A new year is a time to reflect upon past events and make future plans. Priorities shape plans and plans construct our reality. At a time of new beginnings, we ask, “where do I want to go?” and follow that with, “how will I get there?” While it is crucial to have a plan for achieving our goals, most of us are pretty good at making plans once we have goals, it is actually determining where we want to go that proves difficult. My generation (20-30 somethings) is famous for our flurry of activity to arrive…we don’t quite know where—think of the jobless college graduates who managed to dodge the career services arm of their universities while studying ferociously. So, as 2012 opens, “where do I want to go?” is a good question to ask; but perhaps the more fundamental question to ask is “what is important to me?”

Brazil’s declining fertility rate

Just before the turn of the year, I read, over breakfast, one of the leading stories on washingtonpost.comⁱ. “[Brazil]’s fertility rate has fallen from 6.15 children per woman in 1960 to less than 1.9 today.” While that represents a significant shift in Latin America’s largest country, it seems in chorus with declining rates across the world. The reporter pointed out that across the continent’s diverse spread, “from sprawling Mexico to tiny Ecuador to economically buoyant Chile,” fertility rates have dropped almost as sharply as Brazil’s. What seemed incredible to me was that the drop occurred despite laws prohibiting abortion, few government-run family planning services, and strong opposition to birth control by the Catholic Church. Brazil’s fertility rate is now below the United States, 2, and quite below the 2.12 generally required to replenish the outgoing generation.

So, the decline in Brazil is not due to what many point to as the causes of the US trend—easy abortion, accessible government programs, and weakening religious influences. “Then what could have caused this phenomenon?” I wondered. Perhaps modernization.

Well, I was wrong again. Brazil’s almost 200 million is an ethnic melting pot with a large economic gap between rich and poor despite a growing middle class. “‘Brazil started coming down and had this big drop that amazed everybody, everywhere,’ said Suzana Cavenaghi, a Brazilian census bureau demographer. ‘We wouldn’t expect that in a country that’s so diverse, with a lot of poverty in so many places and so unequal, economically speaking.’” Brazil’s baby drop has not only swept cosmopolitan Sao Paulo but also Amazonian villages and the central farming belt.

With my initial theories now smashed, Veronica Marques, communications director for Elas, a group that helps women start businesses across Brazil, gave hers: “This idea of doing what she really wants to do, and having the power to do it, is the thing that has changed this country.” Numerous U.S. and Brazilian researchers have pinned the nation’s popular soap operas as heavily influencing the drop in fertility rate. “The protagonists may be perpetually anguished about lost love, but they inhabit an appealing, affluent, high flying world, whose distinguishing features include the small family.” “‘They are all young. They live well. They are comfortable. They are beautiful,’ said Maria Immacolata Vassallo de Lopes, coordinator of the Center for the Study of the Telenovela in Sao Paulo. ‘Why do they need children?’” Zeitgeist attitudes seem to mirror Jaqueline Ramos, who, along with four others, recently opened a restaurant: “Her grandmother had 19 children, but Ramos, 24, said she may not have any. ‘It is too much work to have children,’ she said, busily chopping cilantro.”

Misplaced priorities

Have we missed something if our ambition for achievement means no children? Children are a significant time and freedom constraint, it is true; those who have and raise children cannot do some of the things they want to do. However, the idea that one is constrained in his or her choice because of another choice is not unusual—it’s life! We prioritize our time because there simply isn’t enough of it to go around. So, my concern this New Year is that we might misplace our priorities from what we really believe is important. Has chopping cilantro become more important to us than creating the future of our society?

What I‘m saying and what I‘m not

Brazil’s macro fertility decline is an interesting subject and young adult attitudes toward marriage and child-rearing are too, but I want to talk on a micro level. I’m not trying to suggest macro-policies or levy macro-blame; I’m trying to investigate whether our individual goals, yours and mine, align with what is truly significant.

I’m also not saying that women should not reach for their economic aspirations. Have you noticed how dull a person is without a compelling ambition? That micro-level observation is genderless! It is both beautiful and thrilling to witness anyone achieve excellence! My concern that many of us, especially my generation, are misplacing our priorities relative to childrearing is also genderless. In fact, I am more appalled at a young man who will leave a child and her mother to fend for themselves than I am about a young woman refusing children. I agree with Jeffrey Holland, a Mormon religious leader and Yale PhD candidate at the time of the feminist movement, who said in a recent interviewⁱⁱ that feminism’s model was misshaped. We shouldn’t focus on getting women out of the home; we should focus on getting men back in the home.

What I am saying is that we ought to take a good, hard look at where we are spending our time and where those decisions are leading us. Professor Clayton M. Christensen spoke at the Harvard Business School’s Class of 2010 commencement and subsequently was asked by the Harvard Business Review to publish his speech in their magazine (which has gone viral). He wrote:

When people who have a high need for achievement—and that includes all Harvard Business School graduates—have an extra half hour of time or an extra ounce of energy, they’ll unconsciously allocate it to activities that yield the most tangible accomplishments. And our careers provide the most concrete evidence that we’re moving forward. You ship a product, finish a design, complete a presentation, close a sale, teach a class, publish a paper, get paid, get promoted. In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered mostⁱⁱⁱ.

