Call it life imitating art or at least television. For the past four years, HBO’s Sex in the City, based on Candace Bushnell's book of the same name, has told the story of four single professional women living in New York. The central character, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, is Carrie Bradshaw, a columnist who writes about sex and dating. Carrie asks and answers questions like “To be in a couple, do you have to put your single self on a shelf?”

Given the show’s popularity, it was inevitable that young women would copy more than Bradshaw’s fashion sense. As the June 14 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education tells us, “a small but growing number of women” are writing advice columns on love and sex in college newspapers. Some of them, like Southern Methodist University’s “Ask Nell,” are remarkable only in the degree of their banality. Their idea of insight is stuff like “life’s too short not to be exciting, right? The worst feeling in life is regret, so try out what you’ve always wanted to . . . ” Thanks, I also saw Dead Poets Society.

Others, however, aren’t content to “Carpe Diem.” Whether to make a point or to draw attention to themselves, these columnists have decided that the raunchier and the more explicit, the better. One of them is Meghan Bainum, the sex columnist for the Daily Kansan in Lawrence, Kansas. As one unnamed university official put it, Bainum “has no shame.”

One of her columns was devoted to an explicit and rather thorough explanation of the uses of various “sex toys.” Another column contained a similar discussion about the best way to fondle the other person’s genitalia. And rounding this leave-nothing-to-the-imagination trifecta, there was Bainum’s paean to the joys of genital piercing. After reading Bainum’s stuff, it didn’t surprise me to learn that some high school principals asked the university not to send the Thursday edition, where Bainum’s column appears, of the Daily Kansan to their schools.

One can only imagine what they would have done if their schools had a subscription to the Yale Daily News where columnist Natalie Krinsky covers the same beat as Bainum. I’m not sure how to describe Krinsky’s body of work except to say that she makes Ms. Bainum look Miss Manners. One especially memorable column tells readers about Krinsky’s sexual preoccupations when she was 14 years old. Thanks for sharing, Natalie. It’ll take at least five viewings of The Sound of Music to overwrite that bit of data in my memory.

Bainum’s and Krinsky’s obvious delight in shocking some readers’ sensibilities brings to mind a scene from George Orwell’s 1984. Julia, Winston Smith’s lover, worked in Pornosec, a division of the Ministry of Truth that “turned out cheap pornography for distribution among the proles.” Orwell wrote that these books, “with titles like Spanking Stories or One Night in a Girls’ School,” were purchased by “youths who were under the impression that they were buying something illegal.” The thrill associated with imagined transgression blinded them to what was really being done to them. Likewise, getting away with “talking dirty” blinds Krinsky and company to how impoverished their understanding of human sexuality really is.

Reading their columns, and those of other collegiate sex columnists, I’m struck by how, well, un-erotic it all is. I don’t mean “erotic” in the sense that it is usually used: as a synonym for “pornographic.” I mean in the sense that the Greek philosophers meant “erotic:” a physical-emotional passion. Eros “is the love that seeks unity with the beloved,” which desires to “merge souls” with the object of love. There is little or nothing of this understanding of love and sexuality in any of these columns. They are more like the advice you get on hanging dry wall or plumbing from Time-Life books or The Learning Channel than Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers or the biblical Song of Songs. Sex, in the world inhabited by Bainum and Krinsky, is more about fluid dynamics than it is about matters of the human spirit.

There is a profound irony at work here. The sexual revolution, without which columns like these would have been impossible, was supposed to be about more than allowing people to have sex without guilt. The animating idea of the “revolution,” that sex, being a biological or “natural” function, had little to do with morality, was not only suppose to further human freedom, but also promote better sex. The theory was that people, liberated from the sexual inhibitions derived from the old sexual ethic (which was the product of Christianity), would be free to explore and express their sexual nature in its entirety, to the benefit of their sex life.

It didn’t work out that way. The price we paid for sexual freedom was a diminishment of sex itself and a corresponding dehumanizing of our sexuality. For many Americans, there is nothing, at least of any consequence, to sex besides the purely physical sensation: no moral, spiritual or social dimension ¯ a fact driven home in a recent Washington Post article. When asked by their teacher to describe “the meaning that sex is supposed to have in people’s lives,” one student spoke for the rest when she replied “sex is supposed to have meaning? What do you mean by that?”

That’s what you get when you insist that sex is a biological function and that what we do in the bedroom says nothing about the kind of people we are. You strip sex of nearly all of its mystery, emotion and spirituality and turn it into little more than fluid dynamics. All that’s left are questions about technique. What’s especially ironic about all of this is that it’s Christians who are always accused of being anti-sex. Please!

There’s another powerful cultural force on display in these columns: what Rochelle Gurstein, in her book The Repeal of Reticence, calls the triumph of the “party of exposure” over the “party of reticence.” For most of us, “reticence” is synonymous with “inhibition” and, as such, is something we must overcome. But as Gurstein tells us, reticence — which comes from the Latin word for “to keep silent” — is simply the conviction that there are some areas of life that shouldn’t be subject to public scrutiny. Stated differently, they are no one’s business but our own.

Well, they used to be. The “party of exposure” took tact, discretion and other behavior associated with reticence and labeled them as the stuff of elitism and prudery. The result is a culture where the most intimate aspects of our lives are placed on public display and demeaned in the process. As Gurstein writes, “our public sphere, which should have displayed and preserved the grandeur and beauty of our civil ideals and moral excellences, is instead inane and vacuous when it is not utterly mean, ugly or indecent . . .”

“Inane.” “Vacuous.” These also describe our ideas about sexuality, ideas we have the sexual revolution to thank for. Like Orwell’s proletarian youths, we are so pleased with our naughtiness, so delighted that we have thrown off the shackles of inhibition, that we don’t think to ask ourselves “are we really better off?”

If the stuff being peddled as “advice” is any indication, the answer is “no.” Because when you look behind all the X-rated chatter you’ll find that the problem with all this exposure is not only that you’ll let people see too much. It’s that they will discover that there isn’t anything worth seeing there in the first place.