Trouble’s Brewing at Cornell University

…by Jonas E. Alexis

Letitia Chai is a senior at Cornell University, and she has to run a trial for her scholar senior thesis. For her presentation, she wore a button down shirt and denim cut-off shorts.

Chai’s professor, Rebekah Maggor, who teaches media arts, thought that it would be appropriate for Chai to dress modestly for the occasion. She specifically said that Chai’s dress was too short and that it would distract the audience from her presentation.

But Maggor seemed to have found that that was the wrong thing to say in a school which has already been inundated by feminist ideologies.

Chai, in response, was furious. She told the Cornell Daily Sun, “I think that I was so taken aback that I didn’t really know how to respond.”[1] In response to Maggor’s statement, Chai walked out of the theatre where she was presenting her thesis.

After she had talked with Maggor outside, the Cornell Daily Sun tells us that she “stripped down to her bra and underwear and walked back into the theatre room, where she performed the entirety of her thesis presentation in the same state of undress.”[2] Not only that, Chai asked others during her presentation to do the same, which they did.

Maggor’s course syllabus specifically said that students ought to “dress appropriately for the persona they will present” and that the attire should “show respect.” So Maggor’s comment should not have been a big deal at all. In fact, even the students who seemed to agree with Chai acknowledged this point. Those students declared:

“Our professor regularly asks all of the students, male and female, such questions to clarify appropriate attire for public speaking. Our professor went on to say that what you wear and how you present yourself make a statement.

“She noted that if you were to wear jean shorts to your thesis presentation, that is a statement. Her focus on attire was a means of noting the importance of professionalism in certain public speaking situations.”[3]

In response to Chai’s reaction, one commenter said:

“Guess what? People in society beyond Cornell judge you by the clothes that you wear. People show respect for an occasion by ‘dressing up’ for it. People dress up for weddings, funerals, and thesis defense to show respect for those occasions.”[4]

Another commenter humorously said that Chai wanted people to remember the color of her underwear as opposed to the content of her thesis. Other commenters argued that Chai ignored what was clearly stated in the course syllabus and obviously wanted to create trouble. One commenter again said of Chai’s behavior:

“Try pulling this crap at your first job interview (or your second, third, fourth …) and then explain to your parents why you’re still living in your room when you’re 30.” Another commenter said: “That would depend on what job she’s interviewing for…. I hear Stormy [Daniel] is hiring…”[5]

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What is the fundamental issue here? Chai, as a feminist, does not want to face the fact that men do get titillated by the way women dress. How else would the porn industry be making billions upon billions of dollars every single year?[6]

As Gail Dines of Wheelock College and Robert Jensen of the University of Texas put it a few years ago: “Just as the food industry shapes how we eat and the fashion industry shapes how we dress, the sex industry shapes the way we think about sex.”[7]

More importantly, Chai has to pick up Euripides’ The Bacchae and start reading it. Sadly, Chai doesn’t seem to know that she is being manipulated by the feminist ideology. As we shall briefly show, the fundamental philosophy that makes up the feminist movement is intellectually incoherent and therefore worthless. Let’s begin with ancient Greece and see how they viewed this whole issue.

In The Bacchae, Euripides introduces us to Pentheus, who is the king of Thebes and who represents the anti-thesis of social disorder and chaos. Pentheus observes that Dionysus, the god of wine and sexual revelry, is the real cause of sexual licentiousness in Thebes.

All Dionysus has to do to create moral decay throughout the land is unleash sexual debauchery among the women in particular. How? Simple: Allow the women to leave their looms and dance naked. The men would eventually be drawn to their sexual and uncontrolled passion, which means that they will also drop their moral cognition and intuition. The end result? The men will eventually be slaves to their passion.

As E. Michael Jones interprets it, “Whoever controls sexual behavior controls the state, and he who controls the mores of women controls sexual behavior. That is the first lesson of sexual politics.”[8] Jones adds that the cultural revolution “got the women of this country [America] to leave their looms and dance naked on the mountainside.”[9]

In short, once the mind has been subdued by a potent ideology, namely uncontrolled sexual passion, the person in question is no longer a good man but a slave. As Augustine rightly put it,

“Thus, a good man, though a slave, is free; but a wicked man, though a king, is a slave. For he serves, not one man alone, but what is worse, as many masters as he has vices.”

Later, Edmund Burke added that “men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters.”[10]

What we are saying here is that lust and uncontrolled sexual passion always lead to moral and intellectual blindness, moral blindness inexorably leads to “sin city,” and “sin city” leads to spiritual death.

