Wanted: Adoring Female Students from Inside Higher Ed

And more handmaiden complexes...

Inside Higher Ed looks at a Twitter thread started by a blogger asking respondents to

please share with me all your stories of the male professors you had in college who thrived upon and demanded female admiration to function

and the resulting tweets, including messages about how this was not part of their student experience and pointing out that the Other Sex professors also enjoy adulation.

Again, it is this idea that women do not show up to work/study, or that getting sexual attention from professors is just part of the experience. To be fair, this is also a part of exploiting youth, of either gender, to quench a midlife crisis.

I also liked this quote from Allison Kimmich, executive director of the National Women’s Studies Association, where she stated that,

“Men are overwhelmingly the majority of full professors by rank,” she said, noting recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics. “So that means male faculty by definition have greater power and authority on campus by virtue of both rank and numbers.”

She continued: “Does that mean every male faculty member abuses that authority (as the Twitter [thread] suggests)? Obviously not, but clearly there are structural issues at work in higher education that lend themselves to potential abuses of authority.”

I also don't want any comments about how students dress that invite such flirtation. I went to school in Canada and staying swathed in a parka to fend off the chill of the classrooms does not dissuade the most determined perv, since they want verbal, but sexually charged, adulation, at a minimum, and for you to disrobe, at close to the maximum access. It's not about clothing, it's about attitude and self-control.

The Handmaiden Problem

One of my co-workers passed around this article from the LA Times, Sexism a problem in Silicon Valley, critics say, and in addition to the overall breathless tone of Newsflash, gender issues an issue in the workplace, and some weird statistics, I also had a problem with this comment:

Speaking before a gathering of women in technology, Facebook Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg recalled an uncomfortable exchange with two men on a different stage discussing the scarcity of women in the industry.

One commented that he would like to hire more young women but not all are as competent as Sandberg. The other said he, too, would hire more young women but his wife fears he would sleep with them and, he confessed, he probably would.

I would like to call this The Handmaiden Problem; in other words, the urge this male executive has to visit one of his female colleagues and say, I'm so glad you brought your lady parts to work today! Let's take them on a test drive over lunch! and that the female person would, of course, screaming with eagerness, copulate with him until his nuts fell off. Or lunch was over. Whatever came first.

I'm not sure what Sandberg said when trapped with this nugget in an enclosed space. Hopefully, it was along the lines of, most of the men who worked in harems were eunuchs with some seriously potent stink eye. But her husband telling her, they told the truth and that now she has to deal with it, is ludicrous. I think I'm not here to have sex with you, no matter how nicely you ask, Mr Married Executive, should be a given.

This is not about anti-romance in the workplace, either. This is about how all females supposedly swish their tails aside when the alpha male arrives. The women he would have hired--once his wife gave him said permission, of course--were not obliged to sleep with him, even if he really, really wanted it. The assumptions are not only, "career girls" are available all the time, but also, women are just making time at work, but not really working. Handmaiden, come hither and service me.

I do think most men understand their female co-workers are a) here to work, b) are competent, c) are not obliged to have sex with them, but the persistence of this belief annoys me.