You Think You Got Problems

The Problem with Everything: My Journey Through the New Culture Wars by Meghan Daum.  Gallery Books.  224 pp.  $27.00. ****

I’ve been thinking a lot about my college days lately, perhaps because I’m coming up on my 50^th reunion.  If I could name one overwhelming sentiment that characterized my generation’s arrival at college, it was: don’t tell us what to do.  We’d been stifled by the conformist culture of the Fifties and had had enough.  Duke University, where I arrived, was still conformist—women, for instance, were not allowed to wear jeans on the men’s campus, and (this is my favorite fact) men had to wear jackets and ties to the football games—but its conformity would not last long.  We arrived looking like preppies and left looking like Haight Ashbury.  By that time the campus barbershop had closed.  Nobody used it.

There were all kinds of rules about women not being allowed in men’s dorms.  There were certain Saturdays when they could enter the building, but supposedly if you closed your door while a woman was there, you could be expelled.  That rule was still officially in effect two years after my arrival, but that year I was spending long hours on the weekends in bed with my girlfriend (I just had to get her back to her dorm by 2:00 AM), and my room was right across from the resident grad student (who was in law school).  I was certain he would never report me.  The dorm would have run him out of town.

What we were fighting against was a policy of in loco parentis, which didn’t mean that our parents were loco, though they often were, but that the university was acting in the place of parents in policing us.  The hell with that, was our reply.  In defiance of convention, professors commonly had affairs with students—I was a total recluse, but probably knew seven or eight students who had sex with professors—and we would have snarled at anyone who suggested there was anything wrong with that, or with professors having us to their houses for booze parties.[1]  We wanted to be free.  (I just gotta be me, as somebody or other said.)

The most notable affair I knew of among all those that happened—and I was in a class in which one freshman woman married a professor at the end of our freshman year—was between a male professor of my acquaintance and a guy whom I believe was 17 when the affair began.  In those days what would have gotten the professor in trouble—and almost did—was not the age of the student, but the gender.

Meghan Daum, who at age fifty is also approaching old fogey status, though in her jacket photo she still looks young, had a different problem at college twenty years later.  By the mid-eighties fear of AIDS was so rampant that, as she says, a man’s whole sex life could involve masturbation, and he could wear a condom every time, and he’d still be worried about getting AIDS (she’s hilarious on the subject).  I had just gotten divorced at that time, and was “dating” again (God help me); I remember that period well.  By that time, a professor would have been fired for having an affair with a student.

Nowadays, apparently, a professor can be accused of sexual wrongdoing if he just says the wrong thing in class.  He can lose his job.[2]

Daum tells a story of an undergrad she knew who was accused of sexual assault (she acknowledges that she only knows his side of the story).  He went out with the woman in question because he heard from others that she thought he was cute.  They spent hours together on that evening, and eventually decided to go back to his room and watch a movie together on his laptop.[3]  The young woman kept giving him what used to be known as “come hither” glances, and finally said, “You just don’t get it, do you?” and began kissing him.  He was actually a virgin, but had bought a condom; at one point he put it on but lost his erection (these things happen).

Eventually—perhaps because he thought the condom was causing his problem—he initiated intercourse without the condom, and eventually ejaculated.  All this sounds like an awkward first sexual encounter, but such things can still be fun, and the two of them parted on good terms, and were in touch after that.  He paid for her to get a morning after pill.  But later, after she “thought about it,” the young woman brought charges of sexual assault, and he was put on some kind of probation for a year.

This is not your grandmother’s idea of sexual assault.  (I went to college with your grandmother.)  It’s sure as hell not my grandmother’s.

I look at the cover of this book, with its list of various problems in the culture wars (a tiny sampling: Microaggression, Triggered, Gaslighting, Woke, Snowflake, Safe Space), and I barely know what half of them are, much less how to negotiate them.  I am so happy I’m no longer teaching at the university.  In recent years I taught memo writing in the school of public policy, but years ago I taught creative writing, where you need to be able to say whatever you think.  I don’t see how you possibly can, these days.

Meghan Daum is an intelligent woman and an entertaining writer; instead of discussing all these things in the abstract, she made this a deeply personal book, where she talks about how her divorce—from a man who was among other things a great intellectual partner, to whom she could say anything—happened right before the 2016 election, and left her totally unmoored.  She talks also about her own period of growing up, during which the primary value was being tough.  She can’t understand a younger generation in which everyone, but everyone, wants to be a victim (she definitely understands how that woman could be upset that the man ejaculate inside her.  She just doesn’t see how you get from there to sexual assault).  And she can’t understand a situation in political discourse where there’s no nuance at all; you commit a microaggression which you weren’t even aware of and suddenly you’re a racist.  And then you lose your job.  And then you get canceled.  Then, I assume, you wither up and die.

Most disturbingly, nobody can be funny anymore.  Every joke offends someone.  My favorite Sarah Silverman joke (“I was raped by a doctor, which, you know, is bittersweet for a Jewish girl”) is now one about which she said, “There are jokes I made fifteen years ago that I absolutely would not make today, because I am less ignorant than I was.”  Sarah Silverman!  Whom I’ve always thought of as fearless!  When comedians audition to go on college campuses, the auditioners choose the least offensive—which means the least funny—ones.  Daum tells about showing videos to her creative writing class, things which made her laugh so hard she was bent double, and half of them were sitting there stone-faced.  They couldn’t laugh, because they might be accused of an incorrect attitude.

In the meantime, You Know Who says “bullshit” in the Oval Office on national TV and his supporters eat it up, while young progressives are dithering around not saying anything because they might offend someone.  When I was in college we offended each other all the time.  In class and out.  That was called having a discussion.  It was how we learned things.  Does anybody do that anymore?

Or all they all afraid to speak?

[1] Years later, when I was teaching at the same institution and asked the department chair if I could serve wine when I had my class over for dinner, he said, “We both remember how it used to be.  But I’m afraid I have to advise you not to.”  I appreciated his candor.

[2] I remember my brother telling me about an English professor, a fairly staid person, actually, who gave a long lecture in which he kept using the word cunt.  He kept saying it, aloud.  And I was at a class in which the university president was reading from Ulysses—which he was teaching—and read the line, “the gray sunken cunt of the world.”  A parent was visiting class that day.  She didn’t even blink.

[3] They were in his top bunk, and his roommate was “asleep” in the bottom bunk.  That was the only detail I found truly weird.