Tent of Consent
By Crispin Sartwell
Our beloved mother tongue contains a certain number of words that are designated as "bad" or "obscene." One might wonder just how bad a word can be: picture it robbing convenience stores or dumping toxic waste into the watershed.
Like Harley mechanics, the bad words of English are a happy, useful group. Rich in Anglo-Saxon percussiveness, full both of definite meaning and allusive complexity, they are capable of turning vague everyday blah-blah into stuff that pisses off the elders.
If that was the intention of the Womyn's Concerns group at Penn State when they organized the Cunt Fest! and then the Sex Faire, they certainly succeeded. The first of these events was a feminist art fair; the second was an attempt to educate students about sexually transmitted diseases, rape, the concept of consent, and so on.
Now if you've ever tried to get the attention of college students off beer and basketball long enough to ponder something like feminism even for a moment, you will understand the marketing strategy of Womyn's Concerns, who wanted to make their events - in themselves fairly tame - sound sexy. They tried to wrap their informational content in the black leather of bad words so that people would show up.
State Representative John Lawless from Montgomery County, our very own Jesse Helms, was also provoked into attendance, and now demands that Governor Ridge suspend funding to the Penn State system. It is not perfectly clear how much in the way of taxpayer funds were used for these events, though it appears to be a fairly small amount; most of the money came from student fees.
Dr. Laura Schlessinger got hold of the story last week and lent her angelic contralto to the choiring whine of outrage. I think it's fair to say that, like Womyn's Concerns, Lawless and Schlessinger are pursuing the marketing strategy of provocation.
One thing we absolutely do not have to worry about is the defunding of Penn State; if Ridge tried that he'd be tarred, feathered, and run out to Cherry Hill on a rail. Indeed the deepest concrete risk is that we will be seeing Lawless continually on CNN and listening to Dr. Laura's weedeater voice into the indefinite future.
Perhaps the most controversial element of the Sex Faire was the "Tent of Consent" in which students who volunteered could disappear behind a curtain for two minutes of consensual, or perhaps merely conceptual, activity. I do not for a moment minimize what can happen in two minutes, but I suspect that there was more bashful aversion than orgiastic groping. Indeed this is a version of the pre-adolescent party game known as "seven minutes in heaven," which in my experience of parenting twelve-year-olds turns out to mean nothing at all.
College campuses such as Penn State University Park are themselves tents of consent, little spheres of post-adolescent experimentation, in which the wild temptations of freedom suggest themselves but internalized conservatism originating in the students' parents almost always wins out in the end. Future accountants fight ineffectually for the freedom of Mumia Abu-Jamal; recovering high school cheerleaders pierce their noses.
As long as the nose's owner consents, what, we may ask, the heck? Or the f**k, for that matter? Soon these same people will be our state legislators, and then they and Lawless can be outraged together.
___
