Fix Features

University of Pennsylvania

The Decline of Men in One Word – Porn – And How Colleges Aid and Abet It

by Jennifer Kabbany - Associate Editor on April 29, 2013

The latest column from Julie Baumgardner, president of First Things First, offers a great summary of how porn is destroying men, based on the research from Dr. Phil Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford University, as well as Dr. Gary Wilson, who has studied the neuroscience behind porn watching.

The long and the short of it – porn causes: Erectile dysfunction. Depression. Social anxiety. Severe memory impairment. The list goes on and on, really.

Baumgardner writes:

“Dr. Phil Zimbardo, a psychology professor at Stanford University, discussed the demise of guys, stating that boys are flaming out academically and wiping out socially with girls and sexually with women.

… According to Wilson, most boys seek porn by age 10, when they are driven by a brain that is suddenly fascinated by sex. Thanks to high-speed Internet, a boy has access to unending novelty. With each new image, his brain releases dopamine. As long as a guy can keep clicking, he will keep going.

Eventually his brain wires itself to everything associated with porn such as: Being alone, constant clicking, voyeurism, shock and surprise. This conflicts with learning about real sex, which involves interaction with a real person, courtship, commitment, touching, being touched and emotional connection.

In 2009, a Canadian researcher attempting to conduct research on the impact of porn could not find any college males who weren’t using porn and therefore had no control group for his research. He asked 20 male students who had been using porn for at least a decade if they thought porn was affecting them or their relationships with women. All said they didn’t think so. However, many of these males were dealing with social anxiety, performance anxiety, depression and concentration problems.

“Of all the activities on the Internet, porn has the most potential to be addictive,” said Wilson. “Everything in the porn user’s life is boring except porn.”

Interestingly, there are thousands of men, young and old, who are giving up porn because it is killing their sexual performance.

… Wilson said “widespread youthful erectile dysfunction has never been seen before. This is the only symptom that gets their attention.”

Meanwhile, at universities across the country, porn is heralded as something to be cherished, enjoyed, admired. Consider these stories from The College Fix, all published within the last two months:

* Washington University in St. Louis hosted a panel of porn stars who talked to students about what it’s like to work in the industry, and spoke on their most interesting sexual experiences, among other topics. Click here to read.

* As part of the University of Chicago’s inaugural “sex week,” the school flew in Axel Braun, the director of more than 400 pornographic films, for a Q-and-A. The school also screened one of his films, “Star Wars XXX: A Porn Parody.” Click here to read.

* In a talk advertised by the University of Missouri and well-attended by college students, a “crowdsourced porn” entrepreneur recruited college students to join the online movement, telling them it’s an easy way to make a few bucks and pay down student loans. Click here to read.

* University of Pennsylvania has become the latest Ivy League school to offer “Sex Week” to its students, and its inaugural foray boasted workshops with a porn peddler, exotica writer, vibrator aficionado, orgasm expert, and masturbation tutorial, among other events. Click here to read.

* A Pasadena City College class called “Navigating Pornography” is devoted entirely to studying porn. Click here to read.

It’s too bad colleges and academics don’t spent as much time studying the negative ramifications of porn addiction as they do shoving it down kids’ throats.

Jennifer Kabbany is associate editor of The College Fix.

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IMAGE: Paul Anglada/Flickr

 

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Ivy League University’s Inaugural ‘Sex Week’ Offers Porn, Masturbation, Orgasms

by Katherine Rodriguez - George Washington University on April 8, 2013

University of Pennsylvania has become the latest Ivy League school to offer “Sex Week” to its students, and its inaugural foray boasted workshops with a porn peddler, exotica writer, vibrator aficionado, orgasm expert, and masturbation tutorial, among other events.

UPenn’s debut Sex Week, a five-day event hosted last week, offered lectures and activities during which students learned “The Ins and Outs of Masturbation,” spun “The Sexual Wheel of Pleasure,” partook in a “Kinky Smorgasbord” of sex toys, got tips on writing sex scenes, and was introduced to crowd-sourced amateur pornography.

“It’s a wonderful way to share sex in a more intellectual way,” 20-year-old junior Arielle Pardes, founder and co-chair of Sex Week at UPenn, said in a telephone interview with The College Fix.

Penn’s media relations director, Ronald Ozier, told The Fix in an emailed statement that the Ivy League research institution had no direct funding role in the event and declined to comment on what educational value, if any, “Sex Week” offers students.

Pardes said she secured financial support for the endeavor  from Hillel – a Jewish student campus group – as well as the school’s Social Planning and Events Committee and the LGBT Center. All three groups are listed on Penn’s website as registered student organizations.

University of Pennsylvania has now joined Brown, Harvard, Yale and other Ivy League universities in the growing and controversial Sex Week tradition.

Penn’s “Sex Week” launched last Monday afternoon with Cindy Gallop, a crowd-sourced pornography entrepreneur. Her talk was called: “Pro-sex. Pro-porn. Pro-knowing the difference.”

