Letters to the Editor: March 27, 2008

Regarding 'Letters to the Editor,' (Tuesday, March 25 2008):

In his hard-hitting letter to the Editor, Alexander Hwang '11 correctly asserts that feminists at Princeton have a "burden to eliminate [porn's] threat to the inherent value of women." As Hwang eloquently notes, "porn is bad all the time, for the basic premise of porn is the objectification of the woman as a means to a sexual end." The only dysfunction, if any, in Hwang's argument is that it finishes too soon.

Realistic feminists like Chloe Angyal '09 may be pleasantly surprised to learn that just as porn is degrading to women, men get tired of it too. Men don't want to "objectify" women at all; we want to subjectify them. We don't want to deal with 640x480, when 20/20 is so much better. We have seen plenty of sex on the casting couch, in the VIP room, and in Mike's Apartment. We want to see it on the common-room couch, in the PTC coatroom, and in My Apartment.

Porn's false pretenses have duped pizza delivery men, pool boys, and guys-with-sisters-with-really-hot-friends the world over. Childless men hire babysitters; professors extend office hours that no one comes to, and ugly men ride in the backseat of minivans, wondering why it's not working.

Defenders of porn will tell us and Hwang "not to knock it before we've tried it." But these people don't understand that porn's objectification of women has gone too deep; it's way past the point of no return.

Trevor Biller '09

Res. college diplomas?

An email I recently received from Butler College Dean David Stirk indicated that "diplomas will be distributed, for the first time, at the residential colleges" this year. May I ask why this decision is justified? Are we graduating from the residential colleges or from the University? If we're distributing diplomas away from Nassau Hall for reasons of expediency - graduation is, after all, an extremely long ceremony already - then wouldn't it be faster to distribute them at departmental buildings (which have a good deal more relevancy to one's diploma than where one spent freshman and sophomore year living)? And if the place of diploma receipt is meant to have some symbolic significance, I think that somewhere like my department or Nassau Hall is certainly a good deal more evocative of my education than is Butler College, a place many of us were glad to see razed to the ground that evokes waffle ceilings, long walks and housing disparities between its residents and Rockyites.

Hal Laidlaw '08

Too quick to judge

Last December in a story I wrote for Newsweek's web site about a book called "Soldier's Heart," by a West Point Professor, Elizabeth Samet, I made an off-hand comparison between Samet's English class for plebes and what I knew - or thought I knew - about Ivy League colleges, "warped by political correctness."

The Princeton Alumni Weekly reprinted the story in its March 19 issue, eliciting justified queries from Princeton faculty and administrators. They were, roughly: Where was my information about Princeton coming from? Had I ever actually been to a Princeton class? And what did I really know about what went on there?

The answers, I'm sorry to say, are: from hearsay, second-hand observation, and assumption; once, about four years ago, and not much, respectively. Also embarrassing was the question posed by my wife, Oscie: "You're 56. What do you know about 20 year olds?"

I decided to actually do a little reporting from the four freshmen, four sophomores, four juniors, and one senior in the class I am teaching this semester, JRN 400. They informed me, politely but without much hesitation, that their professors do challenge them to think deeply, to question and wonder. Some of them seemed impressed, if not a little awed, by the quality of critical thinking of their teachers. Yes, there is some jargon thrown about, especially by the occasional precept know-it-all, but students do not feel any particular pressure to conform to political correctness. Yes, there is a certain stoicism about stress and rejection (especially around bicker time) but hardly the joyless pre-professional grind I suggested. And no, they did not all want to go to Wall Street, although some of them might.

One of my more perceptive students asked me if I thought things had really changed that much: hadn't Princeton students always competed for one thing or another or worried about their futures?

I realized as he spoke that I had caught myself in that old trap of projecting one's own experience (or nostalgic fantasies) on someone else's present-day reality. Although I did not go to Princeton (I went to Harvard, which some readers will think explains a lot), my father and both grandfathers did, and I have a romanticized view of an earlier age at Old Nassau that probably never really was. I went to college in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s when students questioned and talked about their feelings and the meaning of life to excess (and, if they were like me, rarely went to class). I love teaching, but when we were done, I had the uncomfortable feeling I had just used my own failure as a case study in the pitfalls of dashed-off on-line journalism. The take-away was simple enough: Don't make glib generalizations based on untested assumptions.

Evan Thomas, Ferris Professor of Journalism