Herald Volume LXXXV Issue 3 (Sex Issue)

THE YALE HERALD Feb. 15, 2019 | vol LXXXV | Issue 3

Yale’s most daring publication since 1986

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From The Editors Hello friends, I write to you for the first time to introduce our new-old Sex Issue—old because, as you’ll find out in Ryan Benson’s, GH ’21, wonderful feature on the obsolescent Sex Week at Yale, the Herald used to publish the Sex Week Magazine. (We value directness in our naming practices.)

New because it’s been a while, and we’ve started from scratch.

I can’t tell you how excited we are. The Sex Issue has lived in our heads for months, and our writers have reified dreams we didn’t know we had, dreams we couldn’t have had. It is hard to write about tender things, and they have all done so. To our writers, thank you.

There are some questions we have in common. In “Screwed,” from her Grammy-nominated album Dirty Computer, Janelle Monae revives, in more pithy form, an Oscar Wilde epithet: “Everything is sex / Except sex, which is power.” Sex is no naked act, no ground zero for intimacy, no insulated chamber into which no eyes pry: people bring things to it. Many of us have it, and even love it; for those of us who do, how do we do it, and how do we do it ethically? Kellyn Kusyk, SM ’20, writes vivaciously about what it means, for them, to top. Janis Jin, GH ’20, discusses the place of dicks (prosthetic or otherwise) in love between women. Camden Smithtro, ES ’21, writes about older men, younger women, and the painful, confusing process of coming of age.

The second we saw the New York Times piece about Anna McNeil, BR ’20, Ry Walker, SY ’20, and Ellie Singer’s, BF ’21, lawsuit against Yale this past Tuesday, we knew we wanted to interview them for the Sex Issue. Our editors jumped in to unpack their motivations and aspirations.

This issue also contains print-exclusive material—luckily, if you’re reading this, you’ve already picked up a copy. I’ll leave it to you to find out what else we have for you.

Happy fucking!

All my love, Chalay

The Yale Herald is a not-for-profit, non-partisan, incorporated student publication registered with the Yale College Dean’s Office.

If you wish to subscribe to the Herald, please contact the Editor-in-Chief at fiona.drenttel@yale.edu. Receive the Herald for one semester for 40 dollars, or for the 2018-2019 academic year for 65 dollars.

The Yale Herald is published by Yale College students, and Yale University is not responsible for its contents. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the views of The Yale Herald, Inc. or Yale University. Copyright 2018 The Yale Herald. Have a nice day.

2 THE YALE HERALD

VISIT US ONLINE AT YALEHERALD.COM

The Herald Masthead EDITORIAL STAFF EDITOR-IN-CHIEF Fiona Drenttel MANAGING EDITORS Marina Albanese Chalay Chalermkraivuth

EXECUTIVE EDITORS Emma Chanen, Emily Ge, Margaret

Grabar Sage, Jack Kyono, Nicole Mo,

Marc Shkurovich, Eve Sneider, Anna Sudderth, Oriana Tang FEATURES EDITORS Joe Abramson, Jordan Powell CULTURE EDITORS Laurie Roark, Helen Teegan VOICES EDITORS Hamzah Jhaveri, Mariah Kreutter OPINION EDITOR Spencer Hagaman REVIEWS EDITORS Kat Corfman, Everest Fang, Douglas Hagemeister FUZZ EDITORS Matt Reiner, Harrison Smith INSERTS EDITORS Sarah Force, Addee Kim

DESIGN STAFF CREATIVE DIRECTORS Julia Hedges, Rasmus Schlutter DESIGN EDITORS Paige Davis, Michelle Li, Molly Ono

cover design by Julia Hedges image courtesy of Stephanie Sarley

In This Issue 5

This week, Fuzz asks a handful of artists to draw the first time they had sex, in the abstract.

6, 7 INCOMING

Pegging

Strap it and tap it, ladies!

OUTGOING

Pegging

The traditional timber frame, known as “postand-beam” construction, made of carefully fitted timbers with joints secured by large pegs, has been replaced by the comparatively inexpensive and structurally sound “balloon frame.”

Week Ahead THE FIFTH HUMOUR PRESENTS: THE EXTRA VIRGIN SHOW THURSDAY FEB. 15 @ 8:00 PM MORSE/STILES CRESCENT THEATER THE HERALD LAUNCHES THE SEX ISSUE SATURDAY FEB. 16 @ 9:30 PM 356 ELM ST, APT 101 FUCKING A WEDNESDAY FEB. 20 @ 8:00 PM YALE UNIVERSITY THEATER

Carly Gove, BR ’19, gets lovesick.

Daniel Yadin, MC ’21, tells a story of sex, sexual maturation, and lube.

8

Kellyn Kusyk, SM ’20, grapples with sex roles, identity, and where to find liberation in the midst of all of it.

9

Janis Jin, HC ’20, deconstructs the concept of the dick and rallies for strap-ons.

10

Chalay Chalermkraivuth, SY ’20, Mariah Kreutter, BK ’20, and Eve Houghton, DC ’17, GRD ’24, have a roundtable discussion on Sally Rooney’s two acclaimed novels, Conversations With Friends and Normal People.

11

Camden Smithtro, ES ’21, comes of age with a confusing first time.

12

YH Staff goes behind-the-scenes with Anna McNeil, BR ’20, Ry Walker, SY ’20, Ellie Singer, BF ’21, and David Tracey, TC ’08, on their lawsuit against Yale.

14

Dive into Sex Week at Yale with Ryan Benson, GH ’21, as she unravels its bizarre 14-year-long history.

16

Rachel Koh, SM ’20, brings some international perspective with Evren Savci, discussing sex work in Turkey and demystifying the global moral industrial-complex.

18

Marina Albanese, PC ’20, speaks with Beatrice Codianni, for a New Haven activist’s take on addressing problems around sex work.

20

Amanda Thomas, SY ’21, and Max Himpe, BF ’21, question society’s obsession with virginity in the newest edition of their biweekly column, Tea Time with Max and Amanda.

21

How can we trace queerness? Addee Kim, JE ’21, Hamzah Jhaveri, TC ’22, and Jordan Powell, MY ’21, trace theirs to the root, bringing us back to the first moments that caused them to question their sexuality.

Inserts Top 5 People to Call After Sex

1.

AMANDA THOMAS, SY ’21 YH STAFF

Your mom: “Hey mom just wanted to let you know that I’m being safe and having a good time!”

Your doctor: “Hey Dr. Joseph, I forgot to pee before and after sex? Am I at risk of getting a UTI? I did take a big dump though… will that work?”

3.

Your father: “Hey Dad! Did you listen to the new Pusha-T album? Also, I ate at the all-you-can-eat Indian buffet yesterday and my stomach is kinda freaking out.”

Your Therapist: “Hey Carol! Are we still on for our appointment tomorrow?

Had a lot of fun with you last night! Sorry about the mess.”

5.

LYDIA HILL, BK ’21 Lauren: I was hooking up with this guy from my FroCo group, literally during Camp Yale, freshman year. He seemed fine from the FroCo group meetings, but then he stopped mid hook-up to ask me if I could punch his balls like a punching bag. I was so shook that I literally left. Thank God that FroCo meetings were already over or else I would have actually had to drop out of Yale.

Beatrice: I met this guy a Fence who told me he liked Kafka so I told him we should have sex. He was cool and very generous, but when he asked me to punch his balls like a punching bag. I was like nah, dude, sorry. So weird.

Rebecca: Obviously it’s that guy who likes his balls punched like a punching bag!! And from what I’ve heard, I’m not even the only girl he’s done it to. It’s so gross. Kid seriously needs help.

Dave: I don’t know if I have anything that crazy, I mean I’m pretty tame. I guess one time this girl kind of like, hit my balls a little, and I was like whaaat?? That’s so weird, dude. Crazy.

Victoria: I was trying to hook up with this guy in the stacks once, and then the lights went off, the library shut down, and we got stuck there overnight! We had to huddle together on the floor for warmth and use books as pillows. Honestly, it was kind of romantic. But then he asked me to punch his balls like a punching bag, so I called campus security.

THE YALE HERALD

4.

God: “Dear God I’m really sorry about the abominations I’ve committed, but did you really have to curse me with explosive diarrhea whilst having sex with my really hot and very emotionally intelligent therapist, Carol?

Thanks a lot, dude.”

Five Yale Students Share their Craziest Yale Hookup Stories!!!!!

4

2.

Fuzz Sex in the Abstract

Fuzz deals in visual content. Each week we come up with a means to distribute drawings, photographs, and interviews with artists. Often we crowd source our content in an effort to generate creative output.

This week we asked participants to draw the first time they had sex, in the abstract.

Voices thanksgiving you’re acting horribly. we’re waiting on a phone call, we have this whole I hate you, you hate my mother, everybody loves the dog thing going on. there’s a package at the door and it’s got my medical supplies. you unpack the box and i sit under steam. shampoo automatic like cold water in morning. the body makes me nervous. little arm, careening from the top of the shower curtain. with every syringe you unpack my body shivers with anticipatory illness. three fingers on the back of my neck. i sit on the sink and you dry my legs. what is it about your hands, the kind of gentleness that settles as bruise. outside, the wind moves through the pines and the needles roll in waves. bruises aren’t so bad. we pile on top of each other in one wet, drying heap. knuckles suddenly white.

CARLY GOVE, BR ’19 YH STAFF

illustration by Matt Reiner

6 THE YALE HERALD

7 Slippery DANIEL YADIN, MC ’21

“O

h my God, Daniel! You are such a little faggot now,” squealed Leah, my closest friend, when I called her after having penetrative sex with a man for the first time. “Did you use lube?”

