Things that make you go hmmm ... Part 1: Sex, politics and idealism in elite America

This is the first instalment of Kirsten's discussion of sex and politics in Ivy League universities. Part two can be read here.

It started with sex. Or did it start with the road trip? It is hard to say. Both issues had been bugging me for a while but then I started to link the two. I’ll start with the road trip. Oh, OK I’ll start with sex – I know you want me to.

Sex in the City University

Newly single shortly after I arrived in the US, I idly entertained of thoughts of the classic rebound fling – both for myself and as a general statement to the world that the dumped one can still cut it in the romantic world . The fling did not come to pass. Then I thought of going out and getting another boyfriend – no luck there either. The offers just seemed to have dried up completely. After the standard personal crisis, therapy, a haircut and the purchase of an expensive gym membership, I started looking around and realized something very strange – no one else seemed to be getting any either.

Then I realized the shocking truth – Ivy league students just don’t have sex. You may find this hard to believe, I mean Hill and Bill famously met at the Library at Yale Law School and surely they did it – at least in the beginning. That may be, but I challenge you to go to a Ivy League campus and find evidence of it. Unlike my alma mater ANU, you won’t find couples languorously stretched out on the grass laughing and snogging here. You won’t see students holding hands as they stroll between classes. It just doesn’t happen. When one Ivy League law school wanted a picture of a happy-looking couple for a promotional brochure they scoured the campus for a candid shot, in the end they had to ask two of my friends (who couldn’t stand each other) to pose.

Go to the Law Ball at one of top five US law schools and you won’t see the typical Australian sight of drunken couples pairing up for a pash at the end of an evening. They don’t get drunk and they don’t pash, I swear.

I am not the only one who thinks this. I stopped short of peering into windows in dorms but I asked around. I overheard one very attractive female undergrad saying to another as they walked past me: "well you know, [Ivy League College] isn’t what you’d call a dating college".

Just last night I shared a bus with first-year law students who were absolutely horrified to discover that the guys here wouldn’t even flirt with them.

In the name of research I talked to the wife of the Master of one of the Colleges here. She knows a lot about campus life and she agrees with me. You won’t see PDAs (Public Displays of Affection) among the student body. Of course sex does happen – at least according to some rumors it does. But public courtship and physical affection are out – if you wanna do it, you gotta sneak around.

Why? Well everyone has a theory. Some people say that Ivy Leaguers often are convinced, with some justification, that their future lies in high political or legal office and they don’t want to risk any scandal coming up at their Senate Confirmation hearings. Others say that in places with such high intellectual ambitions people want to be known and remembered as "that terribly clever Jill Smith" not "didn’t she date Joe Bloggs?". According to a friend of mine the phenomenon is confined to the smaller Ivy League schools on the basis that nobody wants to be the centre of intense gossip. This argument is convincing in the early stages of any relationship but it loses some force when couples have been together for more than six month. In one famous case a couple even got married without telling their classmates.

On the Road

But let’s leave the sex bit for a moment and go back to my road trip. My sister came to visit and we decided to hire a car and see a bit of America. First stop was Washington DC. We loved it. No one does monuments like the Americans – we loved them all: Lincoln, Jefferson, FDR, Kennedy, Korea and Vietnam.

All the Presidential monuments are made out of marble and they all have inspiring quotes made by the Prez carved into them. Some of them are really awesome. One of Thomas Jefferson’s is:

Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just, that his justice cannot sleep forever. Commerce between master and slave is despotism. Nothing is more certainly written in the book of fate than these people are to be free. Establish the law for educating the common people. This it is the business of the state to effect and on a general plan.

One of FDRs is:

The test of our progress is not whether we add more to the abundance of those who have much; it is whether we provide enough for those who have too little.

Then my sister and I got to thinking. What would they carve into the marble for the current bunch? I mean look at the rhetoric about poverty and education and the assumption that the state must help the underprivileged. Who is saying that sort of stuff today in the US?

Take the current Presidential race. One candidate has described it as involving "class warfare" and a friend of mine who works in the field tells me that the candidates actually diverge on a number of serious issues but I know I am among the majority of Americans when I say that they look pretty similar to me. One has as his campaign slogan "Peace and Prosperity", the other "Safety and Security" – I may have got that wrong in precise words but I bet I am about right. These guys are really going out on a limb!

