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Stanford’s Structured Liberal Education, or SLE—which claims to provide students with a Western-based education for a good life—will feature on Thursday the esteemed dominatrix Brittany Newell, a self-proclaimed “silly bimbo” who “plays with words.”
Newell, as advertised in an email sent out to East FloMo, will “advise” students based on her “wide-ranging life as a drag performer, kink worker, journalist, and archivist of San Francisco’s queer sexual community.”
To incentivize students to come—who wouldn’t want to already?—those who rush first to the “toes that brought an executive to tears” will receive a free copy of her newest book, Soft Core, which describes a 27-year-old’s sex “adventures” with her ex-boyfriend, a cross-dressing ketamine dealer, and other men.
While chewing on alternative, sometimes uncomfortable, perspectives is valuable to one’s personal and intellectual development, it is worth critically examining whether the values Newell embodies have a place in a Western liberal education that is fundamentally designed to help students live a good life.
For context, Newell, whose character Ruth favors the loud strip clubs over the "oppressive silence” of wealthier neighborhoods, grew up in Belvedere, where the median home price is $6.3M. Newell went on to attend Stanford, where she never took a writing class. After graduating in 2016 with a degree in gender studies and working in the food industry, she learned that instead of working tiring, low-paying jobs, she could find a sugar daddy and become a dominatrix.
She then proceeded to form relationships with various men seeking intimacy, including a man from Denver whom she never met but received $19,200 from.
Regardless of one’s opinion on sex work and BDSM, there are some jarring contradictions between SLE’s purported aims—namely, an education for a good life—and Newell’s job as a soft-core writer and professional profiteer off of men’s mental problems.
SLE urges students to reconsider Big Tech jobs, claiming they exacerbate wealth inequality, yet is unperturbed inviting someone who significantly profits off of the very money—which she calls “dirty” in the book—and patriarchy she condemns as oppressive. SLE requires students to read Aurelius’s Meditations, a foundational treatise on discipline and self-mastery, and Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, a guide to life that argues against aggressive self-indulgence, yet embraces someone who makes $800 per hour by charging depressed men for tickling or torture.
Instead of getting them help, Newell writes a book about it, romanticizing what she can do to men who feel alienated, sad, and hopeless. Worse, she even admits that it isn’t her job to solve their loneliness, that she doesn’t really know them, and that they “absolutely” don’t know her.
Does SLE mean to tell 18-year-olds that profiting off of others’ vulnerabilities and shame is preferable to working 50-hour weeks at a big company? Is it okay with the idea that men should pay for expensive, temporary “intimacy” instead of trying to address the root cause of their problems with a licensed therapist? Or, more broadly, is the solution to depression simply giving in by appeasing desire through drugs, fantasy, and sex?
This should not be construed as a tirade against Newell or sex work in general, and I’m sure that Newell has good intentions and feels deeply for the men she interacts with. But what does SLE materially gain from hosting her? Even if she has unconventional interests, is she at least a fabulous writer? Does she explore the topic in a novel, interesting way? After all, subject matter is independent of literary prowess, as Nabokov exemplifies with his masterpieces exploring human cruelty and sadism.
Unfortunately, she is not an amazing writer, either. Aside from the 3.6 stars she’s accrued on Amazon, the New York Times describes subplots that “peter out or climax abruptly” and calls her prose “dreamy.” Frankly, it seems like the Times also had to dream up some praise, lauding her use of “banal yet profound” sentences. Phrases like “life felt loose, like favorite panties with the elastic stretched out,” “I felt my old slut-self returning,” and “it was crazy how much could happen to a girl in three years” would probably not be advisable for use in one’s SLE essay. So what exactly are we supposed to learn from her?
In short, I struggle to see how Newell’s expertise in dominating men—and not the pen—is relevant to SLE and its purported goals. SLE is a respectable program with noble aims, and it has the right to choose which speakers it wishes to platform. I believe it should, and can, do better.
