Buy and Be Free!

On Nov. 3, a spacious Emerson auditorium filled for a lecture on female orgasms. The event, organized by a collaboration of different student groups, boasted a high turnout and was deemed very successful. Its eye-catching posters had aroused attention and raised many eyebrows, and the lecture received coverage the next day on the first page of The Crimson. What few remarked, however, is that its commercial nature compromised the purported aim of the event, which ended up being yet another example—if we needed one—of the commercial establishment’s co-optation of the ideology of personal liberation.

The problem is simple: The seminar consisted of a long speech given by the owner of a Boston-area sex shop. It was a great opportunity for the woman to promote her products and their use to a large audience of undergraduates who had volunteered to dedicate two hours to listening. Free samples of her merchandise were handed out, their use explained in detail. Given that the shop owner was female, it was presumably easy for those involved to reassure themselves that she was there to share new modes of personal expression. Some embarrassment about the fact that the speaker was a shop owner must have been felt by the organizers, however, because her name did not appear on all the posters for the event, and when it did, it was written in a tiny typeface at the bottom of the flyer.

We keep witnessing how slyly the market promotes our liberation through consumer goods. The commercialism of 1970s counter-culture, for example, has been analyzed by Bass Professor of English Louis Menand. A more recent example of the way advertising makes kitsch out of genuine languages of self-definition is the grievous use of the motto of Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man”—“I am what I am”—to sell sneakers. Pseudo-sociological categories such as the “metrosexual man” are constantly invented to make consumers more comfortable with new goods such as clothing or cosmetic procedures. Harvard’s orgasm workshop works within the same economy. Those among us who would find an ally in the market should, however, remember that its friendship is fickle: commercial activity will adapt to conveying whatever political and cultural messages sell the product.

This is not to deny that women’s self-discovery may well proceed through such avenues as the ones outlined at the lecture in Emerson 105. Nor is the argument here that such public discussion should not take place. Rather, the organizers of the workshop should be held accountable for their disingenuous activity and false advertising: we can expect more from our own peers than the marketing of new goods to an unsuspecting group of students under the guise of personal expression and the breaking down of repressive taboos. College is presumably a moment for reflection and self-definition aside from commercialism, rather than the time to be transformed into the faithful consumer of new and varied products. The Nov. 3 event was crude, not because of the coarse language used by the speaker, but because it was a simple display of the market at work, co-opting what might have been a genuine attempt to reflect on a topic of significance. If the organizers of the event believed otherwise, they were deceived.



Alexander Bevilacqua ’07, a Crimson editorial editor, is a history concentrator in Leverett House.