To this end, my sexual encounters with men throughout my first year, including that lubed-up night in the interminable winter of early March, had been matters of impulse: of knowing what felt new and right, and embracing it in the moment.

They were all drunken hookups, mainly with “Yeah. It’s kind of hard to do without,” I said, strangers. A lack of premeditation helped preclude after assuring her it was alright that she’d called any serious self-identification with my actions; I me a faggot. could be a sloppy, horny, impulsive first-year. Never a gay man.

“Oh. Get a big jar, then. For your next dick appointment.”

Anal sex was no different to me by virtue of being anal, though, culturally, it meant the world.

“Maybe.”

Friends congratulated me on no longer being a virgin, whatever that means, and, to Leah and I knew I wouldn’t. A big jar of lube would be to my others, I had clearly entered some club, passed nascent gay self what an American passport was to some citizenship exam. But I was an uneasy resimy Israeli-immigrant mother: a physical marker dent of Homoville, and I shirked some of my civic of my belonging to a new class; a commitment for duties. I continued to have sexual encounters with the long haul. I had done just fine, the previous men, but none of them required lube, and I plodweekend, with the two foil packets of lubricant I ded through the rest of March and the beginning kept tucked away in my sock drawer. My sexless of April just doing my best to grow into myself. straight suitemate had wordlessly tossed them to me one day at the start of our first year at Yale, efore the late-April bacchanale of after I kissed my first man at the Directed Studies Spring Fling, a casual friend antoga party. nounced at dinner that she’d be making a condom run to CVS. I joined. Earlier that “Buttholes are dry,” Leah helpfully offered. week, I’d finalized my summer plans in New York City, and I was determined to shake off the school “I know, I know. Whatever. I don’t know.” year’s uncertainty and enter the city’s dating scene a fully-actualized gay, to wear my sexuality well “Whatever.” She left it at that. and have a bottle of lube to call my own.

B

That conversation was one of many that Leah and I had shared that year about my sexuality. I needed approximately two weeks at Yale to liberate the knowledge that, as I worded it to everyone who asked that first month, “I just don’t think I’m that attracted to women.” That saying yielded to, “I know I’m something, but I’m just doing what I feel like,” which, in turn, gave way to, “I exclusively like men, but saying I’m gay doesn’t really feel right.”

(It’s a process.) But no matter my long-winded self-identifier of the moment, I knew, steadfastly, what I was not, or, rather, what I hoped I was not: such a little faggot.

Though humans have long endeavored to remediate the anus’s inability to self-slicken—Roman men used olive oil for their pederasty, and the Japanese of the Edo period grated Chinese yams into tororo-jiru, a slippery substance well-suited for sex—a large pharmacy’s lube aisle is a space distinct to our current, absurd stage of late capitalism.

CVS sells its generic Lubricating Liquid alongside Mayer Laboratories Aqua Lube, Aloe Cadabra Natural Aloe Lubricant, Swiss Navy MD’s Own Personal Moisturizer, and Mae 100% Natural Vaginal Suppository, whose box enjoins users in typewriter-font to “feel like a teenager again, but

with better judgement.” I settled on a two-ounce baby blue bottle of K-Y Jelly.

“Slippery, avoid spills,” it warned me on the back.

It was around four inches tall and fit snugly in my palm, and I saw, as I moved it beneath the store’s light, that some graphic designer had imprinted faint images of water drops around the bottle.

Wetness, I guessed, was that design project’s dominant motif.

Sitting atop an inch-tall circular prism of clear plastic, the lube bottle sloped gently into itself as it narrowed into its upper fringe, where an expiration date informed me that its contents would work until September of 2019. The plastic of the bottle’s body was smooth to the touch, almost soft, and supple, made to be squeezed. A band of pale cornflower blue wrapped around the bottom inch before ceding sharply to the baby blue expanse.

I paid the cashier four dollars for the bottle and set it on my dresser at home. I didn’t have any more sex with men that year, so there it stood, proud and unused as a high school diploma, through May. Still, its presence was a physical reminder, some material confirmation, of my new, frightening, wondrous capabilities.

I

only unsealed the bottle later, once freshman year was over and I moved into Leah’s house in Brooklyn and I met a nice boy at the Met on a humid Friday in June. He was from Queens and showed me around New York, and my lube traveled with me all summer long, up and down the elevated line of the 7 train, to and from Woodside. Leah didn’t call me a faggot for it, though I was sometimes afraid to hold his hand, and the summer ended and I said that I couldn’t make it work from New Haven and that’s all there really was to that ephemeral thing, although my lube bottle, now half-empty, bears its imprint.

Topping G

enerally speaking, I embrace chaos. Last week I dressed myself in clothes straight out of the dryer and left the rest of the load in the machine for two more days. A chicken carcass spent all of last weekend on a plate in my room. I have a million unfinished projects: a mandolin I’ve played three times, a truck that won’t go into second gear, the beginnings of at least three long-form erotica pieces. I was recently summoned for jury duty in Virginia, but I’m going to deal with that later.

In the bedroom, though, I vastly prefer control. There’s nothing I like more than pinning people down––consensually––and fucking them.

My experience of sex and of my gender are inseparable.

There are plenty of other words I could use to describe myself, but for the sake of simplicity I am trans-masculine and non-binary, meaning that I was born biologically female, use they/them pronouns, dress in men’s clothing (whatever that means), and am going to start injecting testosterone into my body as soon as my healthcare allows me to.

There is an expectation that masc people (queer people who assume “masculine” characteristics) be dominant in all ways, not just sexually, so it’s not particularly groundbreaking that I prefer fucking over being fucked. But I do like it a lot. Topping has the potential to be an act of deep love and generosity, not just control and domination. As Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline Davis write in “The Reproduction of Butch-Fem Roles: A Social Constructionist Approach,” topping subverts the logic of straight sex where the man directs the encounter and is the primary recipient of pleasure. I only ever want to direct if it is deeply desired by and deeply pleasurable to the person I’m fucking. The pleasure I get from topping is secondary and generally psychosomatic, not physical.

Still, I hesitate to identify myself as a “top” in the same way I hesitate to identify as “masc.” I’d rather say, “Usually I am masc,” or, “Usually I like topping people.”

Saying I’m a “top” feels like promising more than I can deliver, because it’s not unilaterally true. My friend recently made the good point that topping is an energy, not a state of being. In most circumstances, though, I do prefer giving over receiving.

I think the first time I topped was in high school. There was a boy who I hooked up with maybe twice during my junior year and had a quasi-friendship with over

8 THE YALE HERALD

KELLYN KUSYK, SM ’20 YH STAFF

Snapchat. Our sexual relationship peaked and ended spectacularly on Valentine’s Day, 2015, when I gave him what was almost certainly a terrible blowjob on his parents’ couch after we’d drunk bourbon and watched five minutes of Casablanca. I was enthusiastic but I absolutely didn’t want him to touch me, which confused me and made me wonder for a long time afterwards if the encounter had been consensual. In truth, though, I think I just wanted to top him. I preferred touching over being touched.

My high-school girlfriend and I never exactly “topped” or “bottomed” when we fucked, but we bought a cheap Amazon strap-on after consulting Autostraddle and learned how to use it together. For most queer people, penetration generally falls under the category of “topping.” I don’t want to place undue primacy on it as the topping activity––I’d consider a wide range of other sex acts to also be topping—but I do personally enjoy penetrative topping a lot. I had a lot of penetrative sex my senior year of high school, when most other things were going to shit around me. At a time when I felt very existentially anxious, I think I accomplished “getting some direction in life” by fucking my girlfriend with a strap-on.

Lesbians who don’t want their genitals touched during sex are generally called “stone butches.” I’m not a lesbian anymore, but I still sometimes feel “stony,” because other people getting me off during sex feels mostly like a needless annoyance. My sexual fantasies are all about giving pleasure, never receiving. Sometimes I wonder if, with hormones and surgery, I will eventually feel more comfortable with my genitals being touched. But that line of reasoning is unsettling to me because I don’t equate topping with a rejection of my own body. On the contrary, topping is an affirmation of a body that sometimes feels painfully outside of my control.

Speaking to us who have inherited the Western gender binary, Jack Halberstam writes in their essay “Gender”: “We are probably not quite ready do away with gender, or with one gender in particular, but we can at least begin to imagine other genders.” The “end of gender” might eventually come, but until then, Halberstam call us not to reject “gender” categorically, but to make our own space within it––to create new genders and inhabit new possibilities. Maybe one day, “gender” will end by fragmentation.

Maybe one day, too, sex roles will be abolished and we’ll all fuck in an indiscriminate blur of moving bodies and dildoes and sex organs, and we’ll all be doing everything exactly equally and coming at the exact same time. But for the time being, when I have sex with other queer people, it’s helpful to have roles as a starting place for fulfilling sex. We bring a lot with us into the bedroom–– queerphobia, memories of bad sex, anxiety about having sex at all; our joys, our griefs, our shame. Assuming roles, like we assume genders, might sometimes limit us, but I think we’re better off considering how they might set us free.

My masculinity is deliberate. I’ve chosen to assume it at a high cost. In this, I hope to avoid being like the crew boys I see in the library, who are so careless with their masculinity it makes me want to die. But with enough testosterone, the world will eventually experience me as yet another white man. I know there’s a risk that I, too, could slip from deliberateness to misogyny.

I hope I always carefully consider the labels I choose to inhabit, and never stop re-imagining what my own gender can and might be. For now, I know that topping feels liberatory.

Maybe one day, too, sex roles will be abolished and we’ll all fuck in an indiscriminate blur of moving bodies and dildoes and sex organs, and we’ll all be doing everything exactly equally and coming at the exact same time.

