Perspective

Great post, Belle. And as for telling your personal story, if it helps kids like Mei-Mei and Zoe in the future… Yes I know, but one can only hope.

Kealy’s article isn’t very funny, but, just for perspective, he isn’t joking about sexually predating on students, or ogling them, but about what you should do if a student makes a pass at or tries to flirt with you. And the message is: keep off. I don’t think anyone has suggested (have they?) that female students are made uncomfortable in any way by Kealy in real life.

Kealey’s article is trying (and failing) for the comedy of complicity: ‘we know we’re not supposed to think this, but we all do, don’t we?’ As if you stood up in a group of historical publishers and said: ‘Haven’t the Nazis been good for us?’ or told a bunch of academics that you’re trying to develop a lecture theatre with a built in device for giving small electric shocks to the seats of the more irritating students. There are some comedians very good at doing this (Ricky Gervais, for example), but it relies on your audience all sharing the same guilty secret.

Kealey’s guilty secret is that he wants (female) students to lust after him and he wrongly assumes that all other lecturers feel the same, or at least all the other lecturers who matter, who are straight men like him. (This is probably because he has read too many novels in which other middle aged men create female characters who lust after middle-aged lecturers).

This in itself just makes him look pathetic. But the problem is when this desire for someone to lust after you makes you interpret any friendly gesture from the people concerned as evidence for that lust. It’s the stalker mentality: ‘they smiled at me, therefore they must really go for me, therefore it’s OK to try and fondle them, because that’s what they really want’. Maybe Kearney is just self-delusional about his capacity for comedy; but if he’s self-delusional about his attractiveness as well, I wouldn’t want to be one of his students.

“If you think that Kealy’s female students are unable to perceive that he regards their pulchritude as a “perk” of his job”

I don’t think either of us have anything to base an opinion on one way or another. If a few pop up to say he is a lech, that will be a different. But either way, the article (apart from not being very funny) is not really all that shocking. It is just making the uncontroversial points that if a femail student flirst with a male prof, it is most likely a passing crush that does not reflect on his powers of attraction and he should keep his hands off. The experiences you describe in this blog are of another order altogether.

And all teachers in higher ed that I know, do enjoy the sexually attractive students that they teach, in my experience the women as much or more than the men. I have a lesbian friend who teaches an arts course who is very funny about the pleasures and pains of resisting the flirtations of attractive female students who develop a sudden bi-curious crush. I think she considers it more of a perk than a punishment.

Belle,

Forgive me for being dense, but I’m unsure which point you are trying to make with what is undoubtedly a powerful post:

1. Teachers should not feel X.
2. Teachers should not admit to feeling X.
3. Teachers should not jokingly admit to feeling X (as opposed to regretfully admitting to feeling X).
4. Teachers should not admit to feeling X — jokingly or not — in places where students will hear that admission.
5. Teachers who violate Rules 2-4 are more likely to — perhaps are the kinds of people who are predisposed to — act on feelings of X.
…
Are there other options? Of course, perhaps your story is mainly a cautionary tale — one that is not designed to produce or to support a general rule. Still, I think the question is worth asking, given the reaction of commenters like John.

I’ll refrain from pointing to the sentences that made me create the above list and simply ask for your thoughts.

Yehbut, the medium is the message here, isn’t it? The guy’s writing in his trade magazine saying “heheheh, guys, eh, those yummy little coeds? We all want to, don’t we? Don’t we? But you know you shouldn’t! Just have a good old stare and then go back home and shag the wife! We all do it, don’t we?”. Well no we don’t. If I was an academic, I’d be quite angry at the insinuation. The content of it is that male academics fantasise about their students while having sex with their wives. That’s actually quite objectionable in about a dozen different ways.

The tone is a bit snickery but, no, I think it is pretty clear that the intention was to satirise the ‘casaubons’ who imagine that undergrads with a crush have fallen for their enormous sexual charsima, and to underscore the message that you shouldn’t be deluded into going anywhere with it. He is explicit that the subject are those undergrads who make passes at profs, not the general population. He was asked to do a funny piece on lust and it looks like he lost control of the style to me.

