This gossip is ten years old, but I only recently learned it – through Oso Raro.
“The experience that matters to me most — it’s why I’m an academic — is this enormous pleasure and intensity of working and thinking with people,” she says in an interview here. “And to me that’s pleasurable, it’s sexy, it’s very close.”
Ms. Gallop believes that her brand of teaching came to be viewed as harassment, in part, because of the split she sees between “power feminists,” like herself, who are pro-sex, and “victim feminists” who are not. That split, she argues has helped lead to the perversion of the definition of sexual harassment on campuses, which used to be about sexism but has come to be about anything that’s sexual.
“The investigation revealed that I did not in fact respect the boundary between the sexual and the intellectual, between the professional and the personal,” she writes in her book. “It was as if the university, seeing what kind of relations I did have with students, felt that I must be in some way guilty and was able, through this wrinkle in the policy, to find me slightly guilty of sexual harassment.”
She continues: “I was construed as a sexual harasser because I sexualize the atmosphere in which I work.”
Ms. Gallop details some of her most intimate sexual feelings and experiences in this latest book and in her earlier works. She earned her Ph.D. in French at Cornell University in 1976. Her dissertation was on the works of the Marquis de Sade, whose writings include graphic sexual descriptions of rape and torture. In her 1988 book, Thinking Through the Body, Ms. Gallop writes that Sade’s texts “moved me to masturbate.” In Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment, she recounts when she first had sex with a woman, when on separate occasions she slept with two male professors on her dissertation committee, and when she first began sleeping with her own students as an assistant professor.
You can read the entire article right here. What do you think of Gallop’s arguments? I find them very poor, and I think the “power feminist” vs. “victim feminist” distinction is entirely bogus – as are the terms themselves. I further submit that it is not natural to want to sleep with someone just because you are working closely with them. I think it is a patriarchally conditioned response. Ask my female students who have slept with their male supervisors. They say, “Well, yes, I just had to feel I had some power over him in some way, and thus gain some sort of feeling of personal power in this discipline. If the whole field were not so hierarchically arranged and so male oriented I would feel differently, but it is as it is and I feel as I do.” And indeed, one of my main disagreements with academic women’s and gender studies experts has to do with the complex ways in which many of them try to relabel gross submission to patriarchal hierarchies, and complicity with these, as “feminist.” (My favorite instance of this is the earnest argument, “I am taking the oppressive side here because it is the self-protective thing to do, and what is self-protective, is feminist.”)
These things having been said, I have far closer relationships with my students than many faculty out of state are comfortable having. Students here are ready and willing to treat you as a friend or a family member, all while maintaining boundaries which are comfortable for everyone and do not impinge on the assigning of grades. I quickly realized that it was fine and even good. My own education might have been better had I actually known the professors. And the only time I have had a problem with a student – about a grade, because we liked each other and I still failed her because, well, she failed the course – it was someone not from here, who made assumptions someone from here would not.
I suppose the bottom line there is, my students and I can handle knowing each other as people, and do not mind. And indeed, it is through work we have bonded. But given the amount of irrationality that sex injects into any situation and the power dynamics which inhere in both sex and school for most Americans and quite a few people of other nationalities as well, I would not trust the average person on an American university campus to handle romantic relationships with their students, their professors or their dissertation committees in any way I would call healthy. You. can. find. other. people. And my money says Gallop and her academic lovers did not really fall in love over books like Paolo and Francesca. My bet is that they just could not find, or did not believe they could find anyone else.
Now, I did once have an affair with a graduate student in another discipline. He was foreign and only slightly younger than I, and he had never heard of sexual harrassment policies. I said, we cannot do this, you are not in my department but I could be called in as an outside reader of your dissertation, or you could decide you want to take my theory class. He said, but I believe in private life. I can handle having one sort of relationship with you on campus and another elsewhere; there is no cognitive dissonance involved in that for me. This turned out to be true, and we did not end up working together or having to work together, and it is not a good parallel to the situations Gallop discusses since the relationship did not arise from intellectual collaboration. And there are exceptions to every rule, but still we both took a chance. I suspect that the university’s policies on sexual harassment would have protected each of us more than they would have harmed us had anything untoward happened.