9 On Lesbians and Dicks S

ometimes I have dreams of fucking with a strapon. But there is a part of me that feels ashamed of this desire. As a lesbian who took a long time to come to terms with identifying as such, I feel self-consciously averse to having any kind of sexual relationship to dicks––including fake ones.

People are confused by lesbian sex. The most obvious evidence of this is that inevitable question everybody (including my MOTHER) seems to ask, if not out loud, then certainly to themselves: how exactly do you… have… sex… without a penis? Couched beneath this benign question, however, is a more insidious claim, one that entered my consciousness via conservatives but remained there via my own internalized homophobia: there is only one “real” way to have sex, and it necessarily involves a dick that belongs to a straight cis man. And so much of my sex life when I began identifying as queer was about working through and against this claim in my head, and learning how to argue–– for myself more than for anyone else––that I don’t need dick in order to have good sex.

And it’s true. I definitely don’t need dick in order to have good sex. But that is, of course, not really the point. Because as much as I have trained myself to disavow the idea that sex requires dick, I cannot deny that lately I have found myself fantasizing about wearing a strap-on, envisioning myself in the mirror with this odd appendage extending from my waist, imagining what it might be like to press my body on top of the person I love and feel a prosthetic dick between us. I’m fascinated by the possibility of fucking with a strap-on. But I also find it difficult to uncouple the strap-on from what the idea of a dick has symbolized for me, by way of a cultural imaginary that is still overwhelmingly bioessentialist and heteronormative: cis straight men.

I am not the first lesbian to feel this way about dicks. Importantly, lesbians before me have used this feeling to justify rampant transmisogyny. Indeed, one kind of TERF (trans exclusionary radical feminist) that emerged at the tail end of second-wave feminism was the trans exclusionary radical lesbian––the TERL. (This isn’t a real acronym—I made it up, but it works well for my purposes so I’ll just keep using it.)

The late-1970s TERL is perhaps best exemplified by lesbian feminist scholar Sheila Jefferys, whose 1979 paper “Political Lesbianism: The Case Against Heterosexuality” defined a political lesbian as a “woman-identified woman who does not fuck men.” At face value, this is a perfectly fine statement. In fact, it’s one I would align myself with.

But what is violent––and frankly, intellectually lazy––

JANIS JIN, HC ‘20

And as a man-hating lesbian myself, it’s also the work I need to do, for admittedly more selfish reasons, in order to feel like I can do this one thing I really want to do: have strap-on sex. about TERLs like Jefferys is the key word at the center of this definition: no, not ‘woman,” but “men.” After all, this is really a definition premised on negation, not affirmation: there is a difference between saying “woman-identified woman who fucks women” and “woman-identified woman who does not fuck men.” So if the disavowal of men is what drives the project of political lesbianism, who does Jefferys define as “men?”

I suppose I gave this point away when I called Jefferys a TERL. Jefferys insists on looping trans women into the category of “men,” in part because, among other things (and I am vastly oversimplifying her argument here, on purpose): trans women were born with dicks and many still have them. As trans scholar Andrea Long Chu––who, I ought to note, is quite controversial within trans studies––puts it: “It is a favorite claim among TERFs like Jefferys that transgender women are gropey interlopers, sick voyeurs conspiring to infiltrate women-only spaces and conduct the greatest panty raid in military history.” We see here how Jefferys’ definition of political lesbianism as lesbian separatism––the politics of disavowing “men,” an urge I myself have certainly experienced––opens itself to an all-too-easy coalescence of lesbian politics, bioessentialism, and transphobia.

And so the work that many trans thinkers have already done, that cis lesbians still need to do (Sheila Jefferys is STILL a raging transphobe, in 2019) is to work through this impulse to equate dicks and men. Saying that dicks and men are one and the same requires no intellectual effort. It is lazy. It is what a cisgender heterosexual world has already told us. Much more difficult is the work of imagining body parts uncoupled from gender as a prescriptive binary, of orienting queer sex in a way that does not position it always and necessarily in relation to cisgender heterosexuality.

I think one way to begin this work is by returning to the concept that drove my initial anxieties around the strap-on: absence. Linking women’s bodies with “absence” is a narrative whose origins can be traced back to Freud’s theory of “penis envy,” which posits that the defining moment of female sexuality is young girls’ realization of a “lack” where the penis ought to be. On the other hand, Monique Wittig, one of the earliest lesbian writers, put forth a notion of the lesbian body defined instead by excess. In the 1980s, Wittig wrote that language itself could not even contain the lesbian “I.” Wittig writes, so very beautifully I think, that the lesbian body is “an excess of “I,” an “I” exalted… Nothing resists this “I” (or this tu [you], which is its name, its love) which spreads itself in the whole world of the book, like a lava flow that nothing can stop.”

Wittig offers a theory of the lesbian body here that refuses the seamless coupling of body and biology. That is, her vision of the lesbian body does not begin with the physical “absence” signified by the vagina. Instead, she points us toward something far more generative: how the body of the lesbian, configured as a non-normative subject rather than as a necessarily cis woman, functions as excessive, spilling over the normative strictures imposed by heterosexuality.

This is a kind of politics that does not rely on biology in order to visualize meaning. It is the only kind of politics that offers a way forward for thinking about lesbian sex in a way that makes space for trans women. It is also a politics of lesbian sex that makes space for the presence of dick. Fucking with a strap-on becomes an act of bringing more queer excess into an already excessive space, rather than simply using heterosexual presence to fill queer absence. This, I think, is the kind of reframing of sexuality that political lesbianism can do, if and when it takes seriously its commitment to creating a more expansive understanding of the kinds of desires possible for women who love women.

And as a man-hating lesbian myself, it’s also the work I Anyway. All of this is mostly just to say: I think it’s about need to do, for admittedly more selfish reasons, in order to time I get a strap-on. feel like I can do this one thing I really want to do: have strap-on sex.

A Conversation with Friends CHALAY CHALERMKRAIVUTH, SY ’20, MARIAH KREUTTER, BK ’20, AND EVE HOUGHTON, DC ’17 GRD ’24

S

ally Rooney is an Irish writer who has published two highly acclaimed novels at the quarter-life-crisis-inducing age of 27. Conversations With Friends, published in 2017, is about a college student named Frances who enters into an affair with an older married man, Nick.

Normal People, which was longlisted for the Booker Prize and comes out in the United States on April 16, traces a years-long relationship between students Marianne and Connell. Both are wickedly smart books about sex, relationships, and power in the digital age. For the Sex Issue, three women—Chalay Chalermkraivuth, SY ’20, Mariah Kreutter, BK ’20, and Eve Houghton, DC ’17 GRD ’24—sat down for a roundtable discussion about her work.

CC: Are the sex scenes in this book erotic? Before we answer that question we should talk about what we mean by erotic in this context.

MK: I was thinking, like, “arousing.” Are they aspirational?

Are they hot? Is this something people could potentially masturbate to? I guess that’s what I mean when I ask “are these erotic?”

CC: Let’s all raise our hands, and it won’t be captured on audio, who’s masturbated to these sex scenes?

MK: I have not but I could.

CC: You were supposed to not say anything. I wanted it to be a hilarious pause.

MK: I needed more, I needed language to express what I was thinking. [...] I think what I find erotic about sex in these books is the intensity of desire. Which I think is revealed by its attempt to conceal itself. Like Frances’s inner dialogue about how she cares so much about what Nick thinks of her, what he’s perceiving her as, and she cares so much about the experience. [...] We should talk about sex and power. Especially in Normal People, that’s such an important theme.

EH: I guess one starting point might be to ask: does excessive desire as a woman make you less powerful? Because I think we can agree that usually excessive desire in men is figured as powerful—at least now, although that hasn’t been the case necessarily throughout all of literary history, needless to say. But I think that Rooney is interested in interrogating women’s desire. And at least Frances, certainly, seems to be afraid that her desire will abase her in some way. [...] I think [women] still find ways to punish [themselves] for feeling desire. I think I’ve experienced that. I’ve found myself feeling self doubt or recrimination.

MK: I agree. I think that’s also why we see these characters trying to conceal their desire through text- based communication. The whole thing of not texting back for several hours, I think that also relates to the attempt to conceal

10 THE YALE HERALD

the strength of one’s desire, whether emotional or sexual.

I think when women desire too much the idea is that they will be hurt. Because, within the heterosexual norm, which is mainly what these books are about— CC: Entirely, I would say. There’s no queer sex.

MK: Yeah. Well— CC: Oh, shit, there’s Bobbi.

MK: Do she and Frances actually have sex?

EH: I think your omission there is actually helpful, in that the erotic side of their relationship is really never described or depicted, which is interesting.

MK: I also never got a strong sense from the novel that Frances felt a really deep sexual desire for Bobbi.

CC: Like, can you be passively bi?

MK: She did strike me as passively bi! The flashback to when they got together was Bobbi saying to Frances, “Do you like girls?” and Frances saying “‘Sure,’ because Bobbi made it easy to go along with things” or something like that. Which also is an interesting question, of what kind of desires are privileged in this text.

CC: I think the sex-and-power question is one that preoccupies feminist and queer theory. [...] As far as I’m aware of the history, on the one hand you have Catharine MacKkinnon being like, “Sex is about domination and subordination, and that’s always bad, and we have to eradicate any domination and subordination whatsoever.” [...] Then you have on the other hand [third-wave] theory, which is like, “That’s silly, sex needs power, and that’s why we have tops and bottoms. [...] People want to subordinate themselves sometimes, and some people want to lead, and you can lead in a way that doesn’t exploit the other person; you can lead in a way that privileges their pleasure.” I think the difficult thing about reading Normal People for me is that it talks about BDSM in heterosexual terms. In one of Chris Kraus’s books— EH: The patron saint of desiring female subjects.