Power versus influence

One of my favorite professors, Susan Walton, the former Public Relations Director of Harley Davidson Motorcycles, taught our class the difference between the CEO and the PR person in a company is the difference between power and influence. The CEO can wield considerable power in terms of financing, hiring/firing, strategy, etc., but the PR person maintains influence over popular perceptions of the company and thus influence over the whole company (a company dies without customers, no matter how good the strategy). While it is nice to have power to direct one’s life and of others, it is more impactful to influence others so that they want to believe and act as you do.

The difference between a career and a child can be thought of in the same way. A career can bestow a person with power to direct that life with greater flexibility. Childrearing provides an opportunity to significantly influence a child’s attitudes and behavior in a way that not only cannot be duplicated but also cannot be measured (generations upon generations). I wonder what our dutiful restaurant owner, Jaqueline Ramos, would answer to this question: “who has had a greater influence on your life and your thinking? Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s first female president and cultural icon, or your mother?”

Five generations before me, Susan Allen Goaslind raised nine children alone after her husband died 6 months following their last daughter’s birth. Owing to intense mob persecution in Illinois and a Mormon extermination order from the Governor of Missouri, Susan left with others of her faith to travel by wagon to the Salt Lake valley in Utah when she was 14-years-old. Once her John had passed, she homesteaded land in Idaho and worked it for 14 years until it had turned around enough to sell. Her motive for selling was to move to Logan, Utah, where a Temple, a sacred edifice, still operates. She was a devoted member of her Church all her life. She was noted for her sternness (especially with herself) because she expected people to always to their best. She threw open her door to welcome and provide for travelers in Logan. It is partially due to her genealogical efforts (well before the world-wide web) that I now know so much about my ancestry. I have only one paragraph of her own writing, done when she was 82-years-young, but that short piece has endeared my heart to hers more than any other ancestor I know about.

What could a little, old lady five generations ago write that could profoundly influence a millennial? The stature of her character and the depth of her devotions have reached through her words and the years to challenge me. She challenged me to live higher; she challenged me to serve with greater love; she challenged me to focus on the profound. Susan Allen Goaslind had little of what many of us would call power—fame, money, position, or global impact—but she continues to have remarkable influence on those of us who call her mother, grandmother, and great-great-great-grandmother.

How will we be remembered?

Most of us won’t have statues erected to our names. Most of us won’t be remembered a hundred years from now. But, if we want to have an influence upon the future of the human race, and we have much to offer, we ought to place our priorities in order of our ability to influence, and the greatest opportunity to influence is in a family. I’ll give Professor Christensen the last word:

This past year I was diagnosed with cancer and faced the possibility that my life would end sooner than I’d planned. Thankfully, it now looks as if I’ll be spared. But the experience has given me important insight into my life.

I have a pretty clear idea of how my ideas have generated enormous revenue for companies that have used my research; I know I’ve had a substantial impact. But as I’ve confronted this disease, it’s been interesting to see how unimportant that impact is to me now. I’ve concluded that the metric by which God will assess my life isn’t dollars but the individual people whose lives I’ve touched.

I think that’s the way it will work for us all. Don’t worry about the level of individual prominence you have achieved; worry about the individuals you have helped become better people. This is my final recommendation: Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.

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The Macy’s on 34^th Street in New York City boasts a bright, glittery, larger-than-life sign that says “Believe”.

Indeed, this is the season for belief, and as people bustle around, making purchases and catching up with family and friends, or taking some well-deserved time off, we invite you to think about this concept of “belief.”

As a student leader on a campus in defense of marriage, the family, and sexual integrity, you have a belief. You believe that these principles are noble, worthy, and beneficial to all persons, regardless of background, race, sex, orientation, or age. You believe that a commitment to the value of marriage, family, and sexual integrity contributes to greater health, happiness, and well-being of people’s lives, and ultimately to a healthier and more stable society as well.

Given that science and philosophy also supports these claims, your beliefs are well-founded. And yet, communicating the basis and merits of your beliefs and commitments is only half of your goal on campus. This half of your vision is intellectual – you want to inform the minds of your peers. But, the other half of your vision is social/ cultural. So many of you express to us your desire to change the hearts and behaviors of your peers. Often, this can be more difficult than winning the intellectual argument. In comparison, believing in the rational basis and merits of your intellectual commitments is not too difficult.

But can we legitimately believe that our culture can change?

We think so. But we also know that to defend this belief – that our generation can do better – you’ll need to not just win the minds of your peers, but also their hearts by addressing their hopes and aspirations at the individual level.

So, as you work to build or contribute to a group on campus, what do you believe about that same group, and what do you believe about the role it can play on campus? What do you want to believe?

As a student leader, you are in many ways the face of the message on your campus. You are the teachers, the role models, and the motivators behind the cultural movement that is beginning to emerge across the country. You are the ones who are able to speak to your campus culture more broadly; through those personal encounters with individuals, touching their hearts and engaging them in a real conversation about the things that matter most to them.

Ghandi once said, “Be the change you wish to see in the world.” As you emerge the next leaders for society, you have the great opportunity to discover the unique set of skills and strengths that you can contribute to a better, healthier culture, one more conducive to human flourishing. One person, thoughtful about the role they can play and committed to the authenticity and necessity of their message, can be a powerful motivating force, as evidenced in the rallying phrase, “believe in me” used by Tim Tebow in recent months.

