The Right to be Stupid
“Everybody gets mad because I say these jokes, but you gotta understand that this is the best time to say them. More now than ever, and I know there’s some comedians in the back. Motherfucker, you have a responsibility to speak recklessly. Otherwise my kids may never know what reckless talk sounds like. The joys of being wrong. I didn’t come here to be right, I just came here to fuck around.”—Dave Chappelle, The Bird Revelation (2017)
Male rapacity and female vulnerability are taken for granted in the neo-Victorian society depicted in Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi classic The Diamond Age (1995). Surveillance drones ensure that women like Nell, the novel’s protagonist, are never alone with men. Wherever they go, the hovering chaperone pods are there: searching for possible signs of male misbehavior, safeguarding feminine virtue, and documenting everything. “By the time she had reached the gates of the Academy, the chaperone pod had gathered enough evidence to support a formal sexual harassment accusation, should Nell have wished to bring one.” Is this our future? I certainly hope not.
Although I refuse to take male rapacity and female vulnerability for granted, I must confess that, alas, at times, it’s a theory that seems to fit the facts. Early in my teaching career, profs told me, with some regularity, that they found it hard to resist the urge to ogle their students. I was always mystified by this—because I find it very easy to refrain from checking out teenage girls, just as I found it very easy to refrain from checking out my little sisters when we were growing up, just as I find it very easy to “hold it” and not piss myself when I’ve gotta go but have yet to find a bathroom.
The ability to effortlessly repress drives and focus our sexuality and aggression on appropriate people is central to what it means to be a civilized grownup. When we see an older kid who’s still in diapers, we don’t say “well, you know, it’s natural to piss yourself whenever you feel the need to pee”, we say: “Why isn’t that kid potty-trained yet?” Likewise, when I meet a middle-aged lecher who can’t stop eye-fucking every teenage girl he sees, I don’t say, “well, you know, it’s natural”, I say: “Shouldn’t your face be potty-trained by now?”
I’m well aware of the problem of sexual misconduct on campus. I got my job at John Abbott College because a pervy prof was ousted mid-semester and they were desperately in need of an immediate replacement. I’ll spare you the gory details about the pervy prof’s misdeeds. Suffice it to say that what he was doing, he was doing to, and in some cases with, minors. This kind of thing is seriously gross and obviously wrong. It’s also against the law. Faculty who mess around with minors deserve what’s coming to them. But if the student in question is over 18, and we’re talking about a consensual relationship between two voting adults, things aren’t nearly so clear.
Therapists are taught to beware of “erotic transference”—that is, the process whereby a client develops romantic feelings for his or her therapist. Teachers should be taught to beware of a similar phenomenon (but, in my experience, they rarely are). Pedagogy is often suffused with a kind of erotic energy. When you’re falling in love with a subject, or an idea, it’s fairly easy to fall in love with the person who’s teaching it to you. Wise teachers have always known this.
Near the end of Plato’s Symposium, Alcibiades shows up to the party wasted and regales Agathon’s guests with a story. When he was a teenager, he became obsessed with one of his teachers—a guy named Socrates—who introduced him to “the madness and Bacchic frenzy of philosophy”. There was something bewitchingly beautiful about his speech: “I was struck and bitten by the words of philosophy, which cling on more fiercely than a snake.” Before long, Alcibiades is in love with Socrates.
Alcibiades tries to seduce Socrates on a few occasions. His shamelessness is astounding, as is his nerve. But he fails each and every time because Socrates knows himself and the pedagogical process far too well. He knows that hooking up with a teenage student is a really bad idea. Just as he knows that Alcibiades has in fact fallen in love, not with him, but with philosophy. Whereas immature teachers are happy to let you mistake the message for the man, wise teachers like Socrates cultivate a healthy distance. But what if teachers fail to cultivate a healthy distance? Should they be fired? Thrown in jail? Or merely frowned upon?
Many companies forbid their employees from being romantically involved with their direct supervisor. Because the conflicts of interest are virtually inescapable. Thinking along similar lines, it seems reasonable for universities to insist that faculty refrain from dating students presently enrolled in their classes. But aside from that specific situation, is it right to legislate what adults can and cannot do on their own time? I think not. Well-intentioned legislation of this kind infantilizes the very women (and, at times, men) it seeks to save. It treats individuals who are old enough to drink, vote, and marry like helpless little children—devoid of agency and desperately in need of institutional protection. How is this empowering? How is it emancipatory? And in what universe is it feminist?
In “Professors, Power and Predators: Why Student-Teacher Relationships Should Be Banned,” Toula Drimonis maintains that student-teacher relationships should be banned outright because they’re fraught with power imbalances. I must confess that I initially thought this was a good idea. But I’ve had a change of heart. To some extent, this is because I know so many happily married couples that started out as student-teacher relationships.
Fred Bode and Janice Simpkins, two of my closest friends in the world, met and fell in love when she was an undergraduate and he was a professor at Concordia University. They’ve been happily married for well over 40 years. As Laura Kipnis rightly observes in Unwanted Advances: Sexual Paranoia Comes to Campus (2017), you can’t throw a stone on a North American campus without hitting a couple of this kind. They are very common. Outlawing a practice that seems to work out well with some regularity seems at best bizarre. Yet this is exactly what Emma Healey would have us do.
In “Stories Like Passwords,” Emma Healey describes a relationship she had with a guy she was dating on and off for two years when she was an undergraduate and he was a professor at Concordia University. The age difference between her and her boyfriend was approximately the same as the age difference between my friends Fred and Janice: she was 19 and he was 34. Just as my friend Janice was never actually registered in any of Fred’s classes, Healey was never actually registered in any of her boyfriend’s classes. Yet she now maintains that their entire relationship was “literally criminal” because of the power imbalance.
Are student-teacher relationships fraught with power imbalances? My guess is that most of the time they are. Are these power imbalances potentially problematic? Of course. But isn’t this a regular feature of the dating landscape? People with lots of power date the less powerful all the time. A high-powered lawyer friend of mine is a case in point. She makes about $500,000 a year. Her boyfriend, a personal trainer who lives in a little studio apartment, makes a fraction of what she does. Should she dump him because of the power imbalance? Of course not! They’re very much in love. Could that power imbalance complicate their relationship at some point? Sure. But that’s for them to work out. It’s none of our business. The same is true of consensual relationships between students and faculty. If there are power imbalances to contend with, that’s for them to work out. It’s none of our business. Just as the state has no place in the bedrooms of its citizens, the university has no place in the bedrooms of its employees.
In the wake of #MeToo, we seem to have momentarily forgotten that there’s a world of difference between reckless behavior that poses a serious threat to society, such as drunk driving, and idiotic behavior that merely reflects poor judgment, such as eating at McDonald’s, dating your ex’s sibling, sleeping with your pet tarantula, getting high at work, swimming in Cape Cod’s shark-infested waters, buying lottery tickets, licking a metal fence in the middle of the winter, becoming a Scientologist, having unprotected sex with strangers, responding to emails from Nigerian princes, wearing lululemons without underwear, or hooking up with your prof. Just because something’s a really bad idea, doesn’t mean there should be a law forbidding it. The rights and freedoms afforded an adult in a liberal democracy such as ours include the freedom to make bad decisions and the right to be stupid.
—John Faithful Hamer, Love Is Not a Liquid Asset (2020)
