycle photos from the 1950s. About a week after myself or some other freshperson (or “Foundation,” as first-year Art-Farts are called, there, cuz’ it sounds so much less… plebian, doncha’ know…) drudge added the required “tattle-tape” to the book spine to defer anyone from stealing it, one of us found the book’s cover, sans the entire book interior, shoved in a dark corner of the stacks. (The tape, having been stuck to the interior of the book-spine, was thus easy to leave behind. All the gay-boy-lovin’ perpetrator had to do was cut the rest of the book away from the cover and– voila !!)
Shamefaced, I took the desecrated cover to my supervisor (Howard Wood, where have you gone ?!) and stammered about the tragedy, half-expecting to be blamed and hit with a nerd-girl-work-study-lech paycheck garnishment or something. My supervisor deftly tossed the cover in his boss’s inbox and shrugged. “Don’t worry, Dear. We have a lot of lonely, lonely people visit us. You’ll get used to it.”
Ahhhh… secular humanist youth, where did it go ?
Considering that Front Page is a Horowitz publication, I wasn’t surprised by the rabidity of the article……anything Horowitz touches has a layer of foam on it.
I think the existence of a place like Oberlin offends those people more than the fact they had a party like the one described – after all Oregon State had a BDSM club as a registered student organization , and the University of Chicago has the infamous Lascivious Costume Ball, a party similar to Oberlin’s, right under the nose of Allan Bloom! Horrors!! I don’t see them criticizing OSU or Chicago…..
Frankly, so long as there’s adequate monitoring for alcohol abuse, drugs, and rape, I don’t give a whit if colleges want to have play parties or SM clubs. Legal sexual activities have the same right as any other activity to have clubs or events recognized by the school.
I’m also intrigued that the people wondering if school resources shouldn’t be used for these activities also feel the same way about divinity schools and campus ministries. Should colleges and universities promote religion, which to me is divisive foolishness that causes most of the world’s geopolitical conflicts?
Change “has” to “had” re Chicago’s Lascivious Costume Ball. Alcohol abuse, not sex, ended that tradition, unfortunately, *before I enrolled there*!
Through the eyes of a Reedie, this is all so tame and boring. “Drag Ball” is it at Oberlin? Puh-leeze. I’m used to Drag Ball preceding the more interesting Fetish Ball, with intricate costumes (use your imagination) and a depp-throat contest, where winner gets a free dildo. And all that pales in comparison to the weekend of debauchery that is Renn Fayre. And this previous statement doesn’t even include any artistic embellishment to get my point across.
Of course, this is coupled with an intensely academically rigorous curriculum meaning that when most Reedies aren’t partying they’re living in the library. Ahhh life.
part of the reason i decided i wanted to go to Oberlin was that they had the “Gay Union” listed as a campus organization, right there in their admissions catalogue! I’m pretty straight, but I figured that any school that was willing to list the Gay Union was probably pretty open. Yes, I know, there wasn’t any mention of lesbians, or transgendered, or bi folks in the name of that organization–of course, this was in 1975 . . .
And, having attended both Oberlin (undergrad) and U of Chicago (graduate school), I’d like to say that the latter institituion features more uptight, neurotic people per square mile than I’ve ever seen in one place. I remember thinking that I was really really glad I had gone to Oberlin as an undergrad, because, thanks to my experience there, I knew that one could be smart AND have fun, and that one didn’t have to be neurotic as proof of one’s intelligence.
Incidentally, Raznor, I have a Reed t-shirt (it says “anarchism, atheism, and free love” on it, if I remember correctly, though maybe it’s communism instead of anarchism), thanks to a great friend who went there a million years ago.
Carla: I’d agree about the neuroses of *some* people I knew at Chicago – although I tried to help people overcome their neuroses by encouraging them to consume large quantities of alcohol. (Very little sex or drugs, unfortunately…..I had more of an experience with them in one year at UNC-Chapel Hill amongst geeks than in the three I spent at Chicago.)
Then again, once I turned 21 or learned which bars didn’t card (most blues bars on the South Side didn’t care as long as you weren’t trying to rob the place), I left campus most weekends to have fun. The U of C has the rest of the city as a backup – how often did Oberlin students go to Cleveland?
carla, yeah it does say Communism, not anarchism. You can get those shirts in the bookstore here.
Ummmm . . . people don’t overcome neuroses by consuming large quantities of alcohol; they overcome inhibitions, perhaps, temporarily, and they may become alcoholics, if they do that long enough, but they won’t overcome their neuroses.
When I first moved to Hyde Park, it wasn’t very easy to get to the city part of the city w/o a car (and I didn’t have one): the buses didn’t run past 6 on weekends, the last IC was before the bars closed, etc. I was more than old enough to drink, but couldn’t have afforded to do so downtown, even if I could have gotten there. It was therefore quite disappointing that so many of the people around me were such a pain and were so full of themselves. When I lived in Oberlin, I pretty much never went to Cleveland, and, believe me, I had plenty of fun–even in the summer, when it’s a tiny town of 8,000 people. Yes, I’m sure for people from big cities it’s a difficult transition, but there was so much to do (and I had never lived in a city) that it really didn’t occur to me.
Whoa! Things have really changed since I went to Oberlin! I mean things where PC but this is just insane.
I think some of Oberlin’s staff should read up on Alcohol Abuse .
(got cut off)
I believe that you will find the LCB was dry – not a single drop of alcohol was served at it. What was seen, as this event was shut down, was an administrative power play, coupled with a remarkable level of casualness about the truth. History was rewritten after the fact, by an administration that counted on the eagerness of many undergrads to take spin at face value, when it came from an authority figure.
They’ve seldom been disappointed since.