Seeking Carnal Knowledge A former professor of mine and I had drinks at a recent convention, gnawing the bone of the good old days. While I was an undergraduate, this man had stormed out on his wife, then slunk home. I think they were apart for about ten minutes. "I can't even remember what the problem was," he said. "You were seriously pissed," I volunteered, "that she didn't like to go down on you." "I told you that?" he asked, aghast. "I can't believe I told you that!" Told me? It's a marvel he hadn't gotten me to do the deed. In the mid-'70s, sleeping with professors was a badge of honor. "It's a different world now," he sighed, and he's right. But I'm here to proclaim that it's by no means a totally better world. In the grip of heightened attention to sexual harassment, more and more American universities now have policies to regulate student-faculty relationships. Most sternly discourage "amorous intimacy." But some policies outright prohibit sex between students and faculty in the same department as a conflict of interest. To lose his job, the lecherous prof no longer has to corner a girl in his locked office and hint that sex could improve her grade. Current wisdom has it that because of the power differential, no student-even, say, a divorced 30-year-old woman with a kid-is really in a position to freely consent. So a willing partner can sue later if she has regrets. "The vengeance factor can be pernicious," warns one professor. "A woman with achy-breaky hurt feelings can want to take it out on a guy." He hasn't so much as risked an after-hours drink with a student in a decade. Which is a shame. Not that I'd wax nostalgic for the scene a friend reports, from 1969, where a charismatic prof would begin class each semester by asking which girl wanted to come once a week to clean his house. ("It was common knowledge," my friend recalls, "that the lucky dog would get to have sex with him after she scrubbed the toilet.") On the other hand, my own affairs with professors were sporadically exhilarating and, even when painful, useful entries in the age-old category of "life experience." I don't regret any of them-- even the ugliest. As a sophomore, I fell in love with a professor whom I shall discreetly decline to overidentify. Imagine him bearded or bowlegged, in English lit or zoology. I think I can say that he taught in a T-shirt and jogging shorts and often arrived for class still sweaty from his daily run. Here is something that would never happen at an American university at the fin of this siecle: On one occasion, he hopped up on his desk and casually removed a pistol from his briefcase. He continued with his lecture, waving the gun around. After a while, he said, "You assume this gun is not loaded. You assume that nothing will happen when I point this gun at you, or you"-he aimed the pistol dramatically, targeting tender undergrads- "or myself." He placed the gun to his temple. Said nothing for long enough that my classmates began to look uncomfortable, which was, of course, his intention. Good teachers pushed limits. Even on the tenure track, a young academic could affect a Jack Nicholson sauciness. I wasn't scared of him. I'd seen him naked. I strode up and calmly said, "Be a good boy now. Give me the gun." At which point, he laughed, aimed at my heart and fired. Unloaded, of course. Good magician's assistant that I was, I'd trusted that. "Now, what Lisa just did," he remarked, sauntering to the blackboard, "is--" whereupon he launched into some riff about existentialism, risk and personal responsibility that had my classmates scribbling notes and that I didn't quite register because as I sat down my mock-shot heart was beating too hard. A heady experience, to be thus singled out. We all called him by his first name, and he sometimes had students to his apartment for beer, but I wanted more. Power is a seductive bug zapper. I didn't want to kneel to cut his toenails like Picasso's most devoted wife; I wanted to learn how to be him, with his confidence, his ferocity and drive. (My own female students are more likely to emulate me. Now about 30 percent of us are women; at the time, I didn't have one female prof.) It's true that I might remember much more about what I was supposed to be reading if I'd spent my time concentrating on my studies and not the sculpted muscles of his legs. But I think it would be unfair to blame him for my shoddy concentration or bad memory. Nor do my studies with him represent a lousy expenditure of my parents' tuition dollars, since I learned a great deal, both in and out of the classroom. Michele Paludi, the editor of Sexual Harassment on College Campuses: Abusing the Ivory Power, claims that students' self-esteem can be permanently damaged by such relationships because they can never trust their academic performance: "They always have to wonder, 'Did I get that A because I was smart, or because he was sleeping with me?"' The typical