Mallory is off for the next THREE WEEKS (!) and Jaya and Matt will be filling in for the first two of those weeks, and staying at my house for some of that time! (paces back and forth waiting for them to arrive) Please offer them the fealty you show to Mallory and myself.
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I do not know if you have read the profile of the two ex-convicts who help get recent parolees used to life outside prison, but please please do, and if it moved you as much as it moved me, you can donate via the Anti-Recidivism Coalition, and see what you can do in your area, just by googling “prison volunteering.” For example, there is this incredible program at one of my local correctional facilities called “Bedtime Stories,” where once a month female inmates meet with volunteers who bring story books and tape recorders so that the inmates can record themselves singing lullabies or reading bedtime stories for their kids and grandkids to listen to. The idea of that literally brought me to my knees.
Anyway, please read the profile (and email me if you’re out of free articles, I’ll send you a pdf or something):
Carlos shouted, ‘‘Welcome home, Mr. Hammock!’’ Roby shouted, ‘‘How are you feeling, Mr. Hammock?’’ They introduced themselves and hurried to collect his few possessions — a brown paper bag and a pair of work boots — moving as if they’d done this exchange dozens of times, which they had, while Hammock stood between them, looking stunned.
Carlos handed Hammock the key and asked if he wanted to pop the trunk. But the key wasn’t a key; it was a button. After squinting at it for a second, Hammock handed it back and said, ‘‘I wouldn’t know what to do with that.’’
He’d been in prison for 21 years.
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The portion of this essay called “On Sex and Manipulation” is one of the best explanations of why it’s wrong to sleep with your students I have ever seen:
I will not make the dumb mistake of theorizing about what young women want (again, as a Young White Heterosexual Male, I am the least equipped to do this, as much as I am intimately equipped to tell you Just How Horny We Are). I can totally fathom how some young women will want to have sex with their male teachers; they might seem to desire a bit of extra attention all the way to a full-blown relationship. Sure. Why not? All is possible! I feel queasy about Kipnis’ claim that discouraging student-teacher relationships is akin to an insulting restriction on women’s choice and mature, adult relationships, but there are extreme reactions on either side of the spectrum. I can see some of her points. I suppose if you are approximately the same age as your pupil, and there is nothing to be gained or lost in the sex — a grade, a position, a publishing contract, a spot on an editorial board, or even entry way to a social circle with clear pyramids of power — and if you are both really, really aching for it, and you tick all the necessary boxes of consent and know no one’s making a rushed or silly choice because of liquor or drugs and you are still aching for it, then okay, okay, okay, but then you can still wait until class is over, right? What’s another month or two? Or are you too much of a boner machine (or selfish creep) to wait? Are you too used to wielding power like a massive phallic bludgeon? I’m not kidding.
One thing that Kipnis seems to think is that if women refuse the sexual advancements of authorities, nothing’s lost. She literally poses the question: “What sorts of repercussions can there possibly be if the student refuses?” Healey touches on this exact notion of consequence, saying “The influence [professors] wield may seem insignificant to those in their community who have moved beyond their reach, but for those who haven’t, it is more than enough to frighten or threaten or silence.” One situation, opposite reactions. Given the choice between believing someone like Kipnis, a tenured, mature professor who can’t understand why someone might be intimidated, and Healey, a young woman articulating her own experience of intimidation, I feel it’s imperative to believe, and listen to, the latter. Moreover, creative writing drops students into a world where the border between classroom and social scene often becomes porous. It means that grades and ‘favour’ aren’t the only things jeopardized by not flirting, or accepting a touch or grab, or ‘hooking up.’ If you can’t understand this, then you’ve got a long way to go before you understand how publishing works.
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One of my very favourite pieces of short fiction we’ve ever run is Helen McClory’s “Pretty Dead Girl Takes a Break”, which is SO short I encourage you to read it again right now and share it with your friends. Anyway, as sometimes happens to our authors (quite frequently, actually, to my GREAT pleasure) Helen got approached by an agent who reads The Toast and now her first collection of short stories (including “Pretty Dead Girl”) is out! Go pre-order it, and be happy for Helen, and also she’ll be doing some readings in NYC and Edinburgh, I’ll let you know when!
