They’re at it again.
A few months ago, I documented for Spectator readers
the disaster that is Current magazine. Current is
published by Newsweek — the full title is Current
with Newsweek — and distributed on college campuses like
Georgetown University, the “Catholic” school where I pick mine up.
As I said in the previous piece, Current is written and
edited by students; call it a farm team for the mainstream media.
It is glossy and liberal and snarky and way too cute.
It is also deeply, deeply obsessed with sex — or what passes
for sex among college students and their journalistic mentors these
days. As I wrote in my last
piece, I find this more dull than titillating. Our culture is
so steeped, marinated and befogged with sex that a strange
switchback has taken hold: the crushing of desire. It’s like being
a baseball player in a season that never ends. For the first few
months you’re excited. Then comes fall, and you’re tired.
Exasperation follows with winter. Then, boredom. Eventually a kind
of zombie psychosis settles in. You become the joyless sex slaves
of Brave New World. (And by the way, ever notice how
liberals are ready with the 1984 Orwell reference whenever the
government datamines, but the slow descent into violent,
dehumanized pornography never conjures Huxley and Brave New
World?)
Zombie psychosis is as good a word as any to describe the large
drawing that makes up half the contents page of the summer issue of
current. It depicts a couple in bed. The woman is straddling the
man, but she faces away from him and is reading a book. The man is
sitting up. He is tapping away at his laptop, which is resting on
the woman’s backside. She is — barely — clothed. How to put this
delicately? He is faced with, um, the female derrier and birth
canal, and is entirely focused on the computer screen.
This cartoon is supposed to draw the reader in to the story that
goes with it, about the abstinence movement on college campuses. It
is intended to emphasize the strangeness of abstinence. And the
article by Rebecca Rohr bolsters this position. Rohr interviews
some kids wearing abstinence rings, then concludes that “with an
estimated 75 percent rate of sexual activity, it may take more than
a trinket and a pledge to accomplish this goal. For now, it seems,
college students and sex are in a long-term relationship.”
Oh, perfect. Miss Rohr will have no trouble jumping from
Current right to Newsweek. She has mastered
liberal no-bias bias. Hey, these kids are trying to wait until
marriage and that abstinence may be the wave of the future. But
statistics are statistics, and no “trinket” or dumb pledge is going
to change that. What doesn’t fit Rohr’s thesis is ignored. The
trauma of abortion, teem pregnancy rates, the recent report that
the pill kills sexual desire? Hey, didja hear that 75 percent of
college kids are doing it?
Quite a contrast to the piece that appears a couple pages later,
on Femsex, the new workshop given at Brown, Harvard and — natch —
Berkeley. It’s a “safe space” for people “to explore their
sexuality.” All are welcome; students “use the term ‘phe’ instead
of he and she.” According to one facilitator, Femsex is “a
sex-positive women’s space.” Hear, hear, says writer Alexandra
Hiatt — a positive space “and a stimulating one at that.”
So: abstinence, an impossible joke. Femsex, healthy and
stimulating.
Yet Current may have accidentally stumbled across the
truth even while trying to subvert it. When I first opened the
magazine and found myself face to face with the drawing I described
above, I didn’t think of an abstinent couple who are so de-sexed
that she can read and he can blog while their bodies are virtually
doing it. I instantly thought of the joyless sexual promiscuity of
Brave New World and our pornified culture. It reminded me
of the lost souls in Huxley’s dystopia, who can have all the sex
they want, yet it is sex without procreation, personality, heart,
or laughter. I thought of those stories, now quite common, of men
who cannot get aroused by a beautiful woman in their midst because
their internal sexual gears have been stripped by photography,
which is the only thing that can stimulate them. Indeed, the poor
slob in the Current cartoon may actually be viewing porn
on his laptop while his partner remains lost in a book. I also
quietly thanked God that my Irish Catholic father was misguided
enough to teach me that women are creatures on infinite magic and
mystery, and that a very good way to screw yourself up is to
violate that mystery in the name of — well, something. It
certainly doesn’t lead to knowledge or happiness, if today’s
students are any indication.
Even a blind pig finds an acorn. In showering us with yet more
sex, Newsweek may have accidentally slipped in some
truth.
