by Laura Kipnis
There’s no doubt that being groped by someone you find unappealing can be disgusting and gross. And irksome—for maybe a day or two. Even a week. But when Wolf writes, decades after the knee-groping, that she’s still afraid of Bloom, and that he’d played such a large role in her imagination that she’d stopped writing poetry after the encounter, you find yourself thinking that some crucial things are being left out of the story. What’s being left out, I’d suggest, is first of all, the great man’s pathos, and second, the complainant’s own conflicted desires.
When Bloom had invited Wolf to come chat with him after she’d audited one of his famous courses, she was “sick with excitement” at the prospect, she wrote. He had an aura that was compelling and intimidating, he attracted brilliant acolytes, and Wolf wanted to be one of them. And let’s face it: the sexual privilege that accrues to Important Men like Bloom accrues for exactly these sorts of reasons, which is why ascribing such scenes to male sexual rapaciousness alone doesn’t explain enough. For one thing, it bypasses the inconvenient problem that power can be erotic, even when possessed by otherwise flawed and unappealing people, especially for those without power (and I’m speaking as a former fawning young student myself: this is not unfamiliar territory). What is to be done, short of a complete overhaul of the human psyche?
Maybe a more nuanced account of male power would be a place to start. Let’s imagine, for instance, that some percentage of these otherwise flawed and unappealing Important Men were the guys everyone laughed at in high school or who’ve been otherwise dented on their journeys through life and now, having achieved some elevated standing in the world, find themselves on the receiving end of periodic adulation from those in positions of lesser power, for instance, their students. Even if these flawed men should bring the full measure of their maturity and moral judgment to bear, even if the erotics of power and sexual activity per se should be understood as two distinct things, it’s not hard to see that rectifying those earlier injuries and humiliations might be the more pressing psychical priority.
What I’m trying to say is that, paradoxically, the trouble really starts when the idealized masculine icon fails to be phallic enough, when the icons turn out to be damaged and insecure themselves, when it turns out that Big Men also want validation from those they’re supposed to validate. And for the acolyte, with so much hero worship driving the story, how could the Big Man not fail and disappoint in stomach-curdling ways? Oedipally speaking, a father figure in the erotic crosshairs is a complicated entity, so complicated that twenty years later the idealizer might still be rehashing the story. (Wolf has told this one in multiple venues by the way; see a previous rendition in her memoir Promiscuities.)
But even beyond the levels of mutual miscomprehension propelling these situations, what I’ve never understood about the phrase “unwanted sexual advance” is that it suggests the outcome of the advance should be known prior to that outcome occurring. Do we all announce our desires in neon letters on our foreheads? Do we even know beforehand what they actually are? Surely someone’s occasionally caught by surprise, unexpectedly propelled from a non-desiring state into a desiring one by something in the moment, or the air, or the wine. I know it’s happened to me, and I suspect I’m not alone. The point is, how can the advance-maker be expected to know ahead of time whether an advance is wanted or unwanted when desire itself isn’t a stable condition to begin with? Just to be clear, I’m not talking about cases of ongoing unwanted sexual advances—or threats, or quid pro quo demands—otherwise known as “sexual harassment.” I’m talking about regular human mating conduct, which often involves just … giving it a try.2
I realize that raising such questions puts me out of step with current thinking about how professors should relate to our students. Maybe I’m out of step because when I was in school hooking up with professors was just what you did; it was more or less part of the curriculum. Admittedly, I went to art school, and in a different era. Mine was the lucky generation that came of age in that too-brief interregnum, after the sexual revolution and before AIDS turned sex into a crime scene replete with perpetrators and victims, back when sex—even when not so great or someone got their feelings hurt—fell under the category of experience, not trauma. It wasn’t harmful; it didn’t automatically impede your education; sometimes it even facilitated it. This isn’t to say that teacher–student relations are guaranteed to turn out well, but then what percentage of romances do?
