KK's take on Sex Week at Yale

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Today, I wouldn't trade places with an 18-year-old guy for a million bucks.

It's a wonder our sons don't end up in the loony bin, given the schizophrenic messages we bombard them with.

The latest "you've-got-to-be-kidding" example to cross my desk involved frat-boy antics at Yale University -- home to lots of folks who pride themselves on being among our nation's best and brightest.

A few months ago, it seems, a group of Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity pledges marched onto Yale's campus and chanted crude slogans "making light of" rape and necrophilia, according to the Yale alumni magazine. ("No means yes, yes means anal" -- you get the idea.)

A "storm of controversy" erupted. Yale administrators expressed shock and outrage.

"We will confront hateful speech when it has been uttered," vowed President Richard Levin and Dean Mary Miller, according to the magazine. "No member of our community should engage in such demeaning behavior."

The Yale Women's Center went ballistic, of course, and "students, administrators, and alumni all wrestled with how to respond to a public display that many found offensive."

An online alumni petition condemning the chants drew nearly 2,000 signatures. Predictably, the frat boys -- denounced on all sides -- apologized for their crude behavior.

OK, OK, the Yale critics are right. Young gentlemen should not conduct themselves this way. But wait, what else is happening on campus?

Well, there's Yale's biennial "Sex Week" -- a nine-day, student-sponsored event timed to coincide with Valentine's Day and blessed by university bigwigs. Last year, a Sex Week headliner was porn megastar Sasha Grey.

Grey's claim to fame is her insatiable appetite for being sexually brutalized. Among porn performers, she stands out for "her take-no-prisoners attitude toward the hardest of hard-core sex scenes and consensual degradation," according to the Los Angeles Times.

Sex Week's ostensible purpose is to help Yalies navigate "sex, love and relationships," according to the Yale Daily News. No chocolates or roses, though. Sex Week celebrates pornography. (Love, relationships, porn -- hey, what's the difference?)

Last year, the program featured porn stars and/or producers at 11 events, and included demonstrations on everything from sadomasochistic and oral sex techniques to the finer points of erotic genital piercing.

Female Yale students get into the act, too. They strut down a catwalk in a "Fetish Fashion Show," modeling lingerie that evokes such "role-play themes" as "boss and secretary."

But Sasha Grey may capture the event's spirit best. Her numerous adult video awards include "Best Anal Sex Scene" and "Best Oral Sex Scene" for a scene with four men.

Grey's predilection for violence is longstanding. According to Los Angeles magazine, in her first X-rated film --shortly after she turned 18 -- she turned to her partner and said, "Punch me in the stomach."

Grey feels "completed" by sexual degradation -- being "smacked, slapped, yanked, and sodomized," she told the magazine. She likes "peeing, spit, vomit," and at the time of the interview was scheduled to fly to San Francisco, where her vagina would be electrocuted on film.

"I have a high threshold for pain," she said. "I love the energy, the passion, the enthusiasm in being degraded."

Her favorite scenes? "The best ... are when the men want to slap you around a little bit, when they want to pull your hair, when they want to smack your," um, derriere. "They're getting what they want, and I'm getting what I asked for. I guess I've just been blessed."

Who can blame Yale guys for being confused?

Let's get this straight. Yale big wigs invite young men -- buzzed by testosterone -- to experience and celebrate the outer edges of male sexual prurience. They invite them to ogle female fellow students in garters and leather bustiers as they slink down the catwalk in the university dining hall.

But when the guys take the invitation seriously, an outraged chorus denounces them for "demeaning" and "hateful speech."

It's just another example of the blind spot so many our "best and brightest" exhibit. Too often, folks with strings of graduate degrees think they can reshape the world and human beings to their own specifications.

They act as if human beings are infinitely malleable -- as if there is no "floor to the universe." They think they can encourage young people to view sex as a sport, and are shocked when the dark side comes out.

So Yale is crazy.

