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Sex Week At Yale 2004
Lust et Veritas
by Susan M. Block, Ph.D. '77
Nude Beer at Mory's? Only
at Sex Week at Yale .,,, PHOTO: SUZY
Sex Week at Yale.
Sex? Yale? What? These two world-renowned, single-syllable entities would seem to be uneasy bedfellows for any length of time, let alone a whole week.
Yale University started out as an all-male, deeply Christian, virtually monastic institution. Indeed, on October 16, 1701, a group of Congregationalist ministers, including famous Puritan Cotton Mather, founded Yale, in part, as a rebellion against what they perceived to be the growing “liberalism” of Harvard.
Since then, Yale has become famous for grooming diplomats, scientists and presidents of large companies---including the United States. Prominent Yalies range from Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale to writers like Jonathan Edwards, Noah Webster, and James Fenimore Cooper, to inventors like Eli Whitney and Samuel Morse; as well as U.S. Presidents William Howard Taft, George Herbert Walker Bush, and George W. Bush. President Bill Clinton and Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, President Gerald R. Ford, and Supreme Court Justices Benjamin Cardozo, William O. Douglas, and Clarence Thomas are among noted Yale Law School graduates.
Not much sex to speak of, is there? Well, no, but then again.... Upon closer inspection, we realize that thanks to Clinton JD ‘73, the world got to hear about semen stains on the mainstream news, and thanks to Bush ’68, we have stains of a much kinkier nature to worry about. Yale’s influence upon American sexuality has been subtle, but profound.
Moreover, though Yale was founded to be holier than Harvard, its piety was intertwined with its rebellion against the older, more established institution. Though sex is for everyone, the study of sex is for rebels. Perhaps that’s why there’s a Sex Week at Yale (SWAY), not at Harvard.
So, maybe Sex and Yale really do go together. At least, for a week. Or as they call it at Yale, The Week.
Thus, I was stirred but not shaken when intrepid SWAY Founder and Coordinator Eric Rubenstein '04 contacted me in 2002 for the first SWAY, an event produced by his new organization, Students for a Sexually Aware Campus, to "challenge Yalies to reconcile love and intimacy with sex in their lives."
Apparently, Eric’s Dad, Jim Rubenstein '77, an oncologist who was in my class, had seen one of my HBO shows (executive produced by HBO Senior VP Sheila Nevins’63 DRA), and told Eric to get me on board his new extra-curricular obsession, a Valentine's week of adventures in higher sex education at Yale.
I was intrigued, partly because it had been a few years since I’d been back to visit Old Blue. But I could only stay a few hours, time enough to be part of the “Celebrity Panel” with radio host Joey Renolds, Harvard grad and Drip proprietress Nancy Slotnick and my old friend Al Goldstein, making my first SWAY a fun but rather jet-lagged quickie.
Quickies are great now and then, but I wanted my second Week to be longer and more satisfying. So when Eric invited me back for SWAY 2004, I decided to spend a few days... and learn a little more about the mystery and the mastery of sex at Yale...
Yale's Great Gothic Phallus:
Harkness Tower. I took the first black and white photo from the
Saybrook
College
courtyard under Harkness for a photography class in the winter of '77. I
took the color pic in the winter of '04 showing essentially
the same view. Some Yale things never change.
Yes, mastery. Yale is filled with Masters. And we're not even talking about the secret societies yet.
In my field, when people talk about a “Master,” they think of some big guy in leather wielding a whip. At Yale, a Master is the distinguished leader of one of the undergraduate school’s twelve residential “colleges,” each housing about 250 students, a dining hall, library, theater, seminar rooms and other amenities, modeled along the lines of Cambridge and Oxford.
When I was a student, a Master was always a Mister. Nowadays, Yale has female Masters, and they don’t call them Mistresses (that would be too kinky); they call them Masters.
Master Mary Miller, Vincent Scully Professor of the History of Art, racket ball aficionado and mom, presides over Saybrook, one of the oldest, most beautiful residential colleges at Yale, its gracious courtyards flanking one side of Yale's Great Gothic Phallus, kingly Harkness Tower. Saybrook was my college at Yale, so I was nostalgically thrilled to accept Master Miller's invitation to stay in the guest suite at Saybrook during Sex Week at Yale. Oh, I had learned so much and screwed so many (in a good way) in these hallowed halls and cherished dorm rooms...
