It sounds like the opening of a pornographic movie: An attractive young teacher saunters up to the blackboard. Next, she ducks behind the podium to slip off her tights. Before you know it, she’s standing topless and bare-chested in front of the entire class, calling for a few student “volunteers.” But this story isn’t fiction.
The teacher, in this case, was a porn actress named Madison Young. Young was invited to speak at Yale University in February as part of a nine-day series of lectures, panels, and special events known as “Sex Week at Yale.”
Introduced in 2002, Sex Week at Yale has courted controversy from the beginning. Held every other year, it brings to campus everyone from porn stars to sex-toy manufacturers, and has grown bigger with each installment, this year topping 30 events. They included, to name a few, a presentation on “kink” and fetishism, a lingerie show that used Yale students as models, two presentations in defense of non-monogamous relationships, an instructional presentation on masturbation, a female-condom giveaway, and a graphic presentation on erotic genital piercing.
I first experienced Sex Week as an undergraduate. This year, I returned to cover the event as a journalist.
The biggest event of Sex Week 2010, in both promotion and turnout, was surely the instructional presentation on oral sex called “Babeland’s Lip Tricks,” which was sponsored by a sex-toy company. The event’s planners were wise to book one of Yale’s larger lecture halls: When I arrived, every seat in the house was full, including those in the balcony, and hundreds of extra students had flooded the floors and aisles, with scores more huddled around the back doors. Some sat on the stage itself. I estimate there were 2,000 students present — more than a third of the undergraduate student body.
The instructor was a burlesque performer from New York called, simply, “Darlinda.” Using a projector screen and various rubber props, she demonstrated oral-sex techniques in front of the rapt audience for an hour and a half.
Pornography has always been a part of Sex Week — more so every time, it seems. Of the 34 events on this year’s Sex Week schedule, eleven featured porn stars or adult-film producers as primary speakers or performers. That’s about one event in three.
In 2008, a screening of pornography was shut down mid-reel after organizers became alarmed by the film’s depictions of sexual violence against women. This year, however, sadomasochistic pornography was back on the program. On the afternoon of February 13, Madison Young was scheduled to give a lecture on sadomasochism entitled “BDSM 101,” a presentation billed as an opportunity for students to learn how to “build new levels of intimacy, trust and connection with your partners.”
Her talk was held in William Harkness Hall, the building on Yale’s central quad where, as a student, I attended a class on international relations. I returned to Room 208 for a lecture on relations of a very different kind.
Near the classroom door, bras, panties, and briefs were laid out across a chair, along with dozens of condoms. These items were free for the taking, courtesy of Sex Week’s corporate sponsors. (Merchandise is promoted or given away at nearly every one of Sex Week’s events.)
I passed on the latex and took a seat in the back row. At the front of the classroom, Young’s manner was breezy and casual. She encouraged students to shed their coats and extra layers. “I want you to be comfortable.”
She began by explaining the basics of BDSM. “The ‘B’ stands for ‘bondage,’” Young said. “It can be handcuffs. It can be zip ties. It can be rope — anything that’s restraining you. It can be neckties.
“The ‘D’ is for ‘discipline’ and ‘dominance.’ . . . Dominance is more about power. The ‘S’ stands for ‘submissive,’ often associated with ‘service’ — a dominant and slave, a teacher and a schoolboy.
“‘S & M’ stands for ‘sadism and masochism.’ Sadists give sensation, or what might be referred to as pain.”
Young paused for a moment. “Is everyone in here 18 and over?” She had to make sure before playing a clip from one of her films, because in it she is bound by all four limbs, and a man is lashing her with a whip. Large red welts appear across her torso. I averted my gaze but could still hear the sound of blows as well as the man’s taunts, which are too obscene to print. He orders her to repeat the insults as he beats her, which she does.
After the clip ended, Young began a series of demonstrations. She took a young female student from the front row and bound her hands with a zip tie, then led her around the room so everyone could get a closer look. Students applauded. Young asked the next volunteer, a young man this time, to pin clothespins along her inner thighs. (At first, he was too delicate. “Put it on with an intention,” she critiqued.) He and another student, on the count of three, tore the clothespins away with an attached string. Young exhaled deeply. “That was wonderful,” she said.
Young’s next demonstration began with her stripping to the waist, but I cannot say what happened after she started attaching pinching devices to her naked breasts, because I left the room.
I went next door to Room 207, where a very different presentation was under way. The speaker, David Schaengold, had been invited by the Anscombe Society at Yale, a small campus group devoted to the cause of premarital abstinence. The event drew about 14 students.
Schaengold explained that, with the sexual revolution, traditional ideas about sex gave way and “consent” became the only moral test. The modern view ignores the possibility that “some sexual acts are incompatible with human dignity.” He asked the audience, “Can we move from saying what is permissible to asking what is right and what is good?”
At that moment, on the other side of the wall, a porn star was standing half-naked before a crowd of students while volunteers inflicted pain upon her for the instructive benefit of the class.
Margaret Blume, a Yale senior, resents the hypersexualized atmosphere that Sex Week promotes. “It’s pretty degrading,” she said to me. “It just seems to rob many things of dignity. Obviously, as a woman in particular, objectification is more prevalent this week. The whole week seems to just demystify everything and de-reverence everything.”
As people like Blume see it, Yale is not simply being permissive; it is pushing a specific sexual agenda. Or, as a female friend of mine put it, “It’s not Sex Week, it’s Have Sex Week.”
For the last eight years, university administrators have played willing host to the biennial pornification of Yale — not just the screening of pornography but its promotion and distribution, and not in the dorm room but in the classroom. In both 2008, as a student, and 2010, as a journalist, I witnessed volunteers, guest lecturers, and, in a few cases, even Yale professors passing out to students paraphernalia such as vibrators and pornographic DVDs. Sixty years ago, William F. Buckley Jr. faulted Yale for an “extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude” on the basis of much less.
– Mr. Harden graduated from Yale in 2009. He is currently writing a memoir of his experiences as a conservative student at Yale. This article first appeared in the April 5, 2010, issue of National Review.