Sexuality today liberated, not necessarily in a good way

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Sexuality today liberated, not necessarily in a good way

This piece represents the opinion of the author:

Judah Isseroff

Columnist

November 11, 2011

Ostensibly, the Bowdoin campus is sexually liberated. Matters of sex are discussed freely with first years at orientation, conversations and lectures about sex are frequent during the semester, and perhaps most importantly, bowls of condoms sit in the hallways and stairwells of most Bowdoin dormitories.

We seem to be the happy inheritors of the hard work of our counterparts in colleges all over America in the 1960s, who struggled successfully to rid sexual discourse and activities from their suffocating taboo.

Now, four decades later, there are no restrictions on coeducational socializing in dorms. A male student need no longer keep his door propped while entertaining a female friend or lover. And most importantly, colleges such as Bowdoin have recognized that questions and problems of college sexuality cannot be properly understood solely through the lens of heterosexuality.

Yet, now in my third year at Bowdoin, I am wondering if the progress achieved by the so-called "sexual revolution," is somewhat incomplete.

As mentioned, sex is certainly no stranger to the Bowdoin campus. However, sexual openness and confidence is to some extent lacking. While professors and students both talk extensively about sex in the classroom, sexual activity at Bowdoin seems to find a shameful beginning in the basement of the social house.

This article by no means intends to function as a tirade against the depravity of social house parties. Frankly, I find nothing particularly wrong with these parties in and of themselves. Rather, it is the fact that they have been tacitly anointed the hub of sexual activity at Bowdoin that troubles me.

It seems to me that the great achievement of the sexual revolution was supposed to be the loosening of the knot between shame and sex that had for so long appeared inextricable. Students advocated vehemently for the liberation of sexual acts. They revolutionarily decided that there was nothing innately wrong with the body that provoked the cascade of sexual shame felt by the generations that preceded them.

Instead, with their eyes focused on the cultivation of their own humanity, they decided to glorify the body rather than condemn it, indulge in its capacity for pleasure rather than practice frustrating abstention.

Now, there are certainly those who may righteously condemn the excesses of the sexual revolution. Many critics have argued and will argue that sexual indulgence is often indiscriminate to its detriment, and that the resultant objectification of both men and women is doing more harm than good for college students.

Indeed, they will probably point to the institutionalized promiscuity of the social house party and its ensuing hookups as a poignant manifestation of the problem.

Today's attitude toward sex, as confined to the social house and related locations, indicates a sexual revolution gone awry.

Certainly, the goings on at social houses do validate the fact that sex has been liberated. However, the repression of the social house says something very different. It says that while sex in the abstract has finally exited prison on parole, we the people, are still languishing in our jail cells.

The social house, as the only atmosphere where we can freely express our sexuality at Bowdoin, is similar to the sexual repression of 1950s America.

Whereas the latter era committed premarital sex to the category of the unspeakable; the prospect of sex in the social house context is permitted, but only because people allow these dance floor interactions to progress because it is too loud and too dark to make a fully educated decision.

Though we are free to act on sexual impulse, we lose the ability to showcase anything else that is good about ourselves by confining our sexuality to what is essentially a decadent dungeon. Sex takes on an identity as something profoundly different from the rest of human experience, and thus we are tragically unable to conceive of sex as something that deserves the devotion of all our virtues, rather than just our pick-up lines and Saturday night outfits.

The thrust of this column, so to speak, is not to recommend sex as an activity for the Quad in the daytime, rather than as the end to a successful night at Ladd House. Rather, it is to excoriate the attitude that has bred terms such as "the walk of shame." There should not be anything shameful about that walk home.

Ultimately, the problem manifests in two ways. While the sexual revolution was reacting to a culture that was categorically afraid of sexual expression, we now also witness the imprudent equalization of promiscuity with liberation.

In the end, we are left only with the liberty to choose what we really want and to resist sexual norms that are repressive either in their exaltation of abstinence or in their exaltation of promiscuity under the cover of darkness and dubstep.

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