Here’s a question I’ve been turning over for years: what’s your responsibility if you know that someone (say, a faculty member or a boss) has sexually harassed people, but those people don’t want to (or can’t) come forward?

This is incredibly difficult. I know of a case where a Senior Lecturer and minor celeb. was widely known among thhe student body to be a serial sexual exploiter of undergrads. In this instance it was not only that none of the students affected complained, but the man vermin’s wife (who was emotionally abused in various ways) was aware of what was going on and lived in terror of it blowing up.

My informant here was a friend of the wife, and kept quiet because she was asked to, and feels badly about doing so, but what can you do?

“Kealey is going with not merely the “she was asking for it” defense, but universalizing that defense – “they are all asking for it”. ”

This is what is odd about this particular hoo-ha. How on earth can anyone read that into an article urging professors not to have sex with undergraduates?

John, if you permit me: “Oh, b*ll*cks!”, this isn’t about finding the view of the opposite or same sex pleasing, this is about mixing your perspectives & then being able to hide under complexity of real life. It’s not because you’re friend is lesbian that she’s not able of being at risk of crossing an abundantly clear line – the pleasure and pain of resisting flirtation IS flirtation.

If you think that Kealy’s female students are unable to perceive that he regards their pulchritude as a “perk” of his job,

Suppose that they hadn’t. Suppose that he’s the model of propriety and discretion, who actually does look away as soon as he can, though not before what he calls the “flash of appreciation” has, apparently, burned itself into his retinas. [It’s a hypothetical. He presumably thinks this about himself, at least.]

They sure know *now*, don’t they? Moreover, they know what that image will be doing on his retinas later.

He seems to have believed ex ante that he could just have these unspoken charged moments with some subset of his female students who were [in his mind] deliberately flirting with him. Again, suppose that he’s right. In writing this piece he took them out of the privacy of his mind and made them accessible to *every* female student who has to go into his office.

Belle’s almost certainly right that what he thought he kept to himself, he didn’t successfully– but in the act of writing this piece, he’s guaranteed that. And so the writing of it was an added, unteacherly, thing to do, harmful to his current and future students, above and beyond his underlying attitudes.

This issue is fraught but I can testify at least that in the period 1964-1980 or so, at the height of the sexual revolution so-called, questions about age and power differentials between partners, the question of defining “underage”, and the question of faculty-student relationships were obscured by a battle between two absolute positions: the old conservative, mostly christian definition of chastity, and the new position of “anything goes, and anyone who objects to any kind of sexual activity is a puritan”. The people in between with a more nuanced view were swamped.

I have lots of anecdata. A friend of mine said her parents’ friends started hitting on her when she was about 14. A single parent of a 15 year old girl basically doubledated with her daughter. Famous cases from Oregon are Sen. Packwood and Gov. Goldschmidt, both of whom hit on their HS age babysitters, with long term harm in the latter case. (Packwood’s babysitter was disgusted and repelled the advance. She actually had a boyfriend already, a college student about 22 years old.) A HS principal who fondled his student aides. A HS football coach who married a girl right after she graduated.

In college both gay and straight faculty student relationships were common, and two couples married upon the woman’s graduation. It was all don’t ask don’t tell keep it out of the papers and police docket, but I knew about a lot of it and I wasn’t all that tuned into the gossip. One of these marriages seems to have been ideally happy — I still meet them occasionally. One was unhappy in the normal range, according to report. The couple married out of HS is reportedly still married, and the wife is a lawyer now.

As an instance of the older pattern, my brother-in-law-to-be was jailed in small town Minnesota when his girlfriend’s mother found them in bed together. It was a knagaroo court and I don’t know what the charge was — he was actually younger than her.