For example, I also had a romance with a faculty member in another discipline, with whom I was not and would not be required to work. It went badly, and I would have left sooner had I not become afraid of the workplace harrassment which it had become evident would ensue, and which did in fact ensue when at last I left. Partly because we were in unrelated units I did not realize this amounted to sexual harrassment until the university itself said you know, we have policies and procedures we can invoke to stop this. A light went on in my feeble brain and I said: Of course! Sexual harrassment is harrassment precisely because it engulfs and disempowers you, so that you have no name for what is happening and thus remain vulnerable to it!
Then I had a colleague who believed in feminist “transgression” and made a good career writing about it, but enacted it in practice by making out with her male colleagues, in their wives’ presence, at faculty retreats. Nobody said a thing and I think this was because her behavior fit patriarchal expectations so well that, while somewhat remarkable, it was not ultimately problematic. There was also a female acolyte of Derrida, a professor where I went to graduate school. She and her boyfriend liked threesomes with women and would entice bisexual graduate students to join them. These students were fascinated and flattered at the beginning but then discovered – as one of them said later – that the professor and her boyfriend were “on a seduce and destroy mission.” They probably justify all of this by citing Gallop but I find that attitude dilettantish and self-serving. And the behavior is hardly transgressive.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
this just goes to show how sick people are regarding a most natural experience – sex…we’ve somehow perverted it to be over analyzed and taken to the ninth degree….great article
A lot of behaviour considered transgressive is not! For the postmodernist crowd S&M is transgressive. I would say that it is barely so, since you are brought up from age 1 to be a part of a hierarchical society. You are just reenacting something that you have been taught.
In the old days transgressive sex would have been sex which did not just reenact those hierarchies. From what I am able to gather / interpret – and the S/M community will disagree, I’m sure – S/M allows you to stay in these very pre-programmed, limited roles.
Well I found the following analysis of such to be rather more sophisticated and relevant than most:
McClintock, Anne 1995. Imperial Leather : Race, Gender, and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. New York: Routledge.
She speaks about how this Victorian era working class woman found a patron in some somewhat more upper notch fellow, who had a fetish for dirty hands.
Yet, most of the time, I don’t get the impression that there is any social or political critique implicated in S&M.
Ah yes, this is one of the many books of which I’ve read a long informative and interesting review at some point and then not gone on to read the actual book. So, this woman found a patron, as happens sometimes, but did his fetish some how transgressify…? I seem to remember the book as more or less talking about colonialism as an S/M type scene which then gets transferred into the domestic realm…?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternization
As long as there is a power relationship (even if that relationship is not abusive) fraternization should be discouraged. I liked most of my professors. Many kept their distance. One professor told me more than once that she likes me in her classes because I can say things as a student that she cannot say as a professor and what I say helps convey her political messages. I know she trusted me with this revelation. However, I must admit I would and do expect good grades from professors that I think like (or use) me. Not saying I would take advantage of the relationship as in simply not doing my work but I do expect to be thrown over a hump to the positive side if my grade is in fact not completely over that hump. I have experienced the other side as well. My Shakespeare professor did not particularly care for me. Often she would have something snide to say when I asked a question and twice after we received major papers back, she would discuss mistakes to the class that were clearly my mistakes. I received a B+. I think it was the worse she felt she could get away with because class participation was giving the greater percentage and no way did I not earn an A+ in that category. I know I did not do my best on the two papers but on average and compared to my peers at the worse I should have gotten an A-. Another professor (Ecology) gave me an A-, I know for a fact because he did not appreciate a rant I delivered during a class discussion on the hypocrisy SUV use by environmentalists. Turns out that he had a whopping mega size SUV (he now has a hybrid, well he did two years ago). In hindsight, I should have protested that grade but it was early in my education and I was not that confident. Nevertheless, there was no sex involved and I still had some issues so I do not believe in a million years that once sex is introduced there will be fairness. Even if the student fares well, the other students will be cheated because they did not benefit from the fraternization.
