College Sex - Philosophy for Everyone: Philosophers With Benefits (20 page)

• • I will not discuss any of these obvious moral wrongs here. Instead, I will investigate the morality of genuine friendships and loving sexual relation- ships between students and professors. This does raise the question of whether a student can freely enter into a friendship or sexual relationship with a professor. I believe the answer to this question is that a student can. How?The answer is the same as the punch line to the old joke about how two porcupines make love: very, very carefully. As several writers have pointed out, there are serious obstacles to clear and honest communication at every stage of the development of such a relationship; but those same writers agree that these obstacles can be overcome.
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    To the extent that these obstacles rely on a context in which “a trade [of sex for grades] is not seen as utterly fantastic,”
    5
    we might hope that as universities discuss these issues more openly, and become less sexist, some of these obstacles will be reduced.
    

    Friendship and Sexual Relationships
    

    Deirdre Golash has provided perhaps the best arguments that close friendships between students and professors are less morally problematic than sexual relationships.
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    A number of considerations lead her to this view. She argues for the following claims:
    

    1. There is no clear line between being merely acquainted and being close friends.
       

    2. There is a clear line between being close friends and being in a sexual relationship.
       

    3. There are goods to be gained by both parties from a student-professor friendship that outweigh the possibility of resulting injustice.
       

    4. Any further goods to be gained by escalating such a friendship to a sexual level are outweighed by the possibility of resulting injustice.
       

    5. Therefore, while student-professor friendships are acceptable, stu- dent-professor sexual relationships ought to be avoided.
       

    I will argue that claims 1 and 2 cannot both be true.The degree of clarity of the lines between acquaintance and friendship, on the one hand, and friendship and a sexual relationship, on the other, is about the same, though it is unclear whether the lines are sharp or fuzzy. I will also argue that one cannot maintain both claims 3 and 4. Whatever dangers lurk in a sexual relationship between professor and student, they appear before the relationship becomes a sexual one; and those dangers do not seem to increase more than the value of the relationship as it is transformed from a friendship into a loving sexual relationship.
    

    Most people think there’s a clear line to be crossed between a non- sexual relationship and a sexual one. Golash doesn’t say where she thinks that line lies, but one obvious possibility is that it’s the line between
    not
    having had sex and
    having
    had sex. (For instance, at one point she asks the reader to “compare the feelings that one has for a lover before, as opposed to after, the first few sexual encounters.”)
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    But where exactly is this line drawn? Perhaps the answer that comes first to mind for most people is “at the penetration of a vagina by a penis.” But putting it this bluntly raises all sorts of concerns. For starters, this is clearly a hetero- normative conception of sex. Neither two women nor two men can ever have sex according to this conception, and that’s enough to reject it as obviously false. To retreat to a conception of having sex as the penetra- tion of any one of some delimited set of bodily orifices by any one of some delimited set of bodily parts is more likely to promote ridicule than agreement. In her excellent essay on this topic, Greta Christina prompts us to test our intuitions about what counts as “having sex” against the following acts:
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• Penile-vaginal intercourse
  

• Penile-anal intercourse
  

• Oral sex (fellatio, cunnilingus)
  

• Digital/manual-vaginal/anal intercourse (fingering/fisting)
  

• Toy-vaginal/anal intercourse
  

• Manual genital stimulation (to orgasm?)
  

• Nipple stimulation (manual or oral)
  

• Kissing (with tongue?)
  

  • Masturbating in one another’s presence
    

  • “Talking dirty”
    

  • Participating in a sex party (in any of a number of capacities)
    

  • Engaging in some of these activities without pursuing your own pleasure
    

  • Engaging in some of these activities without anyone pursuing their own pleasure
    

  • Engaging in some of these activities with a sleeping partner
    

  • Sadomasochistic activity without genital contact
    

  • Rape
    

One conclusion Christina draws from such considerations is that there is no clear line between having sex and not having sex. This does not mean there is
no
line. If you’ve had penile-vaginal intercourse, you’ve had sex, and if the only interaction you’ve ever had with someone is a brief kiss on the lips, then you haven’t had sex with that person. But whatever the boundaries of the concept of “having sex” are, it seems clear that this is not the relevant concept for figuring out whether one is in a sexual rela- tionship in the sense relevant to our topic. For if Sam and Pat spend office hours behind closed doors, kissing, talking dirty, and masturbating together, whatever concerns one has about the situation will be independ- ent of whether one thinks any of this strictly counts as “having sex.”

What we need, then, is a less stringent conception of being in a sexual relationship, one that is going to capture more of the cases that seem likely to worry those concerned about the ethics of student-professor sexual relationships. From now on, I will be using such a concept when I use the term “sexual relationship.” I will not attempt to delineate this concept, since it is likely to be at least as vague as the concept of “having sex” (though it is not the same concept). Instead, I want to illustrate this vague- ness in order to cast doubt on Golash’s second claim: that there is a clear line between being in a close friendship and in a sexual relationship.

Recall the last time you entered into a loving sexual relationship. At some point you were not in the relationship – before you met the person, for instance. At some later point, you were in the relationship – the first time you were having sex with them, for instance. At what point did your relationship change from being non-sexual to being sexual? Even if you think that penile-vaginal intercourse is the only kind of sex there is, your relationship became sexual before the first penetration. When you were both undressing before the intercourse, for instance, your relationship had clearly entered the sexual stage. But it most likely entered that stage

much earlier – perhaps with some earlier sexual acts, but before that with some kissing or hand-holding. What about
before
the first time you held hands, though? At any point when holding hands is a live possibility, it seems to me, you’re in a relationship of the sort that we’re interested in, that is, one that some people are uncomfortable about students and pro- fessors entering into. And this doesn’t require having had any physical contact. In fact, it seems possible to enter into this kind of relationship
at first sight
(though that ain’t love), given the right people and circum- stances. Moreover, we usually hope that sexual relationships will develop out of close friendships, rather than being based purely on physical attraction, say.

