On the whole, the reviewers of Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons have been caught up with two questions: (1) Is his depiction of the contours of contemporary college life accurately drawn and (2) If Charlotte Simmons is a picture of the real world, what should we do about it? Some have praised Wolfe for his unflinching eye, while others have thought he has greatly exaggerated the seamier side of student life. As Rachel Donadio explains in her New York Times Book Review essay, the stealing of Charlotte Simmons’s virginity and the destruction of her innocence have been seen as the evidence religious conservatives need to justify a new (should I say "anti-sexual"?) revolution on American campuses, which in turn has led others to hope for "a third way between, as it were, the missionary calling and the missionary position." I think the debate about how terrible and/or how fixable contemporary college life is has missed the point.
     I am Charlotte Simmons is Wolfe’s engagement with a much, much older theme — the place of sex in the development of a man’s intellectual and moral life. Wolfe struggles mightily to speak to us from the heart of his heroine, but Charlotte Simmons is not really a book about what awaits young women on the contemporary American campus; rather, it is— intentionally or not — an energetic examination of what happens to young men when women relinquish the trappings of sexual modesty. To put it another way, in Charlotte Simmons Wolfe returns to the problem that dominated his earlier novels, the question of what sustains or undermines a man’s moral fortitude. But in Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe shifts the scope of his investigation. In The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full ambitious men seeking ever greater power and status finally go too far. They compromise fundamental moral values and find themselves and their dreams ground under the wheels of major social institutions: the criminal justice system and big banks. Women play roles in those novels but almost always on the sidelines, often as unappealing and self-serving wives or mistresses, worse than the flawed men from whom they seek satisfaction. Even those men who do find their way to a philosophical and, thus, morally centered life, usually do so despite their women. Such was the case with A Man in Full’s Conrad, who dragged himself up from the humiliation of an unjust jailing by reading Stoic philosophy, even after his wife, whom he at times had thought of along with his two children as a "third baby," essentially deserted him. In Charlotte Simmons, however, Wolfe brings the question of a woman’s role in a man’s ethical and intellectual being from the margins of his investigation to the center.
     While Wolfe certainly does not ignore the powerful social structures (such as wealth and status) within which Charlotte Simmons and his three male leads (Hoyt, Jojo and Adam) move, Wolfe’s chief concern is with how the sexual politics shaped in those contexts affect the choices the young men make about schoolwork, moral obligation and the possibility of a thinking life. True to form, Wolfe captures a certain contemporary mood. His critics might think he has exaggerated the excesses of college life, but he has certainly not exaggerated the fears shared by many observers of American youth culture, as Caitlin Flanagan’s recent article "Are You There God? It’s Me, Monica: How Nice Girls Got So Casual About Oral Sex," in The Atlantic Monthly so aptly demonstrates. In Charlotte Simmons, Wolfe gives us a rich opportunity to get beyond the momentary obsession with the popularity of a particular sexual technique to see how today’s public debates about sex are driven by bigger, older questions about what a woman’s sexuality means to a man’s growth as a moral creature. Moreover, in putting the old sex questions before us in such starkly contemporary terms, Wolfe also helps us to see how much, even in the twenty-first century, we are still prone to seeing expansive sexuality in women as a threat to men’s humanity.
     At least one of Wolfe’s readers has seen the man-woman-mind question lurking behind Charlotte Simmons’s living-color pictures of college debauchery. In his Commentary review Sam Schulman finds that, by the end of the novel, Charlotte has been set up as a "Soul-Charioteer whose passionate quest for beauty that is truth can be read about in Plato’s Phaedrus," one of the many dialogues in which Socrates explicitly treats the ways in which eros can impede or assist the work of a philosopher in search of a just life. The question of which sort of erotic attachments undermine a man’s capacity to develop a philosophic spirit and thus a love of justice for its own sake courses throughout Plato’s dialogues, as Socrates both debates the issue with his interlocutors and describes his own philosophical practice as a kind of eroticism, one that in some ways parallels his physical love for Alcibiades. Certainly, Wolfe helps out readers like Schulman by having one of the novel’s male leads, the basketball player Jojo Johanssen who at the end of the novel becomes Charlotte’s boyfriend, turn to Greek philosophy and win the epithet "Socrates" from his irritated coach.
