R E C E N T L Y Revisiting "The Golden Bough" (03/10/99) Broaddrick charges are 21 years too late (03/03/99) Butler vs. Nussbaum (02/24/99) Three-way sex with death (02/17/99) Gender whores (02/10/99) ___________________ Do you love Camille Paglia? Worship at her altar at barnesandnoble.com ___________________ A L S O About Camille Paglia Ask Camille archives - - - - - - - - - - C O L U M N I S T S Sexpert Opinion By Susie Bright Erotic wasteland (03/05/99) The Reluctant Capitalist By Heather Chaplin Big Apple pickpocket (03/05/99) Left Hook By Joe Conason Honor thy geezers (03/09/99) Unspun By Steve Erickson Why Elia Kazan should not receive an Oscar (03/17/99) Right On! By David Horowitz Walking the walk (03/15/99) Mr. Blue By Garrison Keillor Should I worry about my boyfriend's pornography habit? (03/16/99) Word by Word By Anne Lamott Didgeridoo (03/04/99) Media Circus By Susan Lehman Kiddie-porn trafficker -- or crusading undercover reporter? (03/11/99) On Television By Joyce Millman "Strange World," "First Wave": The Xerox Files (03/08/99) Under the Covers By James Poniewozik Strange fruit (03/16/99) Let's Get This Straight By Scott Rosenberg Amazon vs. the ants (03/10/99) Home Movies By Charles Taylor "That Thing You Do!" (03/15/99) Second Thoughts By Sallie Tisdale Lost in the supermarket (03/11/99) Salon Columnists - - - - - - - - - -

A S K_C A M I L L E +|+ C A M I L L E+P A G L I A --- Online advice for the culturally disgruntled --- Harvard's date-rape idiocy Today's elite campuses teach little girls to run blithering to their craven, PC parent-substitutes. Dear Camille: Harvard's been thrown into hysteria by a girl who demanded the expulsion of a student who had sex with her while spending the night in her bed. The faculty agreed and voted to dismiss the male student. After drinking with him and spending several hours in bed with him, he penetrates her and she screams rape. Was this rape? Muddled in Michigan, John Tuttle Dear Mr. Tuttle, The Harvard controversy (reported in the March 9 and 10 Boston Globe, the March 10 New York Times and in explicit detail in the March 11 Harvard Crimson) is a startling revelation of just how deep the Ivy League has sunk over the past 20 years into the PC swamp. This date-rape brouhaha, with its creakingly passé, victim-centered, anti-male assumptions and rhetoric, certainly marks the nadir of Neil Rudenstine's administration, which has pandered to every trendy special interest since he took office as president of Harvard. What has academic feminism wrought to reduce Harvard's women undergraduates to blithering whiners? As an equity feminist, I strongly oppose all special protections for women as reactionary and Victorian. From the published facts about the case, the drunken Harvard girl seems just as responsible for the muddled chain of events as her male companion. For her to heap the entire blame on him -- and then run off to tattle to the powers that be -- is symptomatic of the increasing infantilism of American students, who are dragging authority figures back into their private sex lives to buffer cold reality and to salve life's inevitable wounds. This reactionary U-turn by campus culture was the theme of my Jan. 27, 1991, New York Newsday op-ed piece, which in national syndication aroused a firestorm of abuse from PC ideologues but which over time has palpably shifted the public discourse on date rape and student sexual mores. I was the first to suggest a connection between the emotional turmoil of affluent but negligent middle-class families and the nascent longing by immature students for in loco parentis surveillance -- for a restoration, in other words, of the college parietal rules that my 1960s generation of women had defied and overthrown during the sexual revolution. We wanted freedom; today's students want paternalistic hand-holding. That the assembled Harvard faculty is now earnestly debating sexual allegations shows how intellectually vacuous and politically craven the elite schools have become. Real rape is a barbaric outrage that must be reported to the police and consigned to the criminal justice system, which has established procedures for neutral inquiry and assessment of evidence and which can guarantee the civil rights of the accused. It appears from the Harvard case that the New Man -- who repents and apologizes for his sexual excess -- will always get shafted. The Classic Cad, who would glibly lie about a sexual encounter, would have escaped the lynch mob and rolled merrily on as a student in good standing. Great lessons they're teaching these days in Cambridge! How idiotic we must appear to foreign observers -- with sexual snitches and screeching witch hunts rattling the ivory tower and with randy cavorting and slippery casuistry besmirching the White House. As I maintained in "The Nursery-School Campus" (a 1992 TLS essay), American universities as commercial enterprises are no longer educational institutions but feel-good summer-camp extensions of the banal bourgeois home. N E X T_P A G E | Dusty Springfield; the cultural semiotics of gay "bears" - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Become a Salon member. Click here.