Sex

RECALL MAKES for strange bedfellows. Arnold Schwarzenegger has coupled onscreen with Sharon Stone. Arianna Huffington and Al Franken hit the sheets, John-and-Yoko-style, to report on the 1996 national conventions. Cruz Bustamante is in bed with the Indian gaming tribes that underwrite his campaign.

And then there's Mary Carey: adult entertainment performer and independent candidate for governor.

THERE WAS TRENT LOTT on one side, and now Rick Santorum on the other. Like bookends, they seem to frame the war with Iraq--each subject to an attack in which an offhand comment is taken by opponents for a steed and ridden to death with spurs. Some commentators (and many, many politicians) hoped that in the high seriousness of a nation at war this trend in public discourse would wither away. But it clearly hasn't. Welcome home, boys.

I'VE SPENT A LOT OF TIME on elite college campuses recently--at Yale, where I taught a course, as well as at Princeton, Dartmouth, Kenyon, and a few less rarefied schools--and while I've temporarily given up on the game of trying to diagnose the ills of America's youth, I have found that things really are different than they were when I graduated about 20 years ago.

For one thing, the students in the competitive colleges are products of an almost crystalline meritocracy.

IF A GOVERNMENT set out slowly to strangle the family life of its people, what would be the best tactic? One diabolical approach would be to saddle young adults in their early 20s with massive debt. Surely, this would delay marriages, as potential spouses shied away from this perverse form of anti-dowry. Even more surely, this tactic would push back childbearing for a decade or more, as potential mothers and fathers put off having children until their debt collectors were satisfied.

Skipping Towards Gomorrah
The Seven Deadly Sins and the Pursuit of Happiness in America
by Dan Savage
Dutton, $23.95, 302 pages

THE AMERICAN SODOMITES have found their defender and his name is, appropriately, Dan Savage. In his day job, Savage writes a wonderfully lewd sex column in which he reports on a great variety of bizarre sexual practices with chilling and not-at-all self-conscious candor.

THE LAW OF AVERAGES dictates that if you spend enough time writing for a living, you will eventually make embarrassing disclosures about yourself. Here is mine: Of all the crank left-wing groups I am paid to periodically encounter, I've always harbored a secret soft spot for my friends at the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. This is not an easy admission. For the only thing I like better than eating meat once a day, is eating meat two or three times a day. If they made meat desserts, I'd push for four. Meat and I--we've had some great times together.

BY NOW, you're surely aware of the controversy that erupted at UC Berkeley last week over the school's student-taught courses on "Male Sexuality" and "Female Sexuality," sponsored by (of course) the Women's Studies department. Last semester's "Male Sexuality" course featured an orgy; a party game involving matching anonymous Polaroid shots of students' genitalia with the correct student; and a field trip to a gay strip club to watch course instructors strip and have sex.

IT TURNS OUT that the politics of personal destruction does have cultural consequences.

As noted by Opinion Journal's Best of the Web, the January 29 edition of the Palm Springs Desert Sun featured an op-ed by a distressed 13-year-old named Lindsay Llarena. It seems that on January 8, a police officer who provided security for the local high school pleaded guilty to having sexual relations with a 17-year-old student.

IN AUSTRALIA, the era of big government is alive and well. WorkCover, the official workplace safety group in New South Wales, Australia, is getting ready to release a set of guidelines aimed at improving the working conditions of women (and men) involved in the sex industry. "Getting on Top of Health and Safety" is loaded with tips and advice for New South Wales's finest prostitutes and state-licensed brothels.

Under the Disorderly Houses Amendment Act of 1995, Aussie sex-selling went legal.

DESPITE HIS SAINTLY RETREAT from the dirty things of this world, J.D. Salinger remains ubiquitous and annoying. It's been thirty-six years since he published anything, but he is reportedly the object of homage in the upcoming Wes Anderson comedy "The Royal Tenenbaums." And only last year, Sean Connery played a Salinger knockoff in Gus Van Sant's "Finding Forrester." In that faulty production, the literary recluse is in hiding in an apartment in the Bronx.

WHO CARES ABOUT a few strippers in the context of the slaughter of 6,000 innocent people?

Actually, the strippers--together with some booze, some hookers, and maybe even a little gambling that some of the hijackers enjoyed before September 11--could help the United States win one of the minor battles in the broader war on terrorism.

The Bush administration has gone to great lengths to reassure Muslims at home and abroad that the war on terrorism is not a war on Islam. It's a key distinction, and one the terrorists and their friends are trying to blur.

OFFICIAL WASHINGTON is a city of the sly evasion, the artful misdirection—spin, we like to call it—but seldom of the outright misstatement. You don’t often see a public official rise in his official capacity to make an official statement that is flatly, demonstrably, unmistakably contrary to the world as it is. It just isn’t done, for heaven’s sake.

David Satcher, the surgeon general of the United States, held a press conference at the end of last month to issue a new report. Issuing reports is what surgeon generals do. Since his appointment by President Clinton in 1998, Dr.