The woman at the center of the alleged Cornell gang-rape claims that the university fostered a culture in which sexual violence could flourish. But her own text messages raise an even more unsettling question: Was she attending the very kind of institution that helped make this possible? Days after the encounter, she reportedly described herself as “really open minded” and wrote that “sexuality and sex” were changing, that everyone needed to “grow up,” and that experiences like hers would become more common. As she sobered up and the days passed, however, that certainty appeared to collapse. Her messages became increasingly distressed, and she later said that most of what happened had not been consensual. We cannot know precisely what she consented to. She may have recognized coercion only afterward. She may have consented to some acts but not others. Or she may have discovered that an experience she accepted in the moment violated her conscience more deeply than she anticipated. But the messages appear to capture a devastating collision: the permission offered by progressive sexual ideology at war with a young woman’s own conscience. She may have been trying to understand an extreme and potentially traumatic experience through a worldview that taught her to interpret transgression as openness and openness as progress. She did not invent that worldview. In fact, it was fostered in American academia where it still thrives. The father of modern sex education was a man named Alfred Kinsey. In 1947, he founded the Institute for Sex Research at Indiana University. It still operates today as the Kinsey Institute. Kinsey was not an impartial scientist. He was a pervert. He practiced sadomasochism, deliberately injured his own genitals and reportedly circumcised himself with a pocketknife. He filmed masturbation, heterosexual and homosexual intercourse, and sadomasochistic acts in the attic of his home, sometimes involving members of his research team, their spouses and Kinsey himself. His research involving children was even more horrifying. Kinsey published tables cataloguing supposed “orgasms” in children, including infants. Some of his most detailed figures came from the records of a single adult male who claimed to have sexually abused children and timed their physical reactions. Kinsey treated those records not primarily as evidence of child abuse, but as scientific data about childhood sexuality. This was the man whose personal practices, political mission and research became entangled in an academic campaign to redefine sexual normality. He did not simply document and incite a sexual revolution. He helped give it the authority of science. Mary Calderone later carried that project into American institutions. The former Planned Parenthood medical director founded SIECUS, which helped move sex education beyond reproduction and disease prevention and into questions of identity, pleasure, values and social change. SIECUS eventually produced national sexuality-education guidelines for children from kindergarten through 12th grade and today openly calls itself “Sex Ed for Social Change.” These are the people at the center of the accuser’s worldview that “sexuality and sex” is changing. They would applaud what happened in that fraternity bedroom. Of course, we do not know this woman’s major, which courses she took or whether she ever encountered Kinsey’s name. But these ideas were hardly foreign to Cornell. During the semester of the alleged incident, the university offered a course called Sexual Citizenship, examining how culture, peers and physical spaces shape students’ interpretations of sex and sexual assault. Cornell maintains a Feminist, Gender and Sexuality Studies program, while university materials tell parents that students may encounter instruction about both the “risks and pleasures” of sexuality. Perhaps she never studied this history directly. She did not have to. At most American universities, it is basically in the water. None of this excuses the behavior of the young people involved. But universities cannot spend generations dismantling sexual boundaries, proclaim transgression to be liberation and then absolve themselves when students are harmed in the pursuit of sexual freedom. Neither can parents who send their children into these institutions without questioning the values being taught. We collectively helped create this culture, allowed it to persist, and now we cannot pretend to be surprised by its consequences. The post Did Cornell Teach the Culture It Now Condones? appeared first on Redacted.