Deresiewicz on campus love

An interesting article from American Scholar, "Love on Campus" looks at the proliferation of films featuring sexual relations between professors and students, in which the professors are almost always arrogant, ineffectual, bad husbands, bad fathers, bad novelists and worst of all, humanities scholars. (Incidentally, when a scientist in a film has something approaching a libido, it is regarded as so rare as to be laudable, but humanities types are assumed to have monstrous sex drives that they try unsuccessfully to sublimate into writing literary criticism.)

What makes this article stand out is that it manages to point out the reasons for this current obsession with lecherous professors, chief of which is that these days most people (or at least most Americans) don't understand the real reasons behind the student-teacher crush: it's erotic, but it's an eroticism of ideas, or as one former student quoted puts it more prosaically, it's "brain sex". OK, there's often also a fair amount of normal physical sexual tension going on under the surface, but it surfaces far less often than novelists and film directors like to think.

"In our sex-stupefied, anti-intellectual culture, the eros of souls has become the love that dares not speak its name."

Well said, that man.

(no subject)

Dinosaur comics just gets better and better.