Around that time I also met a Hollywood girl about 13-14 who’d been sent to Oregon to get her out of the orgy scene she’d been in, all with boys only slightly older than her. But in Oregon she picked up a boyfriend in his 20s.

It was really like a validation of the slippery-slope argument that if you don’t have absolute and somewhat arbitrary rules, chaos ensues. As I’ve noted many times elsewhere, there was a nationwide correction consisting of the change of the age of consent, which had been as low as 12 in some states ( and not just the ones you’d expect, it was very low in Hawaii and Iowa. ) Basically the old rule was replaced by a new rule, showing that chaos doesn’t last forever. The age now is 18 in most states and 16 in some, and there are little adapters for cases when one partner is not too much older than the other (say 21 and 17).

Belle’s case was compounded by the apparent fact that the guy was either inept or mean or both. I was briefly checked out by my piano teacher, who I’d been warned about, but after a brief uncomfortable period he became my best teacher ever. He was a very gentlemanly and considerate guy, but if the student was interested, as I wasn’t, the guy did date students.

To my knowledge none of the above cases involved date rape but many involved power differentials. Date rape is usually anything goes compounded by gross sexism and in Polanski’s case, abuse of power.

Pro forma: I have no skeletons in my closet and no doog in this fight, but this has struck me for a long time as an instance of an actual, observable change, after a period of chaos, from one system of rules to a different one which is laxer in one sense (toleration of “fornication”) and stricter in another (attention to power differentials, sexism, and age differences) .

But you still have worst-of-all-possible-worlds attitudes, which is Las Vegas/Texas high-roller social conservatives who are indulgent of straight male excess but strict about female and gay excess, and likewise tolerant of dominant white male excess and harsh on lumpen excess.

It just recommends that male profs do not delude themseolves into thinking it is OK to sleep with undergrads

it also recommends that they fantasise about having sex with undergrads while doing so with their wives; am I just some sort of old-fashioned type or is this really not much of a way to behave?

I have a certain amount of sympathy for John M’s point of view – he’s not actually advocating anything horrendous, it’s just a bunch of really ill-advised and crass humour. But it is really crass and unpleasant, and there does have to be some recognition and social sanction for that. Jacob is exactly right; this sort of coarse, laddish humour isn’t harmless or victimless and a bit of scolding and shaming is totally appropriate. Kealey shouldn’t lose his job over this, but he ought to lose a sufficient proportion of his bonus to make him think twice about doing anything similar ever again.

I hate to pile on here … well, okay, no, I don’t. Sorry to repeat the obvious, but Belle is exactly right that Kealy’s piece is boorishly insulting, humiliating, and awful to his female students. And John Meredith’s argument that the piece is simply an awkward lame-humor cautionary nudge to Kealy’s colleagues is false by omission. Yes, John, he’s literally saying, don’t fuck your students. But the reason why Kealy thinks you shouldn’t fuck your students is that you can’t get away with exchanging sex for grades any longer, because the fools in the administration have stripped you of that privilege. Kealy is telling his colleagues of a certain age that the nature of the ‘perk’ that students are for their professors has changed. You may now look but you can’t touch, no matter how you may miss the days when you could. And the extra trouble is that all those sluts will abuse their new power over you by continuing to try to get you to fuck them, so you have to be strong in the face of temptation, and don’t let them trick you into thinking they really find you attractive.

John Meredith,

in re “placing fault:”

Kealey has a notion in his odd brain that female students (and lots of them!) want to sleep with him. He places the fault for this notion on the female students.Even more, he decides that he knows why they want to sleep with him, decides it’s not a good enough reason, and so resigns himself to masturbating furiously (with his wife, poor soul) about the whole affair.

Now perhaps the fault for this notion rests in Kealey and his poor grasp of social signals. My theory is that the fraction {students who actually wish to sleep with Kealy}/{students perceived by Kealy as wishing to sleep with him} is quite small.
Certainly his choice to write such an article makes me doubt his ability to read social situations well.