CC: Also the patron saint of like, straight women who potentially misuse queer theory.

EH: Fair.

CC: I think she’s a narcissistic straight woman who misuses a lot of theory. [...] She takes BDSM and her whole notion of BDSM is like, “It’s just a replication of patriarchal power in sex that is always present in straight sex, where you’re just clear on what’s happening.” It’s just taking what’s

always there and making it deliberate. And therefore, in some way, the woman has some sense of control, because she knows exactly what she’s doing. [...] And with Sally Rooney, in Normal People anyway, there’s a parallel thing where BDSM exists within the constraints of straight sex, and it takes the patriarchal abuse that Marianne experiences and [acts as] a recapitulation of her trauma. [...] By the end of the novel she would still let Connell walk over her, or do anything, but she knows that Connell would never do that. And that’s the redemption. And that’s interesting too. [...] Like Catharine MacKinnon was wrong, right, you can’t get rid of power in sex, [...] so how, knowing that, can you deal with it, especially if you’re a straight woman? [...] And Normal People is, in that somewhat limited sense, optimistic, because you just find someone who would just never ever ever abuse their power over you. Only ever for your pleasure. That’s really beautiful actually. [...]

MK: I think historically excessive desire on the part of a man has been seen as a power to hurt. […] So is Connell a wish fulfillment of, like, the one good man? [...]

EH: I think the open-endedness of the ending might imply that we have to keep having sex under patriarchy? I mean, we don’t have to. But for those of us who would like to have sex, it’s going to be under patriarchy.

CC: Unless you’re queer. I mean, maybe even then. I won’t venture.

EH: I think that’s what might associate [Rooney] with a later generation of feminist theorists than someone like Catharine MacKinnon. [...] We can talk about these power dynamics, we can interrogate them, but you have to keep connecting with others, physically and emotionally. And that, for me, is the optimism of this ending. [...] Can [heterosexuality] be saved?

CC: Can it be saved? What happens to those of us who stay on the sinking ship? And for Normal People the answer is to find the one good man. And for Conversations With Friends the answer is, like, polygamy.

MK: Is that the answer?

CC: I don’t think so. The other thing I was gonna say is I think there’s a really interesting relationship between submissiveness and morality. That’s part of what Conversations with Friends is all about, about Frances and Nick not accepting any responsibility for their actions, like, “Oh, I didn’t instigate this, I’m submissive in this dynamic, everything just happened to me.” Those are thought patterns that I have had myself, where I’ll sort of perform every-

11 thing up until the very last moment, and only at the very last moment, when I know there’s no way for any other outcome to occur—this was at my heterosexual peak—I pretend to forget, I put all the work in the back of my head, and have the “object” of my pursuit perform the last action. And once I thought this through I called it manic vulnerability. I know other women who do this, and without exception they have some kind of power— cultural capital, sexual capital. So part of what I’m saying is, how as a “submissive” partner can you not abdicate responsibility? [...] Like, submissiveness should never be an excuse for moral laxity. [...] [A final question:] How has this book informed your sexual practices?

MK: I think my experience is more like, “Oh my God, I definitely do that, I should stop doing it.”

CC: But you haven’t stopped doing it?

MK: I don’t think I’ve stopped being manically vulnerable; I think I’m still manically vulnerable in general. Has it informed your sex practices, Chalay?

CC: I haven’t had any sex since reading these books. [laughs]

the fact that I’d like to be finished with it. And that’s still true; I definitely read Conversations with Friends and was like, “Wow, I’m never going back.” [...]

MK: Interesting. I mean, yeah I do think Normal People is more redemptive. But also reading Conversations with Friends I was kind of like, heterosexuality is fucked but— EH: We’ve got to keep fucking?

MK: We’ll table that for now.

MK: Yeah.

CC: Well, I think this was very much in line with conversations I was having with myself and my one-time partner and my friends, especially my queer friends, I guess, about heterosexuality and its ills and woes, and

CC: [screeches] Heterosexuality is fucked but we’ve got to keep fucking.

Condemned, Blameless CAMDEN SMITHTRO, ES ’21

I

had sex for the first time the summer after high school. I was 17, pretending to feel older, and deeply lonely. I counted down the days until August with a coworker in his twenties who flirted with me on and off until I made out with him in the back parking lot. One night toward the end of the summer, the makeouts slipped into sex. When he rolled off of me in the backseat of his car, I felt proud. I felt like an adult. And I felt like I could not think about that night ever again or I would probably throw up. Without a real context to compare it to, I settled for murky, mixed emotions, and I moved on.

with her best friend in the race to mature. In describing Elena’s first experience with sex, she validated mine. This is the sex we have when, at the old maid age of 17, love seems so far away and loneliness seems unbearable. This type of sex was an ordeal forced on ourselves by ourselves, as we struggled to make sense of senseless adolescence. Elena and I both “heard clearly the ridiculousness of his trained voice… but I thought: maybe we really are made of the same clay, maybe we really are condemned, blameless, to the same, identical mediocrity.” We did not want to wait for better, because the only better we could see lay ahead of us in adulthood.

Last December, I read Elena Ferrante’s The Story of a New Name, and halfway through the novel, those feelings came back. That night in the car came back, when the teenage protagonist Elena—sitting on the beach, full of jealousy for her best friend’s sexual maturity—was approached by the father of her schoolmate. When she allowed herself to hint, when she allowed him to touch, when she allowed him to fuck. She cursed at him after, but maintained, “not for a moment did I think sex with that rather conceited, vain, garrulous man had been a mistake. Yet to see him there… and recognize that it was he who had deflowered me, disgusted me.”

So we fucked our way into adulthood, propositioning and being propositioned, exploited for our youth and aware of it. Elena and I performed the narrative young women have been taught: that for a woman to come of age, a man must cum.

Ferrante treated it not as an aside, but as a critical moment in Elena’s coming-of-age story, her struggle to keep up

While sex made me feel freed from my childhood, it thrust me into womanhood, a state that was both alienating and unifying. Without anything emotional tying me to the man who fucked me, I felt isolated. But Ferrante gave me a framework to connect to, an experience of womanhood I could see myself in, permission to own my messiness without judgment.

So we fucked our way into adulthood, propositioning and being propositioned, exploited for our youth and aware of it. Elena and I performed the narrative young women have been taught: that for a woman to come of age, a man must cum.

Suiting Up

INTERVIEW WITH ANNA MCNEIL, BR ’20, RY WALKER, SY ’20, ELLIE SINGER, BF ’21, AND DAVID TRACEY, TC ’08.

YH: How long have you been working on this case, and what was the process of becoming a plaintiff with [discrimination attorneys] Sanford Heisler? Why Sanford Heisler specifically?

they had speciality in public accountability law […] Some of our first advisors were Yale Law School professors, and people who had affiliations with Yale were obviously reticent to officially file the complaint or take us as a client, so that was difficult. It was [also] AM: We had known that we wanted to file difficult to find a firm that understood all of some kind of complaint or eventually work the complexities of the case… so that took towards a lawsuit for well over a year now. awhile, to find that match.

We were initially thinking of filing the complaint ourselves, but we had been looking YH: Could you speak more to Yale’s history of for representation for around a year at this inaction, and how that played into your filing point. And we came to Sanford Heisler over of the lawsuit? the summer, and honestly working with them has been very good so far. We feel like they RW: I think in terms of headlines about really understand our case. They’ve gone to fraternities, or discussions that we had read pretty great lengths to help us get here, so about in the last few years, one of the earlier I’ve been pretty happy with the outcome. instances was the DKE pledge event with the [...] I think that when we were looking for “NO means YES, YES means Anal,” the “We representation before we found Sanford love Yale sluts” in front of the Women’s Center Heisler, [it] was difficult because a lot of incident, in addition to the 2015 SAE party firms maybe had speciality in Title IX, or in which they didn’t admit any black women,

BY YH STAFF

or rather had a “white girls only” policy. So I think there’s this much longer history where, after two of those instances, there were college students who reformed that Greek life. And Yale has revoked some [privileges] from some of these organizations, and has, at times, given them some sort of punishment with limited oversight. As far as there being real effects, or real change, there has been little policy and little oversight yielded by the administration over these organizations. That’s one thing that we came into a lot of trouble with when we started going to countless meetings in the Yale Dean’s Office [...] The administration came to the conclusion that they were not willing [...] to oversee and monitor these organizations that are putting students at risk—their students at risk— so often. So there’s this longer history, particularly with fraternities, that has made clear the great gap in Yale’s own ability and power [and] its responsibilities on this campus.

YH: What does it mean to file a lawsuit against Yale, and why did you guys choose to file against the University [as well as] the fraternities themselves?

AM: I think it kind of goes back to what Ry was saying. We wanted to make it clear that we oppose the fraternities as institutions, both the national and local chapters, but also we were trying to imply that Yale has an obligation to its students to keep them safe, and to keep them free from discrimination.

