Everyone within the university has a responsibility for the welfare and safety of students. After all, the university exists primarily to serve students.
The concept of "in loco parentis" seems to have faded away, but even the most leftist administrator must admit that the university community as a whole bears a special responsibility to seek to safeguard those we seek to prepare for successful lives and careers.
Most of us would agree that the student counselors bear a special responsibility to students. But, in fact, in the name of sexual equality, they are doing their charges harm. They encourage their students to engage in a harmful form of freedom.
Just how free really is the liberated college woman? Just maybe the right to be a guilt-free slut is not the best thing for her.
The so-called “value neutrality” found on most college campuses has left many young women rudderless. Over the past few decades, our educational leaders have abdicated their responsibility to shape the values of our youth.
They have shown a form of moral cowardice. They proved themselves not up to the task of confronting those who sought to undermine traditional American values by advancing the gospel of moral relativism.
The result is widespread promiscuity and a resulting plague of sexual diseases. Nearly half of college women -- 43% -- have been infected with the virus that causes cervical cancer. This sexually transmitted disease, human papillomavirus (HPV) is a cancer-causing malady whose most easily
recognized sign is genital warts. At least 20 million people in this country are
already infected.
It is distressing to me to walk across campus and think that nearly half of those lovely young women I see have genital warts. It's like seeing a canker on a rose.
But the high risk of life-threatening and fertility-threatening disease is only part of the hazard. The psychological and emotional welfare of our precious daughters is in jeopardy as well. Yet this is a fact of life on campus that health professionals do not feel safe to even discuss.
One sign of just how far the atmosphere on campus has sunk is that one of such professional in a position allowing her to be most knowledgeable about what is happening with our college women was so afraid to speak out about it frankly that she felt it necessary to publish her book anonymously.
Since publication of her book "Unprotected," the author has been revealed as Dr. Miriam Grossman, a psychiatrist at the student health service at UCLA.
How ironic it is that the same people who started the “free speech” movement at Berkeley in the 60's have created such a strict orthodoxy within academia that those who question it put their jobs at risk.
In her book, Dr. Grossman provides compelling evidence that the easy promiscuity promoted today is actually bad for many women.
The popular politically correct myth is that men and women are identical. Despite countless generations of observation that males are much more capable of casual sex, those who argue against a “double standard” deny that sex has a different emotional meaning for women. No one can deny that consequences of promiscuity are visited more heavily on women. To the brutish half of the race that I belong to, having sex can be the end of a relationship. To fertile women, it can be the beginning of a lifelong commitment to a child.
I believe that males are naturally promiscuous for a sound biological reasons. Spreading your semen is a sensible reproductive strategy. But for the half of the race potentially burdened with pregnancy and child care, it makes more sense to be more selective, to reproduce only with males who are a good bet for hanging around and helping to rear the child.
Dr. Grossman cites evidence that indeed women are hard-wired to bond with sexual partners, citing the effects of higher levels of the hormone oxytocin on women. (In one experiment, subjects playing a risky investment game, thosegiven oxytocin displayed "the highest level of trust" twice as often as the control group.)
She reports that she has observed among her female patients a huge number of students reporting chronic stress, eating disorders, and depression. The ethic encouraged on campus is that sex is purely recreational, that the casual "hook-up" culture is completely natural and that sex and love have little to do one another.
But Dr. Grossman finds that her patients’ experiences are otherwise. They feel depressed and exploited; many suffer a loss of self esteem when they discover that they have been infected with genital warts. This is especially true of those who acquire a strain of the virus that leads to cancer so that they must be tested every six months for the rest of their lives.
On most campuses, students can easily get a free abortion. But if they grieve afterward – as some 20% do – their emotional distress is ignored, this medical reality denied. That's because this fact of genuine differences between the sexes does not fit into the leftist world view . This prevailing Weltanshaung insists that all races, both sexes, all human beings, all ages, all sizes, all shapes are equal and identical.
I wonder if the human race will ever figure out that there are some constants in human events, that the different roles played by the sexes are there for a good reason? Males are males and women are women, and they are different. They will never fully understand one another, and that is a good thing. I love women. I like it that they are so different. I like it that I can always find something new, mysterious, baffling about them.
My type of human being is bigger and stronger, smarter in some ways, stupider and less sensitive in other probably more important ways. I am built to take care of them, to lay down my life to defend them if necessary, and I like it like that. Some women seem built to hate males, and that's OK too. I am often not too fond of males myself. I want to preserve the differences between the sexes. I want to protect women who welcome it and I want to defend the right of women to decide for themselves what is best for them.
(A fuller discussion of “Unprotected” can be found at Mona Charen's blog at
http://www.townhall.com