Whatever one might say about Tim Tebow, he is a motivating force behind a team, because of belief. Perhaps your fellow students don’t believe in their ability to join in your effort, or don’t believe in its likelihood of success. You can unlock that in them through your example, through your conversations, or through your personal invitations to events or group meetings.

For example, help them make the connection between their behaviors now and their long-term plans. Build bridges for them between their dreams and their current reality. In the recent State of Our Unions report, 84% of girls desire marriage one day, along with 77% of boys.[1] Yet, studies also show that those who practice abstinence prior to marriage tend to experience greater relationship stability and satisfaction by 22% and 20% roughly.[2] These kinds of statistics may reflect the desires in people’s hearts and conveying these ideas can help lead students in a direction towards achieving their relationship goals.

You and your peers have proven yourselves capable of achievement, whether in the classroom, on the sports field, or in leadership positions. We believe that not only are you students capable of greatness in these areas, but also in your personal lives. Time and again, you students have proven that they are ready, willing, and able to strive for more than the culture would offer in the area of marriage, family, and sexual integrity.

Until you graduate, the campus is your playing field and you students the players; you have the ability to cast the vision to your peers about what this change will look like and how they can bring it about in their own lives.

So, as you prepare to launch into your spring semester, we encourage you to think about what vision you want to cast for your group members. How do you personally want to affect change? And then, what skills and strengths do your fellow students have to bring to this effort? You as students have the ability to make an impact on campus, and sell the message in a way that many can believe in.

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[1] State of Our Unions 2011

[2] Good Things to Come to Couples who Wait

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In 2006, in the midst of the lacrosse scandal, Rolling Stone published “Sex and Scandal at Duke” and described the university as a place where “traditional intercourse is common, and oral sex nearly ubiquitous, regarded as sort of a form of elaborate kissing that doesn’t really mean very much.” Does Rolling Stone’s description of Duke hold true today? Is there such a thing as a “hookup culture” at Duke? Past events, such as the lacrosse debacle, and the recent rise to fame of Karen Owen and her “f*** list” along with Tucker Max and his candid accounts of hooking up with women at Duke have perhaps given the media a skewed view of Duke’s hookup scene. My project delves deep into these stereotypes and includes the viewpoints of a wide-range of students at Duke on the hookup culture. Through my research, I have gathered the diverse perspectives of thirty-two different Duke students with respect to gender, race, religion, class year, and membership in a fraternity or sorority on premarital sex, abstinence, and the hookup culture. With such data, in addition to prior studies conducted on campus, I have concluded that Duke’s hookup culture is not as widespread as many believe it to be. Read more »

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We are told that these are the best four years of life.

Visibly eager, and almost impossibly energetic, the recent high school graduate fantasizes about the ideas he will learn and the experiences he will live in this new utopia without limits and free from the dreaded specter of authority figures quelling fun and life itself.  College life is supposed to be experimental.  The student steps into an unfamiliar world when he begins his career at college, and very quickly the world without limits that once appeared so desirable becomes a source of great confusion, and in no way is this more evident than with regard to interpersonal relationships, both sexual and platonic.  In its attempt at boisterous self-expression, the sexual revolution has freed us from the yoke of a “thou shalt not…” but has simultaneously left the modern university student with no guidance about what sex is for and what he ought to do with such desires.  In examining the reasons for this strange paradox, I argue that today’s undergraduates are more sexually and personally disconnected than ever before because the sexual revolution’s emphasis on self-expression has isolated men from each other and distorted the selfless use of human sexuality into a hedonic pursuit of self-gratification.

The rallying call of the sexual revolution on campus today is the unquestioned assertion of the inherent goodness of self-expression—this is taken to be axiomatic.  It is true of both the homosexual and heterosexual contingents of the movement, for indeed, the logic of self-expression is intentionally apathetic toward the actual content of that expression; it matters little what is expressed or how it is expressed—only ensure that the self is expressed, the tacit argument goes, and we have attained our goal.  And undergirding this entire edifice is a dank and seething selfishness, for the object of these aspirations is not to be noble or brave or to display any such classical virtues.  The object is simply that the self exert itself upon the world, and under such conditions, none can claim that the self-expression of the philanderer is any better or worse than that of the philanthropist.

The modern understanding of sex is also inherently selfish because it has, at its root, the desire for self-satisfaction above all else.  C.S. Lewis articulates this quandry thusly: “Sexual desire, without Eros, wants it, the thing in itself; Eros wants the Beloved.  The thing is a sensory pleasure; that is, an event occurring within one’s own body.”[i] A more incisive analysis of the contemporary college hookup culture could not be written as succinctly.  The “other” is merely an accessory for achieving the desired sensation: “how much he cares about the woman as such may be gauged by his attitude to her five minutes after fruition.”[ii]

This attitude toward the disposability of the sexual partner is not novel; what is novel is engineering social relations with the express purpose of disposable sex, and it was just this attitude toward sex and this confusion over the very essence of relationships, love, and sexuality that was enshrined at my alma mater, Georgetown University, in an event during Senior Week 2011 entitled “Last Chance Dance.”  Having completed four years of rigorous study, the senior class is presented with a week of activities as the pinnacle and culmination of their undergraduate years.  The Last Chance Dance is designed as a venue to air hitherto unexpressed romantic affection toward another student or students, and the intention of it is something far less than Platonic.  Placed as it is, strategically after a university-sponsored keg party and only a few days before graduation, the Last Chance Dance is designed as the ideal opportunity for casual “hookup” sex between ebullient and inebriated couples who, either for want of ambition or because of the pesky influence of sexual morality, have thus far been prevented from enjoying their allotted and expected bacchanalia.  And should social awkwardness ensue after the event, no matter. Graduation and departure are only a few days away.  This is the epitome of lust without romance—it explicitly and unquestionably exalts the sensory experience to the detriment of all relational and personal experience.

