Today, the New York Times runs a piece in its magazine on abstinent Ivy Leaguers that tries desperately to make them seem more sophisticated than knee-jerk fundamentalist abstinencers. Hence, the article caption:

In the Ivy League, abstinence is a) philosophical, b) research-based, c) an outgrowth of feminism, d) sexy and fun, e) all of the above.

The writer, Randall Patterson, has to strain pretty hard to make the case. He quotes Kevin Joyce, the former head of Princeton’s abstinence club, saying, “Every position we take as a group can be confirmed by rational thought,” and then proceeds to spend thousands of words profiling a group of people who make no real arguments whatsoever. All the abstinence activists Patterson talks to operate under the basic premise that sex is dirty, bad, and wrong. The assumption drips from the page. Here’s a section on Princeton’s conservative Catholic group, the Anscombe Society:

Anscombe’s arguments against premarital sex are as impressive as they are difficult to summarize, and the students so admired her logic, they named their society after her. Robert George, a professor of jurisprudence at Princeton, is one of the Anscombe Society’s informal faculty advisers. Himself a Catholic thinker, George says that society members employ “philosophical-ethical arguments” to support their belief that promiscuity “deeply compromises human dignity,” and psychological and sociological rationale to justify the claim that casual sex leads to “personal unhappiness and social harm.” The students are some of Princeton’s most gifted, George says, and “even people who don’t accept their conclusions recognize that the arguments being advanced by the Anscombe students are serious and cannot be easily dismissed.”

Note Patterson trying to give Anscombe and its allies the benefit of the doubt, without actually bothering to include the content of their claims, beyond the assertion that sex “deeply compromises human dignity.” People are obviously welcome to believe that, but if they want to make the case to me, I’d sort of like to hear why.

This kind of stuff is sexual Intelligent Design Theory. It’s pseudoscientific — full of claims like “safe sex is not safe” and “[abstinence will give you] better sex in your future marriage” — and relies on that pseudoscientific veneer to mask a fundamentally religious agenda. I’m glad that this seems to have some sort of relationship with feminism for some, like Janie Fredell, the main subject of the article, who expresses deep and obviously genuine concern about equality, female genital mutilation, etc.

I want to reiterate again here that people are of course entitled to their own beliefs about how personally damaging sex is, but calm the agenda down, guys:

By the time I met her in December, Janie Fredell had grown used to explaining to strange men why she won’t have sex. Only 21 years old, she had spoken with a number of reporters and been on CNN. “It’s such an incredible thing to have the power to influence people for the better,”

Despite Fredell’s clear concern for important women’s issues, one can’t help but get the sense that this is a sad, 19th-century style feminism, in which frail, pure women must be protected from the bestial, carnal desires of men. She denies this avidly, but neither she nor Patterson doesn’t bother to explain how her feminism differs from this “protect-the-weak-women” attitude, except to assert flatly that it does differ. Here’s one of Fredell’s co-abstinents:

Keliher quoted to me what an abstinence speaker said — that the real meaning of masculinity is “being able to deny yourself for the sake of the woman.”

It’s another example of the ironic postmodernism of the contemporary American right, which is willing to tolerate such dissonance as the cooption of its arch-enemy, feminism, if that means pushing its fundamentally anti-modern agenda.  Present, of course, is the classic victimology trope of those who are pushing for a basically regressive agenda. The group calls itself “True Love Revolution,” and Fredell’s clear comparison of herself to heroes of people who were actually, forcefully repressed:  “To bolster herself, she often thought of Gandhi and Nelson Mandela.”

I don’t know why sex seems so unhappy and unpleasurable to people like Fredell and Keliher. I’m sorry that it does, and I’ll happily concede their right not to have it if they don’t want to. But it’s offensive to suggest that people who enjoy having sex are demeaning themselves and their bodies, and it’s a completely indefensible argument when its religious underpinnings are knocked away.

Thomas Jefferson once declared, “Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without a government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.” Sadly, one can no longer espouse such faith in this country’s media. The media have become complicit in the mudslinging and the lack of focus on issues, and they are having a serious impact. Having just researched a 20-page PWR paper on media influence, and learned about the media’s impact in my political science class, it is astounding how much of an effect Wolf Blitzer, Rush Limbaugh, The New York Times and others can have.