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this dang love story slayed me:
It was a chilly day. Wind whipped across the sand. A photo shows Selma in Bucky’s fatigue jacket, several sizes too big, his dress cap askew on her head. Her smile lit up the beach, her eyes creased with joy.
Though they had been apart for months, she would not allow him more than a nuzzle in public.
“I felt my father’s eyes were on me,” Selma said.
Bucky was patient. “I figured that was my girl, and if everything eventually falls into place, I’ll marry her.”
*
ooof:
Joseph Sledge went free. He was embraced by his sister, his brother, a nephew he’d never met, and by his lawyers from the Center on Actual Innocence. They took him out for oyster stew. He’s due $750,000 for 36 years in prison. I want him to live happily ever after.
David’s apology is a good precedent, but not a good apology. It’s not a performative utterance, in that he says he’s apologizing to Mr. Sledge, but doesn’t actually say “I apologize, Mr. Sledge” or “I’m sorry, Mr. Sledge.” There’s too much about the suffering of prosecutors.
‘What happened to you was awful. We totally hate when that happens, worse than anything! Hate it! It hurts us here.’
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Jessica Machado on shame:
I’ve spent the last eleven years since that day in Denny’s wrestling with the idea of shame. At first, I dismissed my stepdad’s explanation as trite and cliché. I was befuddled that a pregnancy from more than thirty-five years ago had consumed my mom during her last moments on earth. I didn’t get why my mom, who had raised me in the diverse, accepting breeziness of Hawaii, during the era of “Like a Virgin” and Motley Crue’s “Girls, Girls, Girls,” thought her liberal daughter with a history of sad-sack relationships would judge her for—for what, exactly? For having sex in college? It was easier for me to believe that my mom, who’d always held her emotions close, was using shame as an excuse to hide herself from me yet again.
Then, during the last presidential election, it struck me how spoiled and ignorant my perspective had been. Shame is indeed a very real, very powerful and very prominently used political tool in places I am lucky to have never lived. My mother was born in 1944 in Shreveport, Louisiana, and nearly fifty years after she gave up a child for adoption, forty-two years after Roe v. Wade, Louisiana essentially remains the <target=”blank”>worst state to live in if you’re a woman: There is only one ob-gyn for every 13,000 women; it has one of the highest maternity mortality rates in the country; and abortion isn’t legal without a counseling session and an ultrasound. Even if you aren’t interested in getting an abortion, these laws demonstrate the attitude that, unlike men, women aren’t allowed to have sexual desires, that their bodies are not worthy of care or protection. They are instead vessels for procreation, most admired for their chastity and primed for deference.
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Would You Rather (Josh or Travis from Clueless edition):
Tyler: Joel, Clueless was my favorite movie even before I finally got to watch it on video. Naturally, no one would take me to see it in the movie theater that summer. What movies did my parents take me to instead, based on my limited memory and what Wikipedia tells me also came out that year? Apollo 13. Batman Forever. Fuckin’ Babe, which I’ll now admit is a fantastic movie but I was furious that I had to sit through it at the time. I had to wait months and months before the film was released on video, and I went to the damn Movie Gallery in my hometown every afternoon to find that the two copies of it (ONLY TWO!!!!!) were always rented. And then when I finally saw it, everything about it was perfection. The clothes. The colors. The slang. The boys, even if I wasn’t exactly sure they were who I was focusing on quite yet. I did know, however, that Cher Horowitz was my hero.
Joel: I think I probably dreamt for almost a full decade about getting a jeep as my very first car.
Tyler: ME TOO! Mine was a Chevy Corsica. You can’t turn that into a euphemism for sex.
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Tags: feminism, link roundup, the internet
OH MY GOD that love story. Selma sounds like a kick-ass lady and HOW ARE THEY SO ADORABLE TOGETHER.
