PhD in Sado-Masochism?
IT IS OFTEN said that the social fashions prevalent within the United States of America today will be replicated in Britain around five years later. A fact which causes many people deep concern, given the genre of 'innovations' the good old US of A has so generously shared with us to date. To follow the 'culturally-enriching' phenomena of McDonalds and Coca-Cola, America now threatens us with an innovation in the field of education. Just when many in the academic professions were confident that the British higher education system had reached its lowest point, it looks as though the US, as it has done many times before throughout our shared, glorious past, will show us how to take standards from 'poor' to 'abominable'.
In America today, the 'Mecca' of British culture, the study of sexuality is booming. Hobart and William Smith colleges in New York now offer degrees in the new discipline of 'Men's Studies'; using Hollywood films to examine such topics as date rape and homophobia. In Minnesota, the Centre for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies offers a certificate programme in sexuality, and Hampshire College in Massachusetts offers a course on 'Queer Lives".
In a few years time, undergraduates in British universities and polytechnics, just like their American counterparts, may be given the opportunity to scale the high points of academic achievement through sculpting genitalia from Play- Doh, participating in lectures on sado-masochism and examining the incidence of homosexuality in the animal kingdom.
Moreover, PhD students who wish to take their education to an even more advanced plateau of attainment may be able to devote themselves to such subjects as the 'Semiotics of Stripping' - a programme currently offered by the Centre for Lesbian and Gay Studies at the City University of New York If public funds allow, British students may even have the honour of receiving guest.
Lecturers such as Eve Sedgwick, faculty member of the City University and celebrated author of a paper entitled: "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl".
The academics and professors responsible for this new field of study have been described in American journals as "the intellectual heirs of Professor Alfred Kinsey". Kinsey was the American 'scientist' who earned notoriety in the 1950's with his book entitled 'Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male', whole sections of which were derived from the experiences of a pederast who had managed to avoid detection and imprisonment.
At the time of the book's publication, Kinsey was condemned by academics from traditional fields of scientific research for his total lack of scientific rigour and disregard for objective sampling methods (re. the disproportionate inclusion within his 'sample population' of practitioners of the sexually bizarre and extreme). Indeed it is perhaps unsurprising that the 'father of sexuality studies' is described within a biography by James Jones, a professor at the University of Houston, as a voyeur, a masochist, a homosexual who trawled public lavatories and an employer who expected his all-male staff to engage in sex games with him!
McDonalds, Coca-Cola, sexuality studies - what manner of cultural establishment will Britain next inherit from our liberal American educators?
This article first appeared in the now defunct 'Vanguard' magazine, issue 53.