Don't let sex crowd out individuality
Published: Wednesday, November 4, 2009
Updated: Wednesday, November 4, 2009
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Sex and individuality are magnified in college, and these issues are of concern for us because we’re defining how we think about them, and reacting to how people think about them.
Ariel Levy’s book “Female Chauvinist Pigs” argues that people are mistaking consumerism for romance. She notes that people (especially college students) are having sex and bragging about these experiences to the extent that these experiences become commodities. She says that people are mistaking hook-ups for individuality and mistaking sexual promiscuousness for freedom. Two conflicting works comment on the identity of an individual, and these have repercussions for Levy.
In Allan Bloom’s “Closing of the American Mind” he argues that undergraduate students are trading faith in objective goodness for a kind of selfish subjectivity. Bloom wrote, “[For] the great majority of students…there is a certain rhetoric of self-fulfillment that gives a patina of glamour to this life, but they can see that there is nothing particularly noble about it. Survivalism has taken the place of heroism as the admired quality.” This book rang true with many people and was a controversial bestseller in the early 1990s. Bloom’s argument was that students are giving up heroism, objectivity, belief in classical literature and science and acts of goodness all in order to be true to themselves.
Charles Taylor’s reaction to Bloom, “The Ethics of Authenticity,” argues that the belief in selfish subjectivity is actually misguided but still alludes to a greater issue. Being true to one’s self for Bloom means students are avoiding difficult or provocative works, such as nuclear physics or the works of Plato and are doing this under the pretense that they are only following their personalities. But to Taylor, while this problem might be true, it still hints at a greater call to individualism.
To Taylor, the issue is actually a greater one of how we assert our individual identities in the midst of these pitfalls. Taylor says, “There is a certain way of being human that is my way. I am called upon to live my life in this way, and not in imitation of anyone else’s. But this gives a new importance of being true to myself. If I am not [true to myself in this way], I miss being true to my own originality, and that is something only I can articulate and discover. In articulating it, I am also defining myself. I am realizing a potentiality that is properly my own.”
To the extent that students are accepting an “it’s all good attitude,” toward hook-ups and their sex lives, Levy, Bloom and Taylor would all agree that people shouldn’t sell themselves short. No one should treat the other or the experiences we have with each other as commodities or conquests.
With both Bloom and Levy in mind, we can affirm the greater thesis given by Taylor that to be true to ourselves is our ultimate goal. The way that we can realize this is by striking down humbug when friends bring it up. If friends are talking about their latest conquest in a sexist or immature way as if her/she were a commodity, then shift the conversation to something else. In this way, people who are pursuing hook ups need to be told that what is right for them is not right for everyone. The answer to the commodification or greatness of hook-up culture is to tell people who brag about their experiences to shut up.
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