The media can tell its audience what to think about and what standards they should use to judge an issue, but it seems to be spending more time relating the life story of the prostitute linked to former New York governor Eliot Spitzer than focusing on issues of substance. The irresponsible and distorted reporting is especially prominent in coverage of the presidential election, where, for instance, they misattribute statements to Barack Obama’s pastor and comb 17,481 pages of Hillary Clinton’s First Lady schedules to establish the fact that she was in the White House on the day of Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky and the infamous stained blue dress. All this coverage ranges from falsehood to distortion, to trashy.

One of my classmates recently lampooned CNN’s “best political team on television,” by dubbing them “CNNenemies” of truth. This is sad (albeit hilarious satire), and with the tremendous power of the media, scary. The media are supposed to be the Fourth Estate. Yes, they’re for-profit businesses, and are basically giving their audience what they’re asking for in order to boost their ratings. Which is why we the readers/viewers should stop demanding sex and scandal and soundbites. I, for one, would like to have Thomas Jefferson’s faith in the media once again.

Josh Kuempel comments on my article below, clarifying that the article in the Daily was edited and lost some of its main argument:

Our main argument is that Stanford is getting run more and more like a for-profit business rather than a non-profit dedicated to the student experience. I posted the full text in a facebook note: (http://www.facebook.com/notes.php?id=209615) If you have time between or after finals, I hope you will get a chance to read it.

I just wanted to post this, and note that I couldn’t agree more. It should be the main emphasis of campus politics and student organizing, and instead it’s totally ignored. If anything is making Stanford worse, it’s this.

It was a typical dead week night for a fuzzy like me. 1:30AM in a recessed corner of Green, headphones on, surfing Facebook in the hopes that paper #2345 would write itself.

Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed some movement. A small freshman girl poked out from behind a book-stack and approached me. Curious, I took off my headphones. She was visibly uncomfortable as she stammered, “Do you know uh, do you know when the library closes?”

Now, I’m no sucker. Anyone who’s in Green at 1:30AM, and especially anyone who found me as deep in the libraries sinister bowels as I was, knows darn well when the library closes. But I was intrigued, so I humored her and informed her of the closing time. She thanked me and stood there for a few seconds, looking extremely torn about what to do next.

“Is there anything else I can help you with?” I asked, starting to wonder where on earth this was going to go.
“Do you have anything, like, um, caffeine or an energy drink or something?” she stammered. Before I could open my mouth to respond, she blurted out, “Actually, do you have any Adderall or any other kind of drugs like that? I need to finish my PWR paper and am having a hard time.” She immediately clapped her hands to her mouth and turned as red as a fire truck.

I avoided making a comment about the fact that if she needed Adderall for a PWR paper she was in for a world of hurt in the years to come and informed her that I unfortunately did not have anything like that on me at the moment. I went on to say that if she really needed energy, she should head to the Axe and Palm and get a coffee or an energy drink before they close. She quickly uttered a hurried “Thanks! Sorry!” and sprinted off into the stacks.

To say I was shocked and confused following our little exchange would have been a fairly accurate assessment. Ignoring the fact that apparently I come off as an academic drug dealer, I couldn’t quite wrap my head around her reasoning and it led me to start asking questions about what exactly created that particular situation in the wee hours of the morning in Green Library.

Saying our Stanford microcosm promotes competition and perfectionism would qualify for understatement of the millenia. Now, I’m not here to decry this competition - if anything, I’m all for it, it leads to an academically and socially involved and passionate student body - but at what point do we have to stop and re-assess the monster we’re creating? I understand that situations like mine aren’t unique, or even rare, occurrences. Stanford students need to excel, they need to be the best, and they are willing to do what it takes when in a dire situation or not feeling up to the challenge. Much like any of the recent headline-grabbing pro-athletes making the leap, a Stanford student too will turn to drugs to gain an edge if they feel pushed to rope’s end.

