Sexual Revolution the only one that counts

Of course, all these nice liberals are actually shocked to death when anyone actually writes about sex with total candor.

Seriously, are sex columns really an important front on which progressives should be advancing their principles?

No, and I don't know that many Democrats who think so. That's a war that's largely won. This is just some random who has a particular interest in sex.

"horny college students who have no sense of propriety or personal boundaries"

That sounds like how you have described yourself in your college years. Why on earth would you ascribe the behavior of people 18-22 as representative of the liberal side of the political spectrum?

But as someone said above, social conservatives seemed perfectly happy to allow torture, an illegal war and a raid on the public treasury, just to keep a few doctors constrained from discussing abortions with their patients - who then no doubt usually went to the nearest PP outlet anyway. What, exactly, did you all get for your/our sacrifice?

Amen, Elizabeth. The Left doesn't really need political consistency lessons from the American Right.

They are college students. The Nation is pointing out a trend, in college students, and explaining why it is occurring. There's no giant meeting of the New Left or the Old Left to approve of orgasms and cultural decadence. I appreciate your nostalgia for the Old Left, because I am nostalgic of the Old Right: country club conservatives who believed they should keep their noses out of people's lives, were focused on economics instead of bedrooms, and who were able to actually get non-white people to vote for them every once in awhile.

Ah, the good old days.

>>>"I'm convinced that for more than a few educated liberals, they'd be fine with economic policy completely run by the right, just so long as they retained the right to have their orgasms without restriction, and to talk endlessly about their orgasms, as well as their abortions."

Yup, that's Gramsci. Use materialism to destroy the non-materialist parts of Western civilization. Works much better than the old Marxist approach of using non-material appeals to destroy the materialist parts of Western civ.

I have a conservative friend who teaches at a liberal arts college. He and his liberal colleagues have actually joined together to counter in whatever way they can the prevailing hook-up culture on campus. Intellectuals on both sides of the debate are decent, responsible, well-intentioned people for the most part, but the left/right debate about sex in the pages of publications such as First Things and the Nation is pretty irrelevant to the facts on the ground. It's the culture of consumption and the commodification (commercialization) of sex that is the main threat to decency today.

Perhaps a minor point, but. . .

Someone who says the government shouldn't legislate orgasms between consenting adults isn't necessarily endorsing all liscentious behavior.

Similarly - if someone says cops should have better things to do than issue traffic violations for not wearing seatbelts or texting - that isn't necessarily an endorsement of seatbelt-less tweeting.

There is already a law of cause & effect in the universe, regardless of what the government chooses to regulate.

RDF: There is already a law of cause & effect in the universe, regardless of what the government chooses to regulate.

But, as any good causal determinist will tell you, even if our behavior is causally determined by factors beyond our ken, we are still morally responsible for our behavior.

Agape123, yours is a completely tiresome argument floated routinely by some of the less-than-original thinkers who comment on this blog. It would be refreshing if you would please engage in the topic without the flaccid "If you're so serious Rod, then why are you blogging about it?" line. If you can't offer anything beyond this sort of thing, which has been logged repeatedly in the comments section ad nauseum, then don't offer anything at all.

I hate to quote myself, but this is worth emphasizing:

Social conservatives, on the other hand, burn with a white-hot hatred for it which is all out of proportion to the actual impact, to the extent that the issue was critical in putting President Bush over the top in 2004.

That is to say, the private relationships of a relatively tiny group of adult strangers was an issue that outweighed:

- The conduct of the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan including the failure to go after al Qaeda
- The conduct of the War on Terror
- The massive federal deficits
- The massive expansion in government police powers and the creation of the DHS
- The unfunded Medicare Part D prescription drug mandate

In the minds of social conservatives, all of these issues took a back seat to gay marriage.

So who's got an obsession?

Re: Yup, that's Gramsci. Use materialism to destroy the non-materialist parts of Western civilization. Works much better than the old Marxist approach of using non-material appeals to destroy the materialist parts of Western civ.

I don't think Gramsci actually said that, and the one government in the world today which quotes Gramsci a lot (Venezuela) is fairly socially conservative. But I agree with your point in general- I much prefer real economic socialism to the 'cultural leftism' we hear a lot nowadays.

As for the sex columns, I don't care for them. I'm generally fairly liberal on sexual matters (I think there's nothing inherently wrong about contraception, premarital sex, or homosexuality). I do very much disagree with promiscuity and the hookup culture, though, and I also disagree with filling the public square with accounts of one's sexual exploits in graphic detail. So yes, count me among those who say 'decadent', in the intellectual as well as moral and political senses. Sex is what people write about then they lack the intelligence, the vision, or the moral courage to write about more serious issues.

Pretty funny that this "phenomenon" The Nation writes so breathlessly about dates--according to them--back to 1996, and they reference a NYT expose on the subject that was published back in 2002. So, not exactly the news, here.

