La paranoia sexual ataca al mundo académico

When I was in college, hooking up with professors was more or less part of the curriculum. Admittedly, I went to an art school, and mine was the lucky generation that came of age in that too-brief interregnum after the sexual revolution and before AIDS turned sex into a crime scene replete with perpetrators and victims—back when sex, even when not so great or when people got their feelings hurt, fell under the category of life experience. It’s not that I didn’t make my share of mistakes, or act stupidly and inchoately, but it was embarrassing, not traumatizing.

As Jane Gallop recalls in Feminist Accused of Sexual Harassment (1997), her own generational cri de coeur, sleeping with professors made her feel cocky, not taken advantage of. She admits to seducing more than one of them as a grad student—she wanted to see them naked, she says, as like other men. Lots of smart, ambitious women were doing the same thing, according to her, because it was a way to experience your own power.

But somehow power seemed a lot less powerful back then. The gulf between students and faculty wasn’t a shark-filled moat; a misstep wasn’t fatal. We partied together, drank and got high together, slept together. The teachers may have been older and more accomplished, but you didn’t feel they could take advantage of you because of it. How would they?

Which isn’t to say that teacher-student relations were guaranteed to turn out well, but then what percentage of romances do? No doubt there were jealousies, sometimes things didn’t go the way you wanted—which was probably good training for the rest of life. It was also an excellent education in not taking power too seriously, and I suspect the less seriously you take it, the more strategies you have for contending with it. It’s the fiction of the all-powerful professor embedded in the new campus codes that appalls me. And the kowtowing to the fiction— kowtowing wrapped in a vaguely feminist air of rectitude. If this is feminism, it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama. The melodramatic imagination’s obsession with helpless victims and powerful predators is what’s shaping the conversation of the moment, to the detriment of those whose interests are supposedly being protected, namely students. The result? Students’ sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.

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Lastly: The new codes sweeping American campuses aren’t just a striking abridgment of everyone’s freedom, they’re also intellectually embarrassing. Sexual paranoia reigns; students are trauma cases waiting to happen. If you wanted to produce a pacified, cowering citizenry, this would be the method. And in that sense, we’re all the victims. | Laura Kipnis

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Tras la publicación, Laura fue demandada de inmediato ante la Universidad. Por estudiantes “traumatizados”, que también organizaban manifas y escraches contra la pecadora. Pobres; unos habían sufrido una “reacción muy visceral”. Otros se sentían “aterrorizados”. Y su idiotización les impedía comprender que estaban, precisamente, demostrando el argumento del artículo. ¡Que los algodones producen niños!

Lo cuenta Kipnis aquí, pero esa ya es la parte kafkiana:

My Title IX Inquisition

Es interesante la manera en que Laura Kipnis digiere el problema, desde su ortodoxia progre y feminista.

It’s the fiction of the all-powerful professor embedded in the new campus codes that appalls me. And the kowtowing to the fiction—kowtowing wrapped in a vaguely feminist air of rectitude. If this is feminism, it’s feminism hijacked by melodrama. The melodramatic imagination’s obsession with helpless victims and powerful predators is what’s shaping the conversation of the moment, to the detriment of those whose interests are supposedly being protected, namely students. The result? Students’ sense of vulnerability is skyrocketing.

Bueno, la idea del “terrorismo machista” no es menos melodrama. Pero el esquema no se circunscribe al sexo. Es el relato del rebaño de corderitos atacado por imprecisos -y más bien imaginarios- predadores, que debe ser salvado por la paternal intervención de la autoridad bondadosa.

Y distingue bien dos feminismos distintos:

A certain brand of radical feminist—the late Andrea Dworkin, for one—held that women’s consent was meaningless in the context of patriarchy, but Dworkin was generally considered an extremist.

Sólo le falta dar el paso, que no he visto claro, de ver que más que distintos son dos feminismos opuestos. El suyo (digamos no radical), que hace de la mujer una persona entera e independiente, y el -digamos radical- que hace a la mujer un ser inferior, dependiente de la protección paternal de la autoridad. Literalmente, una víctima a la espera de su depredador. Otros “ismos” hacen lo mismo con el resto de corderitos “to be”, con un procedimiento calcado. Y lo de las universidades, de momento del mundo anglo, sólo es la punta de lanza. El campo de prueba. No hay más que preguntar a Pablemos.

Nota: Habíamos dicho:

– El problema es que nadie parece preocuparse por el efecto secundario, no menos inevitable. También produce idiotizados.

Es un error, claro. La idiotización no es un efecto secundario de la victimización / infantilización. Es el objetivo. | PLAZA MOYUA