Such an approach toward the disposability of the other stems from a false anthropology, influenced by modern notions of ascendant individualism that claim each man is sufficient in himself.  This is in contradiction to the wisdom of the ancients.  In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes famously gives an unusual and comical speech detailing how human beings are now half of the creatures we once were, “globular in shape, with rounded back and sides, four arms and four legs, and two faces, both the same, on a cylindrical neck, and one head, with one face on each side…” before incurring the wrath of the gods and being severed from our partners.[iii] According to Aristophanes, all romance we experience is the desire to be reunited with our primordial partner, to be completed in the most literal sense of the term.  The story is comical, yet it is no more so than the modern liberal notion that the human person is already a complete, self-sufficient, and entirely whole entity less in need of outside completion than in need of a fuller and freer self-expression, and this is truly a more jarring and dissonant conception than anything Aristophanes could have conceived.

Though we feign romantic admiration of Tom Cruise’s iconic “you complete me,” the modern university student is not truly aware that basic longings and deficiencies naturally exist in his soul and can only be fulfilled through another.  This need for basic, intimate, and faithful human romantic connection is twisted and contorted until the student truly thinks that these desires are engineered (“designed” would be far too baggage-laden a word) to lead him toward unrestrained, unconnected copulation devoid of real, deep connection.  Indeed, we pride ourselves on our ability to have intercourse and move on without sympathy or lingering attachment—it is the subject of social events and high-budget movies. No Strings Attached, an unintentionally didactic tale revolving around the contract of two people to use each other’s bodies for pleasure and nothing more, grossed almost $150 million in 2011 by telling the obvious story that a man and a women having sex together cannot but develop intimate connections that transcend mere physicality, no matter how hard they try to resist such feelings.  This comes as a novel thought to the modern, liberated individualist who, blinded by his own individualism, is confused at his inability to find fulfillment in transitory, libidinous encounters intentionally evacuated of all higher significance in the revered name of self-fulfillment.

But the failure of the sexual revolutionaries to be satisfied is unsurprising.  When the sexual libertines from the sixties down into the 21^st century speak of “free love,” it is lust that they speak of, devoid of agape. “Love,” speaking precisely, is exactly what they do not provide.  Love is always costly, and those who would lightly esteem it will necessarily find themselves with nothing but the shell of love and a cheap substitute for it—a pleasurable sensation caused by the titillation of nerve endings, and then dissatisfaction.  The dissatisfaction with the myth of modern individualist self-expression is unsurprising if one accepts the classical idea that man is, by nature, a political animal (to employ a Greek phrase) and that it is not good for man to be alone (to cite its Hebrew counterpart); modern man’s highest ambition lapses into solipsism because it springs from a false anthropology.

In reality, man is at his most human when he loves the other fully and selflessly, yet by a strange paradox, he is most like a beast when he is in lust. Failing to hold himself to the highest standards of human life, he inevitably gives way to the basest. The result of this on a societal scale is that, as Malcolm Muggeridge famously observed, we become “impotent out of our own erotomania.”[iv]

The modern day college campus, as an environment virtually devoid of any sexual mores, is an ideal laboratory in which to test Muggeridge’s theory.  And here we see that is it holds true.  The result of uninhibited sexual self-expression on college campuses is virtually pandemic: “One in four college students today has some kind of sexually transmitted infection (STI). According to the CDC, 19 million new cases of STIs occur every year, half of them being among 15-24 year olds.”[v] And much of today’s scientific research is oriented not towards educating us into making better choices, but toward allowing us to continue making bad choices with impunity, knowing that science has promised to continue steadily removing the consequences of our behavior at every turn.

Yet if the dissatisfaction and frustration so endemic of the modern university is to be reversed, it is not going to come through scientific advances and increasing sexual liberation.  It will come through the humble confession of our need for others, and a proudly held moral ethos of self-sacrifice and true love. Institutions such as the Love and Fidelity Network show that this desire is not fantastic but is genuinely possible and a work most emphatically worth doing.

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[i] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves.  Harcourt, Brace, and World Inc: New York.  1960. p. 134.

[ii] Lewis, p. 135.

[iii] Symposium, beginning at 189e.

[iv] Malcolm Muggeridge, The End of Christendom, Wipf & Stock Publishers: Eugene, Oregon, 2000. p. 20.

[v] Georgetown Health Services Website, accessed June 22, 2011.  http://be.georgetown.edu/48377.html

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I am pleased to be on this beautiful campus today.  And I’m especially proud to be here with the men and women of the Love and Fidelity Network.

