SEX & THE THREE MONKEYS

http://www.fortmilltimes.com/124/story/449682.html

Lawmakers: Throw sex experts off college faculty
By GREG BLUESTEIN
(Published February 06, 2009)

ATLANTA — Upset House Republicans are mounting a campaign to purge Georgia's higher education system of professors with an expertise in racy sexuality topics as the state grapples with a $2.2 billion shortfall.

State Rep. Charlice Byrd of Woodstock took the House well on Friday to announce a "grass-roots" effort to oust professors with expertise in subjects like male prostitution, oral sex and "queer theory."

"This is not considered higher education," she said. . . .

"Our job is to educate our people in sciences, business, math," said Hill, a vice chairman of the budget-writing House Appropriations Committee. He said professors aren't going to meet those needs "by teaching a class in queer theory."

The Board of Regents, which oversees the state's colleges and universities, has bristled at attempts by legislators to dictate who it should hire. A regents spokesman said the system's mission - teaching, research and service - is a broad field.

He said the state's schools hire faculty with expertise in a range of subjects as part of "a tradition of investigating the human experience." And he noted that they aren't teaching "how to" courses, but rather they are experts on the sociological trends and risks.

Hill and Byrd were incensed to learn a University of Georgia professor teaches a graduate course on "queer theory." They also took aim at Georgia State University, where an annual guide to its faculty experts lists a sociology lecturer as an expert in oral sex and faculty member Kirk Elifson as an expert in male prostitution.


Unlike those who wish to preserve theories about the earth being flat or evolution not existing, both of which cannot be easily researched by individuals, every person’s body, including their sexuality, is “at hand” so to speak. Research on the matter cannot be stopped by eliminating professors. Unreliable individual conclusions might at least be minimized by proper research -- but not just scientific statistics, because sex is in large part humanistic, emotional, and poetic, not to say musical.

What are the consequences of unreliable information? I include here a group for junior high girls to which one can only belong after providing oral gratification for the entire football team. They believe this has no consequences. Or commodifying one’s own young self was recently discovered when a study of online transactions that expected middle-aged men to be preying on kids, revealed upper-class kids who were cold-bloodedly negotiating prices for their bodily acts. No consequences except money for iPods and perhaps terminal disease. I caught part of a radio report of a study on divorce. It found that often-divorced educated upscale women were not suffering from love mismatches, but simply trading up to even more prosperous husbands. Nothing to do with sex. Or love. Tell Jane Austen.

Or, speaking of middle-age, hordes of married people know no better than “wham, bam, thank you ma’am.” On the other hand people who see too many movies, again commodifying if not fetishizing, are on the feverish hunt for satin sheets, champagne flutes and black lace nightgowns. Other ignoramuses need the advice of “Dear Abby” who advises men they ought to take a shower if they expect to be welcomed in bed.

In general I’m against secrecy, but on the other hand I’m in favor of privacy. The puzzle is how to get knowledge and even to participate in a bit of sharing without being trapped by what other people know or think they know. The stigma, the shunning, the economic slamming of doors, certainly encourage people to NOT study such controversies as oral sex. But probably the most stifling force is simply the fear of not measuring up to other people, the imagined “norm.” What if one discovers everyone else is “in the know?”

A university is a specialized environment, a kind of operating theatre for knowledge, where childish and ignorant strategies are theoretically excluded. The incisive mind, like the surgeon’s knife, must be autoclaved, cleaned of old cultural taboos that keep us treading around in circles of frustration. The worst infection lately has been the insidious commodification of the universities themselves, not different from the commodification of surgery. A university now is supposed to provide the means for earning a lot of money. Forget service to humanity: go into science and math because that’s where the money is. Study economics and business because that will teach you money management. Right. And the purpose of surgery is to make you beautiful.

An interesting (to advertisers) but unfortunate thing (to consumers) about sex is that it has become so over-defined and slice-and-diced into saleable uniformity, that if persons could get completely away from cultural taboos and prescriptions, they would probably be much better at the actual act, hopefully preserving a child’s interest in experiment in the here and now.

The tragic thing about sex (to all of us) is that it’s not what most people are looking for anyway. What they really crave is honest intimacy: relationships they can trust. Sex might either help or hinder that search. But commodification is a surefire destroyer of intimacy.

Remember the three monkeys: hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil? These three monkeys are not suitable for college matriculation because they define evil as ignorance. And they are no good in bed. Neither are the three ostriches. However, politics in Atlanta might work out for them.

The two humans -- one of whom says anything goes and one of whom says “ignore anything about scary stuff”-- are being monkeys and ostriches. The one who goes to college, reads books, makes many kinds of friends, and has the confidence to explore while protecting him or her self, is truly human, capable of extending intimacy to others in a way that makes “good sex” possible.