(not going to lie, when I saw “Bucky”, I thought Nicole had linked to some Steve/Bucky fic but NOPE)
(also the only correct answer is Josh >>>>> Travis because BABY PAUL RUDD although really, pretty sure that man has a portrait stashed up in his attic somewhere)
I think I am going to cry happy tears from reading this.
So, linkroundup is going to take me all day to read, because I’m covering for a coworker and it’s MONDAY and ugh, but, first:
Anyway, please read the profile (and email me if you’re out of free articles, I’ll send you a pdf or something)
Stuff like that makes me a. love the toast, and b. think about how one day I expect the community of people invested enough to read the linkroundup regularly to be too big for Nicole to say that sort of thing, and that makes me happysad.
Also, over the weekend, I mentioned to Mr.Table that Mallory was on vacation for three!weeks! and his response was “oh, that wasn’t a joke?”. <3
I totally agree that none of the Optimal Romance Choices in Clueless are actually attractive. (None are bad-looking as such, but…meh.) Can I go with “Elton, and kick him out afterwards?”
TOASTS I had a great visit with my Tiny Nephew on Saturday. I read him the first Babar book and let him headbutt me and kick me in the mouth with his chubby lil legs. Then he decided that the only acceptable way to spend the afternoon was for me to carry him through the garden and talk to him about the plants in a high-pitched voice. Every time I tried sitting down he would wail in disappointment. It was a good arm workout, actually (5-month-olds are heavy!). It’s strange to look at photos of him right after he was born and realize that frighteningly small preemie that almost doesn’t look human at all is the same person as the fat baby who shrieks with laughter if you lift him up in the air really fast.
ON A COMPLETELY DIFFERENT NOTE I really wish NBC hadn’t moved Hannibal to Saturdays because when it aired on Thursdays I could discuss it with you all in the open thread the next day and now I have to wait ALMOST A WHOLE WEEK??
RIGHT???? WORST CHOICE OF DAY EVER. GODDAMMIT NBC, LET THE SHOW GO OUT WITH SOME DIGNITY
(hi i am so in to discuss it with you rn also we could start a twitter group or something because those are very helpful for mid-airing freak outs)
Holy shit, Jessica Machado’s piece hit me right in the gut.
One reason I teach The Girls Who Went Away (which she cites) in my class on motherhood is so that students understand what anti-choice activists are calling for when they say that if they can’t have abortions, women with unwanted pregnancies can “just” give up babies for adoption. I want them to know what’s hidden in that “just.”
That’s so, so disgusting, this idea that you can “just give up” a baby for adoption. If a woman has an unwanted pregnancy, oftentimes there is no easy way out. You get a choice (at least for now) between a few very emotionally difficult options. There’s no need to pretend that it’s ever easy, and frankly it’s misogynistic to act like it is, which I guess is why conservatives believe it.
I was adopted, and a woman I knew in high school got pregnant and gave the baby up, and I think I may have been the only person who even talked to her about it, at all. :/
That book changed the way I think about abortion and adoption and my own family. So glad to hear that you’re teaching it! No one I talk to has ever heard of it.
I run into a lot of people who’ve read it, but am an adoptee, so. I’ve interviewed one of the birth moms from that book, though I never actually did anything with the interview, and we were talking more about counseling for parties to adoption.
I can’t stand the way most people talk about adoption; I find very, very few people understand it well if it hasn’t had a direct impact on their lives. I wouldn’t expect them to understand, in that case, but I also don’t know why they then have these Very Firm Opinions about it and what it ought to mean.
It seems like a glaring case of not knowing how much you don’t know. People don’t even realize they have these blind spots big enough to drive a semi through about this issue. It’s very frustrating.
It had a huge impact on how I think about these issues too. I wish I could give a copy to everyone who has Strong Opinions. Although in retrospect, reading it while in the throes of postpartum depression was probably not my smartest decision.
The piece hit me in the gut too. I know I have mentally skimmed around the idea before, but this piece made me stare directly at the fact that there is a giant industry devoted to shaming women. Not all of the businesses are even remotely related, but they certainly form a lockstep line that bombards from the moment cognition starts in a girl’s brain until she dies. The profits are extraordinary.