Yale is violating that agreement, given that it is aware of the conditions of fraternities and fraternity culture, and has been aware for a decade or more. [...] We were really trying to send a message that Yale’s policy--which is [currently that] these are independent, private off-campus organizations and therefore they cannot do anything about it--actually violates some of the undergrad regulations in Yale’s own policy. Furthermore, and as we argue within our complaint, it is well within their oversight to curb the behavior of these fraternities. And so that’s why we didn’t want to file against just the national and local chapters.

how students are approaching the lawsuit YH: What happens if Yale is found guilty? and taking the news of our filing. I would be Or if they aren’t? interested to see how people react to it. There hasn’t been [much] beyond some individual AM: Obviously David [Tracey, lawyer at messages, mostly in support, and a lot of them Sanford Heisler] knows a lot more about haven’t been from students on Yale’s campus, this stuff than we do, because [the outcome] so I’m actually not quite sure [what] to expect is very far down the line. Years. What we’re in terms of how people will react. looking for is not for Yale to shut down, or anything like that. What we hope to happen RW: One difference between national media is that Yale will have to work with us on some response and campus media response is that of those proposed reforms that we have in our a lot of students on campus know about complaint. [...]

Engender. And most, if not all, fraternity members on campus know about Engender, DT: I’d just like to qualify that slightly. We’re and [know] that we filed a claim over the obviously open to talking, engaging in the summer, and are aware of our efforts. And process that Anna just described, but we this is isn’t necessarily news… the lawsuit seek a really comprehensive review of the is certainly news, but it’s not as much of a complaint that includes gender-integrated paradigm shift in terms of [our] ideology. fraternities—a real paradigm shift in the way Although I’m sure it will have an impact— that Yale regulates and engages with the social I’m sure I’ll be having conversations with our environment at the University, particularly peers over the next few days about this lawsuit. off-campus social spaces. So I think that we It’s not necessarily like the arguments that we will go to trial and prevail, and Yale will have are making about gender discrimination and to make those changes. And the fraternities [fraternities’] hostile environment haven’t will be required to gender-integrate. already been part of the Yale discourse.

YH: We just kind of got into this, but I was YH: How can we support you guys other wondering what the general timeline of than signing the petition?

YH: What outcomes do you guys desire? this, but how long you guys anticipate this AM: This is a good question. I mean, this Legal outcomes? Infrastructural support? taking...years? is interesting because sorority and fraternity More student support? And if it were the latter, what would that look like to you guys? AM: I think David, correct me if I’m wrong, recruitment are finishing up right now. Marvin but the timeline that we’re looking at is that Chun makes the suggestion in his report that ES: Basically we’re looking for the University once Ry and I graduate, and maybe Ellie, too, students stop attending fraternity parties, to end its hands off approach, and start taking this won’t be finished at all. We’re thinking and we agree with him to a certain extent, but beyond that, it would be great if students comprehensive action. Making the fraternities like years, like two years—? stopped joining fraternities and giving them not only integrate but [also] become safer party spaces. So that’s a list of things, [which] DT: Yeah, I think one to two years is fair. so much money to continue exist here. [If ] are in the complaint, but that includes having And we’re going to prosecute the case as we could eliminate the demands for frats that mix-gendered sober monitors, [and] bouncers aggressively and as quickly as possible, but I would require a big shift towards raising funds et cetera that would go towards alternative to supervise [potentially] discriminatory think one to two years. spaces, that would be really great. admissions. And other items that would help YH: How do you guys see this ramifying on a end the toxic fraternity culture here. national level?

YH: Do you guys have anything else to add?

AM: I think there are a number of steps that Yale has taken recently to distance itself from AM: Well this is kind of a historic, well I won’t AM: I’d like to point out that when we say [that] off-campus life. For example, they closed say historic, but the lawsuit is the first of its we experienced sexual conduct in fraternities off-campus party registration. There may be kind in that students challenge fraternities on and [that] we’re trying to join those spaces, talk about changes that further distance the the basis of gender discrimination. We would that’s not like—I think maybe this is clear to a University from being accountable for what really like to pave the way for students at other Yale audience—we’d want to join those spaces happens off campus. A lot of our [provisions] in universities, who face the same problems that with the intention of changing them for the the complaint include things like some degree we do here, to take action similarly. [...] If better, not that we think that [it’s] women’s of University oversight, so that fraternities that messaging could really resonate with the job is to police men in their actions. [It’s that] have to create some kind of regulation about national media, we’d be quite happy with that. we think a co-ed membership would be more able to safely serve a co-ed public. I just want how alcohol is served, availability of food and water, how dark the space is or how crowded YH: How do you see this affecting your social to make that messaging kind of clear. the space is, in addition to gender integration. lives at Yale? How are you feeling?

Because we agree that Yale’s current hands off system fails students on this front. Not just on AM: I mean, it’s kind of hard to say because we’re not… Well, we were taking a lot of the gender discrimination. calls today, so it’s kind of difficult to see [...]

The Rise and Fall of Sex Week at Yale RYAN BENSON, GH ’21

C

ollege Tea with Transsexual Porn Star Buck Angel. “The Anatomy of the Vagina and How to Please it with your Mouth, Tongue, and Everything in Between” with Madison Young. A Screening with Director Paul Thomas featuring Sadomasochistic Porn. These are just three events that Sex Week at Yale advertised to students in past programming. And nearly everyone—from writers at the The Atlantic, to employees at Trojan Condoms, to college students at 18 other universities around the US—were as intrigued at the prospect of such stimulating intellectual conversation as you are now.

Eric Rubenstein, BK ’04, conceived of the idea of Sex Week in 2002, when he half-jokingly proposed to create a “Kosher Sex Week” at a Hillel Leadership Conference as a tactic to attract more students to Hillel events. The idea was consummated when Rubenstein teamed up with Jacqueline Farber, BR ’03, director of the Peer Health Educators at Yale, and Professor Bill Summers, who was then teaching “Science and Sexuality,” more popularly known on campus as “Porn in the Morn.” The team decided to secularize the event, and worked with the Women’s Center and the LGBTQ Co-Op in addition to Hillel and the Peer Health Educators to organize the week-long program.

Professor Summers recalled, “The idea was to have a series of talks that were informative and educational and pushing the boundaries. Discussing things that average Yale students didn’t have too much experience with, like, what kind of soap should I use on my leather sex toys? Or how do you get certain toys through airport security?”

The first Sex Week took place on the week of Valentine’s Day, and featured four or five guest speakers, and several faculty lecturers. According to Professor Summers, one or two of the events during the week were specifically LGBTQ-oriented. Summers, for his part, gave a lecture on intersex people.

In 2003, Rubenstein and Farber, a junior and senior at the time, had higher ambitions. They increased the number of guest speakers and programmed a full seven-day schedule, with topics ranging from “The Medicalization of Sex” to “The History of the Vibrator.” Still, Yale alum and writer for The Atlantic, Ron Rosenbaum, JE ’68, claimed the 2003 iteration of Sex Week at Yale had events so under-attended that “the attendees, if you exclude the two earnest and thoughtful undergraduate organizers of Sex Week, were outnumbered by the four panelists.”

After 2003, Sex Week became a biennial event and experienced a previously unimaginable surge in popularity. It was marketed in new ways, expanding through multi-media platforms including a radio show, blog, and magazine. Professor Summers remembers of the magazines that, “There were articles—some slightly amusing things—that certain people’s grandmothers would not be comfortable with.” Sex week organizers received funding from corporate sponsors like the sex toy company Pure Romance, and the festival began attracting more guest-speakers associated with the porn industry.

In 2008, coordinators invited porn actor and director Paul Thomas. In 2010, coordinators invited transsexual porn actor Buck Angel for a Master’s Tea. A dominatrix came to speak in an earlier year, Summers recalls. The invite list piqued interest in Yale students and newspapers across the country. 18 other universities in the US followed Yale’s suit and created their own forms of Sex Week on campus. At one point, Yale’s Sex Week Magazine had a circulation of over 22,000.

As Sex Week became more porn-centered, students and faculty argued that the week-long event no longer fostered a positive and healthy sex culture at Yale; it did the opposite. In 2011, the Advisory Committee for Campus Climate, chaired by Margaret Mar-

15 shall and comprising three other members, including current Vice President of Student Life Kimberly Goff-Crews, identified Sex Week as an inhibition of a healthy sexual climate at Yale. In a statement to the Herald, Goff-Crews wrote, “Our charge was to advise President Levin and the university’s trustees on sexual misconduct and campus climate… We did not and could not make a decision to ban Sex Week.” The Committee’s report did state, however, that they had “overheard from students, faculty, and staff that ‘Sex Week at Yale,’ a student-sponsored event, is highly problematic.” The report continued, “Over time, this event has clearly lost the focus of its stated intention… in recent years it has prominently featured titillating displays, ‘adult’ film stars, and commercial sponsors of such material. We recommend that ‘Sex Week at Yale’ be prohibited from using Yale’s name and any Yale facilities.”

Undergraduates for a Better Yale College (UBYC), an organization established in 2012 with the purpose of creating a paradigm shift from hook-up culture to monogamous, long-term relationships, were also part of the opposition to Sex Week. UBYC even circulated a petition to end Sex Week. Co-founder of UBYC, Isabel Marin, TC ’12, declined to answer any questions about her opposition to the event. In response to administrative and student opposition, Sex Week at Yale took a two-year hiatus after 2012.

Sex Week did, however, make a return to campus in fall of 2015, this time under the name,“Sex and Sexuality Week.” Sex and Sexuality Week had an altered set of intentions and strategies centered around promoting a positive sexual atmosphere on campus. In past years, the directors of Sex Week organized the festival without consulting organizations and committees like the Advisory for Campus Climate. Katherine Fang, the Executive Director of Sex and Sexuality Week in 2015, took a different approach. Fang began formulating a mission statement for Sex and Sexuality Week through conversations with SHARE, the Office of Gender and Campus Climate, Yale Health Student Wellness, and various WGSS faculty members. The event was moved to take place in October instead of the week of Valentine’s Day.

Fang explained her rationale: “My main goal was to conceive of intersectionality broadly—to involve as many corners of campus as possible in conversation about sexual health and politics, because we all have stakes in them.” Fang’s board collaborated with the cultural centers, queer student groups, leaders of religious student organizations, and Greek groups.