It’s unclear what Gallop spoke on at UPenn. But she gave a talk at the University of Missouri last month with the same title, during which she recruited college students to join her online amateur pornography movement, telling them it’s an easy way to make a few bucks and pay down student loans.

Penn’s students rounded off Monday with a “Kinky Smorgasbord” hosted by Kali Morgan, billed on her personal website as a fetish boutique “proprietrix.” Also on her website, Morgan describes her “sex toy smorgasbord” presentation as an introduction to instruments such as strap-on dildos and various vibrators.

On Wednesday, workshops included “Writing Erotica” and “The Female Orgasm” as well as: “Reclaiming Pleasure: Constructing a non-oppressive, non-repressive sexual ethic in the shadow of religion.”

Pardes, in her interview, defended Sex Week, noting that as a gender sexuality studies major, she has learned how vital and relevant the exploration of sexual themes is not only to college students, but the academic community as a whole. She went on to highlight Sex Week’s interactive side as well.

The week’s “Body Positive Yoga” session, for example, gave Penn students the opportunity to “get to know your body and what feels good,” Pardes said.

Students who attended Dr. Chris Fariello’s “Sexual Wheel of Pleasure: From Vanilla to Rocky Road” enjoyed the opportunity to play with sex toys and watch videos about sex, Pardes said.

The culminating event of the week included a masturbation workshop with a special “interactive component” that showed students the ins-and-outs of masturbation, she said.

Other workshops throughout the week included an interfaith panel, discussions on transgender health issues, a talk on relationships, a Take Back The Night observance, and a performance by Penn’s student run experimental theater group.

That student production, called “Cloud 9,” is described by the group’s website as a look at morality and sexuality: “Men play women, women play men, whites play Africans, adults play children, and somehow, it all makes very good and proper sense.”

Despite the overarching themes of sex paraded throughout the week, Pardes said there was no pushback or resistance from administrators or any other campus groups.

Logan Levkoff, a Penn alumnus who led “The Female Orgasm” workshop at Penn last week, said she saw its inaugural Sex Week moving forward with virtually no controversy as a sign of how attitudes toward sex have shifted over the years, according to a statement she made in The Daily Pennsylvanian.

Pardes said she and other co-founders seek to expand Penn’s Sex Week even further next year.

Fix contributor Katherine Rodriguez is a student at George Washington University.

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Yale Sues its Own Students

by Nathan Harden - Fix Editor on February 6, 2013

When I read this story, I suddenly became grateful. You see, I used my book advance from Sex & God at Yale to pay off my student loans. Turns out I was very fortunate–more so than some of my fellow low-income graduates, apparently.

Yale University may have an endowment in excess of $20 billion, but that hasn’t stopped it from suing some of its poorest graduates for unpaid student loans.

Bloomberg News reports:

Needy U.S. borrowers are defaulting on almost $1 billion in federal student loans earmarked for the poor, leaving schools such as Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania with little choice except to sue their graduates.

The record defaults on federal Perkins loans may jeopardize the prospects of current students since they are part of a revolving fund that colleges give to students who show extraordinary financial hardship.

Yale University is among colleges suing former students for defaulted Perkins loans, which are earmarked for students with extraordinary financial hardship, court records show.

Yale, Penn and George Washington University have all sued former students over nonpayment, court records show. While no one tracks the number of lawsuits, students defaulted on $964 million in Perkins loans in the year ended June 2011, 20 percent more than five years earlier, government data show. Unlike most student loans — distributed and collected by the federal government — Perkins loans are administered by colleges, which use repayment money to lend to other poor students.

“If you borrow to go to school, it may not be just the government that ends up coming after you if you can’t pay,” said Deanne Loonin, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy group in Boston. “We offer credit very easily.” If the student doesn’t benefit financially from the education, “the government or the school comes after them very aggressively.”

Debts must be repaid. That’s certain. And Yale has a legal right to sue for repayment. But I’m surprised to read about a proudly progressive, wealthy university like Yale going after low-income graduates so aggressively. Aren’t you?

Read the full story here.

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Elizabeth Warren Was Also Listed as Minority at U Penn

by College Fix Staff on May 10, 2012

Elizabeth Warren climbed to the very top of the legal academic world, and she was listed as a minority faculty member all along. Not just at Harvard, but also at the University of Pennsylvania, her prior employer.

According to Penn’s 2005 “Minority Equity Report,” it too identified Warren, who taught there from 1987 to 1995, as a minority.

On page 16 of the report, the now-Massachusetts Senate candidate is listed as a winner of the school’s Lindback Award in 1994. Unlike other names listed, though, her name is italicized and bolded to indicate her status as a minority faculty member.

It’s the first indication to date of another one of Warren’s employers having listed her as a minority.

The Senate candidate in recent weeks has struggled to respond to a series of questions about why Harvard listed her as a Native American.

Warren has said her family history suggests she is 1/32nd Cherokee, and that she’s proud of that heritage. But she has also said she didn’t know how she came to be identified as a minority at Harvard.

