UNCW Invests in “Stimulating” Technology

The worst part about censorship is that there are college professors who are too stupid to know what it actually means, or worse, that sometimes pretend to be too stupid to know what it actually means. Censorship occurs when the government stops objectionable speech from being disseminated. It does not occur when the government refuses to actually subsidize speech that may be deemed objectionable. But sometimes professors and low-level college administrators pretend that refusal to fund government speech is censorship. They usually do this when the speech is so bad that no one else would ever subsidize it. So they adopt a false definition of censorship and pretend to believe it in an effort to attack those who would understandably oppose government support of bad speech.

A case in point is the UNCW LGBTQIA Office. They recently sponsored a showing of the film “The Passion and the Power: The Technology of the Orgasm.” You can see the trailer here. It is obviously a very serious intellectual undertaking. I’m just kidding. It is actually a profoundly idiotic documentary focusing on the history of the vibrator.

The showing of a film at UNCW documenting the history of the orgasm was not nearly as bad as it gets on a college campus. In 2005, a feminist group at UNC-Chapel Hill sponsored an orgasm awareness week and built a vibrator museum in the middle of the quad. The museum was filled with vibrators, including a wooden one from the 1920s. It may have been protected free speech. But it wasn’t exactly the peak of the intellectual season.

In reality, there is actually something less objectionable about the UNC-Chapel Hill museum in comparison with the UNCW LGBTQIA film. The former activity was financed with mandatory student activity fees, which must be distributed in a viewpoint neutral fashion. The latter was a sponsored activity on behalf of a government office that should not even exist, especially in a time of deep state budget deficit.

I understand that universities must invest in technology if they want to prepare future generations to lead a nation in a complex and competitive global market. But the kind of technology we need to invest in is scientific technology. We don’t need to invest in orgasm technology. If an administrator wants to show films about vibrators to students (which are then followed by discussions with the students about the topic of their orgasms) she needs psychotherapy. She does not need her own LGBTQIA Office.

(Note: The official UNCW LGBTQIA Office flier reads “We will be showing the film, ‘The Passion and the Power: The Technology of the Orgasm,’ followed by a group discussion on the topic.” I’m not making this up).