To: All CASE supportersFrom: Barry Dank, Coordinator, Consenting Academics for Sexual Equity (CASE) and Professor of Sociology, California State University, Long Beach 90840 310-985-4236- voice mail case@csulb.edu e mail I am enclosing material relevant to an article that appeared in the December issue of the higher education magazine Lingua Franca. You will find a copy of the article; letters to the editor of Lingua Franca that may be published in the next issue (the letter from Daphne Patai is particularly noteworthy; the publisher- Jeff Kittay has informed me that this letter will be published); my letter of December 24 to Jeff Kittay; a copy of a fax from Larissa Macfarquhar of January 20 and my response to this fax in the context of a post sent to Jeff Kittay on January 23. This article represents a vicious attack on consenting academic couples. It is an attack that was promulgated in a dishonest manner, and it employs throughout terribly demeaning stereotypes. The article was dishonest since my quotes were generally accurate, but were framed in such a way as to change the meaning of my quotes. Basically, the writer thru her framing attempts to affirm the prof as child molester, the student as child victim. This is done thru the usage of Lolita- the picture frames the article(sorry I couldn't include the picture, the article contains a picture of Lolita hula hooping and Humbert watching); the table of contents (A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF HUMBERT HUMBERT-the male protagonist in the novel-film; Lolita was 9 in the book and 14 in the film) and the concluding paragraph. In other words, the writer systematically cloaked the article in an adult child molester-child victim framework. And in using this framework she systematically does what I say the banners do- they put female students into the category of "women and children" and they sexually objectify male professors. Whether the readers of the article can see the irony of this, I do not know. The author's sexism amd ageism is most vividly captured in her last sentence. In the past, too many feminists and others have been able to attack without inhibition student-prof couples and former couples knowing that there would be no response forthcoming from said couples. Consenting academics do exist and we will respond. We demand/expect that the publisher and editors act responsibly and publicly apologize for their journalistic misjudgement. ************************************************************** From: LINGUA FRANCA (c) December, 1994 Field Notes: "Dankness Made Visible", pp. 6-7 by Larissa MacFarquhar LAST YEAR, IN A HARPER'S Magazine roundtable on teacher-student sex, William Kerrigan of U. Mass.-Amherst got himself-pilloried for declar- ing that it was for charitable reasons that he unburdened certain female pupils of their maidenhood. "There is a kind of student I've come across in my career," he explained, "who was working through something that only a professor could help her with. I'm talking about a female student who, for one reason or another, has unnaturally prolonged her virginity.... If she loses that virginity with a man who is not a teacher, she's going to marry that man, boom. And I don't think the marriage is going to be very good." This year, Barry M. Dank of the Cal. State- Long Beach sociology department has hit upon a more Nineties solution to the P.R problems of the lusty-professor/lusty-stu- dent couple: the professor and the student are both victims, oppressed by the feminists who work to make their relationship illegal. "You are hurting us, you are engaging in a form of power abuse," Dank exclaims in imagined apostrophe to these supposed despots during a phone conversation with Lingua Franca. "We are here, and you're going to have to say it to our face, you know? We want to have some kind of impact on the cultural landscape of America! We refuse to remain in the closet! You are totally ignoring and denying us! There are so many of us throughout the United States afraid to come forward because the hassle and the objectification." Dank knows from this kind of hassle and objectification: he himself is involved in what he describes as a "multi-asymmetric relationship"--his partner is black, a woman, and a post-graduate student; he's a white male professor. But unlike others in this com plicated situation, Dank has taken action. He has founded an organization he calls Consenting Academics for Sexual Equity, or CASE- a fellowship of academic sexual freedom fighters that exists mostly on the Internet. CASE's main principle as Dank informs interested parties who contact him via e-mail (case@beachl.csulb.edu), is that no consenting relationship between adults can rightly be described as "harassment." "It's utter hypocrisy that people who call themselves feminists are putting women back into the category of 'women and children,' " Dank expostulates. "We argue for the traditional definition of harassment as unwanted sexual attention." The CASE principle is a reaction to the feminist stance that where there is inequality, there