How to ace an ethics course. As long as you have no ethics, that is.

True story: in my final semester of undergraduate study, I found myself without a boyfriend and sitting next to PrincessPixiePointless in a class called Morality & Ethics.

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MORALITY & ETHICS!

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This is funny, trust me. And the professor was so hot!

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With his newly minted philosophy PhD, he was only a few years older than his students and my god he was a gorgeous man. Virtually the entire female cohort of the class transformed into writhing whores, showing up to class in the most outrageously suggestive outfits and twirling their hair and glossing up their lips and doing their damndest to land that trophy!

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Except for me and Pixie. Nah uh. No way. Pixie didn’t think HotProf was all that. She was dating a sociology grad student who wore his long blonde hair in two braids, so I of course immediately dubbed her boyfriend Heidi and refused to call him anything else. I don’t think Heidi liked me much. Oh, he was also in love with Baudrillard and the theory of simulacra, so I also thought Heidi was an idiot, which may have had a tiny impact on how I interacted with him.

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Back to the story. I’ll confess: I was single, HotProf was fucking hot and I’m a competitive bitch, but I’m also a smart bitch, so what I did was this: PREPARE FOR CLASS. While the Barbies in the front row spread their legs and fluttered their eyelashes, I sat square in the middle of the class and drove holes through all their arguments. HotProf’s pedagogical style was to present a theory as absolute truth, using his most authoritative voice and the Barbie’s would nod along as if he were Jesus himself. I would point out all the errors in HotProf’s thinking and have ragey arguments with the guys in the class, who also tended to take the odd step of PREPARING FOR CLASS.

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My ethics class uniform was combat pants, a black t-shirt and army boots. I did Katniss Everdeen way before Katniss Everdeen. I went in there every week ready to kick ass and take names, and as I suspected he might be, HotProf was smitten.

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There’s a lesson for you ladies. A beautiful man has women chucking themselves at him all the time. Compete with your mind! Of course that assumes your ass is fine already. You need both.

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The semester rolled along and the work started to pile up, as it does in final year, and I had to start prioritizing assignments. As I’ve mentioned before, my undergraduate major was in FILM THEORY, so I had oodles of movies I had to sit on my ass and watch. I had Johnny Depp’s entire oeuvre to get through for American cinema, people!

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It was work, let me tell you.

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I like to tease CleverGuy when he comes over that engineers have it so easy. All he has to do for his final project is build a 3D printer from scratch. I had to watch the Polish Avant-Guarde! Andrej Wajda! Ashes and Diamonds!

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The ethics class, unfortunately, dropped down to last place on my list of priorities, so I put on my combat pants and went to see HotProf in his office to ask for an extension on my assignment.

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Did I get my extension? Oh, you bet I did. He closed his office door, and we made it clear that we liked each other very much and some papers got knocked off his desk, but nothing was culminated. I made a deal with HotProf. It went like this:

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Students and professors are absolutely prohibited from having any kind of relationship while they are in a classroom together. A student who is NO longer enrolled in a professor’s class is free to have any kind of relationship they want. In fact, it is not at all unusual for professors to marry former students. What a dating pool!

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Since I was a student in HotProf’s class, we were not permitted to have any relationship and certainly not a sexual one. Of course, if we DID decide to violate that university wide rule, he would pay dearly and I would pay nothing at all.

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Seems reasonable, no?

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I would submit my paper AFTER the deadline when all my other work was done, and there would be no academic penalty for that. I would write my exam, and no matter what the outcome, I would get an A in the course. Once the marks were submitted, and our student/professor relationship was officially over, I would reward him for his consideration.

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And we had a deal.

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So what happened? I got an A, as planned. And I’m not stupid. I had no illusions about HotProf and no fantasy that I was his dream girl and that I would be The One. Are you kidding me? I was just a smart-mouthed girl in combat pants who looked like a few afternoons of fun. HotProf had no intentions of limiting his activities to one woman, and why should he? Young, gorgeous and in an environment where landing hot chicks was like shooting fish in a barrel.

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After the A was on my transcript, I slipped a note under his door: “It was a fun class! Thanks for the memories!”

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And that was that. I got my A and HotProf got nothing. Not from me anyways.

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So what is my point? The news has been filled lately with stories of relationships between teachers and students, and those relationships are prohibited for some good reasons, and some pretty stupid reasons. There are a number of assumptions that underwrite concerns over these kinds of contacts:

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1. That the relationship is automatically exploitive and abusive
2. That the aggressor is always a man
3. That the victim is always a young woman

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Those three assumptions are the reason WHY it’s so difficult for the courts to prosecute women for the exact same “crime” they will destroy a man for. Female teachers who have sex with male students get a pass, over and over again. Male teachers who have sex with female students wind up on the Sex Offender Registry and have their lives shattered.

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Look at this teacher.

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She tweeted topless photos of herself to male students and called them “jailbait”. She was suspended from her job, but likely won’t face any further consequence.

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http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2270383/Carly-McKinney-High-school-teacher-23-tweeted-nude-photos-called-students-JAIL-BAIT-talked-getting-high.html#axzz2JkLj9WOJ

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I asked JudgyAsshole and CleverGuy what their response might have been if, at 16, this teacher had tweeted topless photos to them. Their answer:

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THAT WOULD BE AWESOME!

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The idea that all relationships between students and teachers are automatically exploitive is completely ridiculous. My ass, they are. But even if we ARE going to absolutely prohibit teachers and students from having sex, the rules need to be applied equally to male and female teachers.

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Or how about this? How about we let students and teachers work it out for themselves? Relationships that ARE in fact exploitive can be prosecuted under existing laws, for which EVIDENCE will be required. If you’re going to claim a teacher abused and took advantage of you, you’ll need to have some PROOF of that.

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As it stands, any male teacher that has sex with his female student is a paedophile worthy of jail and lifetime consequences. Any female teacher who has sex with her male students is just a horny gal having some fun.

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http://www.regent.edu/acad/schlaw/blogs/docs/femaleoffender.pdf

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Bullshit.

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The courts are now moving (albeit very slowly) towards prosecuting women for the crime of having sex with students, but I think we’re going exactly the wrong way. We don’t need more victim mentality and more rules and more policing of relationships. We need less.

And we need a clear understanding that exploitation in student/teacher relationships WORKS BOTH WAYS.

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Sometimes, the student gets an A. And the teacher gets nothing. And just because something isn’t ethical doesn’t automatically mean it should be illegal. I learned that in Ethics class.

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Lots of love,

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JB

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