“Kealey has a notion in his odd brain that female students (and lots of them!) want to sleep with him. ”

Look, I am not Kealy’s mother and I have no interest in defending him from all comers, but really you should read the article again. If Kealy has this odd notion it is not deducible from what he writes here.

Belle, thanks for sharing this. Hopefully this anecdote will help others to understand that yes, leching is itself a damaging practice, and that it’s incorrect to call “look but don’t touch” a passive policy (not to mention how “look but don’t touch” becomes “look and maybe comment a little” which becomes “look and comment and test the waters a little but don’t touch unless the waters give way” as a matter of course).

And I’ll second that D^2^ has posted pitch-perfect comments all throughout, especially #10 and #13 above.

In addition to this guy’s female students, I wonder at the impact of this article on women who work with him.

I certainly would find it awkward and unpleasant to sit in a business meeting with a colleague who had seen fit to put such an essay into print. It can be hard enough to work productively with people who hold those beliefs; when they unashamedly promote them in public it gets even more challenging.

(And that’s not to mention the impact on his wife, if he has one.)

Sorry for those bad experiences. That really sucks.

For every woman who’s sat in a classroom or a professor’s office, knowing that her breasts have been more of a draw than her words, I thank you for sharing this. For every woman who’s been told that it’s her sex or her sexuality that got her that good grade or the good job and not her hard work, I thank you for sharing this. For every woman who’s handed over fistfuls of tissues to a sobbing undergraduate who got in over her head at another professor’s pass, I thank you for sharing this.

The Kealey article was tin-eared, creepy and really not funny. If some readers found it amusing, they haven’t spent time in shoes like mine or Belle’s.

“In the sense of willfully misrepresenting its object, not at all. ”

It may not be wilful, but it does misrepresent him. If you believe that Kealy is advising against sex with undergraduates simply because it is not possible to reward the sex act with better grades, you have not read carefully enough. What would be the sense in that?

all of this fell under the look but don’t touch rubric, while still being humiliating and awful

I think this is the key point. It’s what Daniel said to begin with – “leer at ’em all you like, but keep your hands to yourself you naughty boy!” is bad advice on both levels; it despises the women it’s talking about and demeans the men it’s aimed at.

John Meredith @ 24:

“What’s ugly about the article is that it places all fault on the women”
I think you should (re)read the article. It does not place ‘fault’ at all.

From the article:

The fault lies with the females.

When I saw this post, I thought “Hmm, the article seemed crass, but was it really that bad?” So I went and re-read it. Yes, it is that bad. In Kealey’s world, academics are male, women are girls, academics have no power over their students, and “girls” who admire their teachers, or seek their advice, want sex with them. And “The days are gone when a scholar could trade sex for upgrades”.

I think there’s some common-sense middle ground here, in which it is acknowledged that some students develop crushes on some teachers, and vice versa, and that it is a perk of academic life to be surrounded by the energy and vitality of youth, and that many people will fantasize sexually about people they meet in the work-place, and that none of this is a Bad Thing. And that teachers are in a position of power which they must not abuse, and uninvited leching is rude.

Of course academia is more-or-less a continuum, from fresher to reader, and so there are transgressive grey areas. I am aware of at least one post-grad student who seduced a post-doc.

My father was an academic for thirty-odd years, and often remarked that being around young people was a perk. I am certain that he meant it in a positive way.

Then they don’t know what they’re missing. The same probably applies to McQueen. I thought of saying Rudolf Valentino, but that might have been too obscure.

48: Not, of course, to impugn your impeccable reputation for gentlemanly virtue, but is it possible that your restraint in fantasizing about co-workers may be explained in part by your comment 10 above: “I have what I regard as a hilarious satirical article about the inability of the investment banking industry to hire women”?

(No, seriously, you and chris y are making sense on this one. Except for the bit about Steve McQueen, who I can’t see as all that appealing.)

