Lisa Schiffren is right in her post at the Corner yesterday, arguing that Sex and the City has contributed to the normalizing of formerly unthinkable sexual practices such as threesomes — not just for Casanova-type sexual adventurers, but for everyday office girls. But let’s not forget the contibution academia has made to this state of affairs. PBC’s Candace de Russy, along with others, fought a mighty battle to ban sex fairs at an upstate New York state college that featured various toys and manuals for every manner imaginable of the polymorphous perverse.
And Miriam Grossman, formerly a campus psychiatrist at Columbia, revealed in Unprotected: A Campus Psychiatrist Reveals How Political Correctness in Her Profession Endangers Every Student that the official campus policy toward any kind of sexual behavior was completely nonjudgmental and that the dangers of casual sex, STDs, and abortion had to be downplayed and whitewashed because such cautions might have seemed moralistic. The Columbia Go Ask Alice health-services website, at least at the time of her writing, advised on such questions as how to manage a threesome and how to clean a bloody cat-o’nine-tails between sadomasochism sessions. Oh, and there was something about health risks — the health risks attendant on bestiality.