To protect against such contingencies, colleges around the country have been formulating policies to regulate these situations and protect students against the sort of permanent injuries sustained by Wolf. (“Once you have been sexually encroached upon by a professor, your faith in your work corrodes,” she writes.) My quarrel with these codes is that the vulnerability of students has hardly decreased under the new paradigm; if anything vulnerability is on the rise, because under the new “offensive environment” guidelines, students are encouraged to regard themselves as such exquisitely sensitive creatures that an errant classroom remark impedes their education, as such hothouse flowers that an unfunny joke creates a lasting trauma. And telling one may, by the way, land you, the unfunny prof, on the carpet or even on the national news.
Knowing my own propensity for unfunny jokes, I realized it was probably time to read my university’s harassment guidelines, which I’d long avoided doing. When I finally buckled down and applied myself to studying them, I was interested to find that they were far less prohibitive than other places I’d been hearing about, at least when it comes to student–professor couplings: you can still hook up with students, you’re just not supposed to harass them into it. How long before hiring committees at these few remaining enclaves of romantic license begin using this as a recruiting tool? “Yes, the winters are bad, but the students are friendly.” However, we were warned in two separate places that inappropriate humor violates university policy. I’ve always thought inappropriateness was pretty much the definition of humor—I believe Freud would agree—but as thinking so probably meant I was clinging to gainful employment by my fingernails, I decided to put my name down for one of the voluntary harassment workshops they were running, hoping that my good citizenship would be noticed by the relevant university powers.
At the appointed hour, things kicked off with a “Sexual Harassment Pretest.” This was administered by David, an earnest midfifties psychologist, and Beth, an earnest young woman with a master’s in social work. The pretest consisted of a long list of true-false questions such as: “If I make sexual comments to someone and that person doesn’t ask me to stop, then I guess that my behavior is probably welcome.” Despite the painful dumbness of these questions and the fading of afternoon into evening, a roomful of people with advanced degrees seemed grimly determined to shut up and play along, probably aided by a collective wish to be sprung by cocktail hour. That is, until we were handed a printed list of “guidelines.” Number one on the list was: “Do not make unwanted sexual advances.”
Someone demanded querulously from the back, “But how do you know they’re unwanted until you try?” (Okay, it was me.) Our leader, David, seemed oddly flummoxed by the question, and began frantically jangling the change in his pants pocket.
“Do you really want me to answer that?” he finally responded, trying to make a joke out of it. I did want him to answer, but also didn’t want to be seen by my colleagues as a troublemaker. There was an awkward pause in the proceedings while he stared me down. Another person piped up helpfully, “What about smoldering glances?”
Everyone laughed, but David’s coin-jangling was becoming more pronounced. A theater professor spoke up, guiltily admitting to having complimented a student on her hairstyle that very afternoon (one of the “Do Nots” involved not commenting on students’ appearances) but wondering whether, as a gay male, not to have complimented her would have been grounds for offense. He mimicked the female student, tossing her mane around in a “Notice my hair!” manner, and people began sh
outing suggestions about other dumb pretest scenarios for him to perform, like sexual harassment charades. Rebellion was in the air. The man sitting next to me, an ethnographer who studied street gangs, whispered, “They’ve lost control of the room.” David was jangling his change so frantically that it was hard to keep your eyes off his groin. I had to strain to hear what people were saying.
My attention glued to David’s pocket, I recalled a long-forgotten pop psychology guide to body language that identified change-jangling as an unconscious masturbation substitute. If the very leader of our sexual harassment workshop was engaging in offensively public masturbatory-like behavior, seizing his private pleasure in the midst of the very institutional mechanism designed to clamp such delinquent urges, what hope for the rest of us?