Is that ok? Is that something we’ve come to accept? How responsible are we as a University? As a community? How about just as human beings? Sure, President Hennessy and your TA may not go around promoting wholesale drug use to gain mental clarity for finals; but the environment that promotes those kinds of decisions not only exists here at Stanford, but is also constantly propagated by the influences of the outside world. We need to get the best grades. We need to get the best internships. We need to do well on our MCATs, our LSATs and our GREs. We need to prove we are the best and we don’t care how we do it. We need, we need, we need, and our capacities are only so elastic.

At some point, we need to take a step back and ask some important questions of ourselves. There has to be a line drawn at some point that is going to put your mental and physical health above turning tricks for points on a piece of paper. Understandably, that line is going to be different for each and every one of us. Some of us might be dead before we reach that line, others have never even given it so much as a second thought. This pressure to achieve and perform is an issue that haunts the elite academic institutions of this country and one that is constantly brushed under the carpet and ignored, and that’s not right. As Stanford students and as (mostly) sane human beings, we have to be able to recognize a destructive behavior and address it head-first rather than ignoring it until it becomes too late.

-Mark

Have you seen the op/ed by seniors Josh Kuempel and Mark McClure in the current issue of The Daily? I actually agree with some of what they say, but their argument is ruined by Greek-life narcissism, and it’s this failure of the frats to see beyond their own walls that is possibly the biggest single factor in the student body’s constant concession of ground to the administration.

First of all, I think it’s good, when making arguments like this, to actually bother to document the ways that Stanford has gotten less fun. There’s definitely evidence here, and I’m generally on Kuempel and McClure’s side, but it’s easy to overstate the case as well, and the examples they offer are not really that strong. I’ll give it to them on Full Moon, and even Band Run. But Jack Cackler’s tree-week stunts were pretty horrifying, and it’s sticking up for willful stupidity like this that makes it harder for students to make our case on things that actually matter to us.

Ultimately, though, Kuempel and McClure seem to blame Stanford’s less-fun-than-in-the-golden-days character on a weakened Greek system. And this is where we really part ways. It takes a special kind of frat-house self-involvement to think that “the seven housed fraternities on campus bear the brunt of this Atlas’ burden of propping up Stanford’s social life.” First off, drop the martyrdom schtick. It isn’t a burden. You like it. That’s why you do it. Beyond that, though, it simply isn’t true. If the statement were qualified to say, “Stanford’s social life for freshmen,” it would be incontrovertible. But to find upperclassmen at frat parties is rare, and usually kind of weird and uncomfortable.

The heart and soul of Stanford’s non-freshman social life is row house parties: Kairos Wine and Cheese, anything at Chi Theta Chi, EBF Happy Hour, French House Cafe Night, Synergy, Phi Sig, and the odd party elsewhere (Terra, Slav Dom, Jerry, Columbae, etc.). What makes these parties appealing to people who’ve already had the “What if, like, I see colors differently than you do?” conversation is that it’s possible to hang out with people you like, actually talk to them, drink, and also dance, depending on the mood you’re in. There’s none of the faint atmospheric menace of the frat party, no sense that you’re a temporary, semi-welcome visitor on a piece of territory clearly marked by someone else.

These kinds of parties have suffered as much from over-regulation as frat parties. Despite what I wrote above, I don’t have any real problem with frats or frat parties. My issue is that, in thinking that they are the Atlas bearing the massive burden of campus social life, they cause a potentially effective coalition of students to fail. Because here’s the truth: the complaints raised by Kuempel and McClure are fundamentally the same as those raised by the co-ops, the row house social managers, the Band, even SLAC and the sweat-free activists. It comes down to the fact that students don’t get much voice in how the university we call home is run. But you wouldn’t believe how many times I’ve told people in the Greek system that I live in Kairos, only to hear, “Where’s that?” When people like Kuempel and McClure arrogate to themselves the role of defenders of campus social life, they dismiss out of hand the allies who would make this fight winnable.

Reading The Economist does not make you a sophisticated analyst of world affairs, no matter what this Facebook group might claim. The magazine brings a specific, ideological worldview to its journalism, which is fine, but then seems eager to let its readers think that they’re getting a fancy version of Time or Newsweek. They’re not. They’re getting a neoliberal Trojan Horse, an opinion magazine that recognizes how many extra copies it can sell by flattering people’s notions of themselves as the kind of people who read The Economist.

