An interesting thing happened at Yale a few weeks ago. Betty Dodson, a feminist, bisexual, 84 year old, champion of free love and sexual diversity, debated an Orthodox traditional Jewish 21 year old at the Yale political Union. The Yale Political Union is the nation’s largest student debating society where students engage each other as well as some of the world’s greatest political, academic and social minds in academic debate and learning.
The debate was lively and some of the questions included destigmatizing sex, whether sex is something we should be “modest” about—and what effect does that have on sexual culture and sexual crime, and can sex only be meaningful within a long-term monogamous relationship.
In the interest of full disclosure, the young Orthodox Jewish student was my son. It gave me a great deal of pleasure to watch a full spectrum of voices discussing sex in such an open and accepting manner, and I can only hope this will work as a model for (many!) future discussions about sex.