target of professorial lust, I'm told, is both intellectually and sexually insecure--pretty china a man can break. That was not my experience. If anything, the affair confirmed that any man drawn to me would cotton to a brain-bod combo. Even at 19, I was way too hardedged and bossy to make a compelling bimbo. Still, I bet a classmate or two took me for one. These days some universities have mechanisms for third-party reporting of suspected student-teacher affairs. God forbid a student who receives a B might sue for violation of his Fourteenth Amendment right to equal protection because he feels at a disadvantage, defeated by favoritism. To this I say: tough. Only in kindergarten do we pretend that the world is egalitarian, a level playing field. And even there some kids get picked last. No doubt some women do sleep their way to the top. But far fewer women than are jealously accused of so doing. In the real world, we learn that not all failures are fair, not all successes earned. We don't always get what we want, in work or in love. I was smitten by my jogging prof. He was less smitten, backed off and gave me a betrayal to bemoan to my shrink, who was helping me connect the dots between the current bad dudes and my Bad Dad. In 1974, pre-AIDS, I was "dating" three men simultaneously: Professor Number One; his colleague, Professor Number Two, who was fairly taken with me; and a fellow sophomore, a lovely, intense man, now a Manhattan psychiatrist. My shrink at the time kept proposing a two-week celibacy plan. Good idea--except I hoped to be a writer. My professional life, indeed my very identity, felt bound up in exploring matters of sex and the soul. Sex was homework, field research. Verbatim, this diary report of the dalliance with Prof Number Two reads like a casebook study in waif wavering, the kind of uncertainty used as proof that young women can't really consent: "I don't trust my intuitions. His sexual maneuvers aren't very appealing, but I do get excited, and I am torn between just enjoying it and getting up and leaving. Cockteaser, flirt, wench, etc--I am not!" With him I got to practice an essential life skill, the graceful exit: "How not to hurt this man with boring job problems, soft sweater (cashmere) and beginning of double chin--cripes he seems so old!" He was, in fact, only 29. In the historic demographic bulge of baby boomers, before legions of us were tenured to ripen and rot in place, almost all my professors were that young and mostly single to boot. Consensual sex policy does not differentiate between the 50-year-old hitting on, and lording it over, the leggiest freshwoman and the new assistant prof falling in love with, maybe even marrying, a near peer in his field. But they seem drastically different to me. Hardly imperious father figures, these men were closer to my age than my father's and were, I should emphasize, totally forthright, decent people. The bastard, the ruthless predator, was next in line. He was a serious bigwig. I'd read his work, mooned over his dust-jacket photo, and before meeting him, I already felt like his long-lost soul mate. At the orientation party, we were quickly off in a corner. He asked me where I was living, how my apartment was. It was fine, I said, but I had bugs. All manner of ant and roach. He grinned. Several hours later, party over, my doorbell rang. Over the intercom, he said, without announcing his name, "Your exterminator is here." I poured him a drink, and by the end of the drink, to my huge delight, we were fucking. He was 41, rugged and gruff, a baby blue-eyed drinker of scotch on the rocks and a smoker of cigars, which he liked to clench in his teeth somewhat parodically, so that his jawline looked like Dick Tracy's. "Stop squirming around so much!" he commanded from atop me that first night. "Concentrate on the muscles inside!" I was love struck, and arrogant enough to assume that he was, too. After all, I was a mature 21, with a well-stocked bar in my own apartment, my first without a roommate. The apartment was furnished with stray pieces from my parents's rec room that my 49-year-old father, only the day before, had huffed-and-puffed out of the station wagon-a card table, metal utility shelves. To me it felt expansive and elegant. Despite what was to come, I still think with pleasure of that reckless first sex and my pride in that apartment. He didn't spend the night. He never spent the night. He always had to feed his dogs. But one night, about two months into this, he said he had to go because his wife was arriving and he had to meet her plane. "Your wife! " I said. "Well, sure! My wife!" Not only did my lover have a wife, he had a sick one. She'd been off for a dangerous procedure. He should have been pacing and sweating in the hospital lobby, not screwing me. He would appreciate, he said, my discretion. It was a bit late for that, since practically everyone knew we'd been seeing each other, and those who