I find the whole NY Daily News and Fox News obsession with Columbia, recently manifested most recently in an obsession with our sex lives, to be hilarious. However, I see a serious side to all of it, as well. The problem with the "University of Havana-North" garbage is an old one--angry neoconservatives attacking places of learning to undermine the credibility of the learning that undermines their philosophy. With the recent episode, however, we have a return to an earlier battle.

The fact that major news outlets think it acceptable to speak with revulsion about clubs established for those seeking safe exploration of sexual alternatives is a sign of a real threat to sexual liberation. Columbia has struggled to become a place in which the austere, repressive sexual politics that dominated society for most of recent history are not dominant. Students are vigorously protected from harassment, but consensual exploration and honesty has been encouraged. Groups like Alice! have worked to create a safe environment for sexual discussion and, yes, sex. Student groups have struggled to break taboos and open dialogue on issues that are important to the student body, no matter how deviant from the residual Puritanism of the American sexual mainstream. Put more bluntly, we have worked to form a campus on which real sexual liberation and equality can be achieved rather than the more common American college culture of rampant chauvinism, gay-bashing, and rejection of the weird "losers" at which Ann Coulter sneers in the Fox interview I posted above.

I am not going to attempt to pass judgement on the success of our efforts to this effect. As with all sensitive issues, I suspect that our success would be judged very differently by different people with different experiences in our diverse community. However, I will say that the goals of the actions I described are more than worthy--they are necessary. As many of us experienced in high school and still see even in the oh-so-progressive Morningside Heights, much of the progress supposedly made in the days of the sexual revolution appears to have been reversed. In much of America, sex is again a topic to be swept under the table, and the predictable pattern of shame, suppression, and unfair gender discriminations results. Members of the Columbia community should be lauded for their attempts to reverse this trend, and members of the media should be shamed for bolstering it.

These cultural conservatives are not just attacking Columbia, they are using us as a proxy for the fact-loving intellectual left and, now, sexual progressivism. Our response has been one of bemused dismissal so far--appropriate given the absurdity of the tone of the attacks. However, we should also respond seriously to the broader attack on progress in sexual and gender equity and liberation in a society in which these things are far from assured.