Let’s face it: other people’s sexuality is often just weird and creepy. Sex is leaky and anxiety-ridden; intelligent people can be oblivious about it. Of course the gulf between desire and knowledge has long been a tragicomic staple: consider some notable treatments of the student–professor hookup theme—Coetzee’s Disgrace; Francine Prose’s Blue Angel; Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections—in which learning has an inverse relation to self-knowledge, professors are emblems of sexual stupidity, and such disasters ensue that it’s hard not to read them as cautionary tales about the disastrous effects of intellect on practical intelligence. The implementers of the new campus codes seem awfully optimistic about rectifying the condition.
I wonder what the esteemed Professor Bloom, ferocious scourge of every “ism,” would have made of our little gathering. I suspect he’d be against trying to corral the tumult of carnality into a set of numbered guidelines, and perhaps also more attuned to the powers of the weak. In fact, this was another question I’d wanted to ask David: Isn’t it possible that the recipients of unwelcome advances wield some power in these situations—the power to reject and humiliate the advancer, at the very least?
Along these lines, Jane Gallop, a feminist English professor who’s acknowledged seducing more than one of her professors while a graduate student, has said, looking back on her experiences, that sleeping with professors made her feel cocky. She wanted to see them naked, she says, to see them as like other men. Lots of smart, ambitious women were doing the same thing at the time, she points out (this would have been the early eighties)—it was a way to feel your own power, to not play out a victim scenario. No doubt in a better world where people didn’t require such circuitous forms of validation, fewer such transactions would take place and everyone would have sex for only the right reasons (whatever these would be), but so far humankind has not evolved to this higher plane, or not to my knowledge.
It’s not that I don’t understand Wolf begrudging Bloom’s clumsy attempts to employ her for the grubby purposes of masculine validation, but what she’s ignoring about this scenario is that she had power over him too—because of her good looks and youth, to be sure, but they’re hardly worthless currency in our culture. Perhaps especially so for those whom nature has chosen to deprive in this regard. The photos running alongside Wolf’s article tell their own story: Wolf at twenty, rather gorgeous; Bloom, in an undated photo, one of the less attractive men on the planet.
As for the power Bloom wielded over Wolf, it wasn’t because he was collecting a paycheck from Yale—there was no attempt to cash in there, no quid pro quo harassment. He took the “No” in stride and retreated to nurse his wounds. The power he had was his intellectual prowess, the power of his literary judgment: he was a charismatic learned guy, and Wolf wanted his approval (and wanted to be found attractive, she admits elsewhere). But when she writes about becoming sick with excitement when Bloom agreed to read her poems, it isn’t really clear that either’s fantasies were any more objectifying than the other. When Wolf insists that Bloom has power over her, what she doesn’t get is that it’s because she’s in thrall to his power, not because he exercises it; in thrall to the phallic mythos she’s also so deeply offended by. I fully agree that men have too much power, though what we glimpse here is the degree to which that power continues to be propped up by women’s fantasies about masculine icons. What also gets left out of the story, at least in Wolf’s telling, is that these fantasies are themselves a source of pleasure, even when not exactly borne out by reality.
What’s equally excruciating about the whole imbroglio is that the power of youth and prettiness was so transfixing for the aging ugly man that he abandons all dignity and puts himself in such an untenably comic position. The levels of mutual misunderstanding approach condition of farce. At least having written an introduction to a new translation of Don Quixote, with its notorious projectile vomiting scene, Bloom, if anyone, would (one presumes) be able to appreciate the low comedy of his failed wooing of Wolf. And as for Wolf, having vomited on the Great Man’s advances, can’t she rest assured that she got her point across sufficiently twenty years ago?
* * *
Whether or not it’s a brilliant move, plenty of professors I know, male and female, have hooked up with students for shorter and longer durations, though female professors do it less, and rarely with undergrads. (The gender asymmetries here would require a dozen further essays to explicate.) Some of these professors act well, some are assholes, and it would behoove the student population to learn the identifying marks of the latter breed early on, because post-collegiate life is full of them too. I propose a round of mandatory workshops on this useful topic for all students, though it seems unlikely that anyone other than me is about to sign this petition.