In fact, reading The Economist may help you become a reasonably well-informed observer of world affairs, because they do report on things that many of us know very little about. When I read an issue cover to cover, I learn facts. The mistake is to mix this learning up with gaining deep insight. Because, while it’s well-written and well-informed, it’s decidedly slanted as a publication. Harvard economist Dani Rodrik writes on his blog:

Call it a one-man boycott of ideology that masquerades too often as journalism.  . . .  I realized that the more I knew about a subject, the less The Economist was making sense. It’s one thing to be opinionated, another to be misinformed and arrogant at the same time.

Rodrik’s comment has made its way around a certain segment of the blogosphere, to be echoed by, you know, other bloggers. Here’s The Atlantic Monthly’s Matthew Yglesias, pointing out how predictable The Economist’s policy prescriptions are:

You’d be happy to grab a beer with him every few months when he’s in town and hear the occasional wacky anecdote about monarchists in the Caribbean or African dictators railing against apprentice sorcerers. Sure, the fact that the entire “Europe” section could be replaced most weeks by LIBERALISE YOUR LABOUR MARKETS DAMNIT gets a bit annoying, but still you can make a kind of sport out of it. This article on economic problems in Poland, for example, argues that “the urgent need is to raise productivity by liberalising the labour market” in the third graf, whereas this article on economic problems in Spain doesn’t fret about “Spain’s lack of structural reforms to […] free up the labour market” until the very last graf. Does that make the need more urgent in Poland or more emphatic in Spain? No other magazine gives you those kind of delights.

(more…)

Stanford’s men’s basketball team came up with a huge win in the Pac-10 Tournament, handing Arizona a 75-64 loss after a tight game.

There are several things worth mentioning, but first and foremost notice that with under a minute left and an insurmountable lead, Stanford did not attempt to run up the score.

Why not? It’s cruel, tacky and pointless, and most teams choose the more elegant route of dribbling or passing it around until the clock runs out. Few teams run it as hard as possible, and even fewer take cherry pick court length passes to pad the lead with mere seconds on the clock. What kind of player would do that? (Ahem…Darren Collison). What kind of coach would allow that? (Ahem…Ben Howland). This was last week in the final seconds of overtime against UCLA if you missed it.

Yeah yeah, UCLA fans will try and complain that Stanford was still shooting so why shouldn’t they? It comes back to that class thing. The loser taking a few pointless last shots isn’t the same as the winner doing so. Mechanically it may seem similar, but morally it’s the same as rubbing it in, and all basketball players and coaches know it. Now would be a good time to complain about the officiating breaks UCLA got last weekend, but everyone gets some, and we all know Pac-10 officiating is (to put it mildly) inconsistent this season.

So, back to Arizona. Some other nice things to think about after the game.

• -5 guys in double figures for points.
• -Both Lopezes looked very controlled and consistent on both ends.
• -A huge double-double from Mitch Johnson, who also made Stanford’s only 3s.
• -Fred Washington finding the basket after not scoring much in the later part of the season.
• -Lawrence Hill coming in with some impressive inside plays, especially rebounds and putbacks. Someone who knows more about basketball should correct me, but it looked like Trent Johnson was playing Hill at the more inside oriented 4 position towards the end instead of the 3, where he’s been playing all season. It was a necessity move with lots of fouls on Robin Lopez and Taj Finger, but given his play, maybe we should keep Hill there to use him as a better scoring threat. He may also get open for jumpshots this way if he can lose a bigger defender.

If Washington and Hill can build on this momentum going into the NCAAs, and Goods gets the chance to heat up (he only had 4 shots), we could be in good shape. The Lopezes are great, but having other options to turn to will be our best chance to go more than a round or two in the tournament.

(Disclosure: I’m very biased in Stanford’s favor on all of these comments, and Lawrence Hill’s a friend of mine, so I’m particularly biased when it comes to him.)

I didn’t see mention of it in the Daily, or hear much about it on campus, but a Stanford grad was creating a storm over at the Washington Post last week.

