Men (16 page)

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 shouting 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 his 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.