Before the first Presidential debate all the talk was about whether Al Gore would be as stiff as he seems and whether George Bush Jr would again refer to "tariffs and barriers" as "terriers". It is not like there are not big issues to discuss – the environment, the death penalty, Supreme Court appointments, the oil crisis, free trade alliances and US military intervention to name but a few.

When the debate happened all these issues were discussed and the commentators all agreed that there were "strong ideological clashes" between the candidates on the issues. What were they? The moderator's most frequent question was "so what's the difference between you" after the first cliché-ridden response. Leaving aside abortion (which I would argue is not an issue of strict political ideology) and the long, long debate about who was more the same in giving more prescription drugs to seniors the most interesting part was that whenever Bush Jr got into trouble with numbers (which happened a lot) he would try and link Gore to "Washington" (that evil national capital with the monuments I so admire) and Gore’s persistent reference to "the middle class".

Take his discussion of the surplus. In Gore’s opening statement he seemed to echo FDR when he said that the money should not increase the wealth of the wealthy but should be used to help out those "who have been left behind". He then continued "that’s why I support tax cuts for the middle class" and went on to trumpet his record and future plans for "welfare reform" (hint: "reform" does not mean giving more money to existing programs).

I know there is nothing new about Presidential politics being a fight for the middle ground and maybe every election is really the middle vs the upper class. What I find so truly extraordinary is the complacency in the rhetoric– the eagerness to send cozy messages about how one candidate is going to make your life even easier than the other. This is new.

Bill Clinton talked about "feeling people’s pain" when he got elected. At the Democratic convention Al Gore discussed how his little boy had been hit by a car in front of him. In a truly vomitous moment he compared the nation’s polity to his unconscious child, a staring blank face without life, and talked about needing a breath of fresh air to resuscitate the nation. Good taste aside, at least he was trying to inspire people.

His acceptance speech this year went along these lines "I want children to be safe when they walk down the street, I want children to be safe when they go to school, I want children to be safe when they log onto the Internet". Wow.

George Bush Jr is also pretty keen on safety – that and wealth. They are his key messages – I’ll make the US like Texas – tough on crime and rich as hell, then we can be safe in our beds and happy with our bank balance. Of course, this is influenced by the current US prosperity and relative world peace. Bush Jr has his work cut out trying to find some way of saying "its time for a change" during a period of national wealth. He is trying to say Gore was Clinton’s right hand man when issues of ‘trust and character’ come up but also trying to distance Gore from his role in creating unprecedented economic prosperity.

But what no one wants to acknowledge – except perhaps the Candidate without a chance, Ralph Nader – is that it is not a time of peace and prosperity for everyone. Certainly not for people on welfare, not the thousands without basic health insurance and certainly not for the 1.5 million children who have at least one parent in jail.

Commentators have wryly noted that in the supposedly contentious issue of pharmaceutical benefits for senior citizens the Candidates have fallen over themselves to be the one to say most often: "Seniors should not have to choose between medicine and food". But wild Tennessee horses wouldn’t drag Al Gore to point out that single welfare mothers routinely face exactly the same dilemma. He couldn’t. He proudly championed the welfare reform that put them in this position – setting benefits at 40% below the subsistence rate and limiting single parent benefits to 22 months without legislating for a living wage for women who go off welfare, or allowing them to keep their child care allowance or Medicare benefits. Effectively guaranteeing that the women make a financial loss if they try to leave welfare for work.

Bill Bradley made a couple of comments about poverty and health in his speech to the Democratic convention but nobody wanted to hear it. They wanted to see Al Gore kiss his wife. FDR may have been a rare President and the underprivileged have never had a strong voice in US politics but I wonder if there was ever a time when Candidates didn’t even bother to voice concern, didn’t even try and pay lip service (excuse the pun) to the idea of a fair go, a hand up – helping out the truly poor people who can’t even afford to pay taxes.

Wondering what college sex and presidential elections have in common? Kirsten explains all in Part 2.