In a state where the rock ‘n’ roll hit “Louie, Louie” was banned from the airwaves after the governor deemed it subversive, Indiana University (IU) is no stranger to controversy. One of its most famous professors was Alfred Kinsey, whose work is continued by such scholars as Leon Pettiway, author of the recent university press book Honey, Honey, Miss Thang: Being Black, Gay, and on the Streets. Not surprisingly, IU also provides a congenial home for students with unusual sexual interests.

Consider Keith Potter, student organizer of a bondage workshop, who is better known around campus by his nickname, “Bondage Boy.” Imploring the public to “give it a chance,” he told the Indiana Daily Student, “After a while sex can get old. Rather than cut off the relationship, you might as well try new things.”

Assembling a panel of bondage practitioners and advocates in a college dorm. Potter and the CommUNITY Educator program (sponsored by IU’s Department for Residential Programs and Services) introduced 150 students to the pleasures of burning a partner with hot wax, branding or puncturing the skin with needles, using rope, chains, or leather to subdue or tease, and enhancing sexual arousal with whips and biting. John Robinson, president of Headspace, a student group which promotes sadomasochism and bondage, touted the religious benefits of S&M, contending that pain serves “as a method of transcendentalism” and allows participants “to either become a god or to become closer to their god.” He added, “It is a tool that, properly used, can build trust.” If it weren’t already preoccupied with its crusade against land mines, one suspects the National Council of Churches might support Robinson’s claim.

Interviewed by the Kokomo Tribune, “Bondage Boy” confessed “to keeping a few shackles, handcuffs, and a blindfold draped on his bedpost.” Still, he ardently maintained the workshop was “educational” and simply redressed historical discrimination against bondage practitioners. The university’s assistant chancellor for residential programs and services, Bruce Jacobs, agreed, congratulating the school for trying “to keep it perfunctory.” The absurdity was complete when Potter admitted Headspace often sponsors off-campus “dungeon parties” in which students are initiated into S&M or invited to watch, but stressed that the parties always occur at non-alcoholic venues.

Tuition-paying parents aren’t amused. “When based on sexual activity, kids are going to be curious,” one lU undergraduate’s mother noted. “But there’s no reason to entice curiosity.” Yet it is precisely the normalization of the deviant which Alfred Kinsey and the institute he established at lU undertook in the name of science. His exaltation of naturalism simply concealed romantic anti-intellectualism. This flight from reality actually reveals a desperate yearning for purpose in life. Turning to ever more exotic practices and constructing a veritable world of illusion, the naturalist fails to find contentment because everything gets “old” eventually. Sexual liberation proves not so liberating after all.

When the State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz used tax dollars to sponsor a conference featuring presentations on “Sex Toys for Women” and “Safe, Sane, and Consensual S&M; An Alternative Way of Loving,” Governor George Pataki denounced it as an “outrageous” expenditure. Predictably, the college’s president invoked “academic freedom,” the last refuge of an academic scoundrel. What a peculiar notion of freedom—to maintain that one ought to do whatever one pleases at someone else’s expense.

The New York Times editorialized in favor of New Paltz’s besieged president when state legislators began demanding his resignation, and Duke University’s Stanley Fish rushed to defend the proceedings as a contribution to a “more inclusive” curriculum. This sentiment wasn’t shared by one conference attendee, who may file sexual assault charges against Shelly Mars, a performance artist featured in the program. According to local resident and Roman Catholic activist Peter Shipley, Mars attempted to straddle him in his seat during her performance, but bumped against a ballpoint pen in his hand. Falling to the floor, she recovered and lunged towards his crotch. At that point, he explains, “my pen went into her nostril, and she fell back on the floor and said, Tm bleeding!’ Then she got up and took her pants and blouse off.”

Caught with their pants down, organizers of the SUNY conference trot out John Stuart Mill to justify the program. Mill is a peculiar ally for SUNY to champion, as he opposed government schools in principle: “That the whole or any large part of the education of the people should be in State hands, I go as far as any one in deprecating.” Still, a deeper lesson is emerging, one which transcends the source of funding: Society cannot afford at any price the sexual escapism which is the favorite pastime of tire intellectual class. Bondage and leather whips may pose as “victimless” crimes, but reality has a strange way of asserting itself over illusion.

In contrast to the sexual utopianism preached on college campuses, most of America continues to regard bizarre sexual practices with disdain. Common folk possess what University of Chicago ethicist Leon Kass describes as “the wisdom of repugnance.” While not constituting an “argument,” Kass writes that “in crucial cases, however, repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reason’s power fully to articulate it.” Profoundly irrational and disordered acts ought to occasion revulsion in observers. It takes a hardness of heart, a practiced indifference, to react otherwise. But instead of aspiring to the examined life, most universities succeed in numbing the moral sense.

If there is to be social renewal in America, we may need less tolerance and more reliance on the wisdom of repugnance. Of course, no one is entirely immune from the costs of sexual liberation. Indiana elected Dan Coats, a principal sponsor of last year’s Defense of Marriage Act, to the Senate, yet it is second only to Nevada in its divorce rate. Such paradoxes are to be found in an imperfect world. It is the intellectual class which promised Utopia but unleashed the ugliness of modernity; common people understand that life is bittersweet.

The mother of another IU student, when told about “Bondage Boy” and the S&M panel, put it best. “Now I have to pray every day and hope my son continues to make good decisions, and that his bad choices don’t alter his life permanently.” We all must hope the same for our children, and for our country.