Sex and the Ivy League

Abstract

This thumbnail sketch will focus on a strange and even bewildering period of my life that was dominated by issues of sex within the Ivy League. The choice of focus is not idle, because these issues lend clarity to my values and add significance to my life. They led me to distill two simple reflections that changed my life and that I wish to share with the reader. The first reflection is that for a woman to survive and to thrive she must learn to turn negative responses into positive resources. This is a perverse reversal to the Pavlovian response. I call this, for short, ‘turning dung into fertilizer.’ I believe it is one of the most important elements for women’s success and happiness. It is a wonderful recipe for dealing with the ‘glass ceiling’, a well-known and somewhat cruel situation where the more you succeed, the more you get punished. Think of it this way – energy is energy – and simply changing the sign of the response one receives from negative to positive allows one to use all the energy received constructively, and turn it into a survival tool. In mathematical terms, this is “life modulo two.” It is the absolute value of the response that counts, not the sign. For women who are at the frontier, there is one positive feature of the strategy of transforming ‘dung into fertilizer.’ When using negative responses as fertilizer, one never runs out of resources. The second reflection is simpler, and perhaps more fundamental. It is that the only genuine source of happiness in life is the feeling of being useful to others. Nothing else does the job. This is true for anybody. It is not achievement or success, it is not money. It is this feeling of being useful that counts. This is why the issues of sex and the Ivy League are important to me, and below I explain why.