But here’s another way to look at it: the longue durée view. Societies keep reformulating the kinds of cautionary stories they want to tell about intergenerational desire and the catastrophes that result, from Oedipus Rex to student–teacher dating policies.3 The details vary; so do the kinds of catastrophes prophesized—once it was plagues and crop failure, these days it’s psychological injuries. But even over the last half-century the story continues to be reconfigured. In the preceding era, it was the Freudian account that reigned for explanatory purposes: children universally desire their parents, such desires meet up with social prohibitions—the universality of the incest taboo—and become repressed. Neurosis ensues.
These days, intergenerational desire remains a dilemma, but what’s shifted is the direction of the arrows. Now it’s parents—or their surrogates, teachers—who do all the desiring: children are returned to innocence. (The recovered memory movement also has a lot to answer for here, having transformed a lot of perfectly adequate parents and nursery school teachers into molesters on the basis of therapist-induced accusations.) So long to childhood sexuality, the most irksome part of the Freudian story. So too with the new campus behavior codes, which also excise student desire from the story, extending the presumption of the innocent child well into his or her collegiate career. Except that students aren’t children.
Recently, an erotically confused friend, a handsome sometimes-professor nearing sixty and separated from his wife, showed up for drinks with a twenty-five-year-old blonde in tow. She had long flowing locks and a Kewpie doll face. They’d met at a writing workshop he’d taught. “She’s a little stupid,” he confessed, sotto voce, when she went outside for a smoke. “But she has this … animal vitality that’s really appealing.”
He claimed to want to get back together with his wife. Well, maybe he did; he wasn’t sure. “I like being married,” he mused. “I do better when I’m married.” I responded, possibly with a bit of an edge, that for someone who says he likes being married, he seemed to veer in the opposite direction. “I know,” he said, abashed. He leaned closer and whispered, “I’m so fucked up.”
I tried not to feel censorious, since who am I to feel censorious? “Is there a creative figure who has not had a desperately confused sex life?” asks Gilbert Sorrentino in The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Part of me envied my friend’s willingness to be so emotionally incoherent, and to find such willing accomplices at every turn. As for hi
s student, an aspiring writer, I figured she was getting a lot of potential material out of it, not to mention a valuable educational experience.
Cheaters
If I’d been having an on-and-off-again affair with a married sports hero and discovered, to my dismay and chagrin, that a lot of other girls were simultaneously having affairs with the same married sports hero, would I feel justified in telling (and where possible, selling) my tale of romantic injury to the media? This is a question I found myself asking a lot when the marital woes of a certain world-class golf champion became a protracted national preoccupation, with embarrassing new revelations issuing daily from the media wing of his ad hoc harem. I suspect the answer in my case would be “maybe so”1—at least, I can understand how getting clobbered with photos of ten or twelve other mistresses and realizing you weren’t as special and chosen as you’d thought, that you were actually one of a small crowd, might demand some score-settling. At least you’d want to straighten the media out on how you were different from all the rest of them. Classier, for instance.
But here’s another question that crossed my mind. Did the married sports hero in question have some kind of unwitting penchant for sexual and romantic partners who would subsequently feel the need to share their experiences with the world? Is this now a type—not blondes or brunettes, but the garrulous? Or was the sports hero just a little willfully oblivious about certain facts of contemporary life, namely that it’s a new ball game when it comes to celebrity sexual privilege nowadays? Maybe there’s a tough message such guys need to hear (yes, this is largely a male club), which is that the fans and admirers most drawn to these high-wattage hookups appear to be the same cohort most inclined to sell you out later. Worse news still: this cohort may well include your current spouse. If I were a tabloid-worthy sports icon or any scandal-avoidant celeb, I’d want to note the correlation. Serial philanderers and sexual compulsives need to be better psychologists in the age of Twitter, as one suspects that psychological savvy rather than good luck alone is the quality that separates those who end up in national ignominy from those who don’t.