Sex and the Single Professor V; or, The Pudding Problem

Before I begin, the requisite disclaimer:  I am just a quizzical little man, and I don’t know much of anything about anything.  Left unattended in the Shopping Cart of Life, however, I will bring the gumption.  And I will fill your basket up with boxes and boxes of Frankenberry.  It makes milk turn pink.

Thanks to a few well-placed keywords, folks far and wide keep stumbling upon my blog.  Some may perhaps be looking for fellows with whom they might confront their local kraken, but most seem to be looking for answers to challenging questions pertaining to the prospect of student/professor relations.  A few have written me directly, and I hope I’ve fielded their queries and concerns clearly and responsibly (and thank you all, of course, for writing).  Those correspondents have contended, however, that my personal reflections weren’t terribly personal at all.  Color me chagrined; you’ll find it next to chartreuse in your Crayola 64-Pack.

Accordingly, this time around I’ll try to localize and personalize.  I don’t know that my perspective is especially valuable or compelling, but perhaps it can pin down some phenomena in a quasi-useful heuristic way.  Expect little, for today we aim low.

First, to answer the question that occurred in every letter:  no, I have not succumbed to the temptation of student/professor relations.  That’s a statement that might bear some minor qualification, however, since I have what I hope will be an illuminating example to trot out below.  When I was in graduate school, I served as a teaching assistant in a survey of American literature; three years later, as the result of a peculiar concatenation of circumstances, I “dated” a woman who was a member of my study group; friskiness ensued.

Today’s post will attempt to contextualize that “dating,” an attempt that will explain the scare quotes and perhaps articulate more fully something like an ethics.  For the sake of clarity, let us call the woman in question “Ilsa,” in part because it amuses me to do so and in part because it’s easy to type.

I’ll begin with a quibble:  Ilsa was very pretty, but I did not initially find her attractive.  That’s a notion worth elaborating, since I think it’s one of the more important ways of apprehending my sense of the relationships in question.  Take for example Beyonce.  I know full well that she is beautiful, that she represents a combination of bodily qualities that a red-blooded mensch like me ought to desire.  Nevertheless, I find her unattractive (repellent, actually) for reasons that have little to do with the physical.  To my thinking she’s a watered-down caricature of feminine abjection, self-alienation, and misdirected aspiration strutting around as an ersatz champion of “girl power.”  She rates a solid bleccho on my blecchometer.

That’s one of the crucial operant (if not enabling) conditions in my book:  attraction tends to be a combination of the tangible and the intangible, the corporeal presence as inspirited by qualities of mind and character.  When I first met Ilsa, I thought she was pretty and clever, but at the time I was far more invested in finding something illuminating to say about Thoreau or Whitman.  Later, when I met Ilsa again at the tail end of her college career, she was savvy, self-possessed, self-assured…and still pretty and clever.  She hurtled into the attractive column after just a few minutes of conversation.  It was, as attraction almost always is, something that couldn’t be helped.

As a corollary, I think it may be worth elaborating on idea of attraction from the student perspective (and please feel welcome to gloss your own sense of these matters in the comments if you like; I can’t do much more than play extrapolatory games).  Some menfolk and womenfolk in the academy are simply handsome and/or beautiful; let’s take that as a given.  The source of professorial attractiveness, however, hinges on all the usual qualities of mind and character.  To those qualities we can probably add a few enhancements:  not only do profs possess a modicum of power (or the illusion thereof, such as it is), they’re also likely to represent a perceptibly contrastive kind of relational prospect, one tinged with a smidgen of both triumph and transgression.  That’s my extra-fancy way of noting a) that the prof will probably seem unlike the menfolk who are already in the woman’s dating pool, b) that dating a prof might represent an imaginative change in scale (something akin to a high school senior dating a college student), and c) that dating a prof may be titillating because there’s a measure of naughty involved.  In nutshell form, that can translate into some unusual scenarios.  I have known some handsome fellers who, because they were bores or boors in the classroom, were found just as icky and/or skeevy as most older men might seem to younger women.  At the same time, I have known some fellers who, while perhaps not handsome in a conventional sense, inspired desire in certain students because of their classroom presence.  It happens, and for reasons just as circumstantial and idiosyncratic as those that set the stage for any relationship.

Anyway, let’s get back to Ilsa.  She represents what I think is an intangible (but no less palpable) difference, a distillation of desire.  During the course of any given day I will encounter any number of pretty or beautiful women; since I work in a place that harbors about 12,000 women, the odds tend to favor that outcome.  However, I can count on one hand the number of women I find attractive, a difference that often depends on how much I know about them as people.  There are a few about whom I know only a little and wish I knew more; I think that’s a pretty good index of my kind of desire.  When I encountered Ilsa again, she was a much more compelling personality; we left one another with a very eighteenth-century desire to further our acquaintance.

For the sake of complexity I’ll throw in a wild variable, one I will call the pudding problem.  This will I hope explain the “dating” of Ilsa as well as the particular issues that English profs sometimes face.

You see, when Ilsa and I met again after three years passed, we discovered that we both liked pudding.  You may assume that “pudding” here serves as a euphemism for a colorful constellation of interpersonal practices.  Like most purveyors of pudding, Ilsa and I were both keenly attuned to those signals that indicate a penchant for pudding, and when we figured that we were like-minded in that way, there was really no turning back.  Not only did we find each other attractive, not only did we find in each other appealing qualities of character, we also learned that our desires lined up nicely, that we complemented one another (as persons in general and as parties with a particular proclivity for pudding) in a nearly ideal way.  Our “dating” was not so much dating per se as a season during which we practiced the pudding-related arts to our mutual satisfaction. 

Although I’ve probably (certainly) made my time with Ilsa sound more peculiar than it really was (and allow me to note that the description comes to you Ilsa-approved, as we’re still on very good terms), I hope it illustrates the kind of celestial serendipity I feel should preface most relationships:  a lot of stars have to line up before men and women promenade home with their partners in the cosmic square dance, and that’s especially true if profs and their students are in question.  If a student and professor decide to get together, I’m of the opinion that their decision ought not be a concession to unadulterated lust or  infatuation.  I’m not so nerdy that I would attempt to abstract the carnal from the question, but I would characterize connections predicated on nothing but synchronized appetites as those with the greatest potential to be damaging.

Natheless, I think professors, especially those who get to read first-person writing with some regularity, are prone to the pudding problem.  While feelings of intimacy might spring naturally and inevitably from all the usual sources, those moments when profs and students experience pleasurable rapport and fellow-feeling, prose can offer titillating glimpses of interiority (or something quite like it) that inspire desire.  From time to time I’ll read an essay that demonstrates a surprising degree of familiarity with all things puddinged, and I know of friends in the profession who cannot help but respond with warmth (or something more) when they learn that a student loves Nabokov or Bob Dylan, haute cuisine or composting.  It’s perfectly natural for interest to kindle as a consequence of such discoveries, but I think it’s also critical for profs and students alike to distinguish shared passions from a shared passion.  One might be a bridge to the other, given the existence of other bricks to build with, but such correspondence more often invites overreading.  It’s easy for professors and students–lonely folk that we sometimes are–to feel that momentarily thrill of recognition, and a wish to further the aquaintance might spring from the most wholesome of intentions.  In pursuit of pudding, however, we can change the complexion of a relationship that already depends on a decidedly different kind of mutual investment.  It’s a line that ought not be crossed casually.

And it’s a line I’ll have to cross in some future post, if at all.  I have to stop now, as I’m out of time and have an incredible hankering for pudding and/or Frankenberry.  If you’ve got questions or comments, please feel welcome to send them along.  I’ll field what I can when I can if I can.