You have set a high bar for yourselves – to defend “the goods of marriage, family, and chastity.” In the years since you started, you have inspired many other college students to do the same for their college campuses.  Even among your critics who do not share your values, you have earned a reputation for rigor and reasoned argument.  Today, you are truly the counterculture!

Apparently Princeton is getting the message.  How do I know this?  Recently I read in the campus paper that Steve Carell has been invited to speak at your Class Day this coming June.

Mr. Carell may not be Elizabeth Anscombe.  He did, however, star in “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.”  At least for now, that’s probably as close as Princeton is going to get to a celebration of intimacy within marriage.

When I was invited here, I was told that what you are most interested in is learning how to communicate the truths about marriage, family, and sexuality to your college peers – especially through your writing.

So this afternoon, I will speak about three things.

First, I will talk about why people like you provoke such a commotion on our campuses these days.

Second, I want to suggest that what you are really offering your peers is a way of life more consistent with health, happiness and dignity – not simply a litany of sexual No’s.

Finally, I will suggest some ways that you might help use your persuasive powers to bring your message to our campuses.  The way I think of it is this:  Your job is to help a Kim Kardashian world regain its fluency in Audrey Hepburn.

Let’s start with the beginning.  Universities are funny places.  In theory, they are institutions that open young minds … insist on rational argument … and cherish civil debate.  In practice … well, you know more about “in practice” than I do.

Most college administrators today would tell you they have long since left in loco parentis behind.  That’s not entirely true, however.  These days our college and university officials go to great lengths to insulate you from influences thought harmful – and promote those believed beneficial.

For example, just before I left home for this conference, I Googled the phrase “banned from campus.”  And I learned that across the United States, various universities have banned second-hand smoke … the incandescent light bulb … bottled water … plastic bags … fraternities … Red Bull … ROTC … Native American mascots … certain forms of speech … and – at least at one state university in California – a Christian student group.

On the flip side, there are some things our universities actively promote.  Many years ago, Irving Kristol wrote that “a liberal is a person who sees a 14-year-old girl performing sex acts on stage and wonders if she’s being paid minimum wage.”  Today Irving would note that the only question we would ask today is whether the young lady was insisting her partners use condoms.

It’s a curious thing, this faith in the condom.  Centuries from now, it is possible to imagine an anthropologist studying daily life on an American campus in the 21st century – and concluding that we worship latex.  Among the things our anthropologist would discover is a recent Daily Princetonian article reporting on the availability of said prophylactic on this campus.  Many must have been relieved to know that in addition to six other outlets, though it seems that the McCosh health center restricts students to a 10-condom-a-day allowance.

This commitment appears to be paying off in the ratings.  Just the other day, Trojan Brand Condoms announced that Princeton had moved from eighth to third place in its annual rankings.

Let’s be fair.  Notwithstanding this impressive showing, Princeton of course is no worse or no better than any other American college.  At most of these campuses, everyone in this room would likely be regarded as exotic.  So one might think that, at least in the name of diversity, you would be encouraged to make your own choices, right?

Well, not quite.

An English major can graduate from Princeton without ever having read Shakespeare – but not without having sat through a required series of skits in freshman orientation called “Sex on a Saturday Night.”

Porn stars lecture during Yale’s Sex Week, but let an Orthodox Jewish woman ask to live off campus because she prefers not to share her showers with strange men and she is refused.

And on it goes, relentlessly, with much hostility to any poor soul who attempts to resist.

That itself is a telling note.  In a truly libertarian environment, no one ought to care if a man decides that multiple partners are not for him, or a woman declares her belief that she will find her fulfillment in marriage and family.  From your own experience, however, you know people very much do care – and they are quick to put down this kind of talk.

Why hostility and not simply indifference?  The answer is that the sexual orthodoxy that prevails on campus is like most brittle ideologies:  It cannot tolerate dissent.

It cannot tolerate dissent because its advocates know that deep down what they offer is fundamentally unsatisfying.  If, for example, sexuality were merely a physical act of little consequence apart from avoiding disease or pregnancy, it doesn’t explain why we feel such a sense of betrayal over infidelity.  If marriage were simply a piece of paper between two consenting adults, it doesn’t explain the devastation of divorce.

Another way of putting it is this:  If sex were really not the big deal that it is, college students would not have to get so stinking drunk before going back to someone’s room for a hookup.

Do not take my word for it.  Ask any young man who has tried to weasel out of a relationship that changed in some indefinable way after a night of physical passion.  Ask any young woman who has watched a man get up from her bed in the morning — and wonder to herself if she will ever hear from him again.  For so many people, physical intimacy has become the first step in a test whether a relationship should begin at all – rather than the culminating act of love and commitment.

In this environment, the man or woman who stands up and declares “I dissent” can be profoundly discomfiting.  You are those people.  And you are discomfiting precisely because all sides understand that by dissenting you are saying that the prevailing orthodoxy is false, that there is a better path to a happy and fulfilling life.  That is a radical stand on most college campuses today.  And like all radicals willing to accept the consequences of their principles, you inspire a mix of admiration and fear.

This leads to my second point: What your harshest critics fear most is that you may be right.  Or at least that others might find your message attractive.