can be no meaningful consent--the most extreme version of which is Andrea Dworkin's famous dictum that all heterosexual intercourse is rape. This last idea is an easy one to dismiss: saying that someone was harassed, even if she claims not to have been, makes you look patronizing and foolish; saying you yourself were harassed despite consenting at the time makes you look indecisive and possibly pathetic and vindictive as well. Dank, of course, is cleverly sidestepping one central issue in the campus sexual harassment debate: not just the fact of inequality but the degree of it. Most people and contract theorists would agree, after all, that a person with a gun to his head is not in a position to give meaningful consent; nor is, say, an ill- informed tourist who yields to the seductions of a con man. So whether you think consent precludes harassment depends on whether you think the situation of a female freshman bears any resemblance to that of the person menaced with a gun, or, more likely, the tourist. Patriarchy, grades, adolescence . . . all factors considered, the comparison is not as wild as it might seem. "If someone has systematically misrepresented himself, then the consent was based on that illusion and therefore may be grounds for intervention," Dank says irritably when asked about this. "But just to say, 'I gave my consent, but I am somewhat intimidated by this person'-- well, I don't see that as a reason for Big Brother to step in. What should happen is that we try to help people so that they feel empowered to say no. Hey, get it together, stop being dependent on other peo ple, try to empower yourself, go into therapy, or whatever! Your mother and father or your women's studies prouctor can't be by your side saying do this and do that--it's a total cop-out! " Dank has more weapons up his sleeve, mostly of the variety, sounds feminist but bears an uncanny resem- blance to nasty old-boy conservatism. "There's nothing new here," he says, just "people arguing that people should marry and affiliate with their own group. It's been said before: upper-class people should fraternize with upper-class people; blacks should fraternize with blacks; whites with whites; and at the university people should stay within their own specific social category." Dank also thinks it's the height of hypocrisy for feminists to argue for a classroom devoid of intimacy. "At the same time as these feminists are critiquing people such as myself," he points out, "what are they saying in women's studies courses? They are talking about bonding and sisterhood and closeness in the classroom!" In Dank's opinion, the outlawing of teacher-student sex is due not so much to radical feminism as to old fashion catfighting: he and his student-love are just two Cinderellas to feminism's ugly sisters. "There has always been this generational tension between older and younger women," he explains. "And here in academia, you have a pop- ulation of middle-aged academic women whose eligible mates are older male professors. But many middle-aged male professors look toward younger women, and younger women.are often attracted to them too, so the feminist movement comes forward with these bans." It is understandable that Dank does not offer the most obvious argument for his position, but he could certainly use it to his advantage. The argument is, of course, the Lolita defense. For if in the ranks of campus romantics, there are many naive postadolescents, surely there are also more than a few Humbert Humberts, slavishly handing over undeserved A's to canny collegial nymphets. And if the university coun- selor on sexual harassment is moved to anger by the no-longer-wide-eyed student who seeks out her shoulder to cry on, should not someone also spare a tear for the rejected professor, soaking alone in the town bar, wondering if it was his visible nose hair or his varicose veins that drove her away? Larissa MacFarquhar December 22, 1994 ************************************************************************ To the Editor of Lingua Franca: In her recent article "Dankness Made Visible" (December 1994), Larissa MacFarquhar has displayed a petty turn of mind (obviously shared by the staff member who selected the article's title; never let it be said that Lingua Franca is above making fun even of an individual's name). I had not realized until now that Lingua Franca had gone from being a "review of academic life," as it calls itself, to merely one more satirical rag trivializing the issues that it should be helping its readership to understand. MacFarquhar's inability to grasp what is at stake in the movement to ban consensual personal relations between faculty and students will not, I hope, blind your readers to the facts. It is one thing to openly discuss the possibility of problems and conflicts of interest in relationships between professors and students. It is quite another to prohibit such relationships. Yes, sexual harassment is a danger--and there are already laws against it; but that is not enough for those whose main concern is to constantly locate and