In that same twenty-four hour period, three female colleagues shared their fraught experiences with sexual harassment or assault. For someone who studies the history of sexuality and sexual violence, every day seems to bring more to digest. I am glad to see people engaging in new discussions of sex and power daily.
Yet I join many friends mostly, but not exclusively, those who identify as women in being exhausted by these ongoing disclosures. We tell each other our stories. We share advice on idiosyncratic institutional processes. All the while, we hope for real change and permanent solutions. They reinforce heterosexist and sexist assumptions that damage and confine students. All of us who have gritted our teeth through comparable remarks know that like radiation, they cause cumulative damage.
How many LGBT kids in those classrooms were reminded of their exclusion by jokes that put forth heterosexuality as a universal? And how many young men saw these jokes as implicit reaffirmation of their power to define, adjudge, and control female-gendered bodies?
The historic operation of sexual power can help us wade through the current avalanche of sexual assault and harassment allegations by connecting these quotidian happenings to the heinous acts that more easily garner mainstream condemnation. When men joke about the risk of being with a female colleague behind a closed door, or people label this the new McCarthyism or a witch hunt, they are willfully ignoring the ways that sexuality has been used to create and enforce power relationships throughout history.
So I look to what I know: teaching. It shows Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump in a wet, open-mouthed kiss. This, I tell students, is why we need to study sex: because we rarely go a day without relying on sex to convey other relationships.