In popular depiction, you are the Party of No:  No premarital sex.  No sex outside marriage.  Certainly no homosexual sex.  And nothing outside the missionary position.  It is no coincidence that when you first popped up in the New York Times, the headline read as follows: “A Group at Princeton Where ‘No’ Means ‘Entirely No’.”

This is the caricature.  You know it better than I do.  And if you have been at it for any amount of time, you know that the rejoinder to your propositions will more likely be ridicule than argument.

The ridicule, however, cannot hide something that you offer, something that our casual sexual ethos has mostly killed: romance.

There’s a reason that all the great romantic movies were made long ago.  Romance feeds on possibility, and withers when the outcome is a forgone conclusion.  Romance also requires the drama that comes from the sense that what is at stake is something permanent – that the object of your affection may the One meant for you and you only.

We see this in great drama.  Fifty years from now, people will still be studying Shakespeare, still reading Abelard and Heloise, and still watching Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr in “An Affair to Remember.”  Will anyone even remember “Sex and the City”?

Let me put it this way:  I sometimes wonder whether we now have a whole generation wondering what happened to things they know about only from books and old movies:  moonlit evenings …candlelit dinners for two …and the thrill of a first kiss.

In its place, at least on campus, we have sexperts and sex magazines.   At Boston University, Newsweek recently interviewed a young woman who edits a sex magazine called – appropriately enough – Boink.  For the first issue, our young editoress posed nude.  Alas, it turns out that, her peers are not as progressive as she had supposed.  “Everyone assumes because of the magazine that I’m sleeping with everything that walks,” she complained to Newsweek.

Where, I ask you, would they ever get an idea like that?

Now, our young people may in fact believe what everything around them screams:  that the conventional wisdom of yesteryear was based on harsh and unrealistic expectations about human behavior, especially in the realm of sexuality.

But I am curious:  Would it not be arresting to survey unmarried women in their 20s and 30s and ask them this question:  How many of you believe that the man you marry will remain by your side ‘til death you do part?  What would you give for such a man?  Forget that, what would you give for a plain, old-fashioned date: flowers, dinner, and a movie?  The answers would likely be surprising – not to your grandmothers, perhaps, but surely to the bright young things at … Boink.

So how do you communicate about sexuality?  In that same New York Times piece I mentioned earlier, a Princeton spokesman puts it this way: “The University does not take a position on the sex lives of our students but we do take care to make them aware of health and safety issues.”

In other words, with technical advice, such as workshops on how to put a condom over a banana or referrals to websites that allow students to find out the clinical details before they submit to their partners’ more outré sexual demands.

As it happens, of all the ways to talk about sex, the clinical and physical strike me as the least practical.

Sex is powerful because its consequences are by no means limited to the merely physical.  It makes rational men and women irrational.  It ties us to people we would rather be free of.  And in the right circumstances, it gives us a glimmer of the divine.

In a better world, men and women who are more learned and more experienced than you would guide you, by example no less than by instruction.  Unfortunately, the people who should know better either don’t know better – or fear the consequences of questioning the reigning orthodoxy. That means it is left to you, the students, to work your way through the thicket, to become the teachers yourselves.

How do you do it?  And how do you do it in writing?

I sense urgency in the way you ask that question.  This is a tribute to your good hearts, and to your willingness to do what it takes to succeed.  Still we must begin at the beginning, and here the beginning is this: You must start out recognizing that you will likely fail.

That is to say, you must give up the idea, if you ever had it, that the answer is some irrefutable argument, some perfect way of putting these things, some brilliant construct.  That is not how people change their minds – and not how we change a culture.  The truth is that the work you are engaged in is the work of generations.

People who read what you write are not looking for arguments or proofs.  They look to you because they are in some important ways dissatisfied with what they are being told, even if they cannot fully explain why.  What they are looking to you for is some sign of hope.

Men and women are not so much won by argument as persuaded by example.  I would say the same thing when people asked me what makes a good speech:  The most powerful speeches come when the message and the messenger are consonant with one another.  Another way of putting it is this:  Walking the walk is as important as talking the talk.

That does not mean that no one can speak unless he is living an unblemished, saintly life. Sex and desire and indulgence are as real for those who believe in chastity and traditional marriage as for those who believe anything goes.  That means that though the restraint and integrity we ask may be better, they are also indisputably harder.

At times the happy portraits we paint of marriage and the chaste lifestyle can be as false and unrealistic as the Panglossian promises about sex untethered from feeling and moral consideration.  Our most important choices and commitments, if we are honest, are all challenges.  The struggle is inseparable from the message, and part of what makes sticking it out so rewarding.  We do a disservice to those we care about to pretend that is easy, that there are no costs, or that there are not disappointments along the way.

That is especially true for the young.  The young are quick to spot phoniness, or something that does not ring true.  When you write to persuade, you must put yourself in the place of those on the receiving end – to know his insecurities, to understand her sensitivities, to appreciate the pressures and obstacles each faces every day.

In this you have a singular advantage:  You are the same age, going through the same things.  You can relate.  The more you read what has been written by those who have given great thought to these questions, the more you will understand your arguments, the more you will see the unity of these many disparate issues, and the better you will be at countering the thin gruel with which we now feed our young.  Your challenge, however, is to take these ideas – some of them quite abstract – and apply them in ways that your peers relate to.  Quite literally, no one can do this better than you can.