If all this is right, then there are two ways Golash might go. She might withdraw the claim that there is a clear line between close friendship and a sexual relationship, but maintain that, nonetheless, sexual relationships between professors and students are wrong. If she goes this route, then it seems that she will have to disapprove of close friendships between pro- fessors and students, since they fall into a gray area where it is impossible to separate them from sexual relationships.

Alternatively, Golash might hold on to the idea that there is a clear line between a sexual and non-sexual relationship, claiming that the discus- sion above can help us to specify where that line falls, namely, much earlier in the development of a relationship than we might at first have thought. This route leads to the same practical consequences, though they follow from the classification of most cases as falling into the cate- gory of sexual relationships, rather than the gray area between close friendship and sexual relationship.

In fact, it seems that someone with either of these views cannot even encourage casual (non-close) student-professor friendships, since such friendships are likely in some cases to develop into close friendships (of the sort we have just seen they must condemn), and the line between the two kinds of friendship is at least as fuzzy as that between close friend- ships and sexual relationships. Furthermore, whichever response Golash gives, there will be some odd consequences. For if it’s right that one can enter into the kind of relationship that concerns Golash
at first sight
, that is, without doing anything, then it is odd to condemn such relationships. The right response here seems to be that it is not
being in
such a relation- ship, but
acting on
the feelings one has, that is unacceptable. This will require quite a different argument, though, since it is precisely feelings rather than actions that are the basis of Golash’s concerns about the con- sequences of such relationships, as we shall see below.

Harms and Benefits of Student-Professor Relationships

As I noted above, my interest here is in student-professor relationships per se. What kinds of harms or benefits can come from this specific kind of relationship? Two are discussed most frequently. First, there is the worry that there is an inherent imbalance of power in the relationship, and thus that the student may be coerced at some stage. As I argued above, though this is a serious concern, it is not something that distin- guishes student-professor relationships from other relationships where there is a similar power imbalance. Second, there is the potential impact of such relationships on the academic careers of students.

Whether Pat and Sam are friends or lovers, it seems reasonable to expect, first, that Pat would spend more time discussing philosophy with Sam than with other students and, second, that Pat’s assessment of Sam’s work might be colored by their relationship (to Sam’s advantage when the relationship is going well, or to Sam’s disadvantage when it’s going badly). On the positive side, some have argued that the benefits of the extra attention that Sam would receive are not unfair to other students. On the negative side are the potential or perceived injustice to other stu- dents of having their grades devalued by the illegitimate inflation of Sam’s grades, and the potential effects a soured relationship could have on Sam.

Golash argues that there is more cause for concern in the case of sex- ual relationships, since the distorting feelings involved in such a relation- ship are much more powerful and harder to set aside than feelings of friendship (claim 4), and that the benefits of the friendship, but not the sexual relationship, outweigh the potential injustice resulting from the relationship (claim 3). I investigate these matters in the following three subsections.

Spending More Time

Is it a bad thing for Pat and Sam to spend more time discussing philoso- phy than they did before their relationship, or than Pat spends discussing philosophy with other students?
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Golash argues that more time spent on one student does not necessarily come at the expense of time spent on another.Though this is strictly true, the time
may
come at the expense of

another student, depending on what other demands there are on the professor’s time. At some point, one’s office hours run out, and one can see no more students, nor offer comments on any more drafts before the paper is due. But even in these cases, spending time with one student at the expense of another is not necessarily a bad thing. A student who spends more time discussing work with her professor because she seeks him out during office hours is not a recipient of favoritism. Nor is a stu- dent who ends up sitting next to his choir director on the plane during the choir’s European tour, and ends up talking about the material in the music history course the director is teaching. It is not obvious that being in a relationship with a professor is any different in principle from the latter kind of example.The professor is available to talk with this particu- lar student at additional times, and probably for much more time, than other students – for instance, at the pub or in bed. This might give the student an advantage, but – unlike unfair grading – it seems more like a lucky break than favoritism.

In short, there are many different reasons why a student might end up spending more time discussing academic matters with a professor, and such extra time does not automatically count as favoritism, even if it comes at the expense of time spent with another student. There are cases where such time
would
count as favoritism, for example, if one reserved one’s office hours for one’s friends, but it
need
not. Most important for my con- cerns here, though, is that these considerations apply equally to the time spent with a professor as a result of friendship or a sexual relationship.

Biased Assessment

Concerns about Pat grading Sam’s work seem reasonable. There are two reasons I am skeptical of the claim that sexual relationships give
more
cause for concern here than close friendships, however. The first derives from the fuzzy border between these categories. One’s feelings may be most powerful, most distracting, and so on, during the “high courting” period, when escalation to a sexual relationship is a clear possibility, but not a certainty. Whatever these distracting “sexual feelings” are, they don’t necessarily depend on having had sex with the person, whatever that amounts to. The
desire
to have sex, and all that goes along with that, may just as easily influence one’s judgment, and that desire can be at full strength before one has had sex. Indeed, again, it seems plausible that