extirpate the mote in another's eye. Shall we also ban dating because date rape may occur? Once we have cleaned up academe, shall we move on to prohibit all the relationships in the world that have elements of "power imbalances" in them--that is, all those relationships where discrepancies in money, talent, beauty, age, wisdom, influence, etc., are present? How about simply regulating all personal relations, since they are notorious for their messiness and resulting unhappiness? After all, is it not the birthright of all citizens of this Republic to go through life with no potentially unpleasant moments, no complex situations, no possibility of pain or disappointment? Why has it taken us so long to figure out that many more kinds of legislation are needed to bring messy reality into line with our New Enlightened Program for Institutionalizing Proper Human Behavior? Not content with her gross misrepresentation of CASE, MacFarquhar explicitly reconstructs women students as children by Lolitaizing the issue--as if prepubescent Lolita were the very model of a university student and Humbert Humbert the typical professor! Why is such inflammatory and unintelligent reporting acceptable in Lingua Franca? Why are women students (what about men students?) being represented as children? Bring on the nine- year-olds attending universities so we can get their point of view too! A more serious article than MacFarquhar's, one less desperate to amuse, might have asked a number of different questions, foremost among them: Why are we living in a climate in which so many hitherto reasonable people are rushing to impose bans on others, with little regard to the corollary loss of freedoms for all? But MacFarquhar wastes not a line on the problematic issues raised by the move to control personal relationships between students and professors: the loss of freedom of association, the inculcation of an atmosphere of suspicion as professors and students interact, the assumption of venality as the norm in professorial attitudes toward students, the gross exaggerations in the discussions of professors' power and students' powerlessness, and, worse, the debasement to all parties that is implicit in the reduction of all student-teacher interactions to "power issues." Instead of any serious attention to these substantive matters, the article heaps ridicule on the folks who are not ready to join in the redefining of academic life and recasts these people as dirty-minded professors. Naturally the article has nothing to say about the women faculty members like myself who share Professor Dank's concerns and are grateful that he, knowing he will be subjected to misrepresentations such as MacFarquhar's, is still willing to speak publicly about these issues. MacFarquhar's misguided analogies, likening student and professor to a person menaced by a gun-wielding assailant or to a tourist outsmarted by a con artist, should alert all faculty to the increasingly demeaned image of academic life that lies behind such facile and inappropriate comparisons. Interesting that such absurd characterizations are set forth at a time when universities are under great economic pressure, and when large parts of the electorate seem to think education is not something worth supporting in this country. I wonder what all the banners will say when professors have been permanently ousted by computers--far cheaper in the long run, and far less likely to have personal relations (positive, negative, or indifferent)--with students. Then we'll all be able to breathe a sigh of relief that the university will, at last, have been made Safe For All! And we can move on to larger social issues, such as total age segregation in the society at large, and a levelling downward in all spheres of life so that people need never face the distressing prospect of associating with someone who might hold a smidgeon of "power"--of whatever sort-- over them. Oh brave new world that has such foolish souls in it! Daphne Patai Professor of Women's Studies and of Spanish and Portuguese University of Massachusetts at Amherst e-mail: daphne.patai@spanport.umass.edu -- ====================== -- > > Larissa McFarquhar's piece in your December issue, "Dankness Made > Visible," buys into stereotypes of faculty-student intimacy. McFarquhar > seems to dismiss the notion that such relationships could be the product > of informed consent. While the real world certainly does have its Humbert > Humberts--and, for that matter, its student Lolitas--they are far from > universal. To lose sight of the latter fact is to hand the moral > entrepeneurs of the sexual correctness movement more power than they > deserve on the merits. > > Mitchell A. Pravatiner > 8025 S. Oglesby Ave. > Chicago, Ill. 60617 > (312) 375-9758 > email: mitch.pravatiner@launchpad.unc.edu > ------------ To the editor, I have received and read the latest issue of Lingua Franca. Although I generally find the quality of discussion and "Franc"-ness with which most issues are addressed to be refreshing, I must take exception to Larissa MacFarquhar's piece on Barry