From “Eroticism is a Two-Way Street, and I’m Working Both Sides”
by James R. Kincaid, in The Erotics of Instruction, 1997:
“My point is that, however virile flesh-and-blood teachers (you, me) may be, the part they are required to play allows them only bumbling impotence. Our culture provides but one erotic script for the pedagogue, and it’s a farce.
Now, you may think that I am confusing comic plots with real life, but I’m not. It’s you who are confused. I’m saying that our practices and bodies conform to the requirements of the parts we are assigned. That much is clear as pie. We (you, anyhow) have no sexual inclinations, send out no vibes and get none back, because you have adapted, as you must. It’s all there in Darwin. This is not a matter of nerdiness merely; it’s social selection, a matter of survival of our cultural tales. Look at how we dress: always with an eye to the unalluring. Look at the bodies we foster: shapeless and uncomfortable. Both are designed to make the idea of sexual intercourse never present where we are: our clothes are such as no one would ever want removed; our bodies are those no one would ever want to clamber on. That’s just the way it is.
One qualification: the teachers of the very young are often knockouts, men and women alike. Gorgeous kindergarten teachers are the rule; but they become progressively less thinkable as sexual partners as the students get older and more capable of thinking that sexual partners are what they’d like to have. By junior high it’s a mockery, by high school preposterous. Graduate education is an exposure to full-scale god-awful revulsion; it’s a wonder the highly-educated propagate. Those who go on to be deans and presidents enter another species altogether, a reptilian order where cross-fertilization with the human is not to be thought on.”
