Sex? At Berkeley?

Male sexuality-class flap plays to right-wing agenda

By Annalee Newitz

People have their panties so tied up in knots over the salacious "sex scandal" at UC Berkeley that nobody has really bothered to pay attention to the political motivations behind this latest melee in the liberal education wars that were so popular in the early 1990s.

Recent media hoopla has focused on a course called Male Sexuality, the explicit content of which has sparked controversy in the university community. Male Sexuality is offered through the Democratic Education at Cal (or DE-Cal) Program, which lets students earn between two and four credits for taking classes run by fellow students. The idea behind DE-Cal is simple enough: put education into the hands of the students and allow them to learn from one another, at least a little bit. (It's worth noting that students don't receive grades for DE-Cal classes, and only a limited number of the courses are allowed to count toward the units needed to graduate.)

But the real problem is not the course itself; it's the idea that students might openly celebrate male homosexuality. And if UC Regent Ward Connerly has his way, this could be the big chance he's been waiting for to get rid of Democratic Education at Cal altogether.

According to the Feb. 15 article by Brittany Adams in the Daily Californian that set off this whole furor, the male sexuality DE-Cal class led to rampant homosexual activities, including a visit to a male strip club and an orgy at a student's home. Most of the subsequent national media coverage of these incidents made it seem as if the course itself involved having sex, but in fact all of the salacious activities mentioned in the original Daily Cal article were descriptions of things the students did together outside of class.

Daily Cal editor Steve Sexton told the Bay Guardian that Adams was not available for comment, but he added, "She never attended a single session of the male sexuality class," and he said that everything she reported was based on a few students' descriptions of a party Adams also did not attend. Members of the Male Sexuality class told the Bay Guardian that they've been instructed not to talk to the media, and their faculty supervisor, Caren Kaplan, could not be reached for comment. Janet Gilmore, a UC Berkeley spokesperson, told us that Kaplan is currently investigating allegations about both the Male and Female Sexuality DeCal class.

Blaming the sexuality classes for the sexual liaisons of its students is equivalent to blaming a computer science course for the after-hours hacking activities of its students. What students do on their own time, regardless of its connection to what they've learned in school, is their own affair. Charles Davis, a UC student, put it succinctly in a letter to the Daily Cal: "If I want to have an orgy with some people in my integrative biology class, then I think I will."

Meanwhile, the fuss has just played into the right-wing agenda. A recent Daily Cal article noted that "UC Regent Ward Connerly said the university is wasting valuable classroom space and resources by supporting the male and female sexuality courses – and all DE-Cals." Connerly added, "We need to have the credibility of a respectable institution. This sort of activity sounds like degeneracy."

E-mail Annalee Newitz at annalee@techsploitation.com.