Dank and CASE. The only redeeming feature of the article is that she seems to have quoted him correctly. Otherwise, her light-weight commentary merely trivializes the issue at best, and frames the debate in Dwork/MacKinnon-esque stereotypes at worst. Remember (and remind Ms. MaqFarquhar) that the issue of consensual relationships between students and instructors at the University level involves adults on both sides. The allusion to Lolita (aged 9 or 14, depending upon whether you are thinking of the novel or the movie) is a gratuitous and spurious analogy (unless the author actually does subscribe to Dworkin's thesis that "all heterosexual intercourse is rape"). I have come to expect far better from Lingua Franca than what I find in this piece, and I would suggest that your magazine do its level best to find better writers than Ms. McFarquhar. Sincerely, Stanley Dubinsky ******************************************************************* * Stanley Dubinsky E-mail: dubinsk@univscvm.csd.scarolina.edu * * Linguistics Program phone: 803-777-2056 * * U of South Carolina fax: 803-777-9064 * * Columbia, SC 29208 * ******************************************************************* ----- December 24, 1994 To the Editor of Lingua Franca: Your mindless, tasteless personal attack on Professor Barry Dank-- and, transparently, on the principles he and his organization champion -- ("Dankness Made Visible", December, 1994) is utterly offensive. Having been subjected to vicious abuse by Puritanical vigilante banners at the University of Pennsylvania, we find the attempt to outlaw consensual relationships between faculty and students -- or, looking ahead, between editors and writers, for instance -- neither amusing nor trivial. Rather, it raises very substantial issues concerning the privacy, autonomy and dignity of adults, both women and men. Barry Dank deserves admiration and praise for being at the forefront in pressing these serious concerns, not the puerile vilification accorded by Larissa MacFarquhar's blatant hatchet job. Happy hula-hooping, Larissa. David Cass Paul F. and E. Warren Shafer Miller Professor of Economics University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA Claudia Stachel Project Manager, Russian Privatization Center Moscow, Russia --- > >December 22, 1994 > > >Editor 22-DEC-1994 >Lingua Franca >22 West 39th St. >New York, NY 10018 > >Dear Editor: > > Larissa MacFarquhar and Lingua Franca owe Barry > >Dank and a lot of other people an apology for the grotesque > >caricature, painted in her article "Dankness Made Visible," > >of all professors and all students who become involved in > >romantic relationships. The author seems to be eager, in a > >particularly virulent way, to engage in stereotyping that > >distorts a very complex issue and that demeans some very > >beautiful relationships. > > Readers of Lingua Franca should have been allowed the > >opportunity to see that some relationships do not result in a > >sweet young thing's crying on the shoulder of a student counselor. > >Some, like the one in which I am involved, result in very happy > >marriages. As a graduate student about to turn 25, I married a > >former professor of mine. That was nearly 16 years ago, and we're > >still happily married. In no way does our experience resemble > >the ugly picture the author is intent to promote. >> >Sincerely, > Susan E. Plass, Assistant Vice Provost for International Affairs International Affairs, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403 503/346-2166; (fax) 503/346-2023; splass@oregon.uoregon.edu ************************************************************************ December 24, 1994 Jeffrey Kittay, Publisher/Editor in Chief Lingua Franca I am writing to you concerning the article in Field Notes, "Dankness Made Visible", by Larissa MacFarquahar (December 1994), the focus of which was on myself. Please do not consider this a letter to the editor for publication but rather a personal letter to you as Editor in Chief of Lingua Franca. I am outraged and dismayed by the article by Ms. MacFarquahar. I was systematically misinformed as to the purpose and nature of the article by her; she broke the agreement that I had made with her concerning my participation in helping her with the article. The publication of this article reflects a terrible lapse in journalistic ethics by Lingua Franca and an explanation should be immediately forthcoming as to why Lingua Franca chose to publish such a vicious article. When Larissa contacted me she indicated that she wanted to do an article on CASE (Consenting Academics for Sexual Equity), of which I am the Founder and Coordinator. I told her that I would only help her with the article if she interviewed other persons associated with CASE, particularly women. She agreed that she would do this and I gave her the phone numbers of a number of potential interviewees, none of whom she interviewed. Her decision not to interview others was a cardinal violation of our agreement since I strongly indicated that I would not agree to do the article if it focused on me. Given