Do I sound reactionary, prudish, or just like a fuddy-duddy, when I say that I often wish my university had a dress code?
After years of reading The Chronicle, I've heard just about every complaint that teachers can make -- about a lack of appreciation for what we do, trouble getting students to talk, the vagaries of grading -- but there's one basic complaint that has gone unexplored so far: What if you're so hot and bothered that you have trouble teaching the class?
Before you dismiss me as yet another would-be lecherous professor, let me give an example: As a teaching assistant at a major research university in California, I am preparing to lead a discussion about how to do research for an essay using a library database. Then Jennifer enters late -- unusual for her -- and takes a seat at the back.
Since my class has only 22 students, "the back" is just a few feet away from me, and I can take in every detail of the show that Jennifer is putting on this Wednesday morning. I'll start my prurient gaze at the bottom and move upward: delicate feet in flip-flops, a bracelet setting off an ankle. Tiny shorts that reveal every inch of her golden-brown legs. Above her exposed midriff is a tight pink T-shirt. In case I wasn't already aware enough of what the T-shirt was drawing attention to, the logo on the shirt is a pair of boxing gloves with the words "Hard Knockers" in block letters.
And I'm supposed to focus on the Melvyl system?
The typical mental defenses that I'd use against this (while admittedly based on stereotypes) were simply not available. Although her attire might suggest that she was more concerned with sorority life than her classes, Jennifer was actually a diligent A student working her way through school. In a way I admired her.
She was also not your conventional California blond beach-bunny type, but a raven-haired Chinese woman born in Beijing (as she'd informed me on her student questionnaire), who had presumably had one fewer generation of familial immersion in the sexual revolution.
So, I thought: It's you, too, it's everyone, who's riding this globalizing, cross-cultural current of "anything goes," of letting it all hang out.
In short, I was hot and bothered, and at the same time, tired and frustrated -- with the course, with the tiny, airless little composition classroom, with what I'd chosen to do with my life. I wished I had gone to law school, so that I could drive my BMW up to the fast-food place where Jennifer worked, chat her up while I waited for my order, get her phone number, pick her up that night, maybe, and take her for a ride.
I had always read Lolita as a work of cultural criticism, and one reason I had entered graduate school in the humanities was to write such criticism myself. Now I wanted to be Humbert Humbert. How had this happened?
A few years ago I would have had no trouble identifying the villain in this scenario. Oh, you poor thing, so turned on by your students that you can't help being a lech. No, the enemy was myself, insofar as I participated in a larger society that objectified the bodies of women and emphasized their sex appeal over their intellectual talents -- making them feel insecure about their appearances, bringing on self-hate as well as diseases like anorexia and bulimia.
Stuart Ewen argues that advertisers divided and conquered the American working classes by turning them into insecure, keeping-up-with-the-Joneses consumers. In parallel fashion, I had always held to a Marxist-feminist account which emphasized that sexist objectification was the way a male-dominated commercial society kept off the threat of organized political action by women. Keep them thinking about new purses instead of equal rights and equal pay.
As a white male, I could never competely step outside or transcend my position of privilege, but I could play some small role in making the world better. I could struggle against my own tendency to objectify women, and do something as a teacher to bring benighted undergrads, with their "Hard Knockers" T-shirts, to an awareness of their situation.
For example, I once assigned my class "Dressing the Dolls," a chapter from Susan Faludi's Backlash. The title pretty much says it all, as Faludi describes how a male-dominated clothing industry basically forces women to buy more frilly, overpriced outfits than they need or want.
I suppose if I had any real integrity, I would exhume that younger, more critical, more idealistic version of self. But the resurrection now seems impossible. For one thing, the "captains of consciousness" (to use Ewen's term for advertisers) are often successful in colonizing the imaginations of people in humanities departments, too.
A very crude example: I've heard more than one Luce Irigaray-quoting feminist talk about how she was looking forward to blowing off steam by shopping at Victoria's Secret. Now we might argue that a freethinking feminist should have the autonomy to choose what she wants to wear and when she wants to wear it -- to play or not play a given role as she sees fit.
But it seems to me that such a position undermines the idea that a Hugh Hefner or a Felix Dennis (the owner of Maxim magazine, among others) is a demonic misogynist. Or rather, if they are demonic, it's a demonism that we're all beginning to share.
I think the biggest reason that I have started to internalize this hypersexual culture of visual display is that its focus is beginning to turn against men. It certainly seems that men are finding themselves objectified in a historically unique manner, and that many women see this turning of the tables as female empowerment.
Shows like Sex and the City have presented women unapologetically using men as sexual playthings. The February 2005 issue of Cosmopolitan features "Butt Really," a four-page pictorial that has male models displaying the four basic bum shapes ("square booty," "high heinie," "apple tush," "bubble butt").
Conversely, Maxim is playing the role toward men that feminist critics have always accused women's magazines of playing -- that is, cultivating insecurity and immersion in consumer culture. There's no attempt at urbanity in the mode of Esquire; Maxim straightforwardly makes guys feel like losers if they can't afford expensive cologne and Diesel jeans, and aren't getting laid every weekend.