I grappled with shame from an abuser for a long time, and it has taken me a long time and a lot of work to leave that shame behind. It was how he tried to control me, and how others tried to shut me up after the fact.
I have known three women who gave up babies in open adoptions. All of them said it was the hardest thing they’d ever done. One said flat-out that if she’d known how hard it would actually be, she would have had an abortion.
I get very annoyed with people who say, “So you don’t want contraception, and you don’t want abortion, and you don’t want to pay welfare for single mothers? What are women supposed to do, huh huh?”
THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO GIVE UP THE BABY FOR ADOPTION. POOR WOMEN ARE SUPPOSED TO PRODUCE BABIES FOR RICH COUPLES WHO CAN’T HAVE KIDS. THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO DO. Reducing poor women’s access to reproductive technology which helps them control their fertility and to income support for single parents is not some huge, un-thought-out irony, it is an absolutely clear statement about what poor women’s bodies are “for”.
Congratulations to Helen McClory for getting published, and A+ to The Toast for allowing writers to retain their rights to their work!
This weekend was far too much excitement and I’m glad to be back to the frigid, quiet AC of work, for once. And to a nice long link roundup to read over my somewhat shitty cafeteria coffee.
Hi this is Helen here – regular lurker on The (beloved and wonderous) Toast. Thanks for the congrats, and here’s a glass to Nicole and Mallory for playing fair and encouraging us writers along!
Congrats on the book!
Congratulations!!
The original Kipnis piece made me furious for all of the power structures she seems to ignore.The impact of your relationships with your professors extends beyond the classroom, especially in grad school and in places where your professors will be your colleagues. It also affects people around you. I took a seminar class with a professor who was actively sleeping with one of my classmates at the time. I don’t know the details of their relationship, but it seemed and continues to seem like the kind of equal wanting to do it kind of thing Kipnis talks about. But all of us knew and it made us so uncomfortable. Every time act of favoritism he showed her reminded us of what was going on.
Are you too used to wielding power like a massive phallic bludgeon? This is an A+++ line.
yes. I was an undergrad student of a male professor who was sleeping with one of my male classmates, and it was equally uncomfortable for all of us (or at least me very vividly) – I remember among other things a number of us feeling very ignored/left out of the conversation after class very suddenly when before I’d been part of it as had many others. It was the end of seeing him as a mentor for me, really. It was really disillusioning and sad. Teaching is an interpersonal relationship and as such a lot of respect should be shown to maintaining it and handling it well (I think, as someone currently in the teacher position).
Hi yes I would like to be in the club of “my professor was sleeping with undergrads and probably also grad students and not me and let me tell you what, that sucked.”
Moreover, creative writing drops students into a world where the border between classroom and social scene often becomes porous.
It’s not just creative writing; I was in the sciences and if anything, there were even blurrier boundaries due to the long hours you put in in the lab or, in my case, in the field. Fieldwork especially can be pretty intimate in its own way; it’s one of those shared intense experiences that can lead to sexytimes really, really easily.
And let me just say, the way the mostly male department and administration handled this was extremely Not Ok. They managed to somehow punish the students involved, the students who knew about it but were afraid to say anything, and the students who just worked for the guy and didn’t really know anything until much later (hi!), all while protecting this guy’s reputation and giving him the “well I got denied tenure” excuse when he moved on to a new university. Ugh gross.
Ugh. A similar thing happened in my department. Most of the older male faculty didn’t understand why it was a big deal and the rest found a way to punish the students who knew but didn’t say anything out of fear. Dude ended up leaving and getting a sweet gig somewhere else, no problem.
I was just on a field trip where and that topic came up. Both of the people I was with met their spouses in their labs (as in the labs they worked in, I don’t think either was a boss/underling kind of thing). The 4th that used to go with us (until I put my foot down) had impregnated at least 2 students on fieldtrips. He still got tenure.
*jaw drop*
Agreed. I went to a small school with a disproportionately male faculty. The size of the school encouraged mentor-student relationships, and the demographics of the faculty meant that most of those were between male students and male professors. It sucked.
