Book of the week: Sex and God at Yale: Porn, Political Correctness, and a Good Education Gone Bad by Nathan Harden

(Thomas Dunne, $26)

The Ivy League has a problem with sex, said Hanna Rosin in The New York Times. In his new book, recent Yale graduate Nathan Harden spins a portrait of an institution in moral decline by focusing on the university’s biennial “Sex Week,” a campus-wide bacchanal that features oral-sex seminars, vibrator demonstrations, and lectures by porn stars. “The conservative movement loves an innocent,” especially one who “has witnessed the debauchery of the elites firsthand.” Harden, homeschooled and already married by the time he arrived at Yale, plays the part impeccably, describing with horror the experience of listening to a burlesque performer named Darlinda deliver a lecture called “Babeland’s Lip Tricks.” Harden raises some fair points. “As a parent, I don’t really want to think about one of my children attending Darlinda’s instructional sessions.” But Yale’s current sexual culture seems like “fodder for satire,” not for high dudgeon.

Most recent Yalies—including us—take pride in our alma mater’s being “a very sexually immodest place,” said Kathryn Olivarius and Claire Gordon in TheDailyBeast.com. “Harden’s anger with Sex Week—the forced pivot of his book—is that he thinks it creates a terrible environment for women.” But women benefit when all students are encouraged to ask questions about America’s prevailing sexual culture, including the place of pornography. Harden’s problem is that he “doesn’t like any display of sex really,” from photos of nudes in campus art exhibitions to the condom dispensers in the dorms. He also fails to mention that Yale’s administration has recently moved to tone down Sex Week, which makes his book feel late to the game.

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“Harden isn’t the first to argue that universities, and Yale in particular, need to work harder at fostering healthy sexual expectations and practices among young Americans,” said Nora Caplan-Bricker in The New Republic. But what he really wants is for all this sex talk to just go away. Invoking the spirit of God and Man at Yale, William F. Buckley Jr.’s landmark 1951 tract deriding liberal secularism, Harden shoehorns in a tired diatribe against leftist multiculturalism, which he sees as the underlying cause of Yale’s moral decline. But mostly he just condescends, aiming to defend poor, helpless women like me against oversexed, porn-fueled male coeds. “To his 290-page sally forth in defense of my honor, I can only say, ‘No thanks.’”