     Schulman is clearly on the right track in seeing old themes at play in Wolfe’s foray into modern college sexuality, but I think Wolfe’s understanding and treatment of the problem of eros is, philosophically speaking, much more tightly constrained than Schulman realizes. That constraint serves a particular conservative agenda that we should work to expose — not merely for the sake of women, but also for the sake of philosophic and moral life. Wolfe’s confrontation with the dangerous interaction of physical desire and philosophical pursuits takes place entirely within the confines of the post-enlightenment world. What Wolfe has done in Charlotte Simmons is to rewrite Rousseau’s Emile for a more contemporary audience, and in a more pessimistic tone. The problem is that, in beginning with a worldview that is a cheaply contemporized Rousseau, Wolfe is forced to tell a story that is meaner in all ways and that boils down, eventually, to the question of whether men would be better men if women were more willing to withhold sex.
     What I hear in Wolfe is a drum beating, not to the raucous, twenty-first century rap lyrics favored by the college students in Charlotte Simmons, but to a conservative harangue about the pending death of intellectual life under the onslaught of "culturally relativist" thinkers. These were the proponents of the dangerous new fields that Allan Bloom, the author of the 1980s best seller, The Closing of the American Mind, describes as "Black Studies or Women’s or Gender Studies, along with Learn Another Culture." I remember that angry beat well from my own college days in the 1980s. What Charlotte Simmons says in "fiction" about twenty-first century college life, Bloom offered as "facts" about college life in the 1980s. Sections of Bloom’s complaint about the rise of promiscuity and the breakdown of intellectual liveliness on American campuses read as if they are a brief for Charlotte Simmons, down to relatively minor characters, such as the arrogant and ugly Professor Quat, who compromises his standards of academic honesty in order to reward a student for his support of a gay rights march, much the way Bloom’s professors lose their intellectual integrity in the politics of the Sixties Left. Coincidentally (or not), Allan Bloom, who has also translated Emile, was similarly eager to suggest that women should withhold sex as a means of propagating the philosophic spirit.
     This seeming overlap between Wolfe and Bloom and their Rousseau-for-today notion of the connection between a woman’s purity and a man’s intellectual purpose worries me. Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind was a nasty piece, but in the end, those who don’t read Western political philosophy would be driven by the nerdy and almost charming middle of the book to give up reading it. If Wolfe is selling a similar set of complaints in a juicy novel, we have a greater concern. The sexual mores of American campuses may, indeed, reveal some terrible truths, and intellectual and moral life in America may well be impoverished, but to assume that a woman’s purity is some sort of antidote is to become a victim of these misconceptions, not their conqueror. Not only that, but the pursuit of sexual constraint for the sake of an intellectual and moral life runs the terrible danger of getting the cart before the horse — of creating a world where controlling desire becomes a goal for which we are more than willing to surrender our intellectual freedom and our moral autonomy.

WOLFE’S DUPONT UNIVERSITY offers a view of American life that seems to suggest that many of Rousseau’s dire promises about the evolution of the modern world have come true. Wolfe’s heroine, Charlotte Simmons, is a poor virgin from the countryside who struggles to remember herself in the wildness of an elite college community, where her roommate is status-conscious, boy- obsessed, anorexic and alcoholic, and her fellow male students range from terrified to rapacious, with few in the middle ranges of the spectrum. Adrift in a moneyed and sexually charged culture she doesn’t understand, Charlotte is given four choices: 1) She can pursue her first love, the intellectual life, by following a famous (but annoyingly smug) professor into the study of neuroscience; 2) She can seek to win the social status game by becoming the girlfriend of Hoyt Thorpe, a sexually rapacious and intellectually stunted fraternity boy; 3) She can become the loyal helpmeet of Adam Gellin, an ambitious young nerd who will certainly be a gentleman in matters sexual but whose delusions of grandeur are mind-numbing; or 4) She can attach herself to the captivated basketball player Jojo Johanssen, who is abysmally ignorant but finally willing to start using his mind. Charlotte tries all of these options. She is easily distracted from the intellectual route when Hoyt Thorpe becomes available. When he gets her drunk and unceremoniously takes her virginity, her remorse and self-loathing throw her into the arms of Adam Gellin. But as Adam’s nerdiness reveals itself as a kind of pathetic self absorption, Charlotte finds herself drifting to the side of Jojo, whom she had dismissed as intellectually unworthy soon after her arrival at Dupont University.
