project/teacher-story
Amia Srinivasan,
Jennifer Egan,
Lisa Taddeo,
Joy Williams,
Rachel Kushner,
Vladimir Nabokov,
Claire Dederer,
Martin Amis,
Simone de Beauvoir,
James Salter
Rain fell. Every day, heavy rain, and I sat in my apartment and waited for sirens. Just after the rain began, there were always sirens. Rain and then sirens. In a rush to get to where life was happening, life and its emergencies.
Do you understand that I’m alone? I thought at the unnamed friend as I stood in the phone booth on Mulberry Street, the sky gray and heavy, the street dirty and quiet and bleak, as a woman’s voice declared once more that I’d reached a number that had been disconnected.
It was just one night of drinking and chance. I’d known it the moment I met him, which was surely why I was enchanted in the first place. Enchantment means to want something and also to know, somewhere inside yourself, not an obvious place, that you aren’t going to get it.
She examined herself in the mirror with a worried look. What did she see? Being a woman, being beautiful, how does it feel from the inside? How does that silken caress along the thighs feel, that glossy satin against the warmth of a belly? 'How does she think of our night?' he asked himself. 'Has her voice spoken other names in the night? Which? Pierre, Victor, Jacques? And what does the name Henri mean to her?'
omg she GETS ME
[...] 'Sooner or later, I'll have to tell her about Josette. But not just now,' he said to himself. He spent every night in the pale-green room, and they were very passionate nights; but when he got up the following morning, Josette never tried to keep him there. The day of the contract signing, they had agreed to stay together until late in the afternoon. It was she who left him at two o'clock to go to the hairdresser. Was it discretion? Indifference? It isn't easy to measure the feelings of a woman lavish with her body, who has nothing else to offer. [...]
Twenge has a wholly different theory than Shorter and Trivedi about the increase in anxiety , specifically when it comes to young adults. A 2010 study by Twenge and her colleagues found that a shift from intrinsic to more extrinsic goals has mirrored the increase of anxiety and depression among young adults.36 Where previously intrinsic pursuits, such as strong relationships, community , and competence were more central to young people’s life goals, Twenge’s team found a pronounced shift to extrinsic goals, such as appearance, social status, and wealth in the young adults they studied. Peter Gray, a psychology professor at Boston College explains that Twenge’s findings represent “a general shift toward a culture of materialism , transmitted through television and other media ,” in which “young people are exposed… to advertisements and other messages implying that happiness depends on good looks, popularity, and material goods.”37 Where intrinsic goals “have to do with one’s own development as a person — such as becoming competent in endeavors of one’s choosing and developing a meaningful philosophy of life,”38 extrinsic goals, by contrast, require an audience. And, as luck would have it, we each have an ever-present audience, at all hours, conveniently located in our pocket.
this is kind of what i'm getting at with this story right?
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
this is basically the plot of leon morin priest <3
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.
this is good
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.”
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