Late one night last weekend, waiting in the checkout line at Frist, an individual approached me to say that he was of the notion that I was the author of the anonymous “Ask A Girl” column that had recently debuted in the pages of the Nassau Weekly. It’s a strange feeling, being framed. Because no matter how utterly NOT the author of this article I am, the mere speculation draws from the ether an imaginary ghost-me, with ghost intentions, leaving splotches of invented ectoplasm on laptop keys I never pressed when never sitting smirkily in my dorm room, midnight hour, writing a column that the real me- flesh, bone and conviction- simply does not believe in.
Over the last decade, so-called “sex columns” have appeared in campus papers across the country. There was the media buzz generated by a 2001 installment of Natalie Krinsky’s “Sex in the (Elm) City,” a column she wrote for the Yale Daily News. After graduating, Krinsky went on to publish Chloe Does Yale, a novel about an undergrad at Yale who writes a sex column. Julia Allison, author of the more dating-oriented “Sex on Hilltop” for Georgetown’s The Hoya, went on to reap renown as a public figure in the sphere of social and political talk. And now we’ve got Miriam Datskvosky, Columbia ’07, whose “Sexplorations” column in the Columbia Spectator is stirring all the blogopsheric hoopla requisite for similar post-collegiate gravy.
What holds these young women in common, besides the fact that all of their columns start with the word “sex,” is how not anonymous they are. Maybe the anonymous Nassau Weekly “A Girl” plans to unmask herself and cash in at some future date (and by the way, it’s patently clear she’s asking her own questions). Who knows, I may unknowingly sit next to her at Nass meetings in the Terrace library – even the members of the staff are kept in the dark about her identity by the editors. Maybe it’s a guy – in fact, I desperately hope it is. But again, in the meantime, I’d like to explain my problem with the institution of the sex column.
Whenever the Reds used to storm the barricades and seize power in some Third World Country, the violent push of the Revolution would be transformed – by the necessities of managing the State and maintaining control over it and the people – into the idea of what was termed Permanent Revolution (think Cuba or Mao’s Cultural Revolution). This would be where the fun would start: a nation making war on its own people, among whom stalked the unseen enemy.
One of the effects of the cultural upheavals of several decades past was to introduce a new openness in terms of recognizing and discussing sexuality, a treatment of sex oriented around health and ethics – Yes, Now How? – rather than a morality of silence and restriction- No, And Here’s Why. If not a revolution in sexual life, it was certainly a revelation. Today, in terms of the public discourse on sex, we have now entered what could be called the very unfortunate era of Permanent Revelation. Nowhere is this more apparent than on college campuses. With no end in sight, incoming freshman classes will read the inevitable articles on oral sex, faking orgasms, penis size, the right time, the right moves. Permanent Revelation, however, like Permanent Revolution, is an ossifying condition. Nothing new, nothing shocking, a mode of writing that ignores its past and therefore cannot create a future.
The reason for the perennial birth of new sex columns, of course, is that each newly arrived college student must reckon with his or her sexuality and the choices and responsibilities that devolve from it. These crises occur, however, in a society whose sexual education has not caught up to its sexual freedoms. Who then could deny the appeal of these self-appointed oracles of the orifice, almost exclusively female, who seem to have some counsel to offer?
Like the personality cults by which Permanent Revolution is perpetrated, these girl-oracles conceal with rhetoric what could be called crimes against sexual and personal possibility. Feminism is replaced by a jaded sexual nihilism. The gestures of taking up a public discussion of sex, and then of casting oneself as an expert on the matter, are always affected with a kind of brazenness. This brazenness seems to me to be wasted on the form and content of today’s “sex columns.” The easy magnetism of this brand of writing means that we may never know what other things this brazen female tone might well be brought to bear upon. Something about the restriction of a certain female voice to the consuming factors of casual sex seems more than a little disappointing.
Disappointing, but even worse, boring. Look around the world and you will see the grandchildren of revolution grown weary of rah-rah and exhortation, turning instead to feel in their own way for a new tomorrow. Similarly, I would hope that today’s young writers would discard the sordid, broken down bordello of the sex column, leaving its halls to gather dust as we step out under the starlight, trying to find one another.