     Charlotte’s swing through her misadventures is set in a world where fashion, technology and various forms of getting ahead and getting famous dominate the consciousness of the characters while intellectual engagement (of the sort Jojo at last clumsily chooses) is pushed to the very outskirts of a student’s college experience. Even the "intellectual" crowd Adam hangs around with, the Millennial Mutants, are more interested in post-modern sloganeering than good old talking about books. The students’ futures are equally empty. The Hoyt set will compete for incomes and power in investment banking. Adam and his friends hope to win prestige and influence by garnering distinguished fellowships and positions of public leadership. No one, not even Charlotte, thinks about the moral and intellectual costs that must be paid to satisfy these goals. Human freedom? Independence of mind? Moral integrity? When Charlotte Simmons says, "I am Charlotte Simmons," these do not seem to be exactly the things about which she is thinking. Instead, her declaration of self is a defensive cry against a world where she feels out of step, unnoticed or ridiculous — usually because her clothes are not fashionable and she is sexually inexperienced. She is bravely asserting her optimism that she will eventually triumph in the Dupont world on terms the Dupont crowd will value — which is hardly the same as saying that she intends to forge a new and better way to live.
     To return to Rousseau after reading Wolfe is to hear a surprisingly familiar voice in an equally surprisingly radical source. Rousseau describes modern men as desperate creatures, molded by an unfortunate combination of material abundance and a mistaken notion of agency born in powerful but unexamined desire, sounding notes we hear echoed in Wolfe’s treatment of inequality and the competition for status throughout his novels. In his second discourse, the Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality Among Men, Rousseau charts the grievous course of man’s evolution from an animal-like prehistoric existence to the age of progress in which "vast forests were changed into smiling fields which had to be watered with the sweat of men, and in which slavery and misery were soon seen to germinate and grow with the crops." Heedless of the danger to either their freedom or the "sweetest sentiments" of early society, men followed technological developments into a brutal competition for wealth — what Rousseau describes as "consuming ambition, the fervor to raise one’s relative fortune less out of true need than in order to place oneself above others." Eventually most men are miserable, Rousseau explains, consenting "to wear chains in order to give them to others in turn." Rousseau deplores the fact that progress in our sciences and arts has given men more efficient means, and often the reasons, for destroying each other in words that might summarize the career of Wolfe’s doomed real estate developer Charlie Croker in A Man in Full or the ambitions of Hoyt Thorpe at Dupont University in I am Charlotte Simmons. Rousseau writes:

     Rousseau is troubled, as Wolfe will later be, by the question of what sort of man might live in a world where competition for material advancement undermines our attachment to self determination and where even philosophy, forged in this battle for more of everything, serves to estrange one man from another — "because of it he says in secret, at the sight of a suffering man: Perish if you will, I am safe." Men cannot be simply urged to turn back to their souls, as Socrates might have admonished his young interlocutors in Athens. In the eighteenth century Rousseau is already writing for an era in which the discoveries of science have caused great doubts about the existence or integrity of a human soul. Rousseau actually footnotes the sort of research on primates that laid the foundation for the scientific worldview Wolfe talks about in his Forbes article on the cultural fallout of contemporary neuroscience, "Sorry, But Your Soul Just Died." Offering up the despair Wolfe will later claim modern neuroscience teaches, Rousseau writes, "[T]he human soul, altered in the bosom of society by a thousand continually renewed causes, by the acquisition of a mass of knowledge and errors, by changes that occurred in the constitution of bodies, and by the continual impact of the passions, has, so to speak, changed its appearance to the point of being nearly unrecognizable."