Wouldn't the university be a refuge from this "Shut up and do me" culture of exploitation and objectification? Not really. As Thomas H. Benton put it in a previous column, "The rise of the consumer model of education, rather than the older notion of preparation for citizenship and leadership, has stripped faculty members of the robes of authority, even exposing them to the sexual gazes of their students."
As in so many other spheres of life, the Internet is enabling a steady erosion of older norms, an outstanding example of this being the Web site, Rate My Professors.
Professors and professors-in-training are just like everyone else in this appearance-driven society, to be judged in terms of impression management (as indicated on Rate My Professors by happy or sad faces) and -- perhaps even more important, if you're a youngish single grad student -- how your rear looks when you turn to the blackboard (if it's hot, you get a little chili-pepper symbol).
I wish I could say that I'm resisting this trend, drawing on my old spirit of social critique to self-fashion some alternative identity, but no. As a TA who is still lacking a chili pepper after three years of teaching, my darkest hours in grad school have been spent poring over the Rate My Professors site. (Why, I will think, is he considered hot? He has a spare tire already! He's been in a relationship for years! He doesn't need a chili pepper! What are they thinking?)
A close friend of mine has been awarded chili peppers by five of his nine reviewers, with one student emphasizing that "He is extremely intelligent, very witty, and he has a hot ass."
Even my adviser has a chili pepper -- as if I didn't feel inferior enough already.
(In fact, it goes beyond that. When I went online to fact-check that statement about my adviser, I saw that every member of my Ph.D. committee has a chili pepper, making my graduate career a sexual as well as an intellectual degradation ceremony that I never could have anticipated.)
I'm glad I'm not going on the job market this fall, as my teaching philosophy might be summed up as follows:
Get the chili pepper.
"I don't care what the students think of my teaching," I would write in my statement of teaching philosophy. "What I want to know is if they think I'm hot."
On the weekends, now, I'm doing things that I haven't done since age 13 or 14. After years of really not caring too much about my appearance, of wearing black turtlenecks on blisteringly hot days when everyone else was headed for the beach, I'm now shopping in the Young Men's department of Macy's and Robinson/May: Perusing the Hilfiger jeans, the cargo pants, wondering what will catch the female undergraduate eye, knowing I'm a little too old for all this but thinking I can still pull it off. (So long, Stuart Ewen and Susan Faludi. Don't think about grad-student activism. Think about Fossil watches.)
And then there's the campus gym, so conveniently located across the street from the graduate housing complex. The gym is now my favorite place. My apartment is a slum, my writing classes convene in shoebox-like rooms, but the Recreation Center is spacious and state-of-the-art, outclassing any Bally's or 24 Hour Fitness.
After two years of exercising every other day (a fairly intense regimen by grad-student standards), I have now gone from having a "skeletal," bone-thin frame to being the owner of a proudly "skinny" physique. (It occurs to me that I shouldn't do so much cardio along with my weight-training routine, but there was also an insomnia problem to take care of.)
There are grad students who drink too much, who fall into crippling debt; here's one who's falling behind and irritating his adviser by putting off his Ph.D. exams, because he's going to the gym too often.
In fact, in my last advisory session, I stunned my mentor by interrupting his advice about the exams to ask him how he'd gotten so buff, and if he'd ever tried creatine. "I'm your Ph.D. adviser, not your personal trainer," he responded with some incredulity.
As you can see, then, my role as a lecherous Humbert in the writing classroom carries with it its own punishment. Even as I scope out my female students, trying to be covert about it, to keep from making them uncomfortable (while being convinced that they're bringing it on themselves with their short skirts and halter tops), I'm hoping desperately that they will scope me out in turn.
"Don't you see how my shoulders are filling out this new A&F button-down?" I'm thinking as I turn to write on the board. "Please, please objectify me!"
Still more pathetic: It's not working. But irrespective of my disappointment and frustration over this, what's sadder is that it matters to me at all: It seems I haven't really learned anything about sex relations since age 13.
The whole situation strikes me as representing the failure of my social imagination, and the abandonment of my vocation. After all, what does all of this sound like -- the continual insecurity over my appearance, the hot jealousy of other men who are considered great catches by women (unfairly and arbitrarily, of course, in my view), the constant lusting after women who seem so available and unattainable at the same time?
It feels like a return to pubescence, like the overheated world of junior-high school all over again. For decades now in America there has been a trend toward the blurring of the adult role, and in my case it has hit a weird acceleratory phase: No sooner have I dispensed with an already overextended adolescence than I'm having a midlife crisis.
In sum, I'm abandoning standards of adult conduct that I grew up expecting to follow, in addition to political positions and social beliefs that I held until fairly recently. I seem to be living out a reversal of what Norbert Elias called the civilizing process, in which morality goes from a set of external impositions to internalized codes of conduct.
Hence, my self-contradictory suggestion for a dress code, even as I fail to follow any sort of professional dress code myself. Let the authorities take care of it.
On this point, I find it ironic when people argue that new restrictions on teacher-student relationships represent an effort at domineering social control or "puritanism." It seems to me that an "anything goes" sexual consumer culture, and an ever-increasing number of rules and severity of punishments, go together: The more the norms erode, the more we depend upon a higher authority to tell us what's OK.
Indeed, perhaps I should be writing this article from inside a cell -- or, less hyperbolically, the waiting room in the dean's office -- save that so many people would have to be inside the room with me.
