I had just brushed my teeth and got into my PJs, when I checked my Google Reader one last time before I actually got into bed. I came across something that will no doubt haunt my dreams, and I want it to haunt yours too. Let's hope this is just an English thing, but read and be disgusted (via Dana at The Edge of the American West):
The fault lies with the females. The myth is that an affair between a student and her academic lover represents an abuse of his power. What power? Thanks to the accountability imposed by the Quality Assurance Agency and other intrusive bodies, the days are gone when a scholar could trade sex for upgrades. I know of two girls who, in 1982, got firsts in biochemistry from a south-coast university in exchange for favours to a professor, but I know of no later scandals.
But girls fantasise. This was encapsulated by Beverly in Tom Wolfe's novel I Am Charlotte Simmons, who forces herself on to JoJo, the campus sports star, with the explanation that "all girls want sex with heroes". On an English campus, academics can be heroes.
Normal girls - more interested in abs than in labs, more interested in pecs than specs, more interested in triceps than tripos - will abjure their lecturers for the company of their peers, but nonetheless, most male lecturers know that, most years, there will be a girl in class who flashes her admiration and who asks for advice on her essays. What to do?
Enjoy her! She's a perk. She doesn't yet know that you are only Casaubon to her Dorothea, Howard Kirk to her Felicity Phee, and she will flaunt you her curves. Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife.
This was written by Terence Kealey, a vice-chancellor at the University of Buckingham. And though I'd like to think it was written, oh, say 70-or-so years ago, it was written in 2009.
There's just so much wrong with this, I don't even know where to begin. I mean, we all know that (to quote Dana) "all professors are married men." And we know that "normal" girls are vapid anti-intellectuals, so that's not problematic. Nor is the power dynamic between a professor and a student unbalanced or cause for discomfort.
Really, what got to me was that gross little turn of phrase: "Which you should admire daily to spice up your sex, nightly, with the wife."
This is one of those things that does happen, though. And, without naming names, it's happened at least twice in my time at Oberlin. To be perfectly honest, it's not so much the affairs that bother me--I don't like to make it a habit of judging a person's sex life--as much as it is the perverse rational for the affairs as stated so clearly (and ickily) by Kealey. It's scandalous, but acceptable, I guess, for older married men to ogle doe-eyed female students, but any deviation from that archetype is, well, absent from the discourse, as they say.
Even in narratives that purport to turn this oft-romanticized relationship on its head (i.e. Franzen's The Corrections or Tim O'Brien's Tomcat in Love) end up falling into a different sort of trap: older professor taken advantage by scheming nymphet co-eds.
Yes, the problem isn't so much in the specifics--though I imagine it could, sometimes, be. That is, it's possible, I suppose (at least in principle) to have a healthy sexual relationship between a professor and a student, and it's possible (and, I'd imagine, due to the fucked up power dynamics) to have an unhealthy sexual relationship. But the truly sick thing is the cultural background against which these relationships take place, viz. casting college women as either doe-eyed know-nothings or scheming predators and male (always male) college professors as either sex symbols or helpless fools, hoodwinked by the allure youth.
It's that part makes me feel a little queasy.
Two other quick thoughts: (1) this is the exact problem I'm having in writing for Oberlin Blogs. Lately, when I feel the impulse to blog its either to (a) make fun of Republicans, (b) post links to inane things I find while I should be studying, or (c) come across news entirely unsuited to giving prospies an impression of Oberlin life. So, instead, I churn out about a paragraph a day of dead prose about this or that thing I'm doing right now, which even I am bored to tears while reading, and, meanwhile, my already paroxysmal posting there gets downright pathetic.
(2) This is more serious. I'm going to repost pretty much the entirety of Dana's post at The Edge of the American West because it's spot on:
it really should go without saying that female students are not “perks” and it’s entirely possible that the curvy young woman asking for help on an essay just wants help on an essay, and good advice would not say “look, but don’t touch”, but “be a professional.”
The problem here is not the common claim that Kealey was brave enough to voice that “look, don’t touch” ethic that all professors have towards their female students but are terrified to mention because of the fear of PC police. It flirts with establishing the idea that female students should expect to be ogled, and as long as one goes home and tackles the wife afterwards in lieu of taking up with the student, there’s no harm done.
As we say here, knock knock.
Lastly, to take your minds of off the sex lives of old British professors, here's Glenn Beck killing an analogy and a frog:
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