     We are trapped in a miserable, competitive world, where even our ethical studies are but instruments for our advancement among others. And we cannot forsake this world in honor of our souls because we no longer know our souls; we have done away with them through science. What we need, Rousseau concludes, are men who can erect a moral freedom in the place where natural freedom once was. In other words, Rousseau thinks we might construct a "soul" as a form of disciplined response to the conditions around us. In order to do that, we must educate men to be immune to lures toward the frenzied competition for ever greater material well being and status. Engendering this immunity is difficult, because the process of becoming a social being has changed men’s sense of self love from a generalized desire for self preservation to amour propre, a relative self love satisfied only with the receipt of the approval — and even envy — of others. In his second discourse, Rousseau locates the origin of amour propre in the earliest cohabitation of man and woman. In Emile: Or, on Education, his handbook for how to raise a man who can live sociably without being prone to the vices encouraged by amour propre, Rousseau takes on the question of how to arrange matters between men and women so as to achieve a better result. Emile is the pupil. The narrator, with views pleasingly similar to the author’s, is Emile’s tutor. The early education of Emile, conducted, like Charlotte Simmons’s early education in a home far removed from the materialistic hustle and bustle of urban life, is easy enough until Emile reaches adolescence. Then, despite reasonable efforts the tutor makes to prolong Emile’s childhood, Emile’s burgeoning sense of sexuality finally drives them both from isolation. In this way, Rousseau addresses themes that his translator, Bloom, and eventually, Wolfe, will engage in their own writing about adolescents.
     Emile’s tutor sees his pupil’s adolescence as a dangerous moment in which lust for women, and for the things of others, can lure him into the very society he has been educated to combat. But the tutor is also aware that Emile’s awakening to the world around him gives him the opportunity to form relationships that will shape him as a moral being. "This adolescent fire, far from being an obstacle to education, is the means of consummating and completing it. It gives you a hold on a young man’s heart when he ceases to be weaker than you," says Rousseau’s tutor-narrator. At first the attachment that guides Emile is the one he has for his tutor, but over time he must transfer it. With his tutor’s help Emile attaches himself instead to Sophie, a young woman who has also been carefully raised. Sophie’s education has emphasized womanly virtues that are the complement to Emile’s forthright, masculine sturdiness. He has been taught to ignore worldly opinion and eschew dissimulation, while she has been taught to manage appearances in order to cultivate a modest reputation and to manipulate her self presentation so that the very task of understanding her feelings for him imposes a useful discipline upon Emile.
     Contrary to the view of feminist critics such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Sophie is not simply an attractive and docile puppy offered as a prize to the well-behaved Emile. She has been raised in her own experience of discipline, a constraint to domestic duties that Emile’s tutor sees as desirable for women. "Do not deprive them of gaiety, laughter, noise, and frolicsome games…[but] do not allow for a single instant in their lives that they no longer know any restraint," he says. "The first and most important quality of a woman is gentleness. As she is made to obey a being who is so imperfect, often so full of vices, and always so full of defects as a man, she ought to learn early to endure even injustice and to bear a husband’s wrongs without complaining." These constraints dampen Sophie’s ambitions, especially her intellectual urges, as the tutor explains is appropriate to a woman’s situation. Still, the constraints also bolster other qualities of Sophie’s, such as her ability to cloak her surging emotions in a modesty the tutor describes as "imposing" and her capacity to turn away sweet-mouthed seducers by saying, "Monsieur, I am very much afraid I know all those things better than you do. If we have nothing less banal to say, I believe we can terminate the conversation here."
     Wolfe’s Charlotte Simmons is a made-for-today Sophie. Like Sophie, Charlotte has been raised under a gentle but firm taskmaster, her Christian mother. Like Sophie, Charlotte is imposing in her modesty. Also like Sophie, she turns away the early advances of men with a cool sense of their intellectual inferiority. Furthermore, in the scene in which the geeky Adam watches Charlotte’s body as she exercises in the college fitness center in plain, gray shorts, we can say that, while her choices change over time, Charlotte even comes to Dupont dressed like Sophie: "When someone sees her, he says, ‘Here is a modest, temperate girl.’ But so long as he stays near her, his eyes and his heart roam over her whole person without his being able to take them away; and one would say that all this very simple attire was put on only to be taken off piece by piece by the imagination."
     Emile is driven crazy by Sophie. He commits himself to labor, and eventually, to self-effacing service to community members in an effort to assuage his passions and win her heart. He misses a meeting with his beloved to help a suffering man, and when she confronts him he says, "Sophie, you are the arbiter of my fate. You know it well. You can make me die of pain. But do not hope to make me forget the rights of humanity. They are more sacred than yours. I will never give them up for you." At last Emile has succeeded in so sublimating his own ambitions that Sophie comes to trust him and take him as her own: "Emile, take this hand. It is yours. Be my husband and master when you wish. I will try to merit this honor." Emile wins Sophie’s submission, but he has been put through so much by both Sophie and his tutor that some of Rousseau’s readers, such as scholar Denise Schaeffer, express some doubt as to who indeed is the real master in the relationship. Sophie has beautifully demonstrated what Rousseau calls the "empire" of women. Emile goes out in the world to seek a better understanding of politics and returns to his wife with a more robust sense of justice; Sophie’s imposing modesty has served the quest for moral freedom in the larger community in the way that Rousseau argues (ironically) the women of Geneva do (or should do) by employing a "chaste power, exercised solely in conjugal union [that] makes itself felt only for the glory of the State and the public happiness!"
