Last Thursday, cable funnyman Bill O’Reilly sent his cut-rate goon Jesse Watters with a challenge for the “students of Brown” to justify our nakedness in terms of the tuition cost and elite status of our university. According to BlogDailyHerald, the duo wanted to portray Brown students as “over-privileged and hyper-sexualized liberal idiots.” The response went up like a Bat Signal of indignation. “We earn exactly the privilege we deserve,” it reverberated defiantly across the city-dome, “and are most certainly not hyper-sexualized.”
Students carefully combed their hair while co-opting Nudity in the Upspace to the most obscene pimps of institutionalized thought around. In the words of one student: “We’re not at a frat party getting naked, you know? This is an intellectual, um, and to take it out of that context is to, just, awful reporting.” The outrage is not the perpetuation of a corrupt social order, but that a joke of a news show mistakenly treated Brown students as a threat to the status quo — even as we stumbled over ourselves to assure everyone we weren’t a threat to anything at all. Buried in the cloying interviews, the knowing misogyny, the abusive online comments and insinuations that O’Reilly is a sex offender and Watters is the real pervert lies only pugilistic joy at having something to feel righteous about. Forget defending our for-profit “home”— last week saw no shortage of students eager to get in on the feedback cycle of, in the words of Miranda July, “pooping back and forth.”
The Brown Political Review and BlogDailyHerald repeatedly emphasized that the last thing we want is people thinking we get naked to have sex and do drugs, vigorously assenting to Fox’s understanding of sex as immoral. We get naked to have discourse — and we certainly wouldn’t endorse something as “perverse” as the other kind of -coursing in a group setting. Poorly planned interview after article has justified the Ivy League status of our nudity by demonstrating our rational superiority over vulgar nakedness. Brown student groups not only desire the approval of institutional rearguards like Fox — they feel entitled to it.
So giggling like middle schoolers at our first dance, we took our new partners’ hands and spun blissfully over anything that might trouble our righteousness: the illegal wars and police state, dismal national health care — even with the faux-public “Obamacare”— the persecution of journalists, unprecedented surveillance and the sale of the economy to profiteering swine by our current administration, not to mention an education bubble where degrees cost more and pay less every year. We didn’t need to be tricked into arguing for economic injustice because we’ve been afforded such great unpaid internships by the same violence we claim to abhor. Marvel at America’s liberal-est university.
Watters said BPR sent him a “naked” picture, where naked apparently means hiding their genitals behind copies of the BPR and a BPR banner. The irony of conflating “nudity” with “covered in institutionalisms” hurts my head. It’s strange that kids so eager to distance themselves from sexual activity are willing to masturbate for TV, but there were the BPR staff’s slick grins on the “O’Reilly Factor” — for about a second. O’Reilly’s response: “Every college does this.” Before that, he made fun of the cheesy rock grooves in their overwrought, underthought public service announcement.
The Sultan of Spin is right on both counts, and worse, the wrinkled sack of hate shows a better sense of humor than the reporter who held him accountable for saying that Brown asks if applicants “believe in Christmas.” If you’re going to take the plate, at least know what you’re swinging at. But more importantly, if you care about politics and not just petty authority, don’t sell your peers and their ideas to the first cable-grade turds who’ll publish your face. You are not the university you attend, nor are you the social position it prescribes you.
Dan Stump ’14 is a hyper-sexualized idiot.
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