Mitchell, don’t be silly. Of course people crush on other people they encounter in everyday life – there wouldn’t be many people around if we didn’t. I put my hand up to having met my wife in trades union meetings. But most of us try not to crush on our direct subordinates at work, our students, earnest young sopranos in our church choir, or in the case of your typical CT reader, our serving wenches. You exercise a bit of control in these situations, you don’t luxuriate in them.

chis y
So it is okay sometimes? I would really appreciate a more detailed explanation.

Female students must be able to ask for help from the people who are employed to teach them, without having that behaviour interpreted as a sexual advance. The ‘humour’ of this article rests on the premise that ‘asking for help with an essay’ is a sexual come-on, which he must virtuously resist, ho ho.

John-23, I wouldn’t have wrote if I knew others were writing at the same time but I do think it’s not a good argument from general pleasantness to specific pleasantness and further to uttering, or playing with that pleasantness. It”ll be awful hard to draw a line, but it will not be too hard to judge on cases (like the one in the post). And as the article in point goes, the line drawn is wrong as it kinda says it’s acceptable to ‘play with the thought’ which it’s not unless you’re superhuman and you can play with your thoughts without it affecting your behaviour. And if and when it gets to the point (as, presumably, in the case of your friend) where you can’t avoid it, no need to self-inflict pain or whatever; just seek therapy, or another occupation and leave the students alone.

If this were about therapists and not teachers, would you react the same way?

If this were about bad teachers (for instance because of burn-out), would you ask all of us to go and live with the fact they’re bad?

Good for you, Belle, for reporting the high school teacher and ultimately having him fired. The response of your classmates (blaming you) and a fair amount of the thread and other discussions on Polanski show very clearly that ‘reputational harm’ is often not much of a punishment at all.

[aeiou] chris y:
“any action..”
Thoughts are not actions chris and if you don’t understand the difference, tough luck.

I will state again that I find the article deplorable. Additionally, I find sexual harassment and the exploitation of power relationships to be deplorable behaviour as well. However, the mere act of fantasizing about someone is not wrong nor does it rise to the level of sexual harassment. People are sexual beings and will fantasize about whoever they choose. The battle against “lustful thoughts” is a difficult one, just ask the Catholic Church.

Finally friend, I would just like to say that your anger and vehemence on this issue reminds me of republicans who rail against homosexuals and then end up on 60 Minutes after being caught having sex with a man in an airport bathroom. In short “me thinks the lady doth protest too much.”

One question some might ask themselves: would you want this to happen if it were your daughter?

Since Belle is likely asleep and unable to moderate her comments at the moment, I have taken the liberty of disemvowelling a comment with nastypersonal insinuations by Mitchell Rowe above. Mitchell – knock it off or face the consequences.

Who’s Louise Brookes?

I agree whole-heartedly with Nick Barnes @47. Kealey clearly does not see his female students as *students*, not really — they are “girls”, not actual or potential scholars. He advocates “look, but don’t touch”; he does not advocate “teach them”. The real humans he is addressing are heterosexual men, who are or might become part of the academic community; he is being quite clear while that he might have to — for reasons of “political correctness” — *pretend* that women are human beings, “we” know that isn’t true.

Since Belle started this post by re-posting a comment from the previous discussion, I will too:

Kealey’s article … is not satire but a joke, along the lines of Dr Johnson’s A woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.

Kealey, like Johnson, is using humour for one of its core purposes: to emphasize the lines between ingroup and outgroup, and make the ingroup feel good about it. Kealey’s article, like Johnson’s quip, functions to reassure men about an apparent blurring of the lines between “what men can do” and “what women can do”. Johnson said, “don’t worry, such women are just like performing animals”; Kealey says, “don’t worry, such women are masturbation aids”.

Both Kealey and Johnson reassure men that women need not be taken seriously as, you know, real human beings or anything. This is a relief for those on the inside, they “get the joke” and laugh. You can see why feminists would get the reputation of being humourless.