     Charlotte Simmons has no such easy triumph. At least two men, Adam and Jojo, are somewhat Emile-like in their responses to Charlotte. Jojo finds her rejection of his intellectual laziness in the for-jocks-only French class compelling. As Charlotte walks away from him after their first day of class, basketball player Jojo thought, "It didn’t matter what a brain she was. In fact, there was something nice and feminine about that. It went with a look she had. She wasn’t just some hot number . . . . She looked like an illustration from one of those fairy-tale books where the young woman is under a spell or something and can’t come to until she gets a kiss from the young man who loves her, the kind of girl who looks pure — yet that very thing about her gives you even more of the old tingle." Adam is eager to show her that he is an intellectual who can "operate on a higher level" — at first through introductions to his friends and later in his demonstrated sexual restraint when, depressed and desperate for human contact, she sleeps in his bed. Nonetheless, Charlotte chooses Hoyt, travels with him to the drunken orgy that is his fraternity formal, and finally, terribly drunk herself, looses her virginity to him only to have him and her friends mock her. Alas, Charlotte is no Sophie, carefully holding herself apart from a worthy lover until he demonstrates his commitment to fundamental human values.
     Why doesn’t Charlotte Simmons have Sophie’s triumph? To be fair to Wolfe, he shows men to be largely to blame. There are only two strong women in Charlotte’s life — her mother and Mrs. Pennington — and both of these women are so entirely stuck in the backwoods world of Sparta, North Carolina that they can neither anticipate nor prepare Charlotte for the wanton ways of Dupont University. We can’t even lay the blame entirely with Hoyt Thorpe because we learn that he is actually a poor kid who has simply created himself in the image of men with greater wealth and status: his fraternity brothers, the alumni fathers and even the governor of California, whom Thorpe observes receiving oral sex from an undergraduate. Adam is not attractive in part because the models of the intellectual ascendancy he seeks are people like Professor Quat who are simply repelling as individuals. Is Victor Ransome Starling, the neuroscientist who singles out Charlotte as an especially gifted student, any better? Not at all. In his service to science, he tells her she has no soul! She may get a cold sort of intellectual gratification as his star student, but she cannot be expected to learn from him any means of quieting the tumult of urges in her adolescent self. In fact, if we are honest with Charlotte in the way her Mama would encourage her to be with herself, Charlotte’s virginity isn’t entirely stolen; she wants Hoyt to want her, dresses sexily, feels powerful desire for him and lets him at her body. She simply doesn’t know enough about the rules of Hoyt’s world to understand how used her submission to him will make her feel. Jojo treats her better; he is even willing to accept a relationship with her in which he must "win her affections in the fullness of time." Jojo, however, beats the odds. Certainly no one is expecting such restraint from him — not his coach, not the alumni supporters, not his teammates.
     Charlotte fails because she is without the protections that Sophie’s parents and Emile’s tutor give them, and Wolfe puts the blame for that vulnerability squarely on the male-dominated society within which Dupont exists. But the final effect of Wolfe’s novel is not to teach us why male dominance is unacceptable, or even why the powerful social and economic inequalities that structure male dominance and drive the ambitions of Hoyt, Adam and Jojo are unacceptable. Instead, by beginning the novel with Hoyt’s drunken musings on the greatness of Dupont and Dupont men and ending the book with Hoyt’s undoing and Jojo’s triumph, Wolfe gives us a masculine frame for understanding the significance of Charlotte’s losses. What is the great moral of Wolfe’s tale of orgiastic Dupont? When women are free for the taking, men take license. And when men take license, they lose their chance for a full manhood, one in which the intellectual and moral selves are whole. In a world where Charlotte (and the other nice girls like the one who gives a blow job to a sad and powerless-though-not-impotent Jojo) can not be had, men will work harder to win women, and, in the process, become better men.