You must also recognize what success is likely to look like.  No one is going to be persuaded by a blog post or an article for the campus paper, no matter how thoughtful or well written.  If you expect that, you are only setting yourself up for constant disappointment.

The great gift you have to offer is to let people know that there is a different point of view.  For many, that point of view, at least initially, will come across as alien and irritating.  We believe, however, that it is a point of view that has the great advantage of having human nature on its side.

Above all, you must tell stories.  With something as human as sexual intimacy – where the message is that our partners are more than means to our individual ends – we must remember the human drama at the heart.  The culture we have, after all, was not imposed by a dry philosophic tome.

The story we are now offered is as old as the story of the apple and the tree, a false glittering promise that we shall be like the gods if we indulge ourselves.  It is a message that has come to us through fiction, film and television … has been reinforced by popular music … and has now become what President Obama might call the narrative of our time.  In such an environment you must tell your own stories, honest stories, stories that admit of unhappy endings even when people do the right thing.  Your writing will attract not so much by you tell but by what you show, so that people who read you will recognize in your stories, as they do with all honest tales, their own selves and hopes and fears in between the lives.

As you do this, many will dismiss you as conventional, a return to the bad old days.  That is inevitable.  It helps to remember that what we once called the conventional became the conventional for a reason.  The conventional, after all, represents the accumulated wisdom about human nature drawn from experience.  In other words, it is the kind of wisdom you will always find in a Frank Sinatra lyric but seldom in a New York Times op-ed.

My young friends, yours is a lonely charge.  You live in a world forged by people who were taught to defy authority and now are authorities themselves.  You are students doing the work of teachers.

In the course of your good work, you will make many mistakes – in what you say, in how you say it, when you say it.  If you are honest about these mistakes, they will provide you with the best lessons you will ever learn for how to communicate what you want to say in a way that engages the brain but breaks through to the heart.

So my advice to you, especially as writers, is this:  Embrace the scandal of your beliefs.  Take mockery as a tribute to your message.  Remember that there is something powerful about a young woman or a young man who dissents from the received orthodoxies of our age and is not embarrassed to say so. Above all, remember too that there is something deeply attractive about it.

If you do these things, you will not change the sexual ethos of our time.  You may not even change many minds.  You will, however, let professors and students know that there is another view than the one that prevails … that this view hangs together intellectually … and that it can be defended by reason.

In so doing you will give all those unsatisfied with where their pursuit of happiness has led them something precious: a better idea where to look for it.

Thank you for listening. And now I’m happy to take any questions…

Special Thanks to Bill McGurn. Bill is a columnist with the Wall Street Journal and spoke at our most recent Love and Fidelity Network National Conference, “Sexuality, Integrity, and the University.” Bill has allowed us to publish his lecture so that others may benefit from his wisdom.

Filed under: College, Courtship, Dating, Events and Impact, Hook-up, Sexual Integrity, Sexuality | 1 Comment »

A friend of the Network suggested this article from this blog, where a feminist woman writes honestly and candidly about the flaws in the hook-up system, and how it’s harmful for women.  The post generated hundreds of comments from readers who congratulated Steph on her honesty, while others dismissed her statements.  We quote:

Dear Susan,

Happening upon your blog has been something I’m extremely grateful for at this point in my life. I am a senior at college and head of the sexual assault center at my school. I co-run another female mentoring program as well. I read Dworkin, Kimmel,Brownmiller on a regular basis and peruse sex toys with my friends. I am down with the cause, definitely. Yet being an (occasionally) single feminist college student has been tricky in regard to how I operate sexually in hookup land when I so strongly and vocally align myself with sexual education, equality and autonomy in my school community. Really, what’s a girl to do?

I recently hooked up (albeit rather drunkenly) with a male friend of mine. It was very nice, consensual, and he is someone I really respect. But post-hookup something about me just felt done, over the whole thing. I’ve had much worse hookups with much lamer guys.  I spend so much time thinking about hookup culture, talking about it, researching, etc., yet it took me three years to truly realize its shortcomings were not something that could be overcome if done the right way.

I always knew it was flawed and brewed a great deal of insecurity and crippling self doubt, but felt it was the only option. Even though I’ve had serious boyfriends in college I always viewed hookup culture as the main highway, one that must be taken and hopefully leads to some kind of fulfillment. It doesn’t. Any brief satisfaction is quickly replaced by a great deal of emotional fallout. Who hasn’t seen the sexiest, smartest of her friends white knuckling her cell phone, pleading with assorted deities that the overly coiffed, Ed Hardy-clad econ major sends her the obligatory text? It doesn’t matter that 3 days ago, she thought he was a tool, didn’t kiss very well, etc., the reassurance is what we’re after. The assurance that we are enough: smart, cool, different enough to attract someone, even if its not who we want.  Despite our real feelings about these guys, whether we respect them or are repulsed by them, we beg, hope and need for them to like us.

I’ve seen this one too many times in recent weeks, leaving me no choice but to conclude “there must be something better out there.” And whether or not it exists, I will now be seeking it. In talking with my best friend I realized I am through with accepting hookup culture as inevitable. It is an incredibly problematic and often unfulfilling (in numerous respects) system.

