Wednesday, May 14, 2008

Ivy League Abstinence

From "Students of Virginity," NY Times Magazine, March 30, 2008:

...The Ivy League's abstinence clubs began emerging several years ago about the same time as student sex blogs, sex columns and, at Harvard and Yale, student sex magazines…[T]he Princeton club [was] the first to form in the Ivy League in 2005...

[The Princeton club members so admired the logic of Catholic thinker Elizabeth Anscombe, the philosopher and student of Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose arguments] against premarital sex are as impressive as they are difficult to summarize, [that] they named their society after her...

[S]tudents at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were the first to follow with another Anscombe Society...

The Harvard abstinence club came next, in 2006...[The founders] decided that their club would focus on the issue "most immediately relevant" to people on campus — premarital sexual abstinence — and would try to persuade people toward it with arguments less philosophical than scientific...