Navel Contemplation

RECENTLY, Barbara Streisand munificently endowed a professorship at USC, officially to be entitled The Streisand Professorship of Intimacy and Sexuality. Also recently, Shere Hite published another hefty volume on female sexuality. Are these seemingly unrelated facts really unconnected by causality? Or are they the subtle manifestations of a global shift in human thinking?

Certainly, the study of Intimacy and Sexuality is a relatively recent phenomenon. At the dawn of history men and women were completely ignorant of intimacy therapy and safe sex techniques. In fact, scientists speculate that man in this early stage relied on primitive grunts and groans to express his uncertainties about his sexual identity. Lubricants were as yet undreamed of.

In the last twenty years, however, Intimacy and Sexuality studies have taken a huge leap forward. Even here at Harvard, which is notoriously slow to adopt new and progressive course materials, changes can be seen in the way people are dealing with their own personhood. Instead of frittering away their time with chess clubs as they may have in the 1950s, Harvard students of today are far more likely to spend their time in a sexuality discussion group, grappling with issues such as whether they prefer boys, girls, neither, or both.

And, for the lucky few who actually are able to find their true sexuality--and not repress it, like most heterosexuals--there are a range of avenues at Harvard for expressing their new sexual identity. Traditionally, one of the most popular means of expressing one's sexual identity is to find a girl-friend or boyfriend, hard though this has always been for Harvard students.

All this is well and good, but is it enough? Except for females in Women's Studies courses, once a student goes to class there is no way to revel in one's own sexual identity. What Harvard needs are more courses about sex, what it's like, and where to get it. After all, what is healthier than sexual identity?

Nothing. Several things are equally as healthy as one's sexual identity, of course. What one eats is, like sex, an essential part of one's most basic identity. You are what you eat, Socrates said, and he was right. The emergence of groups on campus to help people get together and discuss what they eat, how much, and why is a welcome sign that people are beginning to understand that one's gastrointestinal tract is just as crucial to one's human identity as are one's genitals.

ANOTHER very natural human activity is going to the bathroom. Unhappily, ours is a culture which encourages people to shut the door when they defecate, as though it were an unspeakable act. How sad. Until all people--Black, white, gay, straight, fat or thin--realize that they all shit alike, as co-equal members of the human race, how can we truly be free?

And what about sleeping? That's important, too.

Nowadays too many people are saying that college students are apathetic, that they are interested only in selfish self-indulgent pursuits and have no cause to struggle for. But once we recognize that the satisfaction of our primal urges is our primary responsibility to society, I say that we will have a cause to struggle for--the liberation of our society from its patriarchal, heterocentric, food-ist, fecaphobic capitalism.

We have to do away with "isms", and start having a good time. Our bodily organs together make up the body that contains our individuality, and unless we start to realize that, oppression will reign in South Africa, baby seals will die pointless deaths, and Sally Struthers will weep herself to sleep each night.

The first step is to encourage Harvard to institute a bodily-function-for-credit system and establish a Bodily Functions Center, where students can get together to talk about the important issues facing us, to exercise our bodily functions, and to congratulate ourselves for our progressive attitudes.