Kealey is joking — as Johnson was joking — but that doesn’t make it satire. I don’t actually think it’s possible for someone in Kealey’s position of power to be satiric in the way John Meredith etc want to read him: he invariably ends up comforting the comfortable (=himself) and afflicting the afflicted (=any women at his University with an actual interest in education).

Criminy, that was an icky little essay. I had a high school teacher like that, but had no idea until years later when a former (female) classmate clued me in. That’s the sort of thing that makes me distrust conclusions based on social statistics (eg, women must not be as interested in, or as good at, doing X because fewer of them choose to do it). Must be some kind of academic word for that (I’d say phantom variable but that just displays my ignorance I’m sure).

Look! Someone who doesn’t know anything about Samuel Johnson!

The context of the Johnson quip is in Boswell: Next day, Sunday, July 31, I told him I had been that morning at a
meeting of the people called Quakers, where I had heard a woman preach. As the cite mcmc provides suggests, Johnson had a deep respect for the conservative preaching of the Established Church. He is suggesting that Boswell went to the Quaker meeting as one might go to watch trained animals: for amusement and as a wonder, but not for actual edification or spiritual direction.

Glen’s reading is plausible, but not, I think, accurate.

Doctor Science exclaimed:

arrgh, the blockquote was supposed to go down to “reputation of being humourless.” Preview is your friend!

Preview lies.

Belle rocks.

Thanks Belle for writing this. The point I try to remember is that these stories are not all that uncommon, and shape the experience of many students, especially women, with older people in authority.

Arguments like Kealey’s ignore context and approach a teacher’s duty in negative terms — don’t do this or that. But the teacher has a positive responsibility to establish rapport and a setting in which students feel taken seriously as learners and thinkers. So yes, Kealey’s projection of his own fantasies onto young women undermines that. In addition to being kind of pathetic.

Interesting to think across this and the Polanski business. Not that they’re morally equivalent, but certain common background assumptions emerge.

PS: I see that our Doctor Science (who hadn’t commented on the article when I started my own comment) has with others taken up Mary Beard on her claim that Kealey’s piece was satirical in a comment on her blog, and of course I agree that I fail to see how it can correspond in any way with the Swiftian Gold standard for satire.

Re #84-86, this is an ancient anti-ethical trope, isn’t it — ha ha, we’re all scoundrels but only some of us are honest enough to admit it. E.g. Mandeville. It’s a matter of self-positioning (see examples on the previous thread) via the preemptive accusation that everyone interested in ethics is naive or hypocritical. While this mode entails deliberate (one might even say performative) broadness and coarseness and routinely defends itself by saying ha ha aren’t we humorous, it’s satire in the older sense of extended mockery, as with the _Fable of the Bees_.

I’m someone who routinely fell in love with lecturers while I was studying, and was probably quite stupid enough as a 19-year-old to get myself in way too deep, but I was lucky enough to have teachers who were professionals, and who were unfailingly generous with their advice and their time, while keeping an entirely appropriate distance, even if it wasn’t what I thought I wanted. I look back with gratitude, that those particular teachers understood that I was young and silly, and understood their own power and responsibility to manage the situation, and yes, remembered that I was both a student and a (young, female) human being. How lucky was I? I can imagine that all of my teachers would be rightly insulted at Kealy’s insinuations. What happened to Belle sucked, and no one deserves it. It is the teacher’s responsibility to be the grownup in the room. Some of them find it in themselves to live up to it.

…the teacher’s responsibility to be the grownup in the room

you got it, kid!