The small size also meant that gossip traveled really quickly, so everybody knew when a professor asked a pretty student (not in any of his classes!) out to coffee to “discuss her paper,” and that she soon realized he was just trying to sleep with her. It was really deflating, even though she wasn’t in any of his classes, even though she’d rebuffed his advances, even though I didn’t have him as a professor either.
It seriously harms the whole community. Don’t sleep with students.
Corrections
Criminals! We put you in our prison to correct you
And decades later throw you on the street
despite our sincere efforts to perfect you
you end up back among us tout-de-suite
Tell me, Is this how you show your gratitude?
For the beatings and the isolation rooms
we use to help improve your wicked attitude
It’s your fault when we send you to the tombs
Imagine our surprise that you’re distressed
when we throw you all together, weak and strong
just consider yourself more than slightly blessed
that to some gangster you do not belong
The guards we hire really are the best
that we can find among those unarrested
they only torture those among our guests
who stand where broken cameras are attested
So stop your whining, we’ve done all we can
to prepare you for your life out on the street
It’s your fault if your friendly parole man
returns you to the land of hard concrete.
For those who care (you few, you happy few) I’m dumping these Toast poems on a tumblr: librarymole.tumblr.com.
Good! They deserve to be collected for preservation.
I’m afraid they lose relevance almost immediately.
Some of them may, but I suspect both of today’s will be periodically relevant to the news for a depressingly long time to come.
Maybe you can put them together with their news story? Just put in a link at the end?
There’s been a lot of crazy, gruesome stuff on this show but the latest episode was the first time I had to cover my face because I just couldn’t watch. So tense! And then such whiplash from the next episode’s promo with Zeller and Price all “Oh hi Will, we didn’t think we’d see you again!”
I will never be over the fact that Hannibal surrendered to law enforcement just to prevent Will from getting any closure and getting over him. Talk about cutting off your nose (hehe) to spite your face, jfc.
Also, Hannibal carrying Will in his arms, princess-style, from the Verger house.
I will certainly miss all the artistic craziness when the show finally goes away. The pig surrogate was inspired.
The worst thing about the pig surrogate was that, during the initial conversation, I was sure it was a pig, and then dismissed that as “no, but seriously, that’s insane.” And then it was actually a pig, and I was all, “oh, ok, they did go there after all.”
And then I googled “pig surrogate human fetus,” because Hannibal.
You don’t break up with Hannibal unless he wants you to.
Seriously though, I thought that was a BRILLIANT way for Hannibal to get caught. He’s a man who would never let himself be put in a cage unless it was on his own terms, by his own choice. And to prove a point to his murder!boyfriend by getting himself locked up? HE REALLY IS THE DEVIL.
So excited to have Preller back, I have missed the snark (though Aaron Abrams’ livetweets are delightful regardless of his presence on the show).
“I don’t want to know where you are”
“Here I am! Right here, totally thinking about you all the time, I DREW YOU A THING”
I am so glad I discovered Aaron Abram’s livetweets. Honestly, I really love how the whole cast and crew seems to have such a deep love for the show and don’t just engage with the fans – they are fans. Also, if you didn’t know, Scott Thompson has an after-show where he interviews castmates and crew. He totally ships Will and Hannibal.
I think I just yelled ‘You’re the worst ex-boyfriend, EVER!” at the screen at the end. He’s pretty much a walking Dear Prudence letter.
Mason died just as he lived: being drowned by a pair of lesbians while an eel swims into his mouth.
Thanks for the link to the SorryWatch blog – it’s really interesting! I need to actually, like, do some work today, but I am excited to dive into their archives when I have the time.
Re: When it’s okay to proposition a student. When I was an undergraduate contemplating graduate school, I had the audacity to refuse a professor who explicitly told me he’d like to have sex with me, “now that I’m no longer officially his student.” I remember my face flushing with embarrassment (at him? my own? I still don’t know), mumbled something about a boyfriend, and made some polite talk before excusing myself from his office, which, after that event, became suffocatingly and unbearably small.
