Sex and God at Yale: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad

INTRODUCTION

What you are about to read is my story. But, for a moment, imagine what it might be like if this story were your own. Imagine you are an eighteen-year-old freshman girl arriving at Yale for the first time. You are bright, poised, excited, nervous about making new friends, and still, if truth be told, a bit naïve. On the day you arrive at Yale, your parents drive you up to the main entrance to the university, an arched Gothic corridor known as Phelps Gate. Your dad hasn’t said much during the entire trip. Your mother, on the other hand, is in the throes of empty-nest syndrome and has been crying pretty much nonstop since you pulled out of the driveway the day before.

Your parents help you unload a trunk full of overstuffed suitcases, duct-taped cardboard boxes, bags full of Costco-sized bottles of laundry detergent, granola bars, and an electric blanket your mother insisted you bring along. A pile of clutter is now all you have left of home. You look at that pile and it reminds you that you are leaving home forever. What a shocking thought.

Mom is standing there wiping her eyes. Dad keeps clearing his throat and staring down at the ground. You swallow hard. Your eyes are watering. You know if you stand there much longer, you are going to lose it. One last kiss and I love you and a deep breath, and you take your first and final step away from them.

Call me, your mother shouts. You don’t dare look back, because you really are crying now.

Walking through those Yale gates, you think about all it took to get here: all those nights studying and all those AP exams (you took seven of them), the constant pressure not to fail.

Back in high school, there was a continuous demand to excel in everything. You did homework until late every night and got basically no sleep for four years. You edited the school paper, led the debate team to a state championship, participated in model UN, and, on your own initiative, organized a food drive for a local homeless shelter during senior year. You speak French and read Latin. You played the flute in the school band, and you even ran three years on the track team because you knew being an athlete could give you an edge on your college application (even though you hated the 6 a.m. practices and were slower than a two-legged turtle). You had basically no social life. When you were named valedictorian of your high school, it came as a relief rather than a thrill.

You suffered through all this because you knew that elite colleges are looking for well-rounded candidates. Yale rejects almost 95 percent of its applicants. It isn’t good enough to be smart; you have to make yourself look truly, almost painfully, interesting if you want to stand out. For the last four years, your life has been devoted to the single purpose of building up a truly awesome college application.

You’ve worked hard, desperately hard, to get into the college of your dreams. Somehow you made it. Now you are here. As you step into the main quad, you are engulfed by the buzz of swarming students, and mesmerized by the massive spectacle of Yale’s Gothic grounds. You experience a moment of sublime validation: You are a Yale student.

Yeah, okay. But among thousands of equally accomplished Yale students, how are you now going to forge an identity?

In the past, you have always been the Smart Girl—the articulate, poised, confident pride of Your Town, USA. Now, at Yale, you are just one more smart girl among many. And even in high school, if you wanted to fit in socially, or be noticed by the opposite sex, being the smartest was never enough. You also needed to be desirable. On top of the crushing academic pressures you faced, and in the midst of your frantically overloaded schedule, you felt, every day, the pressure to be eye-catching and effortlessly hot.

You think of yourself as an attractive person, cute even. You take care of yourself. You had a serious boyfriend for two years in high school. Somehow though, the little devil of insecurity still manages to whisper in your ear from time to time. You roll your eyes at the girls who spend all their time reading Cosmo. On a moment’s notice you can offer a five-point lecture on the unjust and unhealthy body-image standards imposed by all the Photoshopped toothpicks-with-breasts on the cover of women’s fashion magazines. You know better. Still, you aren’t immune to the normal pressures of a teenage girl. And no matter how many perfect report cards you get, and no matter how many times you pick up The Economist instead of Glamour magazine, the nagging self-doubt about who you are and what makes you valuable never really goes away.

You still want guys to notice you. Now that you are at Yale, you are no longer the smartest girl in school—not even close. Everywhere around you there seem to be people who have accomplished more, scored higher, won bigger prizes, and just been all-around wonderful. On the very first evening you find out that there is a gold medal–winning Olympic figure skater on the floor below. Then you learn that the girl in the dorm room across the hall was actually named one of Glamour magazine’s ten most inspiring young women of the year after she built some kind of orphanage in Tanzania at the age of seventeen. Nice. How are you supposed to compete with that? How are you going to stand out? What are you going to have to do to get the boys’ attention?

