So, You’re a Pimp

One of my early encounters with liberalism at Brown University wasn’t even on campus. I met a girl while I was at a bar called the Yellow Kitten on Block Island, a small old-style colonial island off the coast of Narragansett, Rhode Island, my hometown. The area is a popular tourist spot in the summer, and thousands of people show up from all over the country to enjoy the beaches, fresh seafood, and tourist activities. It was the Fourth of July, and as you can imagine, an old-style colonial setting such as Block Island makes for a great celebration spot for that specific holiday. Thousands of people flocked to the island.

I was nineteen, and in the bar. Give me a break. I’m Irish.

Across the bar I saw a very attractive female, and anyone who knows me would also know that I would waste no time. You learn pretty quickly in your pubescent years that the pretty ones don’t stay lonely too long. This girl looked slightly older than me, and the only thing I found bizarre about her looks was that she was wearing some sort of alternative-style skirt that seemed to be made out of paper. I remember thinking that it looked as if she had made it herself in home-economics class in the third grade or something. Still, like The Flash, I was right beside her introducing myself. I remember her looking slightly miserable.

The typical starter questions were asked. What’s your name? Where ya from? Where do you go to school? What do you study? Is your boyfriend within a 100-foot radius? Her name was Katie. Katie or Katy or Kadi or Kaity or K.D. I don’t know how she spelled her name because I never got the chance to send her a love-letter.

Things went great at first, though. I remember making her laugh, but I don’t remember exactly what I said. I think I might have told her that I liked her paper skirt. That would have been funny.

She said she had graduated from Brown University. Great! Any competent womanizer knows that it always helps to have one common piece of ground for both of you to stand on, and I was going into my sophomore year at Brown in the fall. We were getting along great before I asked, “So what do you do now that you’ve graduated?”

“I moved back to San Francisco and I run my own business.” At 19 years-old I didn’t know any better. I couldn’t see the warning signs back then. Brown University. San Francisco. The paper skirt. I wasn’t going to get along with this chick. Oh, and I better not call her “chick” either.

“Oh yeah!? What’s your business?” I asked, pretending to care.

“I provide troubled women with sexual pleasure.”

“What?”

“Forget it. I don’t want to get into it,” she said.

“No, no. I want you to tell me about it.” This 19 year-old was suddenly very interested.

“I provide men for women who have trouble with their sex lives. Sex toys just don’t cut it. People need another person there to really be fulfilled. Ya know?”

No. I didn’t know. Proudly. A million thoughts ran through my head at once, and I began to stutter because all of them were trying to come out at the same time, and I also wasn’t sure if I should say any of them.

She could tell I was having a problem with what she had just told me, so she cut my stuttering off and asked me with conviction, “Do you realize that there are thousands of women out there who have never had an orgasm?!”

“No” I said. Actually, I don’t even think I knew women could have orgasms.

“Well, I help women out who have those types of problems.”

“By providing men for them?”

“Yeah…well…sometimes other women too.” She said it so matter-of-factly.

I had gathered all of this information and thought I had it all figured out when I said, “Sooooooo……………you’re a pimp.”

“No. I’m not a pimp. I help women who are very frustrated and unhappy people.” She was getting agitated and borderline insulted by my confusion about her “business.”

I tried to get away from the controversial side of the topic. So, I asked her, “Oh, I see. Well…ummm…Do you make good money?”

“I do okay.”

“And do you pay the guys you set these women up with?” I asked.

“Yeah, of course.”

“Soooooo…….you’re a pimp.” I couldn’t help but press the issue.

She looked at me with a very serious face and said, “Ya know what, forget it! I believe in what I do!” She walked away. That’s okay. I could handle the rejection, and I never dreamed I’d marry a she-pimp anyway. She’d probably wear a white paper dress to our wedding. Not my type.

At nineteen years old, I didn’t fully appreciate what had just happened to me. Back then it was just another girl walking away from one of my valiant efforts to approach her. At that point in my life, I was not interested in political thought, yet I was still very opinionated. And as I spent more time at Brown, campus events would convert me into a committed conservative. Only then did I realize who my Pimp Girlfriend really was. She was a liberal.

Because Brown does not have a real student center, students often advertise events through cafeteria posters, or through postcard-sized slips on the dining tables. These table-slips promoted all types of campus events, from study sessions to musical concerts to activist meetings.