It’s an odd kind of scenario. She basically uses him to enable her to re-enact certain relationships of economic dominance and submission (through a sexually charged relationship) in order to heal herself of the wounds inflicted by a lower social role. Her outward signs of economic bondage become sexually charged fetish forms or items in her own eyes.
Jennifer – interesting – yes, this is what the S/M people say it does for them – re-enact abuse, lack of privilege, etc. but now in a situation you have control over, and which is “play,” and thus get over it. Is this what the woman said or what MacClintock says? It’s the textbook 1990s explanation of why S/M is good for you.
Kitty – yes although those questions of liking and not still exist even without “fraternization.” My dissertation director only liked men and brunettes, the rest of us were lazy, impudent, and abusable as far as she was concerned, and she felt she had the right and knew she had the power. I could go on. But YES, you have got to fraternize with a whole class if you’re going to do it at all, and this is why having sex is sort of … uh … impractical, would you say?
Fraternizing: I have a student I gave a B to but it should have been at most C, because her paper was late and I trusted she’d still get it in and she had a B average so far. But I got no paper. I knew she was having serious family problems *and* she had also been my student worker *and* she had house-sat for me in the summer, feeding my getting away from that family. You see … fraternization! I’ve asked for that paper and not gotten it yet. Now I have her in class again, I just realized I can hold it over her head now 😉 (in a very nice way of course): special presentation on that topic, it is germane.
Is this what the woman said or what MacClintock says?
McClintock says it.
Profacero,
I’d really like to ask you something about this topic but I’d rather do so privately. If you could find the time, would you please e-mail me? Or if you prefer, you could simply let me ask you about it here and then not publish the comment to your blog.
Hi Bint – I couldn’t find your e-mail address, left a comment on your blog with mine, which is profacero@gmail.com. Hasta pronto – Z
University Diaries, on the other hand, has this to say
about romances and sexual harassment, and she provides interesting references:
http://www.margaretsoltan.com/2007/10/professorstudent-affairs-and-new.html
hmmm.
Yes – whatever people want to do, I suppose, but all I ever wanted to do with my professors was talk.
talk not s..talk?
But what if your professor is very derricious?
😉 I really don’t know … I never had that happen! There were one or two good looking ones but instead of pursue them for dating I just thought, oh, how novel of this university to have hired someone well put together.
I wouldn’t have wanted to mix personal stuff with work stuff. In graduate school I didn’t even date other students within my (large) department. But I guess that’s just me!
Well don’t ever try to seduce a Freudian because it is a road fraught with too many misunderstandings:
“Yes I DO want your penis — Only not in that Freudian symbolic way.”
😉 yes – and UD will forgive me but I got the impression from her post that she did want those profs in that Freudian symbolic way! I’m not saying it’s bad…
Well the symbolic way can be very derricious too, but actuarry it can be rather limiting.
This is what I think. A lot of the women I know who have done this have thought at the time it was what they had to do in order to have a conversation. When they figured out that they could have a conversation without it, they stopped (and felt freed). One – a friend, I will say – said it had to do with power. She wanted to hook into professorial power, or counterbalance it with some other power. Somehow I never had these ideas, so I don’t relate, don’t get the gestalt.
Yes. Professorial power is, well, paradoxical and best, and actually what I have noticed is that the professors don’t really grab power, they are not really into it. But what is attractive is independence of spirit. And independence of mind can look like independence of spirit, although it isn’t always so.
One of the things I have noticed about myself is that I’m very attracted to independence of spirit. VERY. So if a person has this quality of daring to do exactly what they want to do, and if they are able to maintain their independence over a duration of time, I find this very attractive.
But, like your writer says, these are actually the qualities I admire in myself.
So I suppose to try to put it into some (probably misleading) psychological terms, it is not the almight phallus that amuses me at all, but the possibility of some shared narcissism.
I *love* shared narcissism … it is fun, especially if one recognizes it for what it is and doesn’t take it too seriously.
Yes, I think so. It is better not to take it seriously.