28.  This is something that earlier feminists knew well. Radical feminists did not rethink their ways of working, child-rearing, arguing, decision-making, living, and loving because they were bourgeois moralists.9 They were not confused about the structural nature of what it was they wanted, or about the demands it placed on them as women. It is true they were often divided on the question of how much of the “personal” to make “political”: whether feminism required separatism, lesbianism, communal property, collective child-rearing, the dissolution of family relations, the end of femininity. And it is true that, taken too far, a prefigurative politics—a politics that insists individuals act as if they were already in the world to come—not only alienates those who do not conform, but also becomes an end in itself for those who do. At its worst, prefigurative politics allows its practitioners to substitute individual personal transformation for collective political transfiguration. It becomes, in other words, a liberal politics. But the same is true of a politics that refuses prefiguration. What does it mean to say that we want to transform the political world—but that we ourselves will remain unchanged?

67.  A vexed question: when is being sexually or romantically marginalized a facet of oppression, and when is it just a matter of bad luck, one of life’s small tragedies? (When I was a first-year undergraduate I had a professor who said, to our grave disappointment, that there would be heartbreak even in the post-capitalist utopia.) Are the un-beautiful an oppressed class? The short? The chronically shy?

But this is not to say that genuinely wanted teacher–student sex is unproblematic. Imagine a professor who happily accepts the infatuated attentions of his student, takes her out on dates, has sex with her, makes her his girlfriend, perhaps as he has done with many students before. The student has consented, and not out of fear. Are we really prepared to say that there is nothing troubling here? But if there is something troubling, and the problem isn’t a lack of consent, then what is it?

Is it too sterile, too boring to suggest that instead of sleeping with his student, this professor should have been—teaching her?

What might it be for the professor to respond to the student’s transference-love, but not respond in kind—instead turning it to good use in the pedagogical process? It would involve, presumably, the professor “convincing” the student that her desire for him is a form of projection: that what she really desires isn’t the professor at all, but what he represents. To switch from Freud’s terms to Plato’s, the teacher must redirect the student’s erotic energies from himself toward their proper object: knowledge, truth, understanding. (Plato, like Freud, is often invoked in defenses of professor–student sex, but in fact Socrates did not sleep with his students—to the apparent frustration of some of them. Indeed, in the Republic, Socrates tells us that “sexual pleasure mustn’t come into” relationships between philosopher-guardians and the young boys they are educating, “if they are to love and be loved in the right way.”20) It is the bad teacher who absorbs the student’s erotic energies into himself. As Freud puts it, “however highly he may prize love,” the good teacher must “prize even more highly the opportunity to help” his student.21

When we speak of the power differential between teacher and student, it isn’t simply that the teacher has more influence on how the student’s life will go than the student has on the fate of her teacher. Indeed, to represent it that way is to invite the counter that, really, women students have all the power, since they can get their male professors fired. (That’s the premise of David Mamet’s Oleanna.) Instead, the teacher–student relationship is characterized, in its nature, by a profound epistemic asymmetry. Teachers understand and know how to do certain things; students want to understand and know how to do those same things. Implicit in their relationship is the promise that the asymmetry will be reduced: that the teacher will confer on the student some of his power; will help her become, at least in one respect, more like him. When the teacher takes the student’s longing for epistemic power and transposes it into a sexual key, allowing himself to be—or worse, making himself—the object of her desire, he has failed her as a teacher.

Adrienne Rich, in a lecture she gave in 1978 to the teachers of women students, spoke of what she called the “misleading concept” of “coeducation”: “that because women and men are sitting in the same classrooms, hearing the same lectures, reading the same books, performing the same laboratory experiments, they are receiving an equal education.”30 For women do not enter or exist in the classroom on equal terms with men. They are assumed to be less intellectually capable, encouraged to take fewer risks and be less ambitious, given less mentoring, socialized to be less confident and to take themselves less seriously, told that evidence of a mind is a sexual liability and that their self-worth depends on their capacity to attract men’s sexual attention. They are groomed to be caretakers and mothers and doting wives rather than scholars or intellectuals. “If it is dangerous for me to walk home late of an evening from the library, because I am a woman and can be raped,” asked Rich, “how self-possessed, how exuberant can I feel as I sit working in that library?”31 Equally, we might ask: if I know that my professor sees me not (only) as a student to be taught, but (also) as a body to be fucked, how self-possessed, how exuberant can I feel sitting in his classroom?