On one particular day I noticed a table-slip that especially stood out from the rest. The slip was shaded bright red with a single word written on it in bold capital letters: VAGINA. Nothing else was written on the table slip. Just VAGINA. My intuition told me that it was a campus feminist organization that had placed these slips all over the cafeteria tables. I couldn’t say that for sure, though, because no organization had signed its name to these vagina-slips.

I was confused, but also very interested. I mean, I liked vagina, but I wondered why the feminists felt a need to remind me of female genitalia as I ate my lunch. I was quite vexed, so I asked several people about these vagina-slips. They told me that the purpose of the vagina-slips was to make people comfortable with the word “vagina.” Feminist theory was that people are comfortable referring to a penis in a variety of ways, but any explicit reference to female sexuality makes people cringe. Oh. Okay. I see.

The following day I went back to the cafeteria for lunch. I don’t know why I kept eating there. Again I found what appeared to be the same table-slip on my table. It too was bright-red and had the forbidden V-word written on it. The feminists, however, had pulled a fast one on the rest of the campus. They had put out a batch of new-and-improved vagina-slips in the middle of the night while others slept. I turned my new vagina-slip over and read what they had printed on the back: HOW DOES IT SMELL?

Well, I guess it depended on the vagina that they were talking about. I thought back to the supposed purpose of these vagina-slips: normalization of the word “vagina.” I hadn’t wholeheartedly agreed with the assumption that a table-slip that said “penis” on it was more appetizing to people than one that said “vagina.” Now, my classmates seemed to be suggesting that people would actually be pleased to see a table-slip that read: Penis, how does it taste?

Despite my obvious bewilderment with feminist logic, did their actions contain any degree of decency? Was it appropriate to put things like vagina-slips on the cafeteria tables? Were Brown’s feminists going to be allowed to commit this extremism without any social ramifications (such as criticism)? Yes, they were. Nobody on campus even flinched.

But how could anyone flinch? The vagina-slips were nothing compared to other productions of the Brown feminists. For instance, their campus sex-toy workshops. And perhaps the most unforgettable feminist event was the airing of the female ejaculation video, which featured four disturbed women masturbating to the point of ejaculation. Awesome. Just awesome.

I heard about the female ejaculation video from yet another public campus advertisement. Come see women ejaculate! Solomon Hall, Wednesday 4pm. Of course, I wouldn’t miss it. I actually arrived early to grab a seat in the front row with my two roommates. We laughed our asses off.

It may not surprise the reader by now to learn that the female ejaculation video was not something that was aired in an off-campus dwelling. This was not something that was intended to be hidden from University administrators. Rather, this was an event inside a Brown educational facility, approved by the University. After some time, this is what I found most disturbing, the fact that administrators were never present to chastise radical feminists or other sexual extremists for turning the campus into one big Hustler Magazine.

Indeed, instances of campus pornography never elicited any sort of disciplinary response. And again, here was the administration using the energy and verve of their students to create a haven for anything liberal. If serious criticism ever came, the administration had an easy out. Hey, it wasn’t us. We didn’t know what was going on. But we’ll be sure to solve this problem right away. Yeah, right. Concerning instances of campus pornography, administrators never saw a need to oppose student indecency. This refusal to oppose my classmates, and the fact that they were allowed to use Brown’s facilities for their purposes, only suggested to me that the administration was actually endorsing their behavior.

I must admit, as a student, I found Brown’s sexual openness as funny as it was repulsive. Perhaps my attendance at the female ejaculation video was motivated by a little more than my need for opposition research. But where were the adults who should have been in charge of the University? Shouldn’t they have been concerned with what I was noticing, a campus with the same sexual morality as dogs in heat? Did I find fun and humor with Brown’s sexually immoral campus? Yes. Would I send my own son or daughter to Brown? Absolutely not.

At Brown, the message clearly was this: Have sex. Lots of it, and with as many partners as possible. Gay sex with five other men in a shower if you prefer. And I couldn’t help but notice it again. Liberalism was not asking people to do better, or to be better. Instead the message was: Just do whatever feels good right now, young ones. Don’t worry about the consequences. No mention or recognition of sacrifice, discipline, or responsibility.