Sultry, red lights deepen the shadows on the faces of the girls behind the table. In front of them, from end to end, sits a large and varied collection of dildos. Nearby, a couple giggles nervously as one student, his face obscured by beer goggles reflecting the reddish glow, attempts to put a condom on one.

No, it’s not the scene from a redlight district Amsterdam travelogue. Nor some seedy sex shop frequented by the drudges of New York City. It’s Collis Common Ground, the fifth annual fullyfunded College Sex Festival 2007. And it’s sooo Dartmouth.

This summer, I sat on my porch watching as an uncanny scene unfolded before me. Nearly every house on Webster Ave. proudly fronted tables for the annual Consent Day. Sophomores in varied stages of alcohol and suninduced inebriation clambered over each other for free t-shirts emblazoned with the slogan “Consensual Sex is Hot.” Nearby, some revelers, returning to the carnival-like atmosphere from a bout of mud-wrestling, frolicked, hugging friends to share the dirt. The event had the largest list of campus sponsors throughout my Dartmouth career, and others have confirmed that this is likely the case. One fraternity president put it this way. Although his house did not want to participate in the event, the pressure felt simply too great. If the fraternity’s name did not appear among the list of sponsors, then students would perceive not only that they did not agree with the event, but they would also be decried as anti-sex, therefore antifeminist and pro-sexual assault.

The linkage of these issues—sex, feminism, and sexual assault—permeates every level of our campus. Attending the first term’s meeting of Untamed Publications, Dartmouth’s feminist publication, the discussion turned to what should be featured on its cover. Throughout the participants seemed fixed on a giant picture of camel-toe. To the credit of the editors of their most recent issue, only some of the articles actually focused on a discussion of the methods of sex. But in conversations with some Dartmouth feminists, I came to realize that such debates are no fluke. The idea that a better, more liberating, sexual tomorrow would arrive through dissemination of both the “right” type of sex and the right information regarding sex girds many assumptions underlying not only the feminism of Dartmouth students, but also the liberal discourse of our campus as a whole. Sure, achieving orgasm is a real problem for many, many women; and sure, sexual assault is also a real campus problem—but rather than these supporting discussion of the idea of gendered, male structures in both classroom learning and fraternity structures, these issues have come to define Dartmouth’s popular, sanctioned, facile, and oversexed liberal discourse.

In the midst of Sexual Assault Awareness Week, no one has stopped to question whether in fact sexual assault is an issue about which we’re not aware. It’s now common knowledge that Tim Andreadis rose to power on a wave of campus concern about sexual assault, with some alleging that the issue had been manufactured. But since then, it seems not a day of Dartmouth life has passed without hearing such a discussion. And students ignore that Andreadis’s campaign was also, largely autonomously run. Since students associated gender-issues with Andreadis, our first homosexual student body president, sexual assault became the issue that immediately intruded onto activists’ minds. Immediately statistics regarding the number of rapes and sexual assaults proliferated across campus. Some decried these as scare tactics—others decried their position as ignorance. The debate about sexual assault had begun.

One thing notably absent from every phase has been open discussion about the variety and type of campus sexual assault. Rather the discussion has been framed in general, all-too-general, terms: does sexual assault really happen?; is it a real issue? (Whatever that means.); who sexually assaults the most? But no sustained work has been done on the heart of the issue—the social conditions at our College that give rise to such assaults and the type of assaults that occur. In fact, statistics on this issue are greatly lacking, with the national “Sexual Victimization of College Women” study forming the foundation of any discussion about rape at Dartmouth. But it is unclear how these statistics apply to Dartmouth as a whole.

Various excuses have been offered for the lack of specific discourse on the issue. First, there has been concern about protection of the victims. But examples concerning the types of sexual assault that occur can be abstracted from in order to protect identities. An administrative source has alleged that the College attempts to keep such information from being both gathered and disseminated because of concern about how it might affect alumni donations. Specific information regarding social conditions that give rise to assaults could be seen as undermining alumni’s common, reactionary defense of the campus’s social structures. And this may indeed be an issue.

Abstract discourse about sexual assault absolutely deflects attention from the conditions specifically conducive to campus sexual assaults. It is no surprise that Dartmouth students ritually drink an absurd, unhealthy, and almost unheard of amount of alcohol. This ritual drinking is deeply tied to the administrative structure, and the social importance of the Dartmouth fraternity system. Discussing sexual assault as a general problem prevents the issue from being deeply tied to both foundational social relations and our shitty version of “care of the self.”

In general, the phenomenon smacks extremely Clockwork Orange. It’s no surprise that human beings are by nature titillated not only by sex, but particularly by the conjunction of sex and violence. At Dartmouth, the general discussion of sex draws students to both liberal and feminist issues alike; abstract discussion about sexual assault causes unspecified concern for women’s issues and social problems on our campus. But these methods must be mere advertising techniques. These types of discourses cannot, and should not be, the foundations for Dartmouth feminism, liberalism and social concern as a whole. It is, in fact, irresponsible and dangerous.

Sex has long been linked to libratory possibilities for the human individual in American culture. For both social conservatives and liberals alike, the promise of better, more correct sex has long been equated with that of utopia. But this seemingly natural linkage is not necessarily correct. Better sex does not mean, for us, a better social organization. More information that sexual assaults occur, will not, in the end, eliminate the social conditions that give rise to them. We must critically reexamine our discourse if we are ever to affect real social change.

Zachary Gottlieb ’10 wrote in The Dartmouth that the Sex Festival caused him to realize that “Clearly our intelligent campus is under-sexed, or maybe that’s just the freshman boy in me talking.” But we’re not under-sexed here at the College. It’s just a perception that we are. We have two sex columns, two sex festivals that make for two of the most attended events at the college, a plethora of sex-related support groups, and popular discourse that declares the possibilities of sexual liberation almost every day. On almost every level of discourse, we’re clearly over-sexed. And this paradox is precisely the problem.