didn't would soon, as I hurled myself into the role of the tragic mistress, cranking out an entire book of poems and a roman a clef about how wantonly I had been mistreated. Here is the worst thing he did to me. Although as a lover I'd already been replaced by my best friend, he continued to meddle in my school business, and his conviction was that I was ill matched to the scholarly life. Instead, he decided, I should get into publishing. He therefore refused to write me letters of recommendation for anything but gofer jobs at Manhattan publishing houses and went so far as to instruct the other professors in the program to do likewise. Today he might as well have worn a sandwich board saying, "Sue me." I didn't need to. Thanks in part to Prof Number Two's dull disquisitions, I understood something about academic politics (most students know appallingly little-can't even seem to tell a full professor from a teaching assistant, except by paunch or degree of baldness). I knew that even if he wanted to, he couldn't much hurt me, which, for reasons of self-interest, he was unlikely to risk. Easy enough to get my eggs out of his basket. So I focused on other professors in the program, worked hard and graduated with honors--solely, many of my sour classmates made it known they believed, because of my association with him. Under current policies, I'm sure they would have clamored to turn us in. Although the statute of limitations is way gone, when I tell this story to lawyers specializing in harassment, they get a rabid gleam appropriate for tracking Nazi war criminals. Surely this affair was exactly the kind that prohibition policies target. Universities can't really prohibit all consensual sex between students and teachers. But they can regulate affairs that threaten to create conflicts of interest. As one policymaker put it, "Nepotism policies are very clear. You couldn't supervise your wife's thesis, so why should you be able to supervise your girlfriend's?" Well, a girlfriend isn't a wife. And a thesis isn't a class. And one grade isn't a job, where a superior could really screw you in measurable ways, deny you promotion or position. There is simply a lot less at stake in the academy than in the business world. No one disputes that it is less than optimal to mix the personal and the professional. One friend who married (and later divorced) her prof was already living with him when he sat her down at the kitchen table to write her final paper for his course-then gave her a "pass," because he said that, morally, he couldn't grade her work. Obviously, I would have been better off without my intrusive Svengali. But whether "better off" warrants an across-the-board mandate is another matter, especially when it involves Invasion of the Body Snatchers-style third-party reporting. I further dispute that because of the student's intrinsically weaker position, the faculty member should shoulder the entire responsibility for an affair. Fun as it might have been to watch Professor X suffer, I firmly believe that I had no case against him. He was a shit heel-and I let myself be stepped on. To claim that I was incapable of consent is to make a mockery not only of real coercion but of my proto-adulthood and the very decision-making skills I'd been sent away to acquire. From the school of hard knocks, I got exactly what I wanted and needed: educational sex, an opportunity to play out my ambivalence toward controlling men and a lifelong aversion to preening, pompous, perennially philandering academics. Lest I give the impression that I spent my college years sleeping with every soul who deigned to compliment my then wild, waist-length hair, let me note: I said no plenty. As do most women. As do the females of most species (watch the Discovery Channel). A breezy "No, thanks" usually works. No harm meant, no harm taken. For women who continue to be the objects of suggestive comments such as those in a recent set of guidelines from the U.S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights--like when a professor interrupts your oral report to ask, "Do you have freckles all over your body?"--Paludi, who hosts antiharassment sessions nationwide, suggests answering in a firm, calm voice, "I'm extremely uncomfortable with that comment." That's not what I'd say. I'd aim for a much more decisively castrating touche. Like the woman in a creative writing seminar told by her famous professor, "I hope you can fuck, because you sure can't write," shooting back, "Well, thank God you can write, 'cause I bet the farm you can't fuck!" There are always assholes who would interpret this as a come-on, show up drunk at the dorm at 3 A.M. There are indeed serial seducers who prey on, taunt and torture the most fragile young women in their classes. It's reasonable for colleges to have formal internal procedures to deal with their nutcases and stalkers. Reasonable, too, to ban quid pro quo offenses, even