On Oct. 7, the Stanford Review published an article entitled “SLE invites Professional Dominatrix to Advise Students.” The article lambasts Brittany Newell, the woman invited to speak at the Structured Liberal Education program on Oct. 8, as well as SLE for inviting her. As a SLE student, I believe the article misrepresents Newell and SLE’s motivations for choosing her as a speaker.
The article was written before understanding the nature of her talk, assuming Newell would lead conversations about sex and vulgarity. According to several attendees of the event I spoke with, Newell focused largely on her creative process and how to get one’s writing published, specifically for the queer community, which is valuable information for SLE students hoping to pursue a creative career.
Yet the article depicts her as nothing more than a sex worker, ignoring the fact that she received her first publishing deal at 21 and her novel, “Soft Core,” received praise from respected publications like “The New York Times Book Review.”
The author scrutinizes Newell’s personal life in a way intended to demean the value of her talk and work, but the two have no logical correlation. Many literary and historical figures have been granted an air of austerity by virtue of their fame, even when reality proves otherwise.
For example, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, a great thinker who helped lay the foundation for western democracy, abandoned all five of his children and confessed to lurking in alleyways and exposing his bottom with the hope of being spanked by passing women.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, who revolutionized the philosophy of languages, regularly beat his students and even rendered a young boy unconscious.
No one seems to criticize the reading of their works in Stanford classes.
I think most would deem it unfair if their unsavory personal lives prevented us from appreciating their literary and philosophical achievements. Evidently, an author’s character and choices have nothing to do with the quality of their works. Thus, any emphasis on Newell’s profession serves little purpose but to shame a woman for her sexual choices.
The implication that inviting a dominatrix will somehow motivate SLE students to go down a path of debauchery and moral disregard is, frankly, ridiculous and insulting to our intelligence. From this, it is clear that the author has a fundamental misunderstanding of SLE’s mission. SLE does not present any ideas as better or worse than others, but introduces students to a wide variety of ideas, some of which may be uncomfortable.
The purpose of SLE is not to give its students answers to the questions of life, but to develop a method of answering those questions and asking new ones. Reading the works of recognized thinkers and writers is essential, but so is understanding people from different walks of life, even those one may deem to be unsophisticated or vulgar. The fact that the author was incensed enough to write about it shows that SLE fulfilled its purpose of making students think.
I fully support the author’s right to his opinion on Newell and her works, some of which I personally agree with, but his criticism of SLE for inviting her is unfounded and seemingly based more on an emotional reaction than reason.
As I have learned from the lectures and discussions at SLE, the more effective method of learning is to approach texts and people through the lens of intellectual humility, not moral condemnation.