Master Miller leads Saybrook with skill and devotion to her students and all things Saybrugian, even though she herself was a Princeton undergrad. She and her husband and son are also excellent hosts. I was accomodated with all the consideration and honor due a descendent of Nathan Hale ’73 (that’s 1773).
Hale, lest you forget your colonial history, was a young Yale grad who took a fateful job as a spy working for General George Washington against the British during the American Revolution. Hale's spying didn't amount to much, and he was caught rather quickly (some say due to his total ineptitude). But his last words, before he was hung, were unforgettable, one of the most powerful calls to military sacrifice that ever have been uttered,“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
Hale spoke this stirring sentence at a low point for the colonists in the War of Independence, a time during which the Brits tended to stereotype all Americans as crude, untutored losers. Young Hale of Yale's stunning eloquence before his ignominious execution blew that stereotype away. His patriotism to a "country" that barely existed was inspirational. The Tale of Hale from Yale's famous last words helped, spiritually speaking, to turn the tide of the American Revolution. They still inspire the young spies of our modern Central Intelligence Agency (where a great many Yalies continue to find their calling; Doonesbury's Jeff Redfern isn't the only Bulldog in Spook School). Despite Hale's failure in the field of espionage, a life-size statue of him inscribed with his final words occupies a place of honor at CIA headquarters.
Though not a skillful spy, Hale was reputedly quite handsome and athletic; all in all, a rather charming, sexy fellow. All the young ladies of Connecticut and some of the young men at Yale were said to have the hots for him. Which brings me back to Sex Week at Yale. Well, something had to!
I flew from LA to Pittsburgh to Hartford, then took a car to New Haven where I was met by Master Miller's helpful husband and son who set me up at my guest digs inside the exquisite old castle of Saybrook. Then, when the Harkness Tower clock struck midnight, I was off to my first (unofficial) SWAY event, a Porn ‘N Chicken party at the Sigma Epsilon (Sig Ep) Fraternity House with my fellow visiting lecturer, Wicked Pictures Porn Star Devinn Lane.
Porn ‘N Chicken is just what it sounds like: a screening of XXX-rated films catered by Popeye’s. Nothing special about that, except that it’s happening on the hallowed grounds of this Ivy League ivory tower.
Whenever I think of an "Ivory Tower", I think of
Harkness
at Twilight. It's more iron than ivory, but it's beautiful.
All Hail Yale's
Great Gothic Phallus! . PHOTO:
SUZY
Like most Yale secret societies (and there are many), the brief, relatively modern history of PnC is riddled with mysteries and hoaxes. PnC is said to have been birthed around 1998 by a bunch of (mostly male) members of the Class of 1999 who hadn’t been tapped for any other of Yale’s more illustrious secret societies like Elihu, Wolfshead, Scroll & Key and the notorious Skull & Bones. So they decided to drown their Ivy envy, along with quenching their natural adolescent lust and fried food cravings, in weekly meetings where they could watch humping body parts while munching crispy chicken parts. By the time these guys (and a few brave girls) hit their senior year, P 'n C was an official Yale tradition. Or an unYale tradition.
"It's kind of a protest against the intellectual nature of Yale," according to an anonymous PnC member who calls himself Jimmy. "It's about as anti-Yale as anything you'll find at Yale."
Perhaps but, being Yalies, PnC members are not afraid to express a certain informed appreciation for the art of erotic cinema. "To me, porn is the avant garde of film-making," says another PnC man who calls himself Dale Everhard. "These are artists performing on screen—they have different abilities, skills, and talents."
Quite. PnC is not so much anti-Yale as just helping to take--or thrust--Yale into the 21st century. So, it’s not surprising that somewhere around the beginning of 2001, PnC members decided that they’d put in enough hours watching and critiquing the work of others. It was time to make their own porn film. They called it “The StaXXX” after the actual “Stacks,” the mammoth maze of book shelves that winds through several floors of Yale’s exquisite old gargoyle-infested Sterling Memorial Library, where I, and many former and present Yalies who will remain nameless, have indeed messed around.
