I slept with a professor actually, when I was an undergrad. It was all right. What I didn’t get then, but figured out much later, was that while I thought I had some kind of power by being desired by him, the sex we had, and our “relationship” was a joke to him. I was just a warm body to him, not capable of being more. I’ve slept with a lot of people, one or two of them sicker than he was, but there is something diminishing about being treated as a pet, about having one’s ideas and memories considered diverting and being so easily forgotten. I don’t think it did me any good. He wrote me a letter of recommendation for a fellowship after it was over. I was too inexperienced to realize it wasn’t a very good letter. I was 20. He was 40. Should there be a law against it? No one would obey the law, nor be any wiser if they did. I can’t help noticing that while there seems to be no shortage of academics in favor of teacher/student relationships these days, I have yet to see any young women coming forward clamoring for the right to be taken seriously after having sex with older men who are unlikely to relate to them as equals. I suppose those in favor of these relationships would say that they’re only talking about “healthy” relationships. If you’ve only been an “adult” for 2 years, how are you supposed to tell? Maybe we have these taboos for a reason. Yes, yes, our culture is horribly repressive and none of us are allowed to be who we truly are because we’re so uptight about sex. There are lots of things in life it’s okay to want, but that it’s not okay to take.

anon, at 11:40 am EDT on September 27, 2007

Thanks for the succulence

“But it seems to me we might also ask: how dare we ignore the human cost being exacted each time we ourselves look at our own students and, if we look with desire, reach instead for a rhetorical hot flannel?” Terry Caeser, Do I dare eat a peach?

“An attack on the roots of passion means an attack on the roots of life.” Nietzsche, Twighlight of the Idols

What a refreshing (and unfortunately a probably soon to be trashed by many who will willfully miss the point) discussion on sexuality and our American obsession with Pauline-Augustinian notions of “sin” (though you didn’t bring that term in) when broaching life’s most exciting gift. The myth of the negotiability of a feeling state underlies the misbegotten notions of human autonomy that pervades our culture from Plato to W. Nietzsche summed it up in Twilight of the Idols when he collapsed the problems of Western culture to 2,000 years of sexual repression. The very feeling of sexual excitement itself has been demonized and the repressions of vocal zealous fews have put us all into a world of circumspect “quotation marks.” Is power predation acceptable? Of course not. Does this mean sex is a burden of unspeakable sin, that like the pathetic Augustine we must despise ourselves and despair of ever being “innocent” and “pure"? What bosh. We might as well blaim the knife for the murder. Terry, you said it all. Why the delusion that passion and desire is something that can, and must, be controlled, not in its acting out, but in its very phenomenal emergence? Augustine saw his inability to prevent this emergence as proof positive of his fundamental, innate depravity, rather than the actuality that his ego demanded to be supernatural, godlike. You speak of the codes telling us, and assuming, that sexual feelings are negotiable, rational behaviors. This has been something I have argued against to others only to the return of askance blank incomprehensive stares. I take those required “ethics” courses online several times a year for every school that employs me as an adjunct, and normally ace them. Yet I once erred in an answer when I had missed the important point that any time an (adult) person has occupational superiority over another (adult) person, despite interest on the side of both persons, dating is strictly verboten. These were the stated conditions of the case: Ms. Lolly Gagge shows interest in supervisor, Jack Goff, a nice, kind, decidedly unabusive type guy, who after a few months asks her to dinner. Is this “ethical"? Sure, why not.? Oh no, says the tube god — he is her supervisor. Go back and answer it right. Case closed. “I’m depraved,” I reasoned. The vast majority of sex is not predation, and there is no sin in having natural hypothalamic processes. Sexual attraction to adolescents is not the same as sexual activity with them, and it is not pedophilia, either (check the DSM for what that actually is — for now, it is sufficient that one must have not reached puberty to qualify as the “ped” with which the “phile” is enamored). ” The power of sex? It must be equal, and take place only between- — or among — equals. Never mind that to much of the rest of the world such notions about sex are fatuous.” This is a courageous (ironically framed) statement in the present American puritan revival, in which we attempt to ignore the slaughter we have directly and indirectly wrought on Iraq while we piously swath ourselves in deeming “moral” such things as demanding abstinence only sex education, federal laws preventing brain-dead patients from being allowed to die (Terry Schiavala) and refering to blastulae as “Boys and girls” when disallowing potentially lifesaving stem-cell research. The dilemmas you wrote of and particularly heartening, to stand up for the right to have sexual passion and feelings, gave a good start to my day. Jan Arnold

Jan Arnold, at 12:35 pm EDT on September 27, 2007

Sex With An Assistant Professor of Psychology???