this violation, she could have at least given some background on me that would lead your readers to understand as to how I came to form CASE. She could have indicated that I have been academically/politically involved in combatting sexual banning movements in the United States for over 25 years. She could have cited my pioneering scholarship in the area of homosexuality, particularly my 1971 article, "Coming Out in the Gay World", which is generally viewed as a classic article. She could have indicated that I was the co-founder of one of the first gay students unions in the United States and I taught the first accredited course on homosexuality in the United States in 1969. She could have also indicated my vociferous opposition to Anita Bryant's Save Our Children campaign directed against homosexuals culminating in a widely circulated piece originally published in the LA Times which compared the dynamics of Bryant's campaign to that of Hitler. She could have also indicated my active involvement in combatting prejudice directed against couples who are interracial and support of their interracial children via the founding of the Interrace Association at Cal State, Long Beach. Of course, she could also have cited my many presentations to professional associations during the last year and a half on the subject of student-professor bans. Specifically I have presented to the American Sociological Association, Pacific Sociological Association, California Sociological Association, Asociation for Humanist Sociology and the National Conference for Ethics in America. She could have also indicated to your readership that my general concern for ethical issues has led me to be appointed as member of the Board of the National Conference for Ethics in America. Of course, she did none of these things since she was simply interested in presenting me in sexually objectified terms and in essence as a child molester. In my phone interview with Larissa, I told her that it is important for student-professor couples to gain visibility since it is only thru visibility that the concept of professor as male predator and student as child-victim can be effectively combatted. I told her that CASE came into being in part to facilitate obtaining this goal; to attempt to diminish the sexual objectification of ourselves and have the populace view us in our full humanity. What Larissa did with this interview was terribly manipulative and vicious. She took the goals of CASE and simply turned them around and framed us thru the novel-film LOLITA. Thru this framing she attempts to affirm the professor as child molester and student as child-victim. No wonder she did not interview any of the adult women I had given to her as referrals. You should know, as I am sure Larissa knows since I told her, how hurtful such stereotypes are to those who are the subject of these stereotypes. In an obvious premeditated and systematic manner she misinformed and misused me in order to present me and CASE supporters as molesters and child victims. The systematic and premeditated nature of the attack is also indicated by the usage of picture in the article from the film, LOLITA, of the adult male predator staring at his hula hooping child victim as well as her concluding sentence in which she invokes the imagery of the male professor with his "nose hair" or "varicose veins" suffering in his miserable existence. Suffice to say we do not find any of this amusing. We do not understand why a magazine such as Lingua Franca would publish such drivel. We do not understand why any editor of your magazine could find this article acceptable. Our lack of understanding relates to the fact that Lingua Franca is not the National Enquirer, is not a sensationalistic exploitative magazine. It is a magazine directed to a highly educated readership. It is a magazine that in the early part of 1994 did an excellent piece on Jane Gallop who at that time was one of the few outspoken critics of the banning movement in the United States. We deserve an explanation as to how and why this article came to be in Lingua Franca. If the editors consider the article to meet the editorial standards of Lingua Franca, we deserve to know why you believe that such is the case. We would like to believe that you as Editor in Chief of Lingua Franca will take responsibility for the misjudgment of your editorial staff and minimally publish a letter of apology to us and your readership in the next issue of Lingua Franca. In a separate forthcoming post you will find a background post on CASE and myself that persons are sent who request information on CASE. I will greatly appreciate your timely acknowledgement of receipt of this post. Sincerely, Barry M. Dank, PhD CASE Founder and Coordinator ASC-L Founder and Moderator and Professor of Sociology Department of Sociology California State University Long Beach, CA 90840 310-985-4236 email: case@beach1.csulb.edu ********************************************************************** 1/20/95 Dear Professor Dank Having read your letter to Jeffrey Kittay, I think that your