AIDS, Date Rape . . . Harvard Gets an Education in the New Reality

Anyone remember high school or college, being invigorated by ideas, events and weird new people, but also being overwhelmed by it all?

Then you stumbled onto a magazine--maybe Ms. or Esquire--in which someone older, wiser, but still way hip--Joan Didion? Tom Wolfe?--peered into your confused world and sorted it out with stunning clarity?

For the next few weeks, it seems likely that Harvard library cubicles and dorm lounges will be cluttered with students poring over Lynn Darling’s “Sleeping with the Enemy” in the April Esquire. Man, does Darling have a lot to clarify.

Harvard is not the school it was in 1972 when Darling studied there, kickin’ it with other “high-strung, neurotic, lefty romantics,” expecting the apocalypse at any minute and worrying, as a Harvard Crimson writer of the era put it, that “people are actively trying to keep you from becoming one with the universe.”

No one at Harvard wants to become one with anyone, let alone the whole damn universe. Rather, it is now “a university beset by a stern insistence on differences.”

As one student puts it, sometimes it’s hard to figure out how to “hierarchize your identity: Are you black first or gay first or female first?”

Then there are AIDS, date rape and harassment. Such a climate isn’t conducive to inter-gender affection, let alone love-ins.

And romance? Totally un-PC.

Only once does Darling succumb to the cliches the post-Less Than Zero, Generation X, sub-thirty-somethings save self-consciously attached to themselves: “They are the cynical survivors of divorce and two-career families, and they have no traditions of permanence to shield them.”

But the style with which she weaves tales of her own sexual and political awakening into her portraits of six current students--four feminists, a gay man, a straight man--is fresh.

These students sense a numbing chasm: “I know all the ways to say no, and all the reasons,” one woman says. “But I don’t know how to say yes.”

There are also surprises. Eleanor, the empowered feminist, has just published a tract against the myth of romance and “that oozy oozy love feeling.” Larry, the sensitive but bewildered straight guy, is afraid to even flirt, since each wink is sure to be broken down into its political components.

But then they get together after an Angela Davis lecture over bottle of tequila, and. . . . Anyone remember the theme from “Love Story?”

REQUIRED READING

* When Sassy magazine sent Cristina Kelly off to follow Miss America 1992 for a day, the writer figured she’d do what everyone assumes a writer for a cool girls’ magazine would do: Tear the silly twit to pieces.

Instead, she writes an honest and emphatic piece, even as she concludes: “Miss America is sort of a racket. . . . You’re an indentured servant to the advertisers. . . .”

* The biggest car problem in Southern California (aside from smog) is not moving from point A to point B, but rather curtailing one’s motion once one arrives: i.e. parking. At least that’s the premise of an article in the April Los Angeles magazine.

Los Angeles boasts 150,000 “No Parking” signs, 40,000 parking meters, 236 miles of permit-only curbs, and 20% to 30% of the cars in town display handicapped permits that can be had for “just $6 and a note from the doctor.” So the article’s title, “It’s Parking Hell,” seems appropriate.

ESOTERICA

Question: How many pounds of pesticides per acre do homeowners apply each year on average?

If you answered correctly--from 5.3 to 10.6 pounds per acre--you may not need Environment & Health magazine.

But anyone who doesn’t know much about the toxicity of everyday household products, indoor air pollution or how exposure to certain common chemicals affects the brain, may want to check out this modest but informative new magazine. (For information, call (805) 564-4212, or write to P.O. Box 41057, Santa Barbara, Calif. 93140).

MAGAZINE VS. MAGAZINE

Bostonia is the sort of magazine that features Saul Bellow’s leisurely philosophical ramblings on Mozart. But readers of the current issue will probably be more interested in Elliott Sirkin’s bitchy attack on Cosmopolitan magazine.

“The Cosmo Contagion: How Cosmo Changed the World--For the Worse” (Spring) suggests that Helen Gurley Brown’s success with shallow celebrity sleaze and sex, sex, sex infected the entire magazine industry and ruined publications from Esquire to McCall’s.

For example, Sirkin points to the decline of Mademoiselle, which went from publishing the stories of Carson McCullers and William Faulkner to running pieces with titles such as: “Vibrators: Today’s Love Toy.”

The very fact that readers probably turned to Sirkin’s piece first is yet another indication that Cosmo has undermined cultural values. Shameful? Yes.

So, getting back to more serious topics. . . .

In his essay in the same Bostonia issue, Bellow discusses “the lively interest” Mozart took in a certain lady, pointing to “the boisterous sexual candor of the letters he wrote her” and to “his fantasies about his genitalia and hers. . . .”