Old Babes: Gender Bender Academic Trailblazers 3

[purejuice]

On the Old Babes Martha Nussbaum disquisition, I wanted to add this. panjianlien, who is very thoughtful and indeed an expert on the subject of sexuality, has no problem with professors and students getting it on with each other. I asked her about the possibility that Nussbaum's leather jacket and other stated aspirations toward being a transgressive teenager means that Nussbaum is seeking, like Socrates, to fuck her students. And PJL says that having observed many such professor/student relationships, she has no ethical objection.

I am way more medieval on this. I'm with Dante: teacher/student sexual relations are an abuse of privileged access. Dante puts these people, as well as hosts who betrayed their guests, and guests who vice versa, and pupils who betray their masters, ditto, at the very pit of the Inferno, below mere mass murderers like Attila the Hun. This is a very fine and humane disposition: abuse of privileged access. Love the Guidoes.

I also think PJL's ethical disposition, that philosophy, professing it and sexuality are not and should not, be mutually exclusive, is also a very fine and humane one.

If Nussbaum is helplessly and cluelessly, or even with complete sentience, trying to hit on her students, I object. Big time. And I think that's where this is headed. Toward the young stuff. Watch out for the hemlock, Miss Thing.

Comments

[panjianlien.livejournal.com]

It is my sense that privilege and access, and privileged access, are not the same in every form the student/teacher relationship can take.

And on that note I was wondering: do you feel differently about students hitting on their teachers than you do about teachers hitting on their students?

[purejuice.livejournal.com]

the original case which made dante so mad was the case of judas, the student, hitting on jesus, his teacher.