Charlotte Allen, who majored in English and Classics, (I wasn’t able to track down what year she graduated) wrote a March 3 op-ed called “We Scream, We Swoon. How Dumb Can We Get?”

The piece opens by noting the number of women reported to be swooning and fainting at Obama campaign events and asks whether women might truly be the weaker (and dumber) sex. I can’t do justice to her argument in a short summary, but it really is worth a look. Among other things, she notes a lot of “dumb” things women do like buy too many shoes or bake dog cookies and concludes that maybe everyone should just stop fighting the stereotypes.

“I don’t understand why more women don’t relax, enjoy the innate abilities most of us possess (as well as the ones fewer of us possess) and revel in the things most important to life at which nearly all of us excel: tenderness toward children and men and the weak and the ability to make a house a home.”

Naturally, this whole “women we’re all dumb” thing didn’t go over well with many Washington Post readers, especially women. The paper received thousands of online comments and a flood of responses and letters to the editor condemning the piece.

“A Dumb Argument” questions what Allen was trying to prove and criticizes much of her logic. “Dumb and Dumber: An Essay and its Editors” asks why the Post bothered to publish Allen’s piece at all and rips into the editors for such faulty judgment.

The Post’s ombudsman Deborah Howell weighs in on the piece and editorial decision here.

See what you think. I agree that Allen’s piece is generally pretty crude and demeaning, but it has its funny moments, and I have to give her credit for having the guts to write it. On the whole, even if she’s an insulting sexist rabble rouser, which seems to be the majority opinion, I’m still proud to say she went to Stanford.

Some of Stanford’s Web sites are getting a makeover, the Daily reported on March 3. “Project 8180 is the codename for a effort aiming to redesign the Stanford University homepage and Web sites for the Offices of Undergraduate Admission, Financial Aid, and Visitor Information.”

Obviously upgrading our internet face to the outside world is important. It wouldn’t look very good if a university that prides itself on being on the cutting edge of technology had a crappy Web site.

But by the same logic, why the hell does Axess seem so dated? Maybe it isn’t, and I just have no idea how Web sites should be, but at least one person commenting on the same news article agrees with me: “when searching for classes you can’t even type something in and press ‘enter’. one has to actually click ’search’. horrible design. it’s amazing that we can produce companies like google and yahoo, but not even have a good student course site.”

Just because no one who isn’t already connected to the University ever sees it, it is still ridiculous that we have to deal with such a cumbersome and slow system. I’m sure it kills efficiency for students, professors and staff alike.

And clearly the University has the ability to take care of this. Though I was initially skeptical, the new Coursework Web site is pretty sweet, and seems to function well even though some bugs are still being worked out. Does anyone remember a couple years ago when there would be times Coursework was so busy you couldn’t even log in?

The new Coursework is a major improvement. Let’s see something similar for Axess. Our internal Web sites matter too.

Today’s Chappie/fake Daily story on the RIAA (no link, presumably because the Chappie junta can’t use the Internets) is the first one that I ever actually fell for. Usually, these Dead Week stories read like Onion articles and can be spotted easily. Today, though, I sat down to read while eating breakfast, and saw the provocative headline, which indicates that the University is handing over the names of huge numbers of students to the record industry for litigation; by the time I’d finished my bagel, I was reeling with outrage. I composed a furious blog post in my head, and then moved on to the next article, about how Fidel Castro is to be appointed a Hoover Fellow. Two sentences into this, I realized what was going on.

However, I’d like to take this opportunity to blame the university administration for something they only did in a fictional parallel universe. Unfair? Perhaps. But considering the arrest of student protesters last spring, the generally opaque university decisionmaking process, and the aloof and patronizing attitude taken toward students by the administration, I think it says something that I believed this article. When I read that fake quote of Provost John Etchemendy saying, “It’s not about what’s fair, it’s about what’s right,” I thought to myself, “Etchemendy would say something like that.”

Regardless of the fact that they didn’t actually do this outrageous thing, my readiness to believe this indicates a worryingly low level of trust between the university and, well, myself. (In my defense, the other people sitting at breakfast with me also believed the article.)

UPDATE: Found the link.