Two things ...

First, I’m not inclined to take kgotthardt’s comments too seriously. That’s because all of his neural activity was apparently swarming around the thought of sex with a fifteen year old. I wonder what his reaction was to Kevin Spacey’s fantasies in “American Beauty” ... or what would he have written had the object of his thoughts been a hot, twenty-year-old, University of Alabama sophomore?

In any event, I read anon’s post with some sympathy. And I’d like to recommend that all coeds be required to participate in a thirty-minute seminar during freshman orientation in which Hoyer’s Insecurity Theory is presented and discussed. According to Hoyer – and he concedes that not all academics reach their station in life via the “insecurity route” – his theory explains why well over 60% of all “professors” (interpreted broadly) choose that profession.

Here’s how it works ...

STEP 1. At some stage of the game – grade school, junior high, high school, somewhere – John discovers that he has an aptitude for succeeding in school (not to be confused with having intellectual interests).

STEP 2. John goes to college ... not necessarily because he was “successful” at Step 1, but because everyone goes to college. Oh, wow, for a reason he may or may not understand, he does fairly well in college.

STEP 3. John graduates from college. Ouch! he’s confronted with a difficult choice. He can either go out into the hard, cruel world or he can – because he’s got a feel for this sort of thing and it’s pretty easy for him – go to graduate school.

[Note: Some go on to professional schools and, although there’s a fork in HIT at that point, Hoyer asks us to take his word for the fact that it still “works” for those who take that route. Of course, only a very few go to graduate school to get a master’s degree. Master’s degrees are consolation prizes for those who are not up to what is required to get a Ph.D. Those with master’s degrees go on to be high school teachers (and coaches, counselors, or assistant principals), and those with master’s degrees plus eighteen hours can become professors at community colleges.

STEP 4. John gets a Ph.D. Ouch! he’s confronted with a difficult choice. Either he can go out into the hard, cruel world or he can – because he’s got a feel for this sort of thing and it’s pretty easy for him and because he was required to do some teaching and research as a graduate student – become a professor.

He knows he won’t make fortune – although the work is fairly steady and the income is predictable – but society at large has wonderful misconceptions about selfless professors who eschew the financial rewards of their educations and devote their lives to the children of others. They also have the mistaken notion that educated people – and we’re all educated aren’t we? (that’s the easy part) – are also intellectuals and scholars. John won’t tell if you won’t.

STEP 5. John become a college or university professor ... and please call him Dr. Pro, Ph.D.

That’s the end of HIT, but, for the purpose of freshman orientation, here’s my addendum ...

STEP 6. Being the insecure person he is and being generally revered by a public that hasn’t got a clue, John is prone to earlier, longer, and more intensive mid-life crises than the next guy.

STEP 7. John finds himself in an environment with a very large number of young, vulnerable, respectful (and often adoring) individuals ... oh, did I mention that they’re women and a very large number of them are at that stage of their lives where they’re experimenting with freedom and independence.

STEP 8. You know, things have not been going that well for John. He has been living with his family so long they can see right through his insecurity. And his colleagues have a very accurate sense of his professional (in)competence. He imagines an affair with a young co-ed will satisfy his pathetic quest for respect and power ... and demonstrate that he has still got what it takes.

Now if young women like anon had been forewarned about these dorks during freshman orientation, she probably would have spent those experimental years in college in the sack with a much more interesting and appreciative collection of individuals.

I can’t help responding to kgotthardt, “Just for the record: sex with a 40 year old associate professor of English literature?? YUCK!!!

Frizbane Manley, at 1:30 pm EDT on September 27, 2007

Well, after Jan Arnold’s comment, dare I make one myself accept to say hurray for you Jan Arnold and hurray to Terry. Of course a relation between a student and a teacher may be abusive. But the idea that the teacher is always in a position of power and that the relation is always contingent on this relation between the powerful and powerless is absurd... better still it is American, for all the reasons Arnold suggests. I was just reaching for my Garcia Marquez “Love in a Time of Cholera” and “Memorias de mis tristes putas” to refresh my memory concerning power vs non power in these novels, and by extension in another culture, when two of my own female students walked in. And being in my “position of power” I could not avoid the temptation to ask them about the question. One assured me that women are always in the position of power (unless under some physical duress which we are not talking about here anyway) since it is always she who decides in the first place, and she who lets him know whether she is interested or not. The she, according to my student and I am only repeating what I heard, can be the student or the teacher. The second student went on to say how a friend of hers fell in love with her high school teacher; they went on to have an affair in which they both loved each other very deeply, deeply enough so that he left his job. It ended however, when she, not he, moved on... to Chile and then to college.

