Our blogstress-friend Bookworm Room commends the IWF’s Carrie Lukas for her great article on our home page about how Valentine’s Day is celebrated (if you can call it that) on our nation’s college campuses. Off campus, Valentine’s Day is the year’s most romantic day: flowers, bonbons, lacy cards, and candle-lit dinners. On campus, it’s the year’s least romantic day: four-letter words, gross art objects in the shape of female genitalia, and, of course, “The Vagina Monologues“–all, somehow, in the name of feminist empowerment. (For more on this topic, read The Other Charlotte’s “Just Send Chocolates,” Feb. 14.)


Bookworm also alerts us to this Town Hall column by University of North Carolina criminology professor Mike Adams, describing a Valentine celebration at the University of Pennsylvania called a “Sex Toy Social” co-sponsored by–what else?–a local sex- toy shop and, of course, the campus feminists, who somehow put aside their usual anti-capitalist prejudices to team up with an enterprise of a kind I always thought had more to do with the exploitation of women than their liberation:


“There was food. There were drinks. There was dancing. But the best part of the social was the raffle to win a Bucket O’ Love, which included candy G-string underwear and ‘body butter.’
 
“The Penn student newspaper quoted a freshman as saying that the event ‘gives a dignity to sexuality’ and ‘helps to highlight the power of female sexuality.’ I’ve heard the same about chanting the names of one’s sex organs. But, somehow, I just can’t lace on a pair of boots and chant ‘penis, penis’ in front of a large audience. That’s why these ladies are really making headway in the feminist revolution.”


And that sex shop sure knew which side of its bread the body butter was on.


Says Bookworm:


“The article makes me realize how foolish I was growing up thinking that feminism was all about earning the same money for the same work, and having reasonably equal access to societal benefits. (I say ‘reasonably’ because I really don’t want to to share a restroom with you guys. Sorry.) I was so wrong. It’s all about sex, sex, sex. The funny thing, though, is that I suspect that sexual obsession is infinitely more beneficial to your average college male, who gets it cheap and easy, than to your college female, who just gets to feel cheap and easy.”