That said, it should come as no surprise to anybody that most of today's colleges and universities are merely daycare centers for premature adults. Stuck in an extended period of adolescence which is caused, in part, by the lengthening lifespans--and careers--of their parents' and grandparents' generations, college kids drink adult beverages to excess, chat about sex in--gasp!--the *student newspaper,* and otherwise behave badly in between borrowing other people's notes in time to cram for exams. I expect that next the Nation will solemnly inform its readers that college kids are conducting undergarment raids or committing the 21st century's only (so far) unforgivable public sin: smoking on campus.

(In fact, imagine a pro-smoking column in any of these papers, and you'll realize that the censorship of public vice is still alive and well; it's just that the aging Baby Boomers running the campuses who still desperately need to think of themselves as every bit as virile or desirable as they were when *they* were back in college are a lot more tolerant of university sexcapades than they would ever be of smoking. Sex is for fun, but smoking is just wrong. Except for marijuana, which should be legalized.)

Do you really think the kids are having more sex than they did 20 years ago? Or might it all be talk and no do? You read blogs like Roissy's and you would think that women these days are ball busters and that it is a serious Darwinian struggle to get laid these day. If anything, I think kids are doing it less than they did 20 years ago. Even the Hollywood movies are suggestive of this. Fast Times at Ridgemont High, which came out in 1982, had more frank sexual discussion amongst the characters than do teen flicks today (or at least the few I've seen).

Its easy to believe the grass in greener in the other guy's lawn. However, I think this is a situation where the social conservatives have got it wrong. Kids today may talk a great game. But I think they do it a lot less than kids 20 years ago. Also teen birth rates are far lower today than 20 years ago.

To Orrie, kids are definitely having more sex than they did 20, 40, and especially 60 years ago. It's a statistically verified fact. The reason for the difference is because society used to have strong controls in play that prevented too much male/female alone time prior to marriage. (You can't have much sex in public or when physically separate or when under adult supervision!) If the controls had not been there, then our grandparents' generation would likewise have been partaking in libertine, hook-up sex. Basically, it's social norms and codes that make all the difference. We don't have any more social norms or codes to prevent casual love-less meaningless orgasms with people whose names we don't long remember.

To Davis, liberals are the chief promoters of censorship in a broad range of social and political issues. I have hundreds of bookmarks of articles that prove this.

I'm no judge of current culture, but the article's first paragraph is wrong. The University of Miami student newspaper was running a sex column as early as the early '70s. One of the biology teachers wrote it, and it was very informative.

I'm not so old that I cannot remember back in the late 60s thinking about sex almost as often as avoiding wearing a uniform in Asia. All that is changed is that it you have new bunch of old folks running around forgetting what it was like to be young and being shocked at what they did when they were that age themselves.

And it did not start with us. I remember almost thirty years ago now, talking to a woman who was actually close to my mother's age (not about sex I hasten to say) and, to express her contempt for her sister's intelligence, said, "She was actually still a virgin when she got married." And, of course, my own mother's question when she saw the bed in my apartment when I went off to grad school, "Will that bed be big enough for two people?"

Seriously, are sex columns really an important front on which progressives should be advancing their principles? Really?

What an weird -- though perhaps predictable -- take on this.

Oddly enough, the issues of sex, gender, and sexual orientation happen to be areas of interest in sex columns. Hello!!!?!?! Seems pretty reasonable to me.

What's really stramnge is how often they come up in state GOP platforms...

College students are having sex? When did this happen?

I sit here laughing at the binary premise behind this entire topic, and how it obscures the truth: the generation in question is not a monolithic, all or nothing group on this or any other subject. My children are 26, 23 and 17. I listen when they talk about themselves and their peers. I tend to learn a lot from listening.

So, the binary choice: Adhere to the conservative-religious-moral stance that essentially (do, please prove it if you disagree) suppresses the natural inclinations of healthy, sexually mature people; Or, dance a jig on the concept of restraint and responsibility and shag anything that isn't moving (including those things that were moving but which you grabbed and made captive).

It boggles my mind that when it comes to sex, people just forget what they were taught about being civilized, socialized humans: Going ahead with [fill in blank] without the other person's consent is wrong, and if you cause injury it is a crime. If the other person is not yet recognized, legally and/or socially, as capable of giving consent, you don't do it.

The grey area is illusiory. We permit peer pressure and bully tactics to rise to the same level as consent. We complain that our youngsters are becoming "sexualized" before they are "ready" while saying and doing nothing about the sexualization of our media... and I'm not talkling about erotica and pornography, the preferred scapegoat of conservatism and moralists, I'm talking about turning on the TV at any time day or night to see teenagers bouncing around in advertisements for food, clothing and entertainment, pre-adolescents with makeup or CGI that make them look like adults from the neck up, women who paint their lips and cheeks, wear 4-inch heels and transparent hose on shaved legs exposed up to and beyond mid-thigh who vocally complain about being objectified... need I go on?

The hypocrisy is ubiquitous and deep, made egregious by those who complain bitterly about the outcomes while getting rich on the very things that create those outcomes.

Guess what, America: Your obsession with "more is always better" is the definition of sex just as much as it is with money, power, material possessions and luxury. Until you face up to that, until you see your hypocrisy, I will just quietly keep going, ignoring your bleating, and helping my children maintain what they've learned about ethics and personal responsibility in the face of your children stomping on them at every turn.