The funny thing about waiting until the semester is over; if you’re a woman and you say “no”, there are always repercussions. He was a powerhouse in his field; his letters of recommendation got me into grad school. The meandering talks with him about science and research helped me grow intellectually and academically. After that proposition? Silence. Not a peep from him, no friendly emails, asking my opinion on this article or that. I lost a mentor and a key contact to a field I once valued. I also lost confidence in my own abilities for a time, until I came to realize the fault was with him, not me. I ended up in a completely different (and far more rewarding) field, and I can thank his douchebaggery as the final indicator that that realm of academia wasn’t meant for me.
This this this. Propositioning a student is never okay. Propositioning a person who until very recently was your student is not okay. Propositioning a person who is or is trying to be a junior member of your field is not okay. Even if the more senior party is a mere adjunct or TA (which I shouldn’t have to spell out, but I did once overhear a (male) grad student claim that it is okay for TAs to date undergrads because TAs “don’t have any power”).
And accepting a proposition from a person who fits any of those categories is extremely questionable. I understand that sometimes there are “happily ever after” versions of this story. I do not care. The chance of trainwreck is substantially higher.
TAs may not feel they have any power; undergrads do not think this.
Right, although I would argue that it’s okay the other way around, because man, so much regret about not trying to jump on the Hot British Junior Prof Train back when I was an undergrad.
(There was this one guy…one of my classmates and I had a running debate about whether he had Bowie-esque endowments or was just really excited about photography and the novel or the pants were just that awesome, and we were both too chickenshit to ever find out. WOE.)
I’m so sorry that happened to you.
I’m a professor and I have become friends — like, genuinely very good friends — with several former students, as well as a few former profs of mine. It takes time, and it’s based on mutual shared interests/humor/etc, and it’s NOT SEXUAL ffs. I can’t imagine how Kipnis & people who think like her find this kind of bullshit okay. I’m known as a young, relatively cool prof (#coolprof?) — I swear in class, I have purple hair, I talk about the internet, etc — and I know that the times when I’ve said to a student “I think you’re hilarious and interesting, and we should keep in touch after class is over,” they’ve acted like it’s a Major Event. It’s a lot of social power, and people who deny it are kidding themselves.
I’m friends with some of my undergrad professors on FB, and it still makes me feel incredibly cool.
This is a good time for me to tell you that your username cracks me up every time!
😀
“What sorts of repercussions can there possibly be if the student refuses?”
WHAT INDEED
Damn it Kipnis, what’s your damage? How is it not incredibly obvious?
SERIOUSLY
(sorry just piping in to say that i’m also a laura elizabeth, what up)
Somehow I missed “Pretty Dead Girl Takes a Break,” and wow wow wow. Congratulations to Helen!
I am going to be thinking about the life after prison piece all day. I hope there are programs around here that I may be able to volunteer for – or even a place that I can bring donations to.
Around here, a lot of the prison outreach is done by the Catholic church. I don’t know if that’s the case everywhere or just around here, but that could be a place to start with, if you’re comfortable with that.
The one I know best is Chicago-area based, but a lot of other organizations have used it as a model, especially the story:
http://www.cjtinc.org/programs
I don’t know where you’re located, but in my area (Austin) we have Inside Books, an organization that accepts donations of books to be sent to prison, and I know there are various programs around town where you can write letters back and forth with inmates as well.
Hey Toast–there was an essay series I meant to read, and now I can’t remember who wrote it or where it was posted. It was by a journalist who unplugged and went to live on a wild river somewhere in a very small town. I think the final essay was linked in a link roundup, and I read part of it before deciding I wanted to go back and read the whole series, which I would now do if I had any idea how to find it again. Anyone have any ideas? I think this was a couple months ago or so.
Alexis Coe’s Russian River series, at Pacific Standard!
That was so speedy, thank you!