In contrast to the orignal Sex Week, Fang said that

“Discussing things that average Yale students didn’t have too much experience with, like, what kind of soap should I use on my leather sex toys? Or how do you get certain toys through airport security?”

“Faculty and the administration were integral in helping our team pull [Sex and Sexuality Week] off.”

Sex and Sexuality Week 2015 was popular among the student body, with some events boasting over 100 attendees.

Unfortunately, Sex and Sexuality Week was the last successful iteration of Sex Week that Yale’s campus saw. Becca Young, previous member of the student group that organized the event in 2016, said that “participation was very low.” Still, Young mentioned

that there was a 2016 panel event for Sex and Sexuality Week on anal play that was very popular.

When I asked why she thought this event might be more popular than others, Young explained, “It seems to me that people will go to events that they can advertise they’ve gone to. It is fun to say you’re going to this thing.” Sex Week was most popular, after all, when the events were most outrageous and sensationalized.

When Jacqueline Farber and Eric Rubenstein founded Sex Week in 2002, campus attitudes towards sex and LGBTQ issues were radically different. The campus lacked vibrant discourse on sex and sexuality, so students decided to push the envelope. 600 students were enrolled in Professor Summer’s class colloquially known as “Porn in the Morn.” Gay activist Larry Cramer was planning a large donation as part of an initiative to include sexuality studies to the Women and Gender Studies department. A club called Porn n’ Chicken produced and released a trailer for a student porno called “The StaXXX.” The notion of organizing a week-long event to educate students on and open discussions about the porn industry, sex toys, and transgenderism was unprecedented in a space like Yale. Sex Week made space for later educational events like Trans Week at Yale to transpire.

Becca Young thinks that one reason that today’s students may not be as interested in participating and facilitating an event like Sex Week is that in the past few years other social issues have taken precedent on campus. Young said, “I do think that campus changed fundamentally after the 2015 protests. It can feel indulgent to talk about the nitty-gritties of sex in an organized setting.”

The evolution of Sex Week is revelatory. As the sexual climate at Yale has evolved, so too have the attitudes of Yalies about the necessity of talking about the particulars of sex in public forums. With or without organized forums, Yale students will continue to discuss the particulars of sex. The sexual and political climate at Yale now does not necessitate organized discussions about porn and sex toys, but instead necessitates forums on consent.

Laboring Bodies: Interview with Evren Savci RACHEL KOH, SM ’20 Evren Savci is an assistant professor in the Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies (WGSS) department. Savci’s interest is in transnational sexualities, and she roots her work in feminist and queer theory as well as ethnographic methodology. Her past work has explored the intersections of language, knowledge, sexual politics, neoliberalism, and religion, and she is currently finishing her first book Queer in Translation: Sexual Politics Under Neoliberal Islam.

RK: Can you tell me about how sex work features in your area of scholarship?

ES: I’m not a scholar of sex work per se... but trans sex workers intersected with my research for my first book, which is about queer social movements in contemporary Turkey, as they’ve been critical in LGBT organizing, historically and contemporarily in Turkey. [...] I’ve dedicated an entire chapter to trans sex workers’ relationships to public space, neoliberal urban redevelopment, changing political economy, the law and the police, and security regimes and the growing authoritarian state. So even though I don’t consider myself a scholar of sex work, I do and have written about sex workers, specifically about trans sex workers, who do end up having a very different place both in the national imaginary and in the way police treats them versus cis women who engage in sex work. [...]I think a lot of progress that feminist work has done is to position [sex work] as a question of labour and not of morals, and also to think about the larger frameworks within which sex work can be discussed, with trafficking being one of the most current iterations of that.

RK: Can you explain a bit more about the particular experience of trans women sex workers in Turkey?

16 THE YALE HERALD

ES: [...]The imaginaries of trans women as sex workers has a lot to do with the way the media has historically represented them as monstrous figures who are out to trick innocent men on the highway and who attack the innocent male public body with switchblades and things like that. There was a big discourse about the so-called “transvestite terror” that was being unleashed. And this is in the context where a lot of trans women were being murdered by men, often times clients or potential clients. That representation, as well as the fact that they have little access to higher education and other forms of labour, means that they do find themselves structurally in a position where sex work is the most available form of labour. [...] Trans women equals sex work in the eyes of the state, the police, the random average citizen. Their presence in public space spells out sex work. [...] Even if [they] are not sex workers. Even if they’re going to the grocery store. There was a law passed [in Turkey] in 2005 that gives the police a lot of liberty to determine who is engaged in “unlawful occupation of public space,” that sometimes just means they can chase street vendors away. But they also use that law to give fines to trans women even when they are walking to the grocery store, or the bus stop, or to their friend’s house. Because it’s never imagined that they’re not soliciting when they’re in public space. Sex worker becomes a master status for trans women. That really affects how they live, what

they’re able to do, their access to public space and their relationship vis-à-vis the police.

RK: What do you think are the main myths that people have about sex work, and how do they come up against the realities of sex work based on your experience and study?

ES: [...] There are particular representations of sex work, such as the ’90s moment of movies like Pretty Woman, that show the undeserving, actually innocent, pretty, well-meaning, funny, smart woman who’s doing it to save money to go to college. It’s the angel-esque stereotype. Scholars point out the connection this has to narratives about sex trafficking, which operate on the back of the idea that there are bad actual prostitutes and then there are the good innocent women who wouldn’t do it if they could, or are doing it because they are trafficked. [...] A lot of people enjoy sex and they don’t see a problem with doing it for money, the way that we don’t see a problem with selling other forms of labour for money—we are all doing it. So there’s an imagined binary between the deserving and undeserving sex workers: the kind that men will fantasize about marrying and saving, and the kind that is unsaveable.

RK: Do you think that there is an ideal policy regime that states should take towards sex work? For

17 example, the Nordic model where you criminalize sex worker could be an illegal sex worker. So that RK: What areas of sex work do you think are the purchase of sex but not the selling or sex, or to- gives a lot of powers to the police and to the state to currently understudied and less understood as they can be? tal decriminalization. harass people.

ES: Looking at the model in Turkey, where sex work is not criminalized but legal and regulated by the state, I totally see the downfall. First of all, I don’t believe in any form of criminalization regarding sex work. I don’t believe in punishing sellers or buyers.

But I would like to see protections of the laborers as laborers, the way you protect people who do other kinds of physical bodily labour. It’s not okay for people to be injured on a construction site. Similarly, there should be protections in place and ideally unionizing, so that people can have structures in place that protect them as workers.

But there also should not be state regulation. In Turkey, for example, the state decides how many brothels and therefore how many sex workers are allowed in the entire country. And if you heard the numbers, you would laugh. They’re ridiculously low. The work hours are nine to five, like you’re going to a state office, and you can’t choose your clients, the way most workers who work for the state don’t get to choose.

You serve whoever comes for service. It’s really poor pay. [...] It’s legal work, you do get a paycheck and you even get retirement and other benefits that come with a state job, but it’s really unappealing work conditions.This means, and this has been historically true in a lot of places, the moment you legalize but make it state-regulated, you are opening an entire can of worms about illegal prostitution. So the same way that there’s a production of victims versus bad subjects, there’s now legal prostitutes versus illegal, clandestine sex work. [...] Scholars in Turkey have written about how police have used that to harass women. This research is from the late ’90s but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still going on. [...] So moral expectations play out in the strange legal liminal zone where anybody who’s not registered as a

RK: How do you think issues surrounding sex work are employed in North American discourse, particularly in relation to countries and peoples who are perceived as less developed?

ES: There’s been great work on the discourse on sex trafficking, and how it creates a world order, basically, of more righteous and less righteous countries.

East Asian countries, especially, have been pegged as countries that don’t do a good enough job preventing sex trafficking. [...] It’s coming from a bit of a hegemonic power that has created a hierarchy between morally upright and morally failed nations based on how well they are fighting sex trafficking.

It happened rather fast—within ten years. Before that there was no such concern and then suddenly sex trafficking arose as a huge global concern.

And it seems a bit devoid of actual knowledge. [...]

There are a lot of women who engage in sex work but are not trafficked. And they treat [sex-trafficking] as different from other forms of labour trafficking. The problem with other forms of labour trafficking is that you don’t get paid. The problem with sex trafficking is that you do get paid for the labour. So it’s already a quite questionable construct. [...] My class, Transnational Approaches to Gender and Sexuality, is asking these larger questions of how seemingly simple human rights issues are implicated in the larger global political economy, and how these particular and very specific supposed measures around “human rights violations” are used to discipline certain nations into behaving according to U.S. standards. This also produces a very racialized understanding of victims, villains, and heroes.

ES: [...] I would like to see more studies on the role sex trafficking is made to play in the neoliberal economy, and how it becomes—Elizabeth Bernstein has written about this, but I’d like to see more beyond a U.S.-centric perspective—how does sex trafficking become a moral flag that different corporations are waving to engage in a type of redemptive capitalism?

It becomes a do-good project for a lot of corporations that are doing a lot of evil, and have been historically, so it would be interesting to see what that looks like in other locations and how that’s perceived. If, let’s say, Google is engaging in these projects – which it is – what does that do to Google’s relationship with Thailand, which is put in hot seats all the time for its “failure”? I think these types of transnational political economy questions can be asked. The other thing is: [...] sex trafficking is not at all a discourse in Turkey, and neither is it in that many countries in the Middle East. Now that there’s a huge Syrian refugee population in the Turkey, I think questions of forced sexual labour are becoming more urgent [...]