But the attitudes cultivated -- and legitimated -- there play out all around us. We surround our sons with juiced-up sex -- on TV, in the movies, on the Internet, even in supermarket checkout lanes. Then we tell them to be on their best behavior. At college, they get "date rape" training. On the job, they get "sexual harassment" training.

No wonder our young men are increasingly confused"

KK implies conservatives do no wrong

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One week ago, a 22-year-old loner named Jared Loughner gunned down six people and wounded 14 more at U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' "meet-and-greet" in Tucson.

Before the victims' blood was dry, the chattering classes and many in the news media had placed Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck and the Tea Party in the dock -- accusing them, in essence, of being accomplices to this heinous mass murder.

The charges ranged from allegations that Palin had "targeted" Giffords on a preelection map to claims that Arizona had encouraged Loughner's rampage by enforcing immigration laws.

The claims came to this: Conservatives had created a rhetorical "climate of hate" that somehow induced this madman's rampage.

It wasn't just MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and other inflammatory left-wing commentators who advanced this accusation, which was unsupported by a shred of evidence.

It was pillars of the media establishment, including the New York Times and CNN, whose speculations were dutifully repeated by regional media outlets.

Unfortunately for the theory's purveyors, it quickly became clear that Loughner is both apolitical and mentally deranged.

Apparently, he's a fan of both Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler, fears mind control through "grammar," and terrified his classmates before being kicked out of college. Psychologically, he appears to resemble the Virginia Tech shooter or workplace mass murderers, not a politically motivated assassin.

Yet I've seen no apologies from the Times or the liberal establishment for the slanders they so glibly leveled against their conservative adversaries. In fact, one of this tragedy's most instructive aspects is what it has revealed about our chattering classes.

Byron York of the Washington Examiner pointed this out the day after the shootings. He contrasted the liberal establishment's rush to judgment in Tucson with its cautionary reaction to the slaying of 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009.

Within hours of that crime, it was known that the suspect, Nidal Hasan, had written Internet postings lauding Muslim suicide bombings and had reportedly shouted "Allahu Akbar" as he fired.

Yet media and political figures repeatedly urged Americans not to "jump to conclusions" that Hasan's attack had any connection to Islam. Their reaction to mass murder, it seems, is closely tied to the identity of its perpetrators and victims.

In pushing its "right-wing climate of fear" narrative, the mainstream media turned a blind eye to the left's rhetorical excesses. No need to mention that left-wing blogger Markos Moulitsas had "bulls-eyed" Giffords in 2008 because she wasn't sufficiently liberal. No need to repeat President Obama's 2008 remark about Republicans: "If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun." There was silence about the left's "Bush hatred"; about "Bush lied, people died"; about a Toronto film award for a movie envisioning the president's assassination. Where the left was concerned, instead of admonishing about a "climate of hate," liberal pundits assured us that dissent is the highest form of patriotism.

Most ironically, the liberal establishment used the Tucson shootings to issue sanctimonious calls for "civility" while simultaneously accusing their ideological opponents of complicity in murder. It's hard to imagine a graver slander.

What explains this?

I suspect our opinionmaking elite was tempted by what appeared an opportunity to put conservatives on the defensive after liberals' humiliating defeat at the polls in November.

The shootings seemed to offer a chance to raise Obama in the polls, to hobble Republicans' campaign to repeal Obamacare and to control political content on the airwaves.

More fundamentally, I suggest, the reaction flows from something deeper -- from the very DNA of "progressivism." It's the tendency to ascribe the worst of intentions and motives to those who disagree with liberal views.

One of liberalism's fundamental tenets is the assumption (rarely articulated) that human beings -- when led by the best and brightest -- have the capacity to shape the world to their liking.

If the world remains imperfect, in this view, it's not because a perfect society is beyond us -- as conservatism and the American founders have held. It's because someone is standing in the way -- someone who doesn't "care," or who has evil intentions.

From this perspective, people who disagree with liberal positions are not just mistaken, they are wicked.

This explains the liberal tendency to view those who disagree as motivated by animus or "hate" -- as racist, sexist or homophobic. We see a reflexive insistence on a "climate of hate," not only with regard to the Tucson murders, but also with opposition to illegal immigration and attempts to redefine marriage.

