Have you ever felt a saccharine tingle swiftly colonize your senses at the sight of your Henry Crown crush? Ever reeled from the hormone rush, that sudden stiffening of your dorsal hairs—or, in plain English, been overcome by horniness?
Follow-up question: How did you proceed? Did you a) act on it or b) reach for a placid, celibate bowl of breakfast grain (a vestal vessel, if you will)? John Harvey Kellogg certainly prayed for the latter.
Let’s travel back to 1894, when Kellogg trailblazed breakfast borderlands. Hoping to create a culinary straitjacket of sorts, he fabricated the first-ever Corn Flake, a cereal so monkish and milquetoast it would forever stop its consumer from masturbating. You heard that right: Kellogg loathed the five-knuckle shuffle, believing it to mother countless physical and mental ailments. Thus, the crispy anti-aphrodisiac became his Stroke of genius to crusade against carnal passion at the kitchen table.
Unsuccessful though it was, Kellogg’s project also took root in our very own Chicagoland, gifting us a permanent motto: Crescat scientia; coitus interruptus! Check any cupboard within a one-mile radius of your dorm, and you’ll find his legacy. Corn Flakes are everywhere. It’s important to notice these little things.
Now, you retort: “Sadie, what an inconsequential history lesson! Never have I ever reached for Sugar Smacks upon feeling kinky. Trix are for Kids™; no multigrain will castrate the passions, nor the contrary; nay, the BDSM breakfast does not exist! What’s the point of this nonsense?”
It is a comforting historical delusion that deviance can be so easily neutralized by feeding the populace a streamlined, nutritionally hollow product.
Lest you snap, crackle, or pop, let me cut to the chase. Today’s Hardcore Curriculum addresses the great bugbear of moral reform: accountability.
To address the recent sexual assaults at UChicago’s chapters of AEPi and Alpha Delt, and the parallel cases making national news at Cornell University, using stock adjectives like “devastating” or “problematic” feels insultingly reductive. Nor do I intend to spoon-feed you what has already been said, mouth-dumping sackless, beige sludge down your expectant throats like an all-knowing mother bird.
When students rally, the University retorts with sterile platitudes about grief in our community while simultaneously hiding behind the legalistic shield that fraternities are Absolutely Legally Independent and Beyond Investigation—washing their hands of the sausage-fest cesspools operating on their doorstep.
But no amount of administrative hucksterism will eliminate sexual violence from our school. No grandstanding campus safety email, however chaste or glacially vanilla, will stop perpetrators from violating people. Use evocative wording, swap one platitude for another, mold it into catatonic miniatures of Phil the Phoenix, honey-nut it and dust with cinnamon sugar, and the UChicago Sexual Assault Policy Ship of Theseus remains a freshly veneered, equally useless version of itself. Nothing changes the fact that the underlying ingredients still boil down to sexless filler food and corporate preservatives designed to feign a filling meal.
I like using satire in this column because humor opens doors. But there is a time and place for seriousness, and platforms ought to forefront things that matter. Let’s talk about what it means to take that seriously.
Earlier this quarter, I warned you against the intellectual poison of solipsism. That is, the self-absorbed delusion that your own mind is the only reality that matters, reducing everyone else to a flat, convenient projection of your desires. But what is rape culture if not systemic, weaponized solipsism? At its core, sexual violence is an act of erasure. A perpetrator treats his own consciousness as absolute and the victim’s humanity as optional, stripping their autonomy and solipsizing a whole person into an inert object. Their sovereignty is effectively snuffed.
At the October 28 “We Are Jane Doe” rally, a speaker instructed participants to raise their hands if they were, or knew, a Jane Doe. A jungle of hands and fists sprouted in the evening air. Our campus brims with Does. We were then told to turn to the nearest person with an arm raised and say: “I believe your story.”
Such moments necessitate an Orphic voice. In classical myth, after his descent into the underworld and loss of Eurydice, Orpheus sings a song so persistent, mournful, and unifying that the dead upper world awakes and spring emerges. To sing with an Orphic voice is to unite a collective, on behalf of both the collective and every silenced J. Doe, to spurn the ease of forgetting, and to beg the return of life to a cold landscape.
Institutional accountability cannot be satisfied by administrative cornflakes. Our university must actualize a campus where student safety and selfhood are structurally secured. To start, concrete, non-negotiable action mandates binding policy overhauls co-authored by survivors and a permanent ban on predatory organizations. If UChicago can claim credit for student life, it can claim responsibility for it. And the antidote to the erasure of every Doe is collective, persistent remembering. We, too, must name rape culture, trace its insidious, Corn Flake standardization in our culture, singing emphatically in our Orphic voice until this university becomes entirely inhospitable terrain for sexual violence.
Enough with the bland regurgitation of institutional neutrality. Accountability is the Breakfast of Champions.
Are you navigating the UChicago dating multiverse too? Whether it’s a Sidechat success story or a slow burn disaster, Sadie wants to hear about it. Submit your campus dating stories, suggestions, or questions here.