I have some strong feelings about that academia piece. Though I’m not an academic, I was what I like to call “academia-adjacent” for a long time, and in that time moved from being relatively powerless to, not powerful exactly (I mean, it’s academia, I’m not sitting there with the nuclear launch codes), but someone with some degree of influence in one very limited sphere. And there were definitely men whose treatment of me changed dramatically as I moved up that ladder. And there were also men — and this group was definitely the majority — who were respectful and kind the whole way through. But the bad apples… they had bought into the power thing in exactly the way the author of that piece describes. It will surprise none of you to learn that I never noticed this problem with women professors. Someone I used to know — a man who was definitely in the second group — once told me that academia is a highly reputational business, and that is probably the truest thing that anyone ever said to me during those years of my life. Who you know, who your advisor is, who you’ve worked with, all of that is so important. I used those those pieces of information to make professional decisions, as did everyone else I know. That’s not to say that those with the “star advisor” or whatever were undeserving of the accolades and opportunities they received — though (as with any group of successful people) I’m sure some were. Rather it’s to say that the consequences of being frozen out, abandoned, or “blacklisted” (formally or informally) are enormous, and real, and devastating.
I also made an intentional practice of warning young women about men they should watch out for. Sometimes I was simply confirming their own impressions (“you’re right to feel that way”) and sometimes it was a more direct warning (“you should not be alone in a room with this person.”) And the reverse, as well: “he’s a good guy and you can trust him.” Since tenured professors can basically never be fired, there’s really not much to be done, unfortunately, other than watching your back and hoping for the best.
RE: Prof, dating, students, etc-
When I was an undergrad, I had an OKC profile I didn’t use much, but occasionally logged into. One day, I looked at my top matches, and BAM, there was the painfully shy youngest prof in the department. And, yes, based on that profile, OKC was right, we were a decent match, based partially on our SHARED ACADEMIC INTERESTS. I’d never taken a class with him, I think by the time he popped up there I wasn’t planning on going to grad school in the field, so while my eyebrows raised a small bit, it was mostly that I was concerned about the fact that if *I* could see his profile, so could a lot of other people. So I sent a screenshot to my adviser and made her deal with it.
She immediately walked into his office, closed his door, and told him that an unnamed student in the department had been matched with him on OKC. He was mortified, he had picked settings such that he couldn’t see people of undergrad age (so he couldn’t see that he was getting matched with me), but had messed up some other setting where he thought we couldn’t see him (but, obviously, we could). He locked that shit down IMMEDIATELY, and also asked my adviser to pass on his deepest apologies and thanks for bringing it to his attention in the least mortifying way possible.
So, basically, best possible result.
Advice to the Academic
Dear Professor
in the name of prudence
it’s probably better
if you don’t bang your students.
Surrounded by youth
enticed by beauty
that way lies madness:
abstention’s your duty
Your midlife crisis
is boiling over
but your mistake
is a lawyer’s clover
So keep it snug
beneath your tweeds
and go off campus
for your sexual needs
I have often considered it the fastest way for me to be fired: to hit on one of the students. But I’m only a staff member.
Remember when Ross Geller was dating his student, Bruce Willis’s Daughter? And it was like I guess supposed to be funny? Hoo boy, Ross Geller sure is a thankfully-fictional sack of hot garbage.
I am team “Put Ross Geller on the rocketship into the sun also it is full of [mechanical] bees,” so yeah.
Team Send Ross Geller To The Alternate Dimension Which Is Entirely Bees
Set up an exchange program – we get some bees from the Bee Dimension to help us with our bee problem, and they…get Ross Geller? Maybe not a fair exchange, unless they’re misandrist bees who like harassing Nice Guys.
YES I DO. I’m (hate-)re-watching Friends right now and it made me deeply uncomfortable.
Side note: I’m wondering whether Ross might be on the autism spectrum? He is Very Bad at reading social cues, particularly in the earlier seasons (I think this is a separate problem from the bad decisions he makes dating-wise, but not being sensitive to social nuance probably doesn’t help)
I don’t think he’s on the spectrum, I think he’s just self-absorbed. It’s not that he’s not able to recognize or understand social cues, but he’s been the coddled center of attention for his entire life, so it has simply never occurred to him to look for/pay attention to those cues in the first place.
