What Your Professors Talk About When They Talk About Love 

“Nearly 80 percent of what he talks about is sex. He connects everything in lecture to sex,” the master’s student hyperbolized at me from across the pub table. 

In recent years at university, I have repeatedly had or heard conversations that mirror one another dramatically. Conversations in which neither the speakers, the faculty in question nor even the department are necessarily common denominators, they’re recurred popular sentiments in the form of reactions to lecture content and style. Almost every time, the pretext was one of warning. Implicit in the warning was the suggestion of a lingering impropriety that has withstood progress and is at odds with youthful attitude (“youthful attitude” itself connoting a liberal and progressive position; Alex P. Keaton and his contemporary equivalents, despite their youth, don’t qualify). It is “look out for this professor, I don’t know where he’s getting these ideas about subtext in A Streetcar Named Desire but it’s suspicious.” 

But while this complaint sometimes rightfully questions the established power and motivations of older, straight white male faculty, this is overwhelmingly not always the case. I have heard these complaints made about faculty of color and who may openly identify as LGBT and contribute scholarship to these areas. Additionally, I have experienced ardent, sex positive, identity-affirming progressives be the ones leveling these complaints. So, my exigence is to be a liberal progressive addressing proponents of liberal values and progress in asking them to evaluate whether this discourse is in line with the methods and aims they already claim to support. In other words, if there exists a “Puritans of UConn” club, I’m not talking to you—go about your business.  

The complaints are centered around the idea that the professor makes repeated reference to sex or sexual themes in his or her lectures, perhaps even when the central text or topic of the lecture is not explicitly concerned with sexuality, and/or there are many texts—literature, film, art— included on the syllabus that represent explicit sexuality in some way with which the coursework subsequently asks for engagement. It’s presented as a problem, but if you ask the speaker why, they often have no answer or recite variations on, “It’s just weird.” It should be noted that this is popular in the context of the humanities where there is some expected subjectivity and the idea of a “choice” of what is presented by the authors, as opposed to the natural sciences, the study of anatomy, for example. I once experienced, to great hilarity, a student making this argument about the content of a Psychology of Gender course. Maybe you can already see how this is problematic. If not, stay with me. 

I’ve arrived at an interpretation of this attitude among students that I believe might explain the dissonance. They’ve been affirmed of too defined and paternalistic a (illusory) demarcation in certain contexts and they’ve come to expect abuses of the demarcation such that it deepens and redounds to the former. Simply, they’ve been told too often that there exists a hard line of what is appropriate for their consumptions and interactions as well as the responsibilities of parents, professors or society in enforcing this line. This combined with the social reckoning of instances like “#MeToo” has conditioned them to expect a moral absolutism on the opposite side of this imaginary line, which keeps moving back. Undergraduate students are often infantilized by administration. No wonder they’re a bit appalled when you ask them to think critically about “adult” concepts (a terminology I take issue with in education, media, and de-sexed YA fiction, because if there’s an age group that is more concerned with and motivated by sex it’s 16 to 21-year-olds). But this doesn’t mean they’re wholly or intentionally repressive. They just think it doesn’t leave their temporary world of narcissistic youth—that these subjective matters don’t have lasting “serious” importance the way other things do. 

I said these students are often unable to explain why it must be wrong. Here it is: tacit in the complaint is the idea that the only reason why my professor would be lecturing on this material, lingering in sexual elements, making connections where the sexual content isn’t textual, asking us students—over whom he or she has some amount of power and likely some advanced age—to be aware of sex must be that he or she wants something from me. That there is derived by the professor some fetishistic titillation or even arousal caused by the exposition of traditionally private machinations holding the potential for arousal. This is a puritanical implication. Unfortunately, we’ve seen that it is possible. But our baseline for protecting against systemic exploitation cannot be the institution of a new world in which basic functions and emotions are outright taboos in all but natural sciences. 

In May 1968, students in France and across the world fought against a conservative pedagogy that forbade some topics from respectable scholarly inquiry based on elitist conceptions of what has academic value, as well as broader moral obscenity concerns. The progressive argument was simple: nothing is off limits as a topic of scholarly inquiry. Nothing is too lowbrow, no topic too debased, no system of ethics impenetrable and no government or academy has the right to impose morality. Contemporary progressive aims might be putting too much emphasis on moral absolutism to affect much progress at all. If you think it’s icky when your professor talks about sex, remind yourself that everybody experiences the complexity of emotion that you do—and if it concerns creative expression especially, that’s the point! Investigate the value in confronting your discomfort, the importance of subjectivity and art literacy. Lastly, consider that this path, despite itself, leads historically to repression, the enemy of knowledge and progress.