But I think there’s a way in which the Middle East gets off the hot seat of the United States when it comes to sex trafficking because Muslims are seen as already “prudish” and “repressed” and “conservative” when it comes to sex. Obviously there is sex work everywhere in the world, including Muslim-majority countries. But it’s interesting to see what moral sticks East Asia gets beat up with, and which moral sticks the Middle East gets beat up with - which is mostly homophobia, and patriarchy. So it would be interesting to look at these larger stories as well: not just sex trafficking in and of itself, but the disciplining and hierarchizing mechanisms of the moral map of the world.

It’s coming from a bit of a hegemonic power that has created a hierarchy between morally upright and morally failed nations based on how well they are fighting sex trafficking.

Policing a Profession: Interview with Beatrice Codianni

MARINA ALBANESE, PC ’20 YH STAFF In the aftermath of the October 2016 arrest of over a dozen New Haven sex workers in a sting operation, New Haven community activist Beatrice Codianni, herself a former sex worker, founded the Sex Workers and Allies Network (SWAN). SWAN’s work focuses on harm reduction, advocacy, and empowerment for people engaging in sex work in the New Haven Area. SWAN advocates for the decriminalization of sex work, organizes protest rallies and vigils, and, in November 2018, collaborated with the New Haven police to arrest a serial rapist.

18 THE YALE HERALD

19 MA: A large part of your work seems to be about getting rid of the violence in a sex worker’s life, from clients to police to pimps. There’s a radical feminist argument against decriminalization that believes the selling of sex is intrinsically abusive of the female body. Do you believe that sex workers can live and work free from violence?

BC: I think it’s all those things. I mean, we need to change the attitudes not just of police, but of society.

People think that Connecticut is progressive, but Connecticut is a puritanical state, as are other states.

Sex is nasty to a lot of people. It’s forbidden, and we need to get over that. Sex is natural. It’s human. It’s human nature. And I think that decriminalization is a great start. But when we start talking about changBC: Our members—and we call them members, not ing the laws, everybody wants to have their hands in clients, not users—are people who are trying to sur- it, to control it. vive. What are these people [who are against decriminalization] doing for them? How are they trying to MA: Because the selling of sex has for so long been help them? They can have their opinion, and that’s an exercise of patriarchal power, I’m wondering if fine. But the reality is that unless people are providing you think it can shed those power dynamics associservices, housing, and treatments for substance abuse ated with it. disorders or mental health issues, unless people reach out to sex workers and offer this, like we do, then they BC: It takes a lot to change attitudes, but yeah. There are other places where trading sex for money or sex need to shut the fuck up. work is legal. Right now, it just seems like old white MA: Do you think that the radical feminist position men are running the whole country, as usual, and which condemns the decriminalization of sex work they’re making sex work out to be something terrible, while not offering anything else as an alternative. is an anti-women or anti-feminist position?

go to police and the police would do something. That they don’t have to live in the shadows. That they are not going to arrest them for sex work, but will go after the person who committed the big crime.

Some people are upset that we do this. We have a “Bad Date List” and we ask the women. when something happens to them, “Do you want to talk to the police? Do you want to report it?” And most often they say no. Then we ask, “Do you want us to keep the description?” They say yes. People ask us how we can work with the police, but why are they trying to shut up the women? Why are they trying to keep them down? This is their voice. They want these bastards off the street before they do anything more. What are you going to do about it? Are you going to protect them? It pisses me off.

MA: Have you noticed transgender sex workers facing a heightened stigma from the police?

BC: I would say so. There’s been a handful of transgender sex workers, and the police just don’t underBC: You know, people are out there doing what they MA: A big part of sex worker activism is about not stand or they don’t know how to talk to anybody that have to do to survive and they make their own deci- making sex workers into victims. How do you rec- doesn’t fit their description of [a sex worker]. The sion[s]. Don’t tell them what they have to do. We’re oncile this position with the fact that sex workers worst thing is for transgender women to be arrested

“People think that Connecticut is progressive, but Connecticut is a puritanical state, as are other states.” a harm reduction organization. We don’t tell people they have to stop. We don’t tell them they have to get treatment. What we say is: What do you need?

How can we keep you safer and healthier? And then we go about our business, doing just that. It’s not about moral issues. We don’t involve ourselves in sex workers’ choices or decisions. Once you’ve made the choice, we’re here to support you. If you’d like to stop, then that’s your decision. If you don’t want to stop or you can’t stop, that’s also your choice. And there’s not a lot of services for women, so sometimes people want to stop, but there’s no bed for them, there’s no doctor for their medical problems. Whether they want to stop or don’t or can’t, we are here for them and we’ll do whatever we can.

are not protected by laws and are often in positions and then put in the male jail. We’ve seen that happen a lot, and that’s traumatizing. where they are abused?

Well, I think that’s the case for women who are not sex workers too. But I think it happens more to sex workers because these women have to live in the shadows. Because the police are out to get them and they don’t trust the police. Because society looks down upon them and makes them feel terrible about themselves. Until sex workers are allowed to be treated with respect, it will be like that. People prey upon sex workers because they know, in most cases, they will not go to the police. They are easy targets. So yeah, abuse happens. They get beaten, raped, and robbed.

But women get beaten, raped, and robbed too. And so do men. In these cases, people go to the police, but MA: Do you think that a policy of criminalizing the there’s no trust in the case of sex workers. For exampurchase of sex, but not the selling of it, would be ple, one woman went to a female officer and said that she was raped and robbed. And the female officer rehelpful to improve the situations of sex workers? sponded, “Well what do you expect? You’re out there No, I don’t think it would, because it takes away because prostitutes can get raped.” That’s the attitude. someone’s livelihood and their way to survive, withMA: How can this relationship between sex workout giving them any alternative. ers and the police be improved?

MA: It was sad to see that, in this past year, there were two deaths of New Haven sex workers (Inez BC: Well, we’ve talked to the police about this and we Perez and Leila Rivera). I wonder what you foresee actually had sex workers meet with them, the Special as a permanent solution to the problem of danger in Victims Unit. We suggested it and a lot of the women sex work, whether that’s new state laws or changing wanted to do it, so that they could see that they could attitudes of police?

MA: What ways do you you think are useful and productive for helping change negative societal opinions of sex workers?

BC: In general terms, education. We do panel discussions, where we bring former and current sex workers, and when people hear these stories of what it’s like to be on the streets, engaged in sex work, hungry all the time, no place to live, they see sex workers as human beings instead of prostitutes, or whatever society wants to call them. We see people talking about sex workers on the streets, having sex in the backyard— that’s bullshit. Sex workers don’t want to be caught, they don’t want to be [visible].

We’re never going to arrest this problem away. Sex workers are still being harassed by the police, even though they can’t get arrested, at least for sex work.

But the police are giving them tickets for “loitering,” if they’re in a known drug zone. All of New Haven is a drug zone. Including Yale Campus. But you don’t see students harassed [for loitering]. Anyway, it’s a tough sell, but we’re trying to put a human face on our people and let people know that it’s work. That sex work is real work.

illustration by Molly Ono

Making Virginity Fun Again Amanda Thomas, SY ’21, and Max Himpe, BF ’21, question society’s obsession with virginity in the newest edition of their biweekly column, Tea Time with Max and Amanda.

AT: According to Teen Vogue, men on average lose their virginity at the age of 16.9, while women lose their virginity at 17.2. (Teen Vogue knows the teens; we have to trust them!) What does that even mean? Growing up, I would’ve read that article and thought, “At 16.9 years old, I have to break my hymen guys!” I was obsessed with my hymen for a while. When I learned that hymens could break from something as arbitrary as exercise, I considered telling everyone after a workout that I had just lost my virginity. Now that she’s gone, I want to hold old-me and tell her: Your hymen is probably the same. And I want to tell my virginity: Hey, I’m sorry I was so unhappy to have you. I actually miss you, you were beautiful.

On a semi-related note, I just started watching Girls (I’m late I know), and so far (season 2) Shoshana is my favorite character. She’s an NYU student who is naive, talkative, and initially a college virgin. Shoshana’s friends are all having sex with people like Adam Driver (so fucking lucky) and she’s self-conscious. I love watching virgins on television because they show that there’s no “look.”

I’ve always felt that having your virginity can make you feel ugly or like a prude, but there’s so much more to it.

There are hot virgins, ugly virgins, God-fearing virgins, secular virgins, horny virgins, asexual virgins, virgins that are nervous about their virginity, virgins who think they’re too good for sex. What I’m saying is that there’s no right way to be a virgin. Your hymen doesn’t have to look a certain way, you don’t have to act a certain way. It’s all a convoluted mess. Max, please talk about the hymen obsession if you have time.

MH: There is no right way to being a virgin. And there’s no right way to losing your virginity, either.

I, for instance, lost my virginity when I was 10-yearsold. It was an innocuous but restless school night. I was writhing in my bed, waiting to find a comfortable sleeping position. As my body re-adjusted against my sheets for the dozenth time, suddenly—oh, something felt good. A ripple of heady goosebumps passed through me. Do that again, I thought. As the writhing continued, with deliberate pace, I acquired a rhythm.

The heady goosebumps came now in waves and the tide was coming in. My nerves undulated as if stroked by a tender massage chair until—oh, wow! I was now fully under the wave. My whole body was numb, like a tongue after good spice. I collapsed into my mattress,

20 THE YALE HERALD

wide-eyed, and asked myself: What new superpower first job you get in your life is usually your shittiest—you had my body just unlocked? gain experience, you grow, and you work your way to your perfect job. Sex happens over and over and over This is how I lost my virginity. Hot, right—I lost my again. The fun part about losing it is thinking about all virginity so young. The moment was not so much a the ways to keep having it! So I guess I’m going to just… cherry-pop as a watermelon-blast because I had just have more sex? accessed a new realm, the realm of sexual pleasure.

