On Students, Sex and Happiness

The nation has been following the account of a high school senior from an elite boarding school in Concord, N.H., who has been convicted of sexually assaulting a 15-year-old high school freshman. He had been accepted to Harvard; instead he faces criminal punishment.
How did it come to this? An intelligent, well-situated young man with a promising life ahead, where did he go wrong? Why didn’t he see he was on a path that would get him where he now finds himself? If he had been shoplifting, cultural pressures would have made it clear to him that he was doing wrong. But his crime was pursuing sex, after all, and everybody is doing that.  
He was one of the most popular fellows on campus. That is heady. Who would not want to be popular, to be the one everyone looks up to? And how do you achieve that status? At his high school, St. Paul’s, it’s by “slaying” the most girls. He told the police that he was “trying to be No. 1 in the sexual scoring at St. Paul’s School.”
Dr. Shamus Khan, who taught at St. Paul’s, wrote of the ritual as being pointedly sexual. As reported in The New York Times, there is the annual dance, called Screw, when the sexual desirability of girls is determined by their value on the ‘screw marketplace,’ with sex and sexuality as the pathway to belonging.
Into this setting stepped a 15-year-old freshman girl, who had been invited by this very popular senior boy to be his date at the “senior salute,” where the upper classmen ask the young ones to go with them for a walk, a kiss, or more. Initially she refused, but after being encouraged to accept his invitation by other students, she accepted.
Off in a secluded place, he became forceful, and she kept yielding ground as the encounter was taking place, worried about offending him, and about the ridicule of the other students. After all, the senior salute was a tradition at the school. She feared making a bad impression, and he was popular.
“I did not want to come off as an inexperienced little girl…I did not want him to laugh at me… I was telling myself, ‘OK, that was the right thing to do, you were being respectful.” “I thought, I’m at St. Paul’s right now, this is graduation weekend, I cannot be dramatic about this.”
Unlike many who keep quiet after such an encounter, she pursued it, bringing about the justice which mars him. However, we all bear some culpability for his actions because of the American culture in which he has been raised.
At what point do we stop and ask ourselves, “What type of moral basis for our children and grandchildren are we creating in our nation?” University of Texas political philosopher J. Budziszewski is a longtime observer of student life. He was recently interviewed by World Magazine. He finds students’ lives “(m)ore and more disordered. Anything goes, especially concerning sex…Twenty years ago, if I’d asked, ‘Are there any problems with the sexual revolution?’ they would have said, ‘No, it’s fine.’ Now they often answer, ‘No, it’s not working.’”
When Budziszewski asks them if they are happy, some define their “happiness” as an absence of pain. Materially, their lives are awesome, but there is a hedonistic paradox. “If you pursue truth and friendship for their own sakes, you will enjoy pleasure. If you pursue pleasure for itself, pleasure recedes and you are likely to find pain.”
Budziszewski believes marital order and social order are related. He told one of his classes, “…my generation had invented the sexual revolution, but I thought theirs was paying the price.” A young man said, “I know what you mean.” He added that he longed to love and marry a woman and be faithful to her forever.
“It is typical for students to say, ‘We want to try out marriage so we’ll live together for a while.’ Yes, but of course it’s not practice for marriage, since it lacks commitment. It’s the shell of marriage. That statement makes some people angry, yet others tell me, ‘I’m so glad you explained that. I’ve always been told the old ideas were just arbitrary taboos.’ There is a thirst to know the rational basis for traditional sexual norms,’” Budziszewski said.
He finds that morality is a prerequisite for happiness because it makes us more free, not less – not jerked around by desires.
Art Hall
From the Bible:  Wisdom gives life to those who use it, and everyone who uses it will be happy. From Proverbs 3:18