If you visited the Syracuse University events calendar recently, you may have stumbled upon the university’s latest “Health and Wellness” seminar: Kink 101, a Bondage Domination Sadism Masochism (commonly known as BDSM) seminar aimed at teaching students how to tie-up, whip and burn their sexual partners. It seems the movement in recent years to re-paint perversion with a coating of academic credibility has finally made a stop at SU.

At an age where young minds are still quite impressionable and on a campus where, in 2020, 19% of students said they were sexually assaulted, SU would like students to believe that sadism and masochism are normal and encouraged components of intimacy. Only at SU can a student simultaneously demand constant coddling but be deemed developed enough for a crash course on how to have violent sex.

Apologists for this sort of programming will say that young people need “sex education” and that it’s meant to promote safety. The assumption is that because some people are going to torture or be tortured for pleasure, we might as well destigmatize the whole thing for everyone.

Promoting fetishistic sexual behaviors to students as young as 18 years old is not SU’s place. BDSM should be off SU’s campus and far away from the eyes of students. The degree to which students’ day-to-day lives have become hypersexualized has damaging implications. SU’s normalization of violent sex compounds an already existing mental health crisis supplemented by the widespread consumption of internet pornography. The sole defense our society has against this — shame — is now buckling thanks to those universities that now encourage depravity.

There is a very real danger in how we are distorting Gen Z’s perceptions of sex. After Billie Eilish became a voice of reason and criticized violence in pornography, commentators rushed straight to the defense of their favorite adult videos.

There is a very vocal crowd that likes to paint our new hypersexualized culture as harmless and liberated, but the reality facing many young people is that the kind of sex they are now expected to have is uncomfortable, unhealthy and even painful. That warped perception exerts an immense amount of pressure on young people.

This is not an isolated incident. Students at universities across the country are being encouraged to normalize violence in sex. The same week SU hosted its Kink 101 seminar, Tulane University hosted its own BDSM workshop as part of the university’s annual Sex Week. Just last semester, America’s premiere Ivy League school did the same, offering an Intro to BDSM workshop. SUNY Fredonia even had a ”distinguished” professor of pornography, sexual fantasies and torture — at least until he was suspended earlier this month for making statements in support of pedophilia.

This is not alarmism, and it is not contended that SU will soon be racked by a deluge of sexual violence. On the contrary, exposure to gratuitous and degrading sexual material is not out of the ordinary for young people — it is the new normal. What is perhaps most disturbing is not that SU hosted this workshop, but that most people are too addled by the TV show “Euphoria” and on-demand internet pornography to even notice.

Augustus LeRoux is a junior history major. His column appears biweekly. He can be reached at aoleroux@syr.edu.

Published on February 21, 2022 at 1:24 am