Why America’s professional elite are so interested in sex acts at universities
A search for “cornell nytimes.com” yields a full page of results related to students having purportedly engaged in various sex acts on campus back in 2024:
Nothing newsworthy other than one night of sex has occurred at an Ivy League institution with 26,500 students and more than 3,000 faculty members. How is that possible? Catherine Liu, a professor at UC Irvine, explains in Virtue Hoarders:
For as long as most of us can remember, the professional managerial class (PMC) has been fighting a class war, not against capitalists or capitalism, but against the working classes.
The culture war was always a proxy economic war, but the 1960s divided the country into the allegedly enlightened and the allegedly benighted, with the PMC able to separate itself from its economic inferiors in a way that seemed morally justifiable. It was after 1968 that the PMC gradually shifted its allegiance from workers to capital. Since that time, the most successful and visible segments of the PMC have brazenly put their smarts at the service of the bosses.
As a class, the PMC loves to talk about bias rather than inequality, racism rather than capitalism, visibility rather than exploitation. Tolerance for them is the highest secular virtue—but tolerance has almost no political or economic meaning.
How can the elites in the PMC serve their capitalist overlords? Distract people from serious attempts to confiscate and transfer wealth from the most successful capitalists, e.g., the billionaires who can’t buy Bernie, to the deserving working class. What’s a good distraction? College students having sex.
Under the Obama administration, the state became intensely involved in the enlightened regulation of sex. From 2008, PMC triumphalism under the well-spoken and well-read president channeled the collective energy of liberals to focus on sex in one of the most important sites of class formation: university campuses, especially elite university campuses. Instrumentalized obsession with sexual violence and sexual excess is an important part of American Puritanism: moral and virtuous superiority in the sexual enlightenment makes up an important part of the countercultural inheritance of the PMC. Rather than focusing on economic malfeasance, an ascendant PMC elite under Obama pursued sexual crimes—not at work or in the workplace but on college campuses—with a zeal that liberals reserve for any policy that diverts attention away from economic redistribution. In short, rather than break up the banks or reform the financial sector after he took office, Obama wanted to use his electoral victory to eliminate sexual violence on college campuses. In 2011, his Department of Education Office for Civil Rights sent a “Dear Colleague” letter to more than seven thousand universities warning them that if they did not take action to prevent and remedy sexual violence and sexual assault on their campuses, they would risk losing their rights to all federal funding.
At the same time, sensational stories of sexual violence and sexual abuse on college campuses emerged in the mainstream media, as if to confirm the necessity of the Obama administration’s stringent new policies. In 2015, at the height of the Obama-era sex panic, Kirby Dick’s The Hunting Ground was released by—wait for it—the Weinstein Company. Dick’s documentary presented college campuses as terrifying places for young women to live. Dick, with the help of Harvey Weinstein, pandered to his liberal audience’s thirst for stories about campus sexual violence. In 2016, Amber Frost cited the National Crime Victimization Survey numbers showing that non-college-going women were 1.2 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than their college-going counterparts. Sexual violence on college campuses attracted liberal PMC elites to a new front in the culture wars, far away from inequality, oppression, and workplace sexual harassment and discrimination. Fighting sexual violence on campus allowed the PMC to reinforce its belief that white-collar professionals and lawyers like Atticus Finch were the true heroes in low-risk struggles against anything but economic abuse.
Fifty years after the Summer of Love, college-going women were armed with more information and more sex education than any generation before them, but they seemed less capable of assuming sexual agency and more in need of protection than previous generations of women, who had had to deal with sexual autonomy and male desire without the help of university Title IX officers.
The bankers whose “tails I win; heads you/taxpayers/shareholders lose” risk-taking caused the Collapse of 2008 skated free/rich while Black college athletes and fraternity meatheads were pursued (see Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town (a.k.a. majoring in partying and football) and “A Rape on Campus”).
Please don’t take this post as an opinion regarding what kind of sex occurred at Cornell, who was at fault, if anyone, etc. I haven’t followed the case beyond the headlines (though with the Governor of New York State hunting for the fraternity guys with a special prosecutor, I assume that the guys will be found guilty and imprisoned). My personal opinion is that as the U.S. welcomes more Muslim immigrants, the kind of situation that gave rise (so to speak) to the situation will disappear. Women will once again be a defined category and they won’t be permitted to gather with unrelated men, consume alcohol, etc. No woman will be able to file a civil lawsuit seeking monetary damages after being raped in a fraternity house because, without a male relative escort, no woman will be able to enter a fraternity house at any time of the day or night.
The complaint does have one interesting angle. The plaintiff says that she was 20 years old at the time the events occured and also that “Plaintiff was in [her sorority’s] care, custody, and control” (essentially, that she was a child or maybe a slave to the sorority).
Though eligible to vote, she characterizes herself as a “minor” (if 20-year-old students are, in fact, minors, should they have the right to vote laws into place?): “Plaintiff, as a minor under 21 years old,”.
One more interesting tidbit from the book is an explanation for the popularity and acceptance of intellectually fraudulent activities such as the New York Times’s 1619 Project (primarily organized by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who has been in the news recently).
Full post, including commentsThe authors of the Project reject all criticism of it: they believe that their findings do not depend on the research consensus and archival evidence sorted through by a scholarly community of historians. Using her new clout and massive audience, Nikole Hannah-Jones led the way in dismissing the accepted scholarship that had been done on colonial America as simply the highly biased work of white males. Lifetimes of careful, empirical research were simply no match for massive foundation dollars backed by one of the largest media companies in the world. It is clear that powerful financial and media interests are behind the promotion of the 1619 Project and its bold attempt to change the way we understand American history and historical research itself. The Project is on top of everything, a bold attempt to eliminate historical materialism from the teaching and writing of American history while destroying the possibility of solidarity in the American working class.
Liberals have abandoned history, because they have to believe they are superior to elites of the past and the contemporary working class at the same time.