Yeah agreed — look at his relationship with his parents for everything you need to know about that. You see it from the very beginning with Susan and Carole and the baby, how he asserts ownership over his EX WIFE and her LESBIAN PARTNER because it’s his sperm juju inside her or whatever. That’s not misreading social cues, it’s straight-up straight misogynist male entitlement that is an entirely predictable result of being raised in a misogynist culture and I’m kinnnnnnnd of sick of everyone seeing men act in entitled selfish harmful sexist ways and going “yeah but maybe he’s on the spectrum,” because it is extensively shitty and ableist and enabling of men who prey on women in ways big and small. Also, there’s never the same goddamn consideration paid to awkward women, who are mostly just called “crazy,” “clingy,” “psycho,” etc.
My boyfriend is a straight white male AND on the spectrum. And the difference between him and a self-absorbed jerk, is that when I point out “hey, you did _____ and it wasn’t cool because ______” he replies with “OH SHIT I’m so sorry I’ll try not to do that again.”
Yuuuuuuucccccckkkkk. I had to stop watching Numb3rs because the main character was a professor who had a crush on his grad student and his family and friends kept encouraging him to ask her out and I NOPED the hell out of there. It just grossed me out sooooo much. It was a fairly early episode but I was DONE at that point. I can’t be having with shows portraying an advisor/grad student relationship as the show’s OTP. Or really as anything other than a no good very bad situation.
I loooooooooove the Decider series. Love it so much. But anyone would would pick TRAVIS over JOSH is DEAD to me. Current Breckin Meyer: total Baldwin, 10/10, would bang. But Paul Rudd is ageless and perfect in every way and therefore Travis is not even in the picture.
The Women’s Association at the church I grew up in used to be really involved with Aunt Mary’s Storybook Project (http://www.cjtinc.org/aunt-mary). I should see if I can do it on my own as an adult!
I am a young professor at a small, tightly-knit institution. Last year we gave a teaching award to a male professor in another department who I have since found out has a pattern of pursuing his students juuuust after the class ends (a lot like the situation belleofthecurve described above). I can’t do anything about it. I’m a fairly new faculty member, and he’s not even in my department–in fact I don’t believe I’ve spoken more than a sentence to the man–but the whole thing makes me so, so angry.
My con law professor was married to one of his former students. By that point, they had been married for at least five or six years, but the other professors (and by default the students) referred to her as “the teenage bride” because she was in her late 20s and he was in his 40s. The story I heard from my mentor was that they hadn’t officially started dating until after she graduated, but nobody totally bought that.
While I had respectful, positive relationships with my male professors, and did not feel that they viewed female students as lesser than male students, there is a good third of the male population of my law school class I would like to see DIAF because they were disgusting misogynist creepers who treated the women around them as jokes, sexual objects, or impediments to their manly success.
TOAST NAMECHECK KLAXON :http://lareviewofbooks.org/essay/on-spinsters
Oh, lord, my own experience as a grad student instructor and then as as a lecturer/adjunct was nowhere near as bad as Spencer Gordon’s, and I’m still having flashbacks reading it. The bone-deep hatred of grading. The anxiety dreams (so, so many anxiety dreams). Having to face sullen 18-year-olds who really didn’t want to be there or learn anything. I actually broke down in tears in my adviser’s office over just how much I didn’t want the rest of my career to look like that. (Now I actually like teaching — but now I’m always the guest speaker, never the person in charge of the class, and never the one who has to grade the papers.)
Oh, Professor That Guy. I felt terrible for him! I was in his Calc II class and on several occasions when he called on people they couldn't even answer because they were busy dissolving into – forgive me – hysterical giggling. He blushed and sweated through every class. I'm happy to say that I heard him give a talk a few years later when I was in grad school and he had gained a certain amount of confidence.
I'm so glad!!!! He was very lovely in every interaction I had with him, if generally so painfully awkward that it was hard not to be awkward back. Except that one time when I was so sleep deprived by working on finals for two upper level math classes that I just started talking to him about them as I checked out his books at the library. (to be fair, i was also surprised he was at N, rather than Y). I think he may have also forgotten to be awkward as well, which was nice.