As for me... as far as I am concerned. Teaching itself is a kind of seduction. You can’t teach something you love “desde las entrañas’ without including the physical and the sensuous. You teach to the whole... the body and the soul... I’m literature, but maybe even math is taught this way. You get the student to fall in love with the subject and to the extent that you are part of the subject, with you. Do you go to bed later? Well, sometimes you do, provided that you understand that a true feeling of love, even when it involves the physical, renders the issue moot. No one is in power or out of power. You are essentially powerless. And that’s something we have to consider.

Vincent Spina, at 2:20 pm EDT on September 27, 2007

Attraction in the Classroom

A review of the basics will help. 1. We have appetites and they are not self-regulating. 2. Reason is their regulator. 3. The more mature we are the more reason-based direction (not suppression)we should be able to exercise. 4. As teachers we need to be moved by genuine caring, a kind of friendship, for the welfare of our students. 5. Our students, for the most part, will find happiness in life by looking for and finding a mate who will be faithful to them and most likely, raise a family with them. 6. Male teachers can help students see the path toward that future as possible and delightful if they model being a person in love with his wife, faithful to her in every way, and capable of directing his sexual appetites toward her and not toward others just because they sit in chairs in front of him. 7. The young woman who concludes from this environment: “There are good men out there and I am going to be the kind of woman who can find one, love him dearly and be faithful to him and have happy kids as a result” is one toward whom the teacher has been a real friend.

Stanislaus Dundon, Professor Emeritus at California State University, at 3:25 pm EDT on September 27, 2007

On Being On The Wrong Side Again

Omigod, here I am again ... wanting to be on the side of Jan Arnold – and even desiring to invite her up to my place to examine my sketches – and I am resorting to being Mr. Dumb Ass.

My dear Jan, you cite Plato; i.e., ”Even that anal rationalist Plato understood Eros (read passion, desire, yes, interpersonal pleasure) as behind all teaching — not agape or any other such de-fleshed non-sense-ical abstraction,”

I, on the other hand being older than Jan, want to back up a generation and cite Socrates ... “My love for this fellow [Agathon, another member of the party who was a beautiful young boy] is not an insignificant affair.”

Sadly, another member of the party, Alcibiades, also loved Agathon and tried to discredit the great master ... “Socrates is lovingly fixated on beautiful young men and is always around them ... in a daze.”

Of course Socrates was one of the most influential scholars in ancient Greece (what would Plato and Aristotle have been without him), and was in fact put to death for what the authorities thought was leading the youth of Athens astray.

Touche! my beloved Jan!

Frizbane Manley, at 4:15 pm EDT on September 27, 2007

MOTS (more of the same)

Whee! Frizbane you shelled it all in a nut — gracias! All I know of your examples is Lolita (the novel) and this is in fact a deep human study — Xtian morality flees the dark Humbertian debate with its pat and pathetic “morality.” JA

Jan Arnold, at 4:20 pm EDT on September 27, 2007

Doesn’t Pesci eat Peaches?

A forty-two year old teacher of high school French is facing a fifteen year felony charge in my home town (Roseville, Michigan) for having intercourse with a seventeen year-old male. (I don’t say “man” because the media doesn’t. The only way for a teenage male to merit the designation “man” is if he commits a crime.) The “victim” is not under the age for statutory rape, but was “abused” by a person with greater power, greater authority. Only if the “child” were nineteen would the perpetrator not be charged with a felony, though she would still lose her employment. (Disparity or asymmetry of power, of course, is what Dworkinites say every man has over every woman, with the consequence that all heterosexual intercourse is an act of rape. Perhaps that is where society is headed, the criminalization of male-female sex.) The age of innocence is certainly rising. Sixteen becomes nineteen and soon may hit twenty-one.

Yet, the greatest “love story” of our time, and maybe of all time in America, is the relationship between Mary Kay LeTourneau and her student Vili Faluau (?), which began when she was 32 and he 12. Not all the king’s horses nor all the kings men could keep these two apart.

John Bonnell, at 4:50 am EDT on September 28, 2007