It has taken me this long to realize that in order for me to truly claim that women deserve respect, kindness and to have the sort of relationships they want, I have to stop participating in hookup culture. It’s flawed and it remains flawed because no one is willing to take the road that involves more clothing. I, for one, think it’s at least worth a try.

Steph

Have something you would like to see on the blog? Consider writing for us! Or send something our way for review. Contact us at acrouch@loveandfidelity.org

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John Blake’s recent CCN article, “Why Young Christians Aren’t Waiting Anymore,” sparked a flurry of thousands of responses. Released in September 2011, the piece cited an article in Relevant magazine entitled “(Almost) Everyone’s Doing It,” exploring the sexual activity of Christian singles. But one finding, in particular, stood out from the miscellany: According to a December 2009 study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 80% of evangelical young adults (18 to 29) reported having had sex—just under the 88% statistic of unmarried adults overall. “Relevant theorizes about why it’s so hard for so many young Christians to wait, including the saturation of sex in popular culture, the prevalence of pornography and a popular ‘do what feels good philosophy,’” Blake writes. But are these listed sociocultural factors solely to blame? Or is there a concomitant reality at play here?

Perhaps the past fifty years of American history can shed light on the matter. Hugh Hefner and Alfred Kinsey set the stage for the Sexual Revolution of the 1960’s, in which Margaret Sanger and other activists created a social movement challenging traditional norms surrounding sexuality and intimate relationships. Their efforts led to greater acceptance of extramarital sex and artificial birth control, wide normalization of public nudity, pornography, and homosexuality, and, soon thereafter, the legalization of abortion on demand.

Such revisions, lobbied in the name of progress, had unclear orientation at best. If their purported aim was freedom, it was freedom from—not freedom for—the other. If their grail was redefined feminism, it was androgyny—not femininity—that won the day. Indeed, in a strange turn of events, women were told that they must become ‘manly’ if they ever hoped to realize social equality—immanently suggesting that there is nothing uniquely valuable about being a woman. Distinctly feminine qualities could be spayed by a Pill, and, meanwhile, masculine traits could be fabricated in their stead, insinuating the superiority of the latter. Was not this the inverse of what the early feminists yearned to achieve? Read more »

Filed under: Cohabitation, College, Courtship, Dating, Femininity, Friendship, Hook-up, Sexual Integrity | 5 Comments »

This article appeared first in the Harvard Crimson.

It’s time to face reality: marriage is dying. Divorce rates remain high, fewer couples than ever are choosing to get married, and more are choosing to cohabitate. However, far from liberating adults from old social mores, this shift creates unstable and unhealthy environments for children and adults alike. One does not have to look far to see the threats posed by marriage’s decline.

Marriage affects people on many levels: socially, psychologically, emotionally, and financially, among others. The Institute for American Values recognizes it as a “virtually universal human institution”. Across cultures, one of the most vital elements in marriage is commitment to family. Just as husbands and wives commit themselves totally to each other, they also commit themselves to raising their children together. This responsibility to children is a moral duty that parents must take seriously; generally speaking, in order to thrive and develop properly, a child must see his home as a stable and loving environment, rooted in the relationship between his mother and father. This is best achieved when the mother and father are married, since only marriage represents a complete and lasting commitment to the family. Read more »

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In 2009, I published an article in my college’s newspaper in which I pointed out that the prevalence of casual, uncommitted sex on our campus fosters the kinds of attitudes that make sexual assault a reality in many students’ lives. I expected my article to be met with hostility, but I received a surprising amount of sympathetic emails. There was one particularly memorable email that I received. Its content was very explicit, so I’ll summarize here instead of reproducing the letter. The writer told me how his current girlfriend had been extremely degraded and sexually exploited by her past boyfriend, but she didn’t protest against it because she thought that it was perfectly normal and expected for girls to be treated this way by their boyfriends. He echoed my concerns about the perversity of our sexual culture.

This letter convinced me of an important point about meta-argumentation. Advocates of chastity often point to STD rates, to emotional harms linked to human biology, and to relational harms caused by permanently unstable yet highly intimate relationships. These arguments are very good ones to be making, and we should continue to make them. What I have noticed about the effects of the sexual revolution on my campus, however, is that even if no STDs are contracted, even if all the participants in the hook-up culture report full subjective satisfaction in their sexual lives, there would still be an in principle reason why the sexual revolution is disastrous for our campuses. That reason is supplied by the described email: it teaches us to use human beings for our own pleasure without any considerations for their dignity or the moral obligations their dignity places on us. It teaches us to view other people as less worthy of respect than ourselves; it instructs us in solipsism and self-centeredness. Read more »

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This article was reprinted from here.

Another school year is in full swing. Frat houses around the country are once again swollen with partygoers and intoxicated youth. Sunday mornings once again mark the regret of thousands of young women who hooked-up the night prior and either cannot remember what they did, or do remember and are trying to forget.

Another hook-up season is in full swing.

But this hook-up season, there is an increasing phenomenon of unlikely bedfellows opting out: Catholic and Muslim women. These women of faith are increasingly allied in searching for a different way to live out their college tenure than from dorm room to dorm room. And they are finding that despite theological differences that run deep, shared perspectives about modesty, chastity, and dignity run deeper. Read more »

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