anger about my article is in part the product of several misunderstandings, so I would like to clear these up. First you say I promised you that I would interview other people for the article, but I have no memory of making what would have been a highly unusual journalistic arrangement. I am always extremely careful to write down special agreements I make with interviewees (not for attribution, off the record, check quotes with them prior to publication, etc.), and since the notes from my interview with you contain no reference to this, I am sure that I never made you this promise. I did, in fact, at your suggestion, look through a copy of Professor Patai's new book, PROFESSING FEMINISM, with a view to interviewing her. But ultimately I decided that, in such a short piece, the intrusion of a second interviewee whose views, you had already told me, were similar to your own seemed superfluous. Second, you feel that I should have mentioned your other political involvements. If I had been writing a profile of you, I certainly would have done that, but since the piece was about a specific issue for which you were spokesman (rather than you as a person), that information didn't seem relevant. Third, you feel that I misrepresented my views to you. Well, the fact is that I AGREE with your position on bans of faculty/student relationships. Someone who thinks that LOLITA is a moralistic novel about child molesting might misread my reference to it as an indictment of teachers who have relationships with students, but I think it is perfectly obvious from the paragraph from which I discuss the book that I do not read it that way. To my mind LOLITA is a good illustration of two of the points you make: one, that relationships are very complicated, private things that cannot be judged on the basis of clumsy, public categories like age and professional position; and two, that, in a relationship between an older man and a younger woman or girl, the girl is likely to be in a position of emotional power as well. I introduced the gun and the con-man into the piece in order to demonstrate the issue of consent can be more complicated than you were making it out to be. Moreover, once I decided to make that argument, I called you a second time (on October 11) to give you a chance to respond to it specifically. It is clear that I asked you to respond to this argument from the statment of yours that I quote in the piece ("If someone has systematically misrepresented himself, then the consent was based on that illusion...it's a total copout"). Nowhere in your letter do you suggest that I misrepresented your opinions; in fact, I quoted you so extensively throughout the article that anyone reading it will be able to make up his or her own mind about your views. The only aspect of your position that I, as a feminist, have serious trouble with is your implication that feminists often campaign against teacher/student relationships not because they have reasoned opinions on the issue but because they have problems getting dates and therefore want to sabotage the romantic lives of younger and prettier students who are stealing their men. This view strikes me as sexist, and I wonder why you are surprised that people take exception to it. Sincerely, Larissa MacFarquhar January 23, 1995 Jeffrey Kittay: I am in receipt of Larissa MacFarquahar's faxed response of January 20, 1995 to my letter to you of December 24, 1994. A copy of January 20 fax follows at the end of this post. Larissa's response is not only factually incorrect but ultimately I would characterize it as surreal. Larissa did agree to phone other female supporters of CASE since I made it quite clear to her that this was a precondition for my cooperation with her. I made it clear that I did not want the article to focus on me, and I felt that having female perspectives incorporated into the article was mandatory. AND I DID NOT TELL TO LOOK THROUGH HER NEW BOOK, PROFESSING FEMINISM, SINCE THE BOOK HAD NOT YET BEEN PUBLISHED. It was not published until late October. I did mention that she was the author of a relevant forthcoming book, but this was simply a casual aside to Larissa that I made to her when we first spoke in September. In terms of our October 11 conversation, I called her. She did not call me. I called to find out the status of the article and to find out if she had contacted any of the persons to whom I referred her. It was at this point that she brought up the meaningful consent issue. Our conversation was quite brief, and I know that at the time I was rushed. Larissa gave me no indication that she was interested in a detailed analysis of the consent issue at that time. I gave her a brief response. In the article, Larissa stated that I am "cleverly sidestepping" this issue. I never attempted to sidestep any issue with Larissa, cleverly or not so cleverly. IF, she had given me the opportunity to respond to her gun analogy, I would have stated that that we have shifted the focus from harassment to rape and, in essence, the campus banning advocates are accusing "us" of being rapists. CASE