implied. A professor cannot target a freshman from a survey class of 150, write on her first test, "See me for your grade," and then invite her away for the weekend. He cannot suddenly begin to give an A student Cs or mock her in class after she refuses to sleep with him. But these are unequivocal abuses of power, not cases of consensual sex gone bad. What I find alarming is the grad student merrily engaging in midnight smooching sessions with her professor, deeply flattered that "a rare friendship was developing with someone whose politics I shared," who turns him in months later-after she discovers that he's sharing politics with two other teaching assistants as well. Then proudly publishes a journal article proclaiming that it wasn't a consensual affair at all but sexual harassment pure and simple. Deborah Brake of the National Women's Law Center is confident that the new, detailed Office of Civil Rights guidelines will keep policy from being "quite so much of a free-for-all. Some universities consistently ignored even the worst offenses, and some overreacted." But over and over I've heard stories of harassment policies being misused for political leverage, as weapons in long-standing internal power struggles-most dramatically at Syracuse University, in New York, where Professor Stephen Dobyns was suspended for two years for throwing a drink in a student's face at a party and allegedly calling her a "Stalinist bitch." The incident polarized the English department. Poet and memoirist Mary Karr doesn't blame the student; she believes that the whole business was blown up into a good old-fashioned witch-hunt. Because Karr argued for in patient alcohol treatment for Dobyns rather than his being fired, she was accused of condoning his abusive behavior and was then threatened with sexual-harassment charges herself, although on the slippery slope of the rumor mill it was not clear what exactly she had done, to whom or when. "I was actually accused, in print, of teaching classes at my house in my underwear," says Karr. "And I'm a person who won't even go to the grocery store without mascara on. There were never any charges filed because it was such bullshit. I mean, if I taught in my underwear, either someone would have taken umbrage or my classes would be better enrolled. It's true that I'll say 'fuck' in a Yankee minute, but there are words I won't use, and there were no distinctions made-there's a difference between using 'dumbfuck' as an example of a spondee and sodomizing a student with a mop handle." But some students, critically bent out of shape by suggestive language or images, seem incapable of making the distinction. At the University of Nebraska, a graduate student was forced to remove from his desk a picture of his wife in a bikini, which two female students deemed too risque. At a California State branch, in a funky reversal, a guy filed a complaint against his professor because her lecture on female masturbation was so explicit it made him sick. Presumably, not many people would, like the Penn State student, hyperventilate in art-history class over a Goya nude. Yet harassment experts now contend, straightfaced, that fully 75 to 80 percent of students feel that they have suffered harassment. "I'm afraid to even be warm to students anymore," one professor complains. "Everything seems to get misconstrued." All this squeamishness about sex and sexual language mystifies me. The image of damsels shrinking from the hot hands and foul mouths of evil men is light-years from the rhetoric that abounded when I came of age. Back then women were supposed to have abandoned the fear of giving the milk away for free, so guys wouldn't bother to buy the cow. No, we were responsible for being as pleasure driven, as out for the tractor ride, as any guy. In fact, we were supposed to be able to come in thirty seconds or less, jammed with a stranger in an airplane rest room, then wave a cheerful, self-sufficient ciao afterward. Both stances are an oversimplistic crock. Sex isn't the Ebola virus, but it isn't all Kama Sutra ecstasy, either. The trouble with sex is that it tends to involve emotions, and emotions are- messy. With professors or anyone else. All you can do is be willing to mudwrestle with disappointment, frustration, complexity and ambiguity. I think of the "Safe Space" program of Union College in Schenectady, New York, which provides peer support for students who feel violated by harassment-advocates can be reached by beeper twenty-four hours a day. Then I think of myself at 18, my freshman year, loopy on LSD, deciding to hitchhike and getting picked up by a tattooed local on a Harley. I declined to sleep with him and thus found myself dumped at night in a field twenty miles from campus with no idea how I'd get back and the wheat shooting out psychedelic flares. Smart? Hardly. But who got the better education? No contest: I did.
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