Let me give you a clue. There is a party coming up soon, known at Yale as the Freshman Screw. Everyone will be there. And you had better throw any ideas you have about self-respect and women’s equality out the window. You are in Yale’s domain now, an elite culture with its own set of rules and expectations. If you expect to have any romantic life at all in the next four years, you will soon learn what it takes. You are about to be surrounded by thousands of young men who expect sex with no relationship or commitment involved. Time to get with the program, sister.

*   *   *

The chapters of this book fall into two categories. The first category presents a detailed and more or less chronological journey through an event called Sex Week that has been held every other year over the last decade. In those chapters I expose Yale’s relationship with the for-profit sex industry, and catalog examples of the sexual culture at its most extreme. The second category consists of topical chapters, which draw from a wide range of my experiences as a student at Yale, and together paint a picture of the major moral, political, and intellectual forces at work on campus. In these chapters it becomes clear that the depravity of Sex Week is no aberration. Rather, it is symptomatic of deeper and more widespread dysfunction.

This is a story of a great institution in decline—an institution of tremendous power and influence that is no longer aware of why it exists or for what purpose. On a more personal level, this is the story of a student who falls in love with a truly great university—who enters feeling utterly in awe of the place—but who soon becomes aware that, when it comes to living up to its lofty reputation, Yale is failing in an extravagant fashion. At Yale, there is definitely a low side to higher ed. And because it is such a culturally and politically influential place, the consequences are potentially far-reaching.

Today, there is a war being waged on the minds of America’s brightest young people—especially its young women. I’ve been in the middle of it, and what I discovered was truly shocking. It is my intention, with this book, to shed light on things at Yale that others would like to remain secret. While the material is at times scandalous and salacious, it is not my intention to merely titillate. Likewise, while the material I cover is frequently absurd to the point of being humorous, it is not my intention to merely poke fun. However controversial the material, and however absurd the details may seem, this book is ultimately an account of how America’s most influential university is shaping the lives of future political and cultural leaders. Therefore, my story has implications for the nation as a whole—and the world beyond.

PART ONE

Yale for Sale: How I received an elite Yale education with a little help from the for-profit sex industry

1

SEX WEEK

No matter how far I have traveled, something from Yale has always followed with me.

—Gerald Ford, L.L.B., class of 1941

My very first class as a Yale student told me much more, in hindsight, about the education I was about to receive than all the glossy brochures and guided tours I had been given before I arrived. It was a literature class called Heroes and the Mock-Heroic, taught by an eminent professor of English, Dr. Claude Rawson. Fresh from summer break, half a dozen students and I, along with Dr. Rawson, were seated around a seminar table in a small classroom. Rawson was dressed rather sloppily in an oversized, untucked polo shirt. He wore white socks and flip-flops with the thong wedged between his toes. He lacked couture, perhaps, but he had an impressive British accent to make up for it.

The room was only about half full, and there were plenty of empty seats left around the table. I glanced around at the other students, and waited silently for class to begin. It was all still very new to me, and I was simply trying to soak in the experience. Out the window I could see the stately stone-clad buildings of Yale’s Old Campus, the earliest of which dates back more than 250 years. I felt an incredible sense of belonging. I was at Yale! That’s all I could think about in that moment.

The reading that day was from Homer’s Iliad. It was the famous climactic scene in which Achilles chases Hector around the city of Troy, catches him, and savagely cuts him down. We read a brief passage aloud in which Hector pleads for an honorable burial and begs Achilles not to feed him to the dogs. The professor then paused and asked the class to analyze the passage.

A few of us offered interpretations, none of which seemed to be what the professor was looking for. Then a girl seated directly across the table from me spoke up. She had dark hair with severe, short-cropped bangs. She half smiled while she talked, as if she were pleased with the insight she was about to impart to the rest of us. She began to describe—with plenty of impressive theoretical language—how all of the bloody battle imagery of the Iliad’s climactic scene was really an elaborate metaphor for sex.

That girl turned out to be Aliza Shvarts, an art major who would, later that school year, initiate a media firestorm and provoke national outrage over her senior art project, which she claimed consisted of blood and tissue from numerous self-induced abortions. (More on that later.)