Emma, that is awesome. Geo: I tend, like you, to take a harder line against teacher/student romance, moreso than dsquared for example. I know some perfectly happy couples who got together under these circumstances, and have heard some awful stories, and know professors who serially date their students as the age gap grows wider and wider. I tend to regard this last group as assholes. I will say that I have never seen this with female prof and a male student, which increases my negative feeling about the power dynamics of the whole thing. Obviously my personal experiences inform my judgment here, and as I mentioned above I did have a similar problem as a grad student which was also annoying and retarded my progress toward my degree. Maybe it could all go swimmingly, I don’t know. I just doubt it, and if persnickety rules prevent a few destined-to-be-happy couples to put off the sex for four years, well, worse things have happened.

dsquared: my point wasn’t that it was satire, but that it wasn’t satire. I found the whole thing clumsy and very, very distasteful. But my dislike of the author and his philosophy shouldn’t get in the way of making an effort to give him a fair hearing. But equally importantly, it is worth taking the time to look at what he was trying to say, and what he and his defenders were trying to say in his defence, rather than going staright to a final judgement (a judgement that I agree with). Otherwise there is a tendency for two closed group to echo opinions between each other without anyone getting any wiser.

Belle @ 93: I wholly agree with everything you say. Interestingly, I think you are outlining a wise but structurally conservative ethic.

This seems to have been the case generally in this discussion, with progressives arguing for a conservative ethic with conservatives for a liberal one. This is just a tendency, of course, Daniel’s original post arguing for a quite liberal approach, which I also think contains much insight.

Primate band status, or, rather, high primate band status, comes down to “I can hit who I want; I can fuck who I want”.

Humans, who are really smart primates, have the option of constructing social groups through culture, which gets into a set of cultures able to support being civilized, which deprecates/suppresses/devalues primate band status because the biggest group you can get to work through primate band status mechanisms is quite small; about 250 individuals. If you can be civilized, you can get vastly larger groups to work, and have things like division of labour, task specialization, and universities.

Lots of people fail to get this distinction. They want, for whatever reasons of failure of imagination, visceral reassurance, upbringing, or failure of forethought and planning, to have high primate band status. Tons of rationalizations exist for why that status is legitimate, noble, socially valuable, and so on; pretty much anything that ever advocated a fixed social hierarchy is advocating for some people getting civilized conduct, and some other people being appropriate persons to exercise primate band status demands upon.

The whole “everybody’s human, women are people, interactions should be to mutual benefit, informed consent is required” principles of civilization thing is, severally and together, necessary for the accumulation of real power by enabling large-group co-operation, a mechanism that permits of mutual sexual enthusiasm (which is a thing not to be disdained), and something many people simply do not get.

Kealey’s attempt at satire, to my mind, puts him in the firmly in the “does not get” group; he does not understand the point to civilization, or why he should not have the primate band status he feels he deserves, nor why the stupid, stupid hierarchy makes the rules it does. That this is a very common failing doesn’t start to excuse it.

He especially appears not to understand the point that Belle made so well, that even an appearance of switching an ostensibly civilized environment to one that works on primate band status rules is justly and accurately regarded as threatening by anyone you’d be claiming to be of higher status than in such an environment. (I think Daniel’s point about the ickiness of the fantasy recommendation lies not in the “fantasy” part, but in the “exercise of primate band status through mental gymnastics and proxies” part, notably the “wife as appliance”, “entitlement of gratification”, and “inappropriate subject of regard remains inappropriate despite lack of touching” elements thereof.)

It’s really not all that complicated a thing, if you keep the traditional rationalizations out of it.

The Kealey article is lame, but no lamer than the Beard defense of it; I wonder why no one has wondered whether Beard is being satirical when she says Kealey is obviously being satirical. (To cut off any infinite regress, let me say that this post is entirely free of satirical intent.)

As a footnote to no. 93, I do know, tangentially but reliably, of an instance where a female law professor married a student, while he was still a student. Not disagreeing about the relative rarity of the situation, however.

roac:
I wonder why no one has wondered whether Beard is being satirical when she says Kealey is obviously being satirical.

I definitely wondered. The need for a sarcasm font has never been clearer …

Serious, I did and do wonder why a woman who has been in academe for many years could say: Come on everyone, NO VICE-CHANCELLOR (not even of Buckingham) calls women students a “perk” unless satirically (and aiming a dart at precisely those assumptions). Honest.

