At our president's alma mater

by Aaron Flicker

\Maybe intellectual respectability is like cash: worthless if you don't spend it.

Some Yale students apparently have a surplus of this quality, or think they do. Perhaps that explains "The Staxxx," a full-length porn film currently in the planning stages that will be directed, produced and filmed by Yale undergraduates. It will even star Yalies! The "brains," or whatever the key organs are behind this masterpiece, belong to members of a student organization called Porn 'n' Chicken, which meets regularly to watch adult videos and eat fried chicken.

The producers have not yet identified themselves, except by e-mail address, but, this being the Ivy League, they have been careful to cultivate an appearance of propriety. This will be porn with pinkies extended.

The New York Times quoted an e-mail from one of the amateur auteurs:

"Confidentiality would be assured if requested, as many Yalies have future ambitions toward the political sphere. The 'action sequences' would be conceptualized and scripted in collaboration with the actors themselves, to liberate the film from any sort of preconceived sexual agenda. Finally, safe sex would be the exceptionless rule."

Said one woman who responded to the casting call: "They were interested in college students doing what college students do." I bet. She also said she was "pretty impressed with their organization and their professionalism."

The Times reporter, David Herszenhorn, called the, uh, project, "an odd mix of the salacious and the discreet." So discreet it made the New York Times.

So here is the chronology these smooth operators envisioned: They post some fliers soliciting aspiring adult performers, no experience necessary, willing to train. They don't identify themselves, just give an e-mail address.

Young women who are, presumably, intelligent, or at least able to fare well enough to get into an Ivy League university, show up for a meeting. They are not handed a script, but told to do whatever seems appropriate at the time. They do, in front of digital cameras. The producers have their professionalism praised in this nation's paper of record.

What is scary is that it all worked according to plan. I know what you are thinking, dear reader: If they can do it, so can I.

No, you cannot. Even if you had the guts, or whatever, to try this, only an Ivy-League brand name would provide sufficient prestige to pull it off, and you don't have it. I am just guessing, but I suspect your state-school pedigree would not inspire confidence among potential actresses.

But George W. Bush's alma mater can claim women like Andi Young '02. (Ivy League papers actually write that way; the Harvard Crimson used to refer to the man George W. beat as Vice President Al Gore '69). Young, one of the first to sign up, told the Yale Daily News: "I'm a self-labeled sex activist. People should feel free to be open about everything."

And so she is. But there is something besides the talent pool that is exceptional about Ivy League schools, and this story shows just what it is.

It is not that some guys are making what is euphemistically referred to as an "adult" film, even though it is aimed at an audience with adolescent sensibilities. Far be it from me to suggest that any students on this campus might have made a movie they wouldn't want their parents to see. But there are more than 4,000 institutions of higher learning in the United States, with more than 14 million students. I don't know what the chances are that two of them might have set up a camera and made a kind of video you can't rent at Blockbuster, but I would not bet against it. If anyone has, though, it didn't get any press coverage.

So this is the real value of "The Staxxx": it provides redundant evidence that part of what Ivy Leaguers are getting for their tuition dollars is the ability to portray childish acts as blows in the fight for intellectual openness.

"When I was young and irresponsible, I was young and irresponsible," said a famous Yale alum. That's not good enough for the boys in Porn 'n Chicken. They're young and irresponsible, to be sure, but articulate enough to make people pretend they're not.

Flicker is brimming over with class envy. He can be reached at af350597.