Op-Ed Columns

(Warning: Small children and oversensitive adults might oughta skip this one.)

Now is the time of year that parents drop their innocent offspring off at universities around the state and drive away fearing for the future.

"Why," they ask themselves, "have colleges become such dens of sin?"

"Why can't colleges return to the good-old days?"

To which I say, "Right, let's go back to the good-old '70s, back to when students at one of our prestigious institutions of higher learning set aside an entire week to celebrate SEX!!"

Yessir.

In the spring of 1974, the University of Alabama — the "Capstone" of our educational system; our Oxford on the Black Warrior; our Sorbonne on "The Strip"; Toulouse in Tuscaloosa; Cambridge, Bologna and Salamanca all rolled into one — sponsored SEX WEEK.

Right in the shadow of Denny Chimes.

Even The New York Times took note.

I missed it.

But my buddy Ed didn't.

Ed, today a senior professor at another major state university, was a student there then, and he told me about it.

According to Ed, it seems that the University of Alabama, in an effort to enlighten the young by offering them experiences they could not experience at home, allowed students to invite experts on campus to discuss issues that had been raised during the "sexual revolution" of the '60s and were now being acted out in the "promiscuous '70s."

The students took to it like a duck to water.

In came legal experts, First Amendment authorities, social scientists and such to discuss constitutional and community issues relating to the topic at hand. The planning committee, knowing its target audience, also arranged a visit by Al Goldstein, publisher of a magazine the very name of which I hesitate to mention in a family newspaper.

Goldstein was amazed by the invitation. "Can you imagine," he told the press, "a hairy New York Jewish pornographer walking onto the campus of the University of Alabama with a filthy movie under his arm to show students and give a lecture."

He couldn't.

Neither could I.

But there he was.

There also was the late-lamented Linda Lovelace, star of the ever-popular film Deep Throat, who spoke to an auditorium filled to overflowing.

The door prize that night was a date with Miss Lovelace. Ed didn't win, but somewhere in all his memorabilia he claims to still have one of the "Linda Lovelace lollipops" that were passed out to those in attendance. Decency prohibits any further discussion of that item of confectionery art.

He also has an "I Participated in Sex Week" button.

Now, how do you think folks outside academia reacted to this?

They didn't.

Without the Moral Majority and the Christian Coalition peeking around every corner, without governors more interested in school-kids praying than learning, without attorneys general checking to see if anything vibrated, without livid ministers denouncing all this from pulpits around the state, and without sanctimonious legislators ready to cut off funds for the university and its activities (except football), the week passed (according to The Times) "with . . . only token complaints from the community." There were "no pickets, no arrests and no censorship."

The strongest condemnation came from a local preacher, who called the whole thing "sexploitation" and found the week "almost totally useless, if not harmful."

But was it?

"Useless?"

"Harmful?"

Hard to say.

My rather limited efforts to track down and question people who were there at the time have uncovered an interesting case of "collective amnesia" — a sorta "Oh, yeah, I heard about that" and "Did they really?"

Notice the "they."

My study is hardly scientific, and is probably based more on intuition than facts, but from what little I have learned the folks who in 1974 frolicked during Sex Week at the University of Alabama (and would have frolicked at any other campus bold enough to sponsor the same) are today a little embarrassed by it all.

"Useless?" No. It was a week in which they learned a lot about limits and were allowed to judge for themselves, in an academic setting, just how far things could go and decide, for themselves, whether or not they wanted to go with them.

"Harmful?" No. Again, without fear or research let me suggest that many, if not most, of those who took part in Sex Week are today in the pews of churches and are pillars of their communities.

They are the folks that the parents who just dropped off their kids were thinking about as they drove off. They believed that the problems of today would be solved if students would just do what such solid citizens did when such solid citizens went to college.

You know, back when they participated in Sex Week.

And who can say, those parents might be right.