Here’s a story.
A long time ago, in my early years of teaching, I used to have semi-frequent coffee chat sessions at a little cafe that is now gone from Richmond (replaced with better– shout out to Roscoe’s). One night, during a long conversation with this much older, nearly-to-retirement aged professor, our conversation wandered to how to handle it when you feel a vague attraction to a student.
He insisted it didn’t happen to him, which I found suspect given what I knew of his past fraternization, but I let him have his moment of discussing the topic from a position that was high and mighty. At the time I was in my late-20s and was single, so it was an issue that was much more dangerous for me than for him.
I insisted then the same thing I insist now: if as an instructor you do feel some sort of attraction to a student, you need to recognize it, think through it, feel through it, then make sure you let-it-go. It’s unacceptable, IMHO, to have any sort of relationship with a student, even if you are single and they are single. Power dynamics like that are really, really treacherous to navigate, and as recent news has shown us, men are bad at it (in general).
He came down hard on me for thinking that it was okay–even normal– to feel attraction to a student, and he lectured me rather sternly. I don’t know if he had an inkling that something was going on (it wasn’t; I did socialize with other students while I was teaching at IU as I was still a student myself, but never a student that was or had ever been in my class), or if he just wanted to stand on his high horse, but it seemed silly to me. Denying your feelings is the most dangerous thing you can do. It seems much smarter to me for a person to understand and know their emotions and deal with them constructively than to pretend they aren’t there and push them into some sort of black box to fester.
That conversation reminded me of a time in high school when I went to a Bible study group with a friend. In this particular session, my friend (who was leading discussion that day) went on this rant about feeling lust and how that is a sin and something a person must cleanse from himself in order to be righteous. This same Bible study group had as a member the girl I was dating at the time. I felt like he was specifically targeting me.
I responded to his lengthy discussion by pointing out that human attraction is part of the human condition, that if we are realistic about it, we can’t control who we feel attracted to (at least in my teens I couldn’t; my biggest crush in high school was a girl who was simply an awful human being and was awful to me, but for some reason I always helped her when she needed me because of how I felt about her). I suggested that the real message was not to deny when you feel lustful thoughts but rather to understand that your feeling lustful thoughts toward someone isn’t an automatic two-way street and that the other person needs to be interested or you need to keep it to yourself.
It occurs to me, as I watch in horror as man after man after man is called out on the carpet for sexual misconduct, that perhaps the biggest problem (beyond men being assholes) is that we don’t educate on how to handle emotions and we live in a society so basted with the Puritan ethic that we think things like teaching young people to not have sex and automatically branding men talking about their sense of attraction to a woman as lewd, thus recasting any male discussion of sexuality not about consent and proper behavior but rather locker room talk.
I, as a personal decision made years and years ago, just don’t talk about women sexually unless I’m with people I know for a fact can talk about the topic maturely. So basically– my wife. She talks about what wrestlers have nice butts and, on occasion, I’ll chime in likewise about a female competitor. She sometimes teases me because I admitted to having a crush on Eliza Dushku. She knows that when I was in junior high I had a Cindy Crawford swimsuit poster on my wall. I don’t think any of those things is or was wrong.
But I’m starting to think that all my fear of offending people might be keeping me from helping young people better understand themselves. I didn’t know what to do with my puberty-induced lust, so I basically just bottled it all up and didn’t interact with girls in any non-platonic sense until I was almost out of high school. I didn’t have anyone to talk to about it, and the people I could see in relationships with women were horrible role-models.
I am pretty sure we’re to the point where we need to talk to boys– in their tweens if not sooner– about things like consent and respectful treatment of women. We should stop with the “feeling lustful toward someone is wrong” messaging and go with the “hey, you know what? That’s how reproduction works for you on an animal, basic, primal level. But you need to remember that you’re not hunting; you have to talk to the female about it and see if she’s interested.”
The fact that we don’t discuss these things in mature ways leads to what I see all too often as a college professor: young men who feel entitled to sex because they spoke to/bought a drink for/got dinner for/paid for a movie ticker for a woman. It’s insanity. But at the same time, we can’t put all of the blame at their feet. A lot of it, sure. I mean how dense are some guys? But someone taught them that their behavior was okay, or at the very least someone gave them the idea it was okay by being silent about how it was supposed to work.
I guess what I’m trying to say, as horribly easy to misinterpret as this will look in type, is that we need to explain to everyone– male and female– that it’s perfectly fine to see someone and let your mind go wild with possibilities, even if those possibilities are things that would make you blush. BUT YOU CAN’T ACT ON THAT UNLESS THE OTHER PERSON FEELS THE SAME WAY.
It’s fine to want something. The idea that “coveting” is a sin, the idea that “lust” is a sin, is a flaw of the Puritan ethic, an American problem. Of course we see and want things. Of course at some point or another we’ll see another human being that sends our imagination racing. That’s normal. It’s how we’re built. But that doesn’t mean we can ACT on these things.
Maybe if we were all honest about how we felt, the repressed ghosts and skeletons and ghouls in our closets could be put to bed instead of leading to the sort of insanity we see of late.
Can’t we just be good to each other? Sometimes I worry we can’t. Sometimes I worry we’re all animals.
We need to do better.