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.