MH: Hell yes! I’m actually super excited to lose my virginity Penetrative sex, the boring definition of virginity, was at a mattress factory. Oh, and I’d definitely count myself as simply another space to discover in this realm. There were a rooftop virgin. So there’s that to look forward to. other discoveries to come, about bodies, intimacy, giving pleasure, and more. But this moment was the zenith of Eggheads (another virginity I have yet to lose) might my sexual enlightenment. My virginity loss was driven by describe this conversation we’re having as the queering of curiosity and adventure. There were no rules, and no one virginity or, in Teatime terms, making virginity fun again. was telling me how to do it.

But, not to speak for Amanda here, I do think this exercise in re-virginification™ has a serious purpose.

Discovering the sexual realm was probably some of the best sex I ever had. So if we’re going to obsess over It is diabolical that people are afraid to admit to their “virginity,” let’s reclaim the moment. Let it be special not “virginity” (in the normative sense) out of fear of being because someone told you it was, but because you knew considered unattractive to sexual partners. As a result, they that it was. Mark it on your calendar and have a little will spend their first penetrative experiences pretending anniversary party—attended by just you *wink wink*. to know what the hell is going on. Which will make the experience worse. And maybe these “virgins” think that AT: Max didn’t talk about hymens, which sucks, but I they’ll get the gist from the porn they’ve watch. But mean to each his own. We’re moving on... The point is learning about sex from porn is about as useful as learning virginity is fluid. You can lose your virginity multiple about politics from Cory in the House. times! Sometimes I fantasize about all the ways I will lose my virginity again. My first time having sex on the beach, If we redefined and undermined this “virginity” binary, my first time having sex with my future long-term partner, we’d be free to tell our sexual partners what we know and my first time having sex in a villa at an all-exclusive resort what we don’t. And no sexual act would be more valid in Jamaica… What I’m saying is that YOU decide when than the other. Goddamnit, honesty is sexy. your virginity is taken. I pose you this: if a person has oral sex at 15 and then has penetrative sex at 25, when did that And on that note, Amanda, I should be honest with you: I person lose their virginity? Both are technically sex! They really don’t get hymens. For a long time, I thought it was a both count! type of medication. Or a disease. One of those two.

Also losing your virginity is special every time, so why does the first time you have sex have to be perfect? The

I’m actually super excited to lose my virginity at a mattress factory.

21 Roots We asked writers to take us back to their queer roots--to the crush or song or movie character that first made them question their sexualities. Here are three portraits of queerness in the making.

W

earing purple Skull Candy headphones, I lay in my lofted bed, listening to the sweet balladry of the Canadian indie-rock band Tegan and Sara’s 2007 hit record The Con. The album opened with an a cappella call and response: I married in the sun (tell me where tell me where). Against the stone of buildings built before. You and I were born (start again, start, again). It was six years before the Supreme Court’s landmark decision, United States v. Windsor, which struck down the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA).

The LGBTQ community was disillusioned with the potentiality of legal acknowledgement of same sex love.

Listening to “I Was Married,” Sara Quin’s ode to her and her partner’s civil ceremony, I was realized it was my love too.

S

hrinking in my oversized t-shirt, I heaved my skinny body into the driver’s seat of my big, white Toyota Tundra pick-up truck. A true Florida boy’s car, I thought to myself, each time I drove— windows down, hair freely flowing, music blaring—from one air-conditioned Orlando haven to the next. The summer I got my truck, just one year after I came out, I was still trying to feel like a man. I can be gay and masculine.

My sexuality won’t define my personality. The truck was a reminder of my ossified straightness, a steel exoskeleton of my internalized homophobia.

I was at a loss for any romantic experience, let alone that of the queer variety. Yet I clung onto each lyric, mourning an imagined relationship lost to cowardice, convinced that they were singing not about, but to me.

Built a wall of books between us in our bed. Repeat, repeat the words that I know we both said. In fetal position, I wept into my pillow.

Over the years, I grew into my gayness and out of my angst. My crushes ceased to be unrequited, and in college, I was lucky enough to find a queer community that came close to my idealized conception of romantic kinship. I felt less alone. But there are still some days when I crave It’s easy for me to mock my 12-year-old, melodramatic a queer tragedy. That’s when I reach for my headphones. self, but to this day, it was the most authentically gut- en I crave a queer tragedy. That’s when I reach for my wrenching emotional response I’ve had to a work of art. headphones.

ADDEE KIM, JE ’21 When the mulleted, pierced-lipped duo sang about the letters they buried in backyards and running away from YH STAFF vulnerability, it evoked utter dread in me. The slight of my

hetero-shield. Fuck that guy! He just cut me off! I would extend my slender arm out of my window and lift the finger in anger. But suddenly, I would be overcome with fear. I’ve transgressed my defense. I’ve sold myself out. Windows up, volume down.

Months passed, and I grew into my sexuality and femme presentation. At Yale, away from the Florida heat, I wear Glossier Cloud Paint and my friend’s tight pink sweater.

I pout my lips in pictures and twerk to Kali Uchis. Yet the truck remains, parked in my suburban driveway. It’s no longer a symbol of my vestigial straightness: it’s now Speeding down the I-4 in my oversized shirt, in my even- the biggest challenge of my queer expression, one I have more-oversized truck, I felt empowered, protected in my

I

t was 2006. Studded belts, denim on denim, and teenage heartthrob Ryan Gosling were hot, hot, hot. But no one was hotter than Meryl Streep, my mother assured me, still her biggest celebrity crush to date. She snapped open the blue and yellow Blockbuster box and slid the disc into the DVD player.

Seven-year-old me gasped in awe of the flamboyant dress of the movie’s main character, Miranda Priestly, editor in chief of Runway, a fictional fashion magazine, played by Mrs. Streep herself. But there was something about her fumbling personal assistant that caught my eye. Maybe it was her determination to set herself apart, or maybe it was her long brown hair and angsty, achy bangs.

hand hoping to touch hers, the irrational things I did for her attention, and then my paralysis when I had it.

Watching Anne Hathaway in The Devil Wears Prada was a revelatory event, for which my youth had no words. Middle school and high school brought a series of profound, yet seemingly meaningless crushes on television actors—what I believed to be similar in kind to my mother’s sweet and simple admiration of Meryl Streep. But at what point my crushes on famous TV screen actors materialized into a personal recognition of queer identity, I am unsure. I am somewhat wistful of my juvenile, tender longing for fictitious female characters that seems somehow incongruent with adult life, wherein real feelings are at stake. A realization of my queerness has untethered me from these women of the made up world,

yet to overcome. How do I fit my truck into the changing framework of my gay identity?

Over winter break, I sped down I-4, windows down again.

Some jerk cut me off. Arm out, finger lifted, t-shirt tight, cheeks pink, volume high.

HAMZAH JHAVERI, TC ’22 YH STAFF

demanding a bravery to confront in daily life that my younger self so naively would not anticipate.

This summer, I went to see Ocean’s Eight, starring both Anne Hathaway and Rihanna—another one of my (probably everybody’s, truthfully) early childhood crushes.

I wonder whose queer awakening this movie was.

JORDAN POWELL, MY ’21 YH STAFF

OUR KIND Patron T. Spielberg

Yale University Program in Judaic Studies

presents

“Mystical Narrative and Theological Poetics: The Literary Craft of the Zohar” Presented by

Dr. Eitan P. Fishbane

Associate Professor of Jewish Thought

Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS)

With a Response by

Peter Cole

Senior Lecturer in Judaic Studies and in Comparative Literature Yale University Dr. Eitan P. Fishbane is Associate Professor of Jewish Thought at The Jewish Theological Seminary (JTS), specializing in the history and literature of Jewish mysticism. Fishbane earned his Ph.D. and B.A., summa cum laude, from Brandeis University, and he has served on the JTS faculty since 2006. He currently serves on the Faculty Executive Committee and the Rabbinical School Council at JTS, and as Division Chair for Jewish Mysticism at the Association for Jewish Studies (AJS). Among his published works are The Art of Mystical Narrative: A Poetics of the Zohar (Oxford University Press, 2018) and As Light Before Dawn: The Inner World of a Medieval Kabbalist (Stanford University Press, 2009). Fishbane was a 2011 recipient of the Charles A. Ryskamp Fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies, and he was named a JTS Chancellor’s Fellow in 2015.

Phone (203)432-0843 Fax (203)432-4889

Silver Contributor Dan Feder Brian Bowen David Applegate Fabian Rosado James Rubin

SPONSORS

February 7th, 2019 4:30pm

For additional information contact Program in Judaic Studies 451 College St., Rm. 301

Gold Contributor Abra Metz Dworkin Molly Ball Christopher Burke

Donors C. Morales Ervolino Sam Lee Joshua Benton George E. Harris Laura Yao Ted Lee Michael Gerber Brendan Cottington Marisol Ryu Natasha Sarin Emily Barasch Marci McCoy Julia Dahl Maureen Miller

Lecture will be held at the

Whitney Humanities Center 53 Wall Street, Room 208 New Haven, CT 06511

23

The Black List THINGS WE HATE

PISCES

No one likes tilapia anyway

MISSIONARY POSITION Get Jesus out of here

STRAIGHT SEX

SEX IN THE LIGHT I did not want to see that!

SEX ON THE GROUND Ugh, I just vacuumed

SEX AT THE HERALD OFFICE

I said get him out of here!

R.I.P., Rasmus Schlutter!

SEX IN THE DARK

JOE BIDEN

Where am I?

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