Regina Barreca, speaking of and to women who ended up as professors, asks: “At what point … did the moment come for each of us when we realized that we wanted to be the teacher, and not sleep with the teacher?”28 The default for most women, Barreca suggests, is to interpret the desire sparked in her by a (male) teacher as a desire for the teacher: an interpretation she must overcome if she is ever going to become the teacher herself. Male students, meanwhile, relate to their male professors as they are socialized to do: by wanting to be like them (and, at the limit, wanting to destroy and replace them: its own source of psychic drama). This difference between women and men in how likely they are to see their teachers as objects of emulation rather than attraction isn’t the effect of some natural, primordial difference in disposition. It is the result of gendered socialization.

To be clear: it is no less a pedagogical failure for a woman professor to sleep with her male student, or for her to sleep with a woman student, or for a male professor to sleep with a male student.29 But an ethical appraisal of the phenomenon of consensual teacher–student sex misses something crucial if it doesn’t register that it typically involves male professors sleeping with women students. The professor’s failure in such cases—that is, most actual cases of consensual teacher–student sex—isn’t just a failure to redirect the student’s erotic energies toward its proper object. It is a failure to resist taking advantage of the fact that women are socialized in a particular way under patriarchy—that is, socialized in a way that conduces to patriarchy. And, what is just as important, it reproduces the very dynamics on which it feeds, by making sure that the benefits of education will not accrue equally to men and women.

Imagine a student who, infatuated with her professor, pursues him and, thrilled when he returns her attentions, has sex with him, dates him, only eventually to realize that she was just the latest in a string of students, and that their affair is less a sign of her specialness than it is of his vanity. What happens next? Feeling betrayed and embarrassed, she can no longer take his classes, or spend time in his department (her department); she worries about which of his colleagues (her teachers) know about the relationship, and whether they might hold it against her; she suspects (rightly) that her academic successes will be chalked up to her relationship with him. Now recognize that this is an experience that happens to many women, and almost no men; and, further, that this isn’t because of some natural division of sexual labor, but because of the psychosexual order into which men and women are inducted, from which men disproportionately benefit and by which women are disproportionately harmed. I think it is clear that our imaginary young woman was not sexually harassed by her professor. But was she not denied the benefits of education “on the basis of sex”?

The youthfulness of my students, undergrad and grad, has a lot to do, too, with the peculiar liminal space in which they, as students, exist. Their lives are intense, chaotic, thrilling: open and largely as yet unformed. It is hard sometimes not to envy them. Some professors find it difficult to resist the temptation to try and assimilate themselves to their students. But it seems obvious to me—not as a general moral precept, but in the specific sense of what is called for in the moments of confrontation with our own past selves which are part of what it is to teach—that one must stand back, step away and leave them to get on with it. Jane Tompkins, in A Life in School (1996), writes: “Life is right in front of me in the classroom, in the faces and bodies of the students. They are life, and I want us to share our lives, make something together, for as long as the course lasts, and let that be enough.”

[...] Thanks to the Hollywood actresses of Me Too, these women can now appeal to the Time’s Up Legal Defense Fund to sue if they are sexually harassed. But to whom should they turn when they need money to escape an abusive partner, or health care for a sick child, or when immigration comes to ask for their papers?70 Few if any feminists believe that harassment should be tolerated, that employers shouldn’t be sued, or that laws against sexual harassment haven’t done much to help working women, poor women included.71 But a feminist politics which sees the punishment of bad men as its primary purpose will never be a feminism that liberates all women, for it obscures what makes most women unfree.