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About the Author
Gina Barreca is a professor of English and feminist theory at the University of Connecticut. Her books include They Used to Call Me Snow White, but I Drifted; Perfect Husbands and Other Fairy Tales; Babes in Boyland; and, with Gene Weingarten of The Washington Post, I'm With Stupid. She's written or edited other books on vice, Victorians and sex, American humor, the erotics of instruction, The Sopranos, women's humor, and Italian-American literature. She will blog about teaching, sex, humor, money, publishing, ambition, books, marriage, envy (professional and personal), politics (professional and personal), aging, and cartoons.
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Featured Articles By the Author
Sex and Teachers
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.”
Posted at 11:24:59 AM on July 7, 2008 | All postings by Gina BarrecaComments
Commenting is closed for this article.
Exactly. And that’s probably why those who succumb to sex with the teach in grad school find themselves emotionally back in grade school…if not in their own eyes, then in those of their colleagues snickering in the hall.
— David · Jul 7, 12:10 PM · #
Confession – when I was in kindergarten I was heavily involved in a sexual relationship with my teacher. It was great. For him.
— Sigmund Freud · Jul 7, 12:25 PM · #
My article for History News Network, sometimes just called HNN, “How Race Relations Touched Me During a Long Lifetime,” appeared in HNN on September 3, 2007. It was republished on two Best of Blogs and nine other sites. And is indexed on Google in some way.
I should appreciate some notice of this optimistic article in Chronicle of Higher Education, after investigation, of course.
Vaughn Davis Bornet
— vaughn davis bornet · Jul 7, 12:57 PM · #
Kincaid’s account doesn’t strike me as generally true to contemporary reality (especially the observation about escalating unattractiveness of teachers), nor does the point it is intended to support take account of the eroticism which thrives on the official denial of sexuality he posits. A better text to quote would be Plato’s Symposium or Phaedrus. He appears to have had a more clear-eyed grasp of the complexities and ambiguities suggested by the cartoon (with the two brains) than Kincaid.
— Anonymous · Jul 7, 02:00 PM · #
More thinkytale for me then.
— Adonis · Jul 7, 08:46 PM · #
I meant thinkytail. Goddamnit.
— Adonis · Jul 7, 08:49 PM · #
love the kincaid
— V.Funny · Jul 7, 09:22 PM · #
K+12grdX2
— Cougar · Jul 8, 11:52 PM · #
Kincaid’s writing is a joke. Is it a funny joke?
I don’t mean he’s a poor or lousey writer. On
the contrary. He seems to write well enough.
But isn’t he just writing entertainingly about
something sort of funny and sort of not?
I had a funny experience as a young instructor.
The husband of one of my students (with whom
I was not having sex), beat me up and kicked my
teeth out because he thought I was involved
with her. How’s that for a laugh?
— Joe Erwin · Jul 9, 08:51 AM · #
Cute, but not really true to my experiences. I think he’s gone to the the wrong schools. I have had absolutely dreamy profs in Junior High, High School and Undergrad. Now, said profs were professional about their presentation and did not in any way accent their charms in the work environment, but I think that’s a pretty sensible course to follow when in the company of the bourgeoning hormones of youth of which you do not wish to take advantage. There are good reasons to keep everything in the classroom professional.
Still, for those who fail to follow that course there is a long history and a social recognition – that virile older professor who had an affair with a student in college in Gilmore Girls wasn’t an original concept by any means. At least for male teachers, the image of one involved in an affair that I’ve seen most often is a double-sided coin where the negative is that he’s seen as needing a puerile youth to fawn all over him much like the typical mid-life crisis guy with the fast car, and the “positive” is that he’s eroticised as a knowledgeable teacher of more than just textbooks but life in general and in bed. The idea of female professorial eroticism is closely tied to the idea of the sexy librarian – someone with an hourglass figure confined in a suit, hair up that can easily be let down, and glasses that can easily be removed to turn the confined educator into a tiger without a cage. I think the male erotic professor view is probably a major influence on the ideas of the twit who kicked out Joe Erwin’s teeth – as a male more in control of the female’s mental development, you become an imagined threat of someone more in control of her sexual development as well.
— bta · Jul 11, 12:59 PM · #