This deduction has been understood by a wide range of individuals—from Sigmund Freud to Wilhelm Reich and all the way to comic book writers such as Allan Moore.[11]

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Going back to Pentheus. In order to put an end to Dionysus’ lust, which drives the men into sexual madness, Pentheus captured Dionysus. When Dionysus was taken prisoner, he told Pentheus that Pentheus was his slave. This obviously befuddled Pentheus. How am I his slave, Pentheus seemed to reason, when I got him in chain?

In other words, Dionysus allowed himself to be captured by Pentheus because he wanted to seduce the very man who seeks to prohibit sexual debauchery. To make a long story short, Dionysus asks Pentheus if he would like to see the women (Maenads) dance naked on the mountainside. Pentheus, of course, was flattered and seemed to have been instantly sensually aroused. We could imagine Pentheus saying,

“You mean I’ll have unlimited access to naked women? Heck, yeah! Oh brother, what man would say no to that? When will I get to see those beautiful sights?”

Pentheus—like Shelley, Byron, Wilde, Sartre, Russell, Wells, Schopenhauer, and more recently Gore Vidal, Bill Clinton, Julian Assange, David Patraeus, Herman Cain, Athony Weiner, Mark Sanford, Samuel B. Kent, John Edwards, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Brian J. Doyle, Wade Sanders, Newt Gingrich, Mel Reynolds, Ken Calvert, who could not keep their pants up—could not perceive that Dionysus was preying on his sexual weakness and then leading him to his tragic death.

Pentheus actually says, “Aye, indeed! Lead on. Why should we tarry?…That would I, though it cost me all the gold of Thebes!” At that point, Pentheus’ moral reasoning began to wane precisely because lust has started to take over his being.

Dionysus was shocked to see that Pentheus was willing to go the extra miles to see those naked women. Dionysus says, “So much? Thou art quick to fall to such great longing.”

Keep in mind that Dionysus has used other means to persuade Pentheus to abandon his moral path but failed. Dionysus finally rested on the sexual dimension, which Pentheus could not resist and which turned out to be an instrument of control.

Moreover, Dionysus quickly learned that talking about naked women was much more persuasive and alluring than positing philosophical syllogism. In the twentieth century, Wilhelm Reich discovered those sexual principles from personal experience. He eventually declared that

“Sexual consciousness and mystical sentiments cannot coexist.”[12] Reich was not the only person to discover this either/or dichotomy. But he was one of the first persons to articulate this in the twentieth century.

Once the culture began to accept Reich’s principles, the social order swiftly evaporated from the minds of many. Reich postulated that the sexual revolution could not take place without “a powerful international sex-economic organization.”

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Dionysus led Pentheus to the mountainside and the naked women ended up tearing Pentheus apart in a sexual frenzy, leading him to a bloody and tragic death. Pentheus’ own mother, Agave, was also one of the maenads who participated in the Dionysian frenzy. Being intoxicated by the revelry and being possessed by Dionysus, she ripped off Pentheus’ head without realizing that it was her own son.

Agave went back to the palace and began to talk about how she triumphantly ripped off a lion’s head—meaning his own son’s—and how fulfilling the whole phenomenon was.

Yet right after she became sober and to much of her chagrin, she realized that she had killed her own son. Agave wept bitterly and inconsolably, but it was too late. Nothing could replace her son. Pentheus got what he wanted: he got to see naked women, but it cost him his own life.

So the logic is pretty straightforward: If you can manipulate a person’s passion—most particularly his unbridled, sexual passion—then you can manipulate his behavior. If you can manipulate his behavior, then you can make him do what you want. During the French Revolution, Marquis de Sade ended up producing a treatise which articulated this point in the most pornographic way.

But Sade’s sexual metaphysics did not die during the French Revolution. This sexual component has also been propounded in many different ways since Sade penned his Philosophy in the Bedroom in 1795.

With Talmudic and Masonic backing, the sexual virus traveled from France to England, from England to Germany,[13] and then from Germany in the 1920s and 30s[14] to America in the 1960s during the sexual revolution.[15] By 1946, one of the British intellectuals who realized that the movement sweeping Europe and America would have to be sexual was Aldous Huxley.

“For myself, as for no doubt most of my contemporaries,” Huxley wrote in Ends and Means, “the essence of meaninglessness was essentially an instrument of liberation…We objected to the morality because it interferes with our sexual freedom.”[16]

One can say that the feminist movement is largely based on this central doctrine: morality is either irrelevant or obsolete because it interferes with people’s sexual freedom. Sexual freedom logically leads to the Enlightenment and to people like Marquis de Sade. According to the Enlightenment view of things, morality is a relic of the past and people ought to be free to pursue any activity without restraint. It is “liberty.”

