university

We send our kids to college because we want them to become positive contributors to society. To do that, they need to reach a certain level of maturity in the different areas of their lives, sexuality being only one of them. But in many colleges and universities today, sexuality issues seem to outweigh everything else. The imbalance adversely affects the campus milieu, making these places less conducive to learning and growth, and I’ve started to question their value in producing healthy, well-adjusted young adults.

In a university where most everything is sexualized, much of the vocabulary needed to define unacceptable sexual behavior is lost, and what remains are the umbrella terms “rape” and “rape culture“.

Rape is a heinous crime, but while each act of rape is ultimately the rapist’s responsibility, we cannot just look away and pretend we didn’t help build the culture where it occurs. Surveying the landscape and seeing all these damaged souls, one can’t help but wonder if college is still the best avenue to prepare for life and career.

One college has had to put up a safe room to protect students, a solution that would be largely unnecessary were college students unscathed from past sexual experiences.

The time to teach our kids self-preservation is while they’re little, not after they’ve played Russian roulette with their mental, emotional, and physical health. The stories of casual sex + alcohol in college are becoming all too ubiquitous, yet still we shrug our shoulders and say, “Kids will be kids.” Our society continues to operate on the assumption that young people’s health is simply about being “disease- and pregnancy-free”. But such an assumption leaves young people vulnerable, and once the damage is done, no sanitized, “bias-free” language can possibly protect them. Trauma will be processed by the brain, with or without triggers.

The hypersexualization of children led us here. This isn’t solely a religious concern. We conservatives are often derided for espousing morality, modesty and chastity, but it’s clear that teaching the opposite has negatively impacted our youth’s mental and emotional health. When dating, courtship, and marriage were tethered to morality, consent contracts would have been seen as ridiculous and unnecessary, because injudicious sexual behavior simply wasn’t the norm.

Here lies the difference between ideology and truth: Truth prepares and protects. Ideology leaves one unprepared and unprotected.

When we talk about human sexuality, we often end up in arguments centering on contraceptive use or access to abortion, when the essential word in that phrase is HUMAN. Compartmentalizing lessons on sex and seeing our sexuality as something that can be encapsulated within the “safety” message, takes away our focus on what’s key. Until we are able to see the truth about human sexuality, we will forever be stuck addressing symptoms of ill health, and pretending that our young adults are perfectly fine, despite evidence to the contrary.

Increasingly I’m thinking that perhaps it’s time to quit university/college. Call it exercising the Benedict Option if you like. It’s not that different from the decision to opt out and homeschool when our children were younger. We have found, to our great delight, that we are indeed capable of educating our children at home, and grow adults who are fully in touch with what it means to be human. Finding alternative options for college/university could be the next logical step if we want to build and strengthen life and coping skills beyond the college experience.

More next time.

Related reading:
The Coddling of the American Mind
The Neglected Heart: The Emotional Dangers of Premature Sexual Involvement
Unprotected, by Dr. Miriam Grossman
The Truth and Meaning of Human Sexuality