The professor as THE sexual outsider

The professor as THE Outsider seduces students and destroys morality as we know it.  Of all the treatises I have read on the condemning of student professor relationships this one by Kentucky Youth Pastor Kyle McDanell is the most extreme.  It does not come from a feminist perspective.  I assume that the youth pastor articulating this believes he is coming from an Evangelical Christian perspective.  Whatever the underlying theological or ideological framework may be, the good pastor does not hide his utter disgust at the the thought of student-professor intimacies.  As he says, the idea of Professor Abramson allowing such things on campus- “that’s just gross”.  For the pastor, Abramson’s writing just boils down to justifying sin.  And make no mistake about it, he believes having sex with a professor is a sin. As he states- “Thus, man will do everything it can to rationalize, normalize, legalize, and excuse everything; such as, having sex with a professor. Even among “consenting adults.”

Justifying student professor intimacies becomes the last straw for this pastor.  For him, rationalizing such consensual behavior comes to represent a form of human depravity. In his words- “Has our culture come this far that we can rationalize everything. This is the result of human depravity with postmodernism on top. Postmodernism is essentially make it up as you go. And when it comes to ethics, you can justify anything.”

Obviously this pastor has a visceral reaction when it comes to student professor relationships.  I have previously argued that such feelings are of the type that occur when there is a violation of a taboo, such as an incest taboo.  There is a feeling of utter revulsion and that anyone promulgating such a violation must be dealt with severely.  But professor student relationships do not have a history within Christianity of representing such a violation.  So it would be reasonable to ask what might be the origins of this revulsion?  Such is revealed in the following passage “Liberals, therefore, don’t want to be told that any form of sex is wrong; homosexuality, bisexuality, experimenting, multiple partners from multiple genders, transgender, and eventually polygamy, bestiality, and incest. This is how freedom is defined, and you see it in this professors argument. He doesn’t want to be told that sex between a student and an adult are wrong.”

So when the pastor thinks of student professor relationships he thinks of child adult sex.  The professor becomes the child molester because the student cannot be an adult.  I believe that this is the default assumption held by many persons going way beyond Christian evangelicals.  It goes back to our childhood when the teacher is always the adult and the student is always the child.  Many persons just can’t get beyond this framework.  No matter that the student is 25 or 35 or 55; the student is always a child and always a victim. The idea of student and professor studying and learning together as two adults and loving each other as two adults and as marrying each other as two adults and parenting as two adults just goes beyond the mental capacity of those holding this hardcore default assumption.

And yes, there are other reasons that many persons are threatened by professor student relationships, but in the dankprofessor’s opinion, most of these other reasons are age related reasons, eg, the fear of the younger woman taking men from older women, the idea that young women are owned by young men and vice versa.  

In this context of age norm violation, the true believer will almost always see the student as child victim, no matter what the age of the adult female student.  The infantilizing of female college students is maddening to female students so infantilized.  And unfortunately no matter what her protest may be such protests are seen as the cry of a victim who has been brainwashed by her victimizer. Of course, the true believer often presents a veneer that disguises an underlying sexual agenda.  And that veneer is grading.  But the veneer is thinly veiled not anchored in disgust and anger and fear.  The prejudicial grader is not THE Outsider threatening the natural order of things. In fact, as  the dankprofessor has previously argued, academics as a whole put little or no value on grading.  What grading does in the present context is that it functions as a smokescreen hiding the underlying sexual dread.  The professor as outsider is not dreaded as a grader gone awry, but rather as a sexual outsider preying on our children. The professor as a sexual outsider has replaced the homosexual as sexual outsider.  

Note the similarity in rhetoric of the Pastor to the rhetoric of the extreme anti-homosexuality of the 1970s.  One of the leading 1970s

homophobes was psychoanalyst Abram Kardiner.  In 1971 in an open letter to the editor of the American Journal of Psychotherapy he stated:

“Homosexuality cannot make a society, or keep ours going very long.  Homosexuality operates against the cohesive elements in society in the name of a fictitous freedom…And no society can long endure when either the child is neglected or the sexes war upon each other.”

Essentially Pastor McDanell and those of the anti-homosexual genre of Abram Kardiner see themselves standing at the abyss both fighting The sexual outsider united in a stand that they believe will save our children. 

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Barry M. Dank aka the dankprofessor™
© Copyright 2007