No-one on any side of this debate has denied that some senior male academics *think* of women students as a “perk”. The only question is whether such a man would be willing to say it in public, under the veneer of “satire”. IMHO, no woman of Beard’s academic experience can doubt that some men are, yes, just that full of their own privilege. I have heard no indication whatsoever, from any side, that Kealey is one of the male academics who is aware and thoughtful about male privilege and about the dance women have to do to be taken seriously in the academy.

I know a number of young, academic women whose reaction to Kealey saying “She’s a perk” has been to feel that they’ve been slapped. They did not for a moment doubt that a powerful male academic would say — and mean — such a thing. It is more plausible that Beard is being satiric in turn than that she is so naive.

Chris:
progressives arguing for a conservative ethic with conservatives for a liberal one

No, I think we’re seeing the real conservatism (and liberalism) coming out.

The question is POWER, not sex. Conservatives wants power to stay where it is, i.e. with the powerful — that’s what they are *conserving*, here. Liberals or progressives want power to be equalized, to be moved away from the powerful. The conservatives aren’t in favor of “liberal” sexuality, but of a consistent power dynamic in sex. The liberals aren’t in favor of “conservative” sexuality, but of consensual relationships between equals.

I think you’re missing an implicit assumption in what Kealey is saying:

“If you’re a male professor, female students will come on to you. That is, when they seek out your attention in any way, that’s probably what they’re doing. However, they aren’t into you, they’re just going for ‘The Professor’. So don’t take it too seriously, but enjoy it whenever it comes along.”

And I think Belle’s disgust comes largely from that — from having been unable to talk to her Roman History professor about Roman History without having it turn into a discussion of whether she wanted him to look at her breasts. It’s hard to get an education if you can’t interact with your professors on an academic level.

To clarify, I suppose I was extrapolating from this sentence: “Kealy doesn’t know the personal histories of the female students he’s ogling.”

Well, I haven’t read this Kealey’s article and and I’m not going to. I’ve heard it all too long ago. I am profoundly struck by Belle Waring’s experience and how little sexual social-politics has changed in forty years. Reading this was painful.

Dsquared #10 — “I have what I regard as a hilarious satirical article about the inability of the investment banking industry to hire women and minorities …” —

I wish you would publish it. My brother, bless his heart, recently resigned his decades-long senior position with a major investment banking firm in the South because his new boss was a woman from New York. I don’t believe he’s ever worked with a woman before except as a secretary. Can’t see him working either with a person deemed other-than-white.

My take would be not to prohibit relationships, but to say that you cannot be formally taught by/teach someone you are sleeping with.

That seems like a good middle ground — provided there’s more than one section of everything. If that’s really the only faculty member qualified to teach that particular course (which is hopefully rare), then I think they just have to be extra aware of their responsibility to be professional and impartial in the classroom.

Particularly when you’re young, it’s all too easy to end up sleeping with someone because you desire emotional and mental intimacy with them and that’s the only way you can think of achieving it. There aren’t enough models around of how you can love someone’s mind but not necessarily their body.

Friendship?

I think our culture is just too distrustful of the idea of friendships between people of opposite sexes (and *especially* older/higher status men with younger/lower status women; not that there isn’t some good reason to suspect some such men of a sexual agenda, but it shouldn’t be the kind of blanket assumption that it is).

Roy, you mention gays, and I have to say that the female professors I have known who were dodgy in this department were hitting on their female students, and not their male ones. Patriarchy protects its own. But all the talk of emotionally vulnerable women students and so on, while true, also neglects to make explicit what I think used to be called the erotics of pedagogy — teachers of adults need to be very aware that a kind of transference takes place sometimes, something that feels very like love to the student and may be mistaken for same, even by both parties. It can even work out, though I think that’s rare enough to be discounted, or at least delayed. The best teachers manage something like the friendship that Chris mentions, but that’s hard — and often disappointing to the student — and needs conscious and explicit and patient work. Psychiatrists are warned and taught about it, and they still sometimes succumb. Teachers are not, as far as I know, and only the best of them work it out.