Call me Is-male. You've probably heard about my distant ancestor Ishmael, and the way that when he felt the chill of a "damp, drizzly November" in his soul, he took to following coffins in funeral processions. When Is-male feels a chill in his romantic life, he does something similarly funereal: he tries to give the whole thing the long good-bye. After all, Is-male reasons, he's had more than his fair share of exhilarating encounters—a marriage here, a divorce there—and more than his fair share of misery and heartbreak as well. Why not just draw a line under it, call it done? Style himself after the romantically embittered and disillusioned Graham Greene heroes who trudge off to leper colonies to lose their worldly desires? But Is-male has tried variants of this before, and there has always been some backsliding. He's been looking for something that will put the final nail in the coffin. And then, as if in answer to a prayer, he heard about Sex Week at Yale.
There's nothing like the prospect of a week of academic theorizing about sex and love to make you want to give it all up. And that's exactly what I was hoping for when I heard about Sex Week at Yale—lots of theory, lots of abstraction, lots of intellectual distance.
I heard about Sex Week last year in the following press release, forwarded to me by e-mail:
I'm coordinating a huge event for Yale University which is titled "Campus-Wide Sex Week." Four organizations are organizing the event: Yale Hillel, Peer Health Educators, the Women's Center, and the Yale Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual Cooperative ...
The week involves a faculty lecture series with topics such as transgender issues: where does one gender end and the other begin, the history of romance, and the history of the vibrator. Student talks on the secrets of great sex, hooking up, and how to be a better lover and a student panel on abstainance. A Valentine's Dinner at the Jewish Center with an afro/cuban band and a debate after the dinner between Rabbi Shmuley Boteach (author of Kosher Sex) and Dr. Judy Kuriansky (radio show host of [Love Phones] and author of [The Complete Idiot's Guide to Tantric Sex]). A faculty panel on sex in college with four professors. a movie film festival (sex fest 2002) and a concert with local bands and yale bands. and lastly, a celebrity panel with Al Goldstein (screw magazine), Dr. Gilda Carle (sex therapist), Nancy Slotnick (Harvard graduate and owner/operator of the Drip Cafe in NYC), and lastly Dr. Susan Block [also a sex-therapist radio host, and a Yale graduate].
The event is going to be huge and all of campus is going to be involved ...
One of my first thoughts on reading this was that before Yale (my beloved alma mater) had a Sex Week it ought to institute a gala Grammar and Spelling Week. In addition to "abstainance" (unless it was a deliberate mistake in order to imply that "Yale puts the stain in abstinence") there was that intriguing "faculty panel on sex in college with four professors," whose syntax makes it sound more illicit than it was probably intended to be.