For my part, I was unimpressed by Aliza’s interpretation of the Iliad, and my furrowed brow must have shown it. I couldn’t see what the battle of Achilles and Hector had to do with sex. But, as a new Yale student, I guess I had a lot to learn. Dr. Rawson, while still appearing not to find the exact answer he was looking for, seemed to acquiesce: Well yes, of course, he said, glancing down at the text, everything is sexual.

*   *   *

A few years before my arrival, Yale University had begun hosting a veritable marathon of sex-related seminars and special events every other year, known collectively as Sex Week at Yale. At no other time do those words of my professor, everything is sexual, appear more probably correct. It happens during the spring semester. The campus is flooded with banners and posters announcing, Sex Week! Sex Week! Sex Week! Students are barraged with e-mails announcing each day’s proceedings, and encouraged to attend the week’s educational programs. Sex Week is everywhere you turn.

No fewer than seventeen official events were held during Sex Week 2008—ranging from a porn-star look-alike contest (judged by a real-life porn film director), to safe-sex workshops, to lectures on the female orgasm. The event was so chock-full of goodies that organizers were forced to stretch Sex Week into eleven continuous days of nonstop sex, sexuality, sexiness, and sexsationalism.

Somehow during those eleven days, amid all the sex, students are supposed to go to class. No one is forced to attend Sex Week events, of course, but you cannot escape the storm of sex-related activity. National media descend upon the campus to chronicle the strange mix of lewdness and Ivy League snob appeal. There are news vans in the quad with big satellite dishes bolted on top. And reporters with press badges roam the hallways, trailed by camera crews. The university’s student-run paper, the Yale Daily News, recounts each day’s highlights to the entire student body. As one of my classmates put it: You can hardly understand what it is like to walk into the dining hall, grab some eggs and coffee and the morning paper, then try to maintain your appetite after glimpsing a front page full-color photo of a smiling freshman clutching a pair of anal beads.¹

In February of my junior year, Sex Week was due to be held at Yale for the fourth time. I received an e-mail detailing the schedule of events. The first few items on the list seemed relatively harmless:

I suppose Tuesday was intended mainly for the ladies, since the focus seemed to be on their own particular … uh, physiology. I was fairly shocked by the items on the schedule. So I decided to go and see for myself what was about to be peddled within the hallowed halls of Yale University.

One day that week, after class, I attended Ms. Levkoff’s homily on la petite mort. I found Logan Levkoff to be an attractive woman, with long, flowing blond locks. When I arrived, she was dressed in a climate-clashing style, wearing shorts and, below them, Eskimo boots. She introduced herself as a certified sex educator, the author of a dating guide, and, last but not least, an official spokesperson for Trojan® brand condoms.

The chief point of her lecture was that our sexual culture is overly focused on the desires of men, rather than women. She complained, in particular, that when it comes to oral sex, women are doing most of the servicing. As a result of the focus on men, she said, women aren’t comfortable enough with their own sexuality and, consequently, often have difficulty achieving orgasm. Ms. Levkoff apparently had less trouble than most. She informed us that she had her first orgasm at the age of seven while watching the Playboy Channel on her parents’ television. It was a touching personal story. But I lost track of her point when she started tossing Trojan® condoms into the audience and one almost hit me in the head. I ducked out and headed to the next event on the schedule.

Snow was falling steadily as I made my way across campus. Steam drifted up from the pavement and I heard church bells calling people in for the evening mass. But I wasn’t on my way to church. I was on my way to see Patty Brisben, the founder and CEO of a company called Pure Romance. Brisben is the world’s leading entrepreneurial purveyor of female sex toys. Her presentation packs a lot of heat. And contrary to what her company name suggests, neither purity nor romance seems to be her primary concern. She brings out all the stuff they never told you about in high school sex-ed class.

The auditorium sits on the lower floor of a building that houses the Engineering Department—not altogether inappropriate considering all the robotic contraptions Brisben brought along to promote. It is a great gray rectangular auditorium with windowless concrete walls, like a bomb shelter with theater-style seating for seven hundred. It feels vaguely Orwellian. I suppose the university administration was glad to have this particular presentation confined to a windowless room, much better to keep it out of public