Hugo Schwyzer

It’s always dangerous to write about books one hasn’t read. Still, I find that I learn a lot from book reviews. For as long as I can remember, my mother has subscribed to the New York Review of Books. Since I started graduate school nearly twenty years ago, she’s given me a gift subscription every year. I can’t say I finish every article, but I read it loyally. Like Ms. Magazine and the Economist, the New York Review is one of those staples of my youth upon which I rely still as an adult. And I learn a great deal from reading reviews about books I will never actually pick up.

I don’t read the very conservative Touchstone very often; run by what seem to be an ecumenical bunch of right-wing C.S. Lewis aficionados, most of what appears in its pages are less eloquent versions of the sort of screeds I prefer to read in First Things. (I mean, I’m not a reactionary, but if I’m going to spend time exposing my eyeballs to 14th century ideas, I might as well make sure those ideas are well-written). Still, I managed to come across this book review recently: Ploy Meets Girl, by Nathaniel Peters.

Reviewing three new jeremiads about the “hook-up culture” on American college campuses, Peters takes the predictable tactic of lamenting the ways in which feminist bogeywomen (the omnipresent forces of darkness in contemporary social conservative discourse) have misled young coeds about the proper understanding of sexuality. But to be fair, his review offers more than the usual wails about youthful promiscuity. Rather, Peters looks at the ways in which colleges do — and don’t — provide mentoring and sexual education to students.

Though even the average secular adult would argue that sex should be about more than just the physical experience, colleges and their students focus only on sexual performance. Universities with no creedal convictions feel ill-equipped to help students address metaphysical questions like the meaning of sex. They can answer only the physical questions, and those end up being the only ones discussed.

At my freshman orientation at Swarthmore College five years ago, we were told about the Sexual Health Counselors, peers who advertised the ability to help with sex toys, contraception, or intriguing permutations of positions and partners. But the college offered no help to those who might ask deeper questions, or even to those who wondered what to do the next morning with the person beside them.

That’s not entirely fair. I’m nearly two decades older than Mr. Peters; I came of age sexually in the Reagan years, when the media predicted a full-blown heterosexual AIDS epidemic. But in those conservative times known as the mid-1980s, I worked as a sexuality educator at Berkeley. Yes, we taught folks how to use condoms, and we even “demonstrated” the not-always ridiculous dental dam. We talked about masturbation and STDs and gave little primers on what was then known as HTLV-III (the forerunner, by name, to HIV). But we also talked about values, and about relationships, and about feelings. We faciltated discussions in dorms and sororities and co-ops about faith, ideals, and romantic longing.

I remember helping to lead a panel discussion (back in 1988 or so) on the question “Why Have Sex?” It was a strange title, and it drew a good-sized audience. The premise of the talk was that too many discussions about sex talked about why folks shouldn’t have it (at least until marriage), or about how to have it properly — but no one was talking about the perfectly reasonable question of why one ought to do it in the first place. The easy answer, of course, was “it feels good.” But that raises the question — what feels good? Is it arousal? Is it anticipation? Is it emotional closeness? Is it orgasmic release? What one person likes best about sex isn’t always what the person they’re being sexual with likes best.

At the time we had this panel, I was at the stage where the honest answer to why I liked sex best was that it made me feel validated as desirable. It was during this panel discussion (that I was facilitating), that I finally figured out that what I wanted out of “groveling” (the term we used before “hooking up”), more than pleasure itself, was the validation that I was desirable. Years later, I heard the comedian Jeff Foxworthy capture perfectly how I felt. I forget exactly what he said, but it was something like:

“You know the best part of being with a woman for the first time? When you’re making out on the bed, and she lifts her hips so you can slide off her underwear; then you know you’re going to have sex. And that’s better than anything that follows.”

The honest-to-God truth was that at nineteen or twenty, still struggling to overcome a tremendous sense that I was fat and unattractive, the best thing about sex was not the physical pleasure or the emotional intimacy but the sheer wonder in discovering that I could be wanted. And of course, the more people I could “get” to “want me”, the better I felt. Though I wasn’t entirely ready to change my behavior, it was during one of these Peer Sexuality Outreach discussions twenty years ago that I learned this basic truth about myself. I don’t know if anyone else at that panel got anything out of it, but I’ve never forgotten it. It was, in fact, one of those key moments that served as a catalyst for my emotional and sexual growth.

The point is, Peters is, in my experience, wrong about what colleges do and don’t provide. Certainly, his description of what he was given at Swarthmore may describe the situation there; if that is indeed all that is provided, that is lamentable. But while I don’t have access to statistics, I’ve got a lot of friends who are active in residential life work on college campuses. (My third wife spent years running residence halls at the University of the Pacific.) And I’ve got a network of former students and youth group kids at schools around the country; because of what and how I teach, I am particularly likely to stay in touch with my students who are interested in gender studies and sexuality. Some of them now work as sexuality educators on their own campuses; from what I hear from them, they are discussing the psychological and emotional dimensions to sex as well as providing information. Arguing from anecdote is useless, but I suspect that Peters has missed out on much of what is available on many campuses.

Peters quotes Donna Freitas, whose book I do need to get, on the importance of having faculty serve as mentors:

Professors need to embrace the idea of themselves as “spiritual guides” of a sort and their syllabi as “confessions of faith.” The campus should be a culture formed by a shared identity, mission, and values of its own, each forming a sense of itself as something special and set apart from the broader culture.

Unfortunately, this is not going to work. Part of the problem lies in the fact that modern universities have identity, mission, and values, but not the philosophy needed to justify them. Furthermore, professors should focus on teaching their disciplines, their primary purpose in a university, not on serving as spiritual directors.

Freitas is writing specifically for professors at schools with a religious affiliation, but the implication seems to be that even those at public colleges ought to take more responsibility than they do for their students’ emotional and spiritual well-being. Peters is dismissive of the Freitas notion, suggesting that we in the professoriate are generally ill-equipped to be spiritual directors. And while I think he may be right about many faculty members, I think Freitas is absolutely spot on about the responsibilty that at least some of us have to be available as mentors.

If I taught macroeconomics, I would expect my students to come to me to talk about their concerns regarding the current global crisis. I would see providing perspective, counsel, and comfort in this time of great financial uncertainty as part of my job. I don’t teach econ, and indeed know virtually nothing about the topic. But I do teach courses on religion, sexuality and gender — and hence I expect students to come to me with questions about how what I’m teaching can connect with their private lives. With some students, that leads to a mentoring relationship. And in some of those mentoring relationships, particularly with my fellow Christians, an element of spiritual direction becomes part of what we do together.

As a gender studies professor, my goal is to raise up thoughtful, empowered, articulate young feminists. As a mentor, my goal for my mentees is simple and three-fold: I want them to grow, I want them to be happy, and I want them to be agents of transformation and justice in the world. As a third-generation college professor, I take this task very seriously. And despite the bias towards rigid chastity in the Peters review, he — and the authors whom he cites — raise some very good questions about what we in the colleges and universities ought to be doing. If our job is to help our young people do this work of growing towards both personal happiness and public service, then those of us in the professoriate who are willing and able need to — at the least — offer spiritual direction, emotional support, and safe, affirming, and frank counsel.