Which Native American group will be the first to come out and denounce Warren’s lies?

Or do Democratic Senate candidates get a free pass on falsely claiming the benefits of minority status in the professional world?

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Penn to Host ‘Boycott Israel’ Conference

by Emily Schrader - University of Southern California on January 24, 2012

Students in the PennBDS organization at the University of Pennsylvania have ignited tensions nationwide with their choice of headliners for their upcoming anti-Israel Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) conference.

The conference, scheduled for February 3-5, supports the national BDS movement, which according to conference organizers Matthew Berkman, Abbas Naqiv, and Madeline Noteware seeks to “end…the occupation, [provide] full equality for Arab citizens of Israel, and [provide] respect for the rights of refugees,” by encouraging boycotts of Israeli products and divestment from Israeli companies.

Conference organizers hope that the sessions and speakers will “build solidarity within the BDS movement and educate activists on the issues.”

Among the presenters scheduled to speak are Palestinian human rights attorney Noura Erakat, Jewish-American author Anna Baltzer, and the keynote speaker, co-founder of Electronic Intifada, Ali Abunimah. Abunimah in particular is highly controversial, having repeatedly condemned a two-state solution, and having gone on record with comments that sound a great deal like incitement to violence against Israelis.

In 2002 he told the Washington Post, “If Israel is going to maintain a military occupation over millions of people by nothing but brute force, then no power on earth is going to stop some of these occupied people responding in kind. The only way to end the violence is to end the occupation.”

It is assumed that by “occupied territories” Abunimah is referring to the land acquired by Israel in the 1967 war. But he ignores the fact that there were a remarkable number of terror attacks against the Jewish state prior to Israel’s acquisition of the “occupied” territories.

Similarly, Erekat has made statements in the past that appear to defend acts of terrorism. From an article she wrote in 2000: “By the time I left Palestine…over 100 Palestinians had become martyrs. Why? Was it to gain international sympathy? Or terrorize the settlers? Absolutely not – they died and continue to die fighting for their freedom and liberation.” Puts a very pretty gloss on a deluded suicide bomber, does it not?

Given the history of these speakers, it seems unlikely that Penn’s conference will in fact promote much in the way of equality, respect, or peace, despite the students’ stated goals. If BDS was truly concerned with achieving human rights and equality, why is there justification of terror instead of condemnation? And why does their criticism only flow in one direction – all toward Israel?

PennBDS organizers say the students who support BDS are actively engaged in protesting human rights violations in other countries as well, but “Israel is a unique case. No other systematic human rights abuser in the international system receives $3 billion a year in military support from the U.S.”

Fellow student Noah Feit, President of Penn Friends of Israel, disagrees with the label of “human rights abuser,” and says many in the BDS movement are basing their case against Israel on anecdotes. “In some cases, BDS is a political façade for a deep-seated hatred of an entire people,” he argues.

But he doesn’t offer a wholesale condemnation of Penn’s upcoming conference. “Many of the speakers have valid points in their opposition to Israeli policy. In fact, Israelis share many of the opinions likely to be expressed.” And, he argues, that is exactly why Israel is a strong democratic country, not a “systematic human rights abuser.”

In response to the BDS conference, Feit’s group plans to host Professor Alan Dershowitz to discuss the destructive nature of BDS and the moral case for Israel. The group will also host its annual “Israel Week” event to celebrate Israeli culture and democracy.

Fix contributor Emily Schrader is a senior at the University of Southern California.

**Update: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the group, Penn for Palestine, as organizers of the 2012 BDS conference. In fact, a different campus group, known as PennBDS, organized the conference.

**Update: This article reflects the following correction. Quotes from PennBDS organizers–one originally attributed to Mr. Berkman and Mr. Naqiv, and the other to Ms. Noteware–should have been attributed to all three organizers collectively.

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Penn to put $100 million faculty diversity plan into action

by College Fix Staff on November 21, 2011

Student government and minority groups at the University of Pennsylvania are preparing recommendations for the schools $100 million faculty diversity initiative, reports the Daily Pennsylvanian:

The Diversity Action Plan — released in June — will devote $100 million over the next five years to hiring and retaining more diverse faculty members across 12 undergraduate and graduate schools.

The minority groups working on this project include the United Minorities Council, the Latino Coalition, the black students’ coalition group UMOJA, the Asian Pacific Student Coalition, Penn Consortium of Undergraduate Women and the LGBT umbrella group Lambda Alliance.

“Sadly, compared to our peer institutions, we aren’t doing very well,” Wharton junior and Latino Coalition Chair Angel Contrera said.

Contrera cited a Minority Equity Report published in 2010, which reported that only 5 percent of Penn’s faculty is black and hispanic.

This places Penn at the bottom of Ivy League institutions in terms of Latino faculty, he added.

The plan requires each school at the university to appoint a diversity officer (an increasingly common practice at universities), although so far, only three schools have done so.

[The Daily Pennsylvanian]

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