The Tucson tragedy rips the veil away from the opinionmaking class, and from much of the mainstream media. In an unguarded moment, they revealed that ideology trumps facts in their quest for power. They put their biases on display for all to see."

KK promotes theocracy

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What should we laud or lament in the year just ended? Where should we turn our attention in 2011? One troubling trend, I suggest, dwarfs all others in importance. It's the shrinking influence and declining prestige of religion in our nation today.

Increasingly, Americans see religion as a private matter with little to contribute to public debate -- even on issues with moral dimensions, such as marriage and family, abortion and euthanasia. In the crusade to banish faith from public life, judges order county courthouses to be stripped of plaques listing the Ten Commandments, and activists attack Christian hospitals that decline to perform abortions.

Our growing distaste for religion springs, in part, from our modern hatred of constraints on our behavior, and from our equating freedom with living exactly as we please. Judeo-Christianity presents an obstacle here. It holds that there are universal moral truths -- accessible to reason -- that should shape our conduct, and that create obligations to others that require sacrifices we might prefer not to make.

In recent decades, the rise of psychology -- which is replacing religion as a vehicle for understanding what it means to be human -- has greatly facilitated our cherished project of throwing off moral constraints. Almost 50 years ago, psychologist Philip Rieff spelled out the implications in his seminal book, "The Triumph of the Therapeutic."

Rieff wrote that our society's model for the organization of personality -- our paragon, or character ideal -- has undergone a radical shift. The Christian model of man, he explained, dominant for 1,500 years, has been increasingly replaced by "psychological man" as our society's primary character type. The "soul" has been replaced by the "self."

Why does this matter? Traditional Christianity, Rieff observed, made great moral demands on believers. Its goal was salvation; consequently, it exhorted believers to "die to self," repent of sin, and cultivate virtue, self-discipline and humility.

Psychological man, however, rejects the idea of sin and the very possibility of truth. He aspires to nothing higher than "feeling good about himself," and sees nothing more at stake in life than what Rieff calls "a manipulable sense of well-being." While Christian man strives for virtue, says Rieff, psychological man seeks only health, safety and material well-being. While Christian man works to control his impulses, psychological man rushes to release them.

As psychology edges out religion in American life, the language of good and evil is disappearing. As the "self" replaces the "soul," we no longer place priority on cultivating virtue, or see it as possible or even desirable.

The consequences for our personal lives are evident everywhere -- from our crumbling families to our voracious consumerism and our shallow and juvenile popular culture. Increasingly, we aspire to nothing nobler than a big-ticket "entertainment center" in the living room or a Lexus in the garage.

But the growing influence of the psychological model of man also has serious, long-term implications for the health of American democracy. That's because it undercuts a principle at the heart of our nation's founding -- the idea that there is a profound connection between virtue and self-government.

America's founders understood this connection well. They knew that democracy is more than a political arrangement -- it's also a moral and spiritual enterprise. (This is one reason self-government has been so rare in world history.) To flourish, a democracy requires men and women who are not just conglomerations of desires, but virtuous citizens -- honest, courageous, self-controlled and public-spirited.

A society that takes "psychological man" as its character ideal does not foster citizens of this kind, for honesty, generosity and self-restraint don't come naturally to human beings. These traits are difficult to acquire, and require suppression or rechanneling of baser human instincts. Only a society with a moral system based on claims of transcendent truth can help its citizens overcome their selfish tendencies, and successfully cultivate virtue.

James Madison, one of American democracy's greatest architects, explained the connection between virtue and freedom this way: "Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks, no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people is a chimerical idea."

Today, we Americans take our democracy for granted. But our founders warned that our system of self-government is an experiment, and is not guaranteed to succeed. If we allow the "ordered liberty" they envisioned to degenerate to license -- as our embrace of the psychological model of man makes likely -- our experiment may fail.

In the words of theologian George Weigel, "Freedom must be tethered to truth and ordered to goodness if freedom is not to become its own undoing."