De Sade again articulated this in a more interesting way. “The philosopher,” he argues, “sates his appetites without inquiring to know what his enjoyments may cost others, and without remorse.”

Sade here was trying to suppress guilt, conscience, and morality. Once that was done, then Sade took another ideological move. “A pretty girl,” he writes in Philosophy in the Bedroom, “ought simply to concern herself with fucking, and never with engendering.”

With morality and order removed, de Sade was free to follow any impulse and encourage others to do the same:

“You girls who have been tied down by the absurd and dangerous bonds of an imaginary virtue and a disgusting religion: imitate ardent Eugenie. Destroy, trample, as swiftly as she, all the ridiculous precepts inculcated by moronic parents.”

Sade further deconstructs the moral order by saying, “It’s absurd to say that this mania is unnatural. Can it be censured if nature inspires it in us? Can nature dictate something that degrades it?”[17]

Here we are getting closing to the inexorable truth: according to the Enlightenment, which now got morphed into feminism, nothing is immoral. Sade was following the logical outworking of Enlightenment philosophy, which, like feminism, promised freedom on the surface but delivered moral and intellectual bondage. How is it intellectual bondage?

Well, very easy. If women should be “free to act however they want,”[18] as feminist and Zionist Mayim Bialik tells us, do men get to enjoy that privilege and honor? If not, why not? Why are feminists so prejudice? What logical move that allows them to apply one law for women and a completely different law for men? Is that fair?

And if they think that men ought to grant the same right, then how can we really say that people like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby did something wrong? Don’t all the feminists out there condemn both Weinstein and Cosby?

You see, no matter how you cut it, the feminist movement lacks moral and intellectual backbone. This is why that one ought to be suspicious about people like Letitia Chai. She will not succeed with her movement precisely because it doesn’t abide by what Immanuel Kant calls the categorical imperative or practical reason, which is our only defense against oppression, the oligarch and the elite.

Kant declares:

“Act only according to that maxim by which you can at the same time will that it should become a universal law.”[19]

He continues to say that for an action to be good, “it is not enough that it should conform to the moral law—it must also be done for the sake of the moral law.”[20] As I argued elsewhere, any intellectual project that does not prostate before practical reason will fall. That’s what happened to Darwin, and his intellectual children are still trying to erect a philosophically repugnant and existentially worthless edifice.

• [1] Sarah Skinner, “Student Presents Thesis In Underwear After Professor Questions Choice of Clothing,” Cornell Daily Sun, May 6, 2018.
• [2] Ibid.
• [3] Lisa Gutierrez, “Cornell professor questioned a student’s shorts. So she gave her thesis in underwear,” Kansas City, May 10, 2018.
• [4] Skinner, “Student Presents Thesis In Underwear After Professor Questions Choice of Clothing,” Cornell Daily Sun, May 6, 2018.
• [5] Ibid.
• [6] For scholar studies on related issues, see Gail Dines, Pornland: How Porn Has Hijacked Our Sexuality (Boston: Beacon Press, 2010).
• [7] Gail Dines and Robert Jensen, “A Pornography Habit Destroys Relationships,” NY Times, November 11, 2012.
• [8] E. Michael Jones, Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation of Political Control (South Bend: Augustine’s Press, 2000), 589.
• [9] Ibid., 590.
• [10] Quoted in ibid., 607.
• [11] See for example Todd A. Comer and Joseph Michael Sommers, Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore: Critical Essays on the Graphic Novels (London: McFarland & Company, 2012).
• [12] See Jones, Libido Dominandi.
• [13] See for example E. Michael Jones, Monsters from the Id: The Rise of Horror in Fiction and Film (Dallas: Spence Publishing, 2000).
• [14] See for example Mel Gordon, Voluptuous Panic: The Erotic World of Weimar Berlin (Los Angeles: Feral House, 2006); Maria Tartar, Lustmord: Sexual Murder in Weimar Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
• [15] See for example Jeffrey Escoffier, ed., Sexual Revolution (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2003).
• [16] Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means: An Inquiry into the Nature of Ideals and into the Methods Employed for their Realization (London: Chatoo & Windus, 1946), 273.
• [17] I have expanded on these issues in my recent book Zionism vs. The West.
• [18] Mayim Bialik, “Being a Feminist in Harvey Weinstein’s World,” NY Times, October 13, 2017.
• [19] Emmanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1959), 39.
• [20] Emmanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (New York: Torchbooks, 1964), 390.

Jonas E. Alexis, Senior Editor

Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, the history of the Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the book, Kevin MacDonald’s Metaphysical Failure: A Philosophical, Historical, and Moral Critique of Evolutionary Psychology, Sociobiology, and Identity Politics. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.

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