It begins with Orientation. Freshmen girls are systematically petrified into being wary of all men as potential rapists. The freshmen boys are lectured sternly on consent laws in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Eighteen-year-olds of both sexes are showered with condoms, lubricants, and dental dams; they are shown how to use them and how to dispose of them. And all of this occurs under the banner of “safety.”

I don’t know about you, but nothing kills passion or intimacy for me more than having it thrown in my face five times a day.

Amherst College went co-ed in 1976. As a result, almost every Amherst student lives on a hall with the opposite sex, and most of us are forced to use co-ed bathrooms, a fact you won’t find in the viewbook.

These co-ed living arrangements are the single greatest inhibitor to dating at Amherst. There is an unwritten law that you do not “hook up” with a floormate—that’s “floorcest.” And you’re discouraged from dating anyone in your dorm—that’s “dormcest.” But the housing office, in its infinite wisdom, has more than likely put you in a dorm with the people you’d most to want to date—all the noisy night owls in one dorm, all the offbeat neatniks in another.

In addition to sharing a hall (sometimes a suite) and a bathroom with the boys, Amherst students eat in one dining hall, on one meal plan. In short, there is nowhere to hide from a relationship gone awry.

This feeling pervades many discussions on dating. “How can I go on a date with him?” A girl asks nervously. “I’ll have to get cereal next to him the morning after.” Strangely enough, this rationale doesn’t stop girls from going out, getting drunk, having sex with a stranger, and then facing the embarrassing post-hookup cereal line the next day.

Feminists, with their battle cry for infiltration of every aspect of male life, have removed any mystery from themselves or their opposites. That is what once made dating a special and sacred rite—you didn’t know what your girlfriend looked like in the morning, or, if you did, it was because you were very lucky. A potential Amherst boyfriend doesn’t rest easy knowing that 20 other men know what his girlfriend sings in the shower.

So we don’t date. We hook up with a host of strangers or hole up with one nice boy, fling ourselves off the precipice of self-respect or fling ourselves into the isolation of monogamous long-term dating. It seems there is no middle ground.

And yet …

And yet there is a growing awareness among women—mostly women who own the 6-part A&E Pride & Prejudice—that something is Not Right with this situation. And though they may agree with feminist rhetoric in the classrooms, they cannot support it in their bathrooms or their bedrooms, for that matter.

Some small part of them clings to everything they have been taught to despise. It’s the part that warms, slightly, when a man holds the door open; it’s the part that grows wistful looking at bridal magazines. This awareness feeds off the vulgarity of the second wave feminists, whose passionate activism and bra-burning in the 1960s gave way to tenured professorships, unkempt graying hair and frumpy clothes. Their words now ring false and hollow.

These women must be brought out from the temples of Gloria Steinem; they must be coaxed into putting down their pins and signs, which they wave to fit in.

I hope that this groundswell, once initiated, will spread like wildfire over the campuses of this country, burning out all the cancerous rot that results from feminist meddling. And, when the fires have consumed the last WAGS department, the light from the dying embers will shine on men and women. And wouldn’t it be neat if we emerged from the ashes, simply holding hands?

De-Cal, short for “Democratic Education at Cal,” consists of student-initiated courses that are not funded by UC Berkeley (students pay for the courses themselves, along with help from private donors), but are approved and monitored by Berkeley faculty. De-Cal came under fire in February after Berkeley administrators suspended a male sexuality course amid “allegations that its students engaged in an orgy at a class party and watched a student coordinator have sex on stage at a strip club,” according to the Los Angeles Times. No doubt because of its prurient subject matter, the scandal received global attention, with articles appearing in the Irish Times and London’s Guardian.

But the scandal is also indicative of the decline in academic standards on today’s campuses. By allowing students to take courses like “Male Sexuality” for credit, university administrators essentially replace La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims with dog-eared copies of Maxim magazine.

Berkeley’s student newspaper, the Daily Californian, broke the shocking story, but supporters of the male sexuality class said the Californian’s editors made much ado about nothing. As class coordinator Drew Navarro innocently told San Francisco Chronicle reporters, “At these parties, we play games that would go under the category of icebreakers.”

For Navarro, “icebreakers” involve asking students to go into a bathroom, photograph their genitalia, and then see if their classmates can identify the photos. Not quite the same as the “Name Game,” is it?

To borrow a catchphrase from the Clinton era, the “Male Sexuality” scandal is not “just about sex.” Indeed, as long as University of California Regents promote the fantasy of “democratic education,” scandal will not be far from Berkeley’s campus.

According to the program’s website, De-Cal serves as “a resource center for education and as a tool for personal and community empowerment.” Students interested in running their own De-Cal course need only find a faculty sponsor, complete the requisite paperwork, and get the appropriate signatures.

Ironically, the De-Cal website warns aspiring student coordinators that De-Cal classes “should not be considered [sic] lightly.” But De-Cal courses focus on the lightest and most inconsequential topic matters, like “The Basics of Anime [Japanese animation] Character Designing” and “Beginning Greek Folk Dancing.”

Even a potentially loaded topic like “Afghanistan: Current Issues and Recent History” becomes trivial in the hands of De-Cal instructors. What expertise would a student instructor have on Afghanistan that a tenured professor lacks? And if course offerings at UC Berkeley ignore pressing issues of the day, why don’t undergraduate students petition to have professors teach these topics?

Instead, De-Cal courses function either as schemes for a small clique of students to earn credit while pursuing hobbies, or as a means of supplemental “political education” that students would not necessarily receive in the classroom.

To wit: the “Take Back the Night” course. Offered for two credits, the course seeks “to educate … about sexual violence in order to find a way to prevent it from happening to others.” How will the course accomplish these goals? “During the spring semester we will plan the Annual Rally and March at Berkeley.” Another Berkeley first: political activism for credit.

A number of De-Cal classes have embarrassed the UC Regents and the Berkeley administration. For instance, last spring Berkeley police officers stopped nude De-Cal students from spending the day loitering downtown. The students resisted, arguing that their nude sojourn was part of a final exam.

There is also the case of UC Berkeley Political Science professor James Cair, who stopped supporting De-Cal after he discovered student instructors using a class to recruit for a local politician’s campaign. The students appeared to be taking the University at its word, reading “Democratic Education” as “Campaign for Democrats”

But a university is not a democratic institution. The modern university has its roots in eleventh century Italy, when feudalism was the cutting-edge idea in political theory. At the first universities in Bologna, Paris, and Oxford, students learned by copying for rote what a Lector read from one of the few books available at the time.

Of course, the idea of a university has changed since the Middle Ages. Today’s universities ostensibly provide students with a liberal education in the arts and sciences. “Liberal” shares the same root of the word “freedom,” and the ideal liberal education happens when a student’s mind is freed from bad habits and error. In contrast, the creators of the Male Sexuality course meant to free students of cultural taboo, religious shame, and adult supervision.

“Male Sexuality” was re-instated on March 1. No “outside events” were to take place for the duration of the course, and there would be “careful monitoring” of both male and female sexuality courses by faculty advisors, according to the Chronicle.

Concerned parents and California taxpayers might wish to think twice about what greater faculty supervision truly means. Remember the faculty and administration are responsible for the De-Cal mess in the first place. As the Latin expression goes, Qui custodiet ipsos custodies? Who watches the watchmen?