Covering all the bases, so to speak

For a course in research methods, I recently found myself critiquing a study titled "Watching Sex on Television Predicts Adolescent Initiation of Sexual Behavior" from the journal Pediatrics. Conducted two years ago by researchers at the Rand Corporation, the study concluded that "watching sex on TV ... may hasten adolescent sexual initiation."

Studies of this sort often have trouble separating cause from effect. Even if we grant a strong correlative relationship between heavy television viewing and increased sexual activity, it's still possible that researchers are focusing on the wrong causal picture. The relationship can just as easily be explained in the other direction: Maybe teens who have greater libido tend to watch television with more sexual scenes or perhaps youths who engage in sexual activity look to television to learn more about risks, effects and behaviors.

It strikes me that we often hear of a correlation between a college student's interest in sex and decreased time spent in academic pursuits. In October's edition of The New Yorker, Professor Anthony Grafton notes the struggle of "lecturing to a roomful of teenagers above whom hang almost visible clouds of hormones."

Anecdotal evidence confirms that students are naturally lecherous. A recent Point poll suggests — if we are to believe the results — that 40 percent of respondents watch films of questionable decency "sometimes," "often" or "very often." Then there's the website boredatfirestone.com, an anonymous online message boardswhich seems to suggest that a disproportionately large number of students at Firestone Library pursue activities likely in contravention of the library's carrel use policy. Finally, is it merely coincidence that this year's only Rhodes Scholar, Christian Sahner '07, also helped to found the Anscombe Society, a sexually conservative student group?

Alan Bloom asserted in his influential commentary on American higher education, "The Closing of the American Mind," that while formerly "a significant number of students used to arrive at the university physically and spiritually virginal" — and therefore filled with a "literal lust for knowledge" — today's student body has been "sated with easy, clinical and sterile satisfactions of body and soul" and is therefore less likely to devote its time and energy to intellectual inquiry.

Historically, this sort of analysis has not been limited to the academy. In "Civilization and its Discontents," Sigmund Freud contrasted the immediate happiness of the "pleasure principle" with the deferred gratification of the "reality principle." If the individual spends all his time fulfilling simple urges, little time is left for demanding tasks, like staying alert through one of Grafton's lectures, for example.

Adherents of this view suggest that the student's naturally vigorous libido works to exclude academic interests. For Bloom, the declining "lust for knowledge" is the result of a more generally increased lust.

But maybe this causal picture is wrong. What if professors, by highlighting the sexual components of their fields to an increasingly explicit extent, have caused students to view sex as something more common, thus promoting on-campus sexual activity and suppressing interest in other pursuits?

One need only examine whether professors are more sexually provocative today than they were in the past. Let's collect some evidence. Two years ago I took EEB/WOM 301: Sociobiology, Sex Roles and Human Development, in which the primary textbook — "Evolution's Rainbow: Diversity, Gender, and Sexuality in Nature and People" by Joan Roughgarden — detailed, among other things, the most common positions for male homosexual sex. We have a professor, Peter Singer, who has been known to introduce his first lecture by polling students on whether it is immoral to have intercourse with one's first cousin and who, as written in The Daily Princetonian five years ago, published an essay titled "Heavy Petting" on some finer points of bestiality. And even Princeton's most conservative voice, Professor Robert George, has been known to pen such discreet lines as, "If Susan, for example, masturbates John to orgasm or applies oral stimulation to him to bring him to orgasm, no real unity has been effected."

We have covered all the bases, so to speak.

Students often get the credit — or blame — for pushing the boundaries of sexual culture on campus. Let's not forget the valuable contributions of our professors who, liberal or conservative, are committed to keeping the discussion as explicit as possible. J.R. de Lara '07 is a politics major from Ithaca, N.Y. He can be reached at jdelara@princeton.edu.