As soon as PnC started posting audition fliers around campus, they not only attracted student hopefuls, but the rapt attention of The New York Times, Fox News, The New Haven Register and other media outlets, all of whom reported breathlessly about "the first Ivy League pornographic movie…an odd mixture of the salacious and the discreet" (NYT). Comedy Central even made a film about the film, forking over some hard Hollywood bucks to the original club members for the story and the title, “Porn ‘n Chicken.”
It was all very heady (pun intended), and it was all a big hoax. A Bulldog prank par excellence. Scenes were said to have been shot, but no one admitted to having seen one, let alone being in one. No footage for "The StaXXX" has ever been found. Does this show how clever Yalies (even those of the less prestigious secret societies) really are? Or how pantingly gullible the American media is? Whatever the case, there is no "The StaXXX" yet, though Porn ‘n Chicken still meets from time to time.
i join the Porn 'n'
Chicken revels at Yale's Sigma Phi Epsilon Fraternity with Sig Ep Breast
Man Steve Kroon, Wicked Pictures Porn Star Devinn Lane (speaking by her
own
film), SWAY Founder and Coordinator Eric Ruberstein, Amy Murphy, and Maria,
a Freshman Reporter from the Yaily Daily News
Thus, I found myself at a PnC club gathering of about 60 or so discreetly heavy-breathing underclassman, about seven or eight brave Yale chicks (two of whom were reporters for the Yale Daily News), and a porn star
We talked foul, ate fowl, drank beer and ogled scenes from Devinn’s movies on a big screen TV, skipping the dialogue and going straight for the sex, as the porn star herself explicated X-rated ethics and aesthetics while suggestively gesticulating with a chicken thigh.
Having had Devinn as a guest on my show a few years ago, I know that her IQ is quite a bit larger than her bra size. She is not only one of the most articulate spokeswomen in porn, she’s one of the sharpest people I know inside or out of Yale. Not everybody in porn is a dumbskull, just like not everybody who graduated from Yale is a genius (Dubya, anyone?). But I was amused to see how shocked and awed the Yalies were that a woman who had sex for a living could say something more sophisticated than “oooh, give it to me baby!”
Despite my intensifying jet lag, I had a great time. The beer was flowing, the chicken was crispy. The guys were drooling over anything female, but unfailingly polite. Being in California so long, I’d forgotten how polite Yale men are. Actually I got that misperception corrected for me by one of the beautiful, brilliant Yale coeds I met there this trip. “They’re more polite to you because you’re an alumna. They’re totally rude to their fellow students who happen to be female.” Ah hah..
But here I was at Yale again, downing plastic cups of beer at a frat party! The porn part barely made a dent of difference. After all, my generation of Yalies saw "Deep Throat" at the York Street movie theater. We just downed our beers and gobbled our junk food before going to the movie. The big difference now is technology; students today have everything on DVD, so they can throw private porn parties and create mock high brow viewing clubs in the tradition of the Yale Film Society.
It’s great to see Yalies watching and dissecting porn like it’s Milton. But Yalies excell in creating, not just critiquing. So I'm still hoping some courageous PnC club members actually make "The StaXXX" some day. Maybe now that they’ve seen Bush’s POW Porn 'N Torture, Porn 'N Chicken members will see that making porn is the proud--though until recently secret--occupation of U.S. President George W. Bush ’68. So why not make The StaXXX? Why not indeed…
Of course, now that Bush's POW Porn has been released, that title “The StaXXX” suggests the pyramids or “stacks” of naked hooded prisoners. Rush Limbaugh compared the Abu Ghraib torture photos to a “college fraternity prank." But somehow I don’t think the boys of Sig Ep or even the pranksters of PnC would find brute forced sex--simulated or not--amusing. I'm not sure about Dubya's frat house DKE (Delta Kappa Epsilon).. And then there’s Skull & Bones...
SeX
Week at Yale '04
Lust et Veritas
by
Susan Block, Ph.D. '77
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4 PAGES
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