Hugo Schwyzer, a professor who’s dwelt frequently and well on older-professor/younger-student crushes, which tend to be older-man/younger-woman as well, talks of a letter he got about an older woman who, after a young man she’d mentored graduated, propositioned him.

...our skewed perceptions about male and female sexuality lead us to see older women, younger men relationships very differently than the reverse. With some considerable justification, we see women as having considerably more potential to be victimized and harassed than we do men; we see men as having considerably more potential to victimize and harass than we do women. And of course, when we look at statistics around rape, assault, and harassment, those perceptions are validated by the evidence. But we make a mistake when we confuse a patriarchal power structure that privileges men over women with the notion that each individual man always has power over each individual woman. And we make an even graver mistake when we deny that men — not just young boys, but grown men — can be victimized by asymmetrical sexual relationships.

Read the quote in context here.

By coincidence I wrote yesterday on the structural complications of men-must-invite/women-must-invite, based on a post by Em of Em and Lo encouraging women to keep asking, despite discouragement, and encouraging men to consider a response other than “woah, she must be desperate.”)

Of course there’s a rather large difference between heterosexual women asking men out in a bar (with men “gatekeeping” their replies) and women professors asking male students. The first is a good idea. The second, while technically “gender equal” is, of course, inappropriate.

I think a lot of patriarchy (ok, or for skeptics what we call patriarchy) is wrapped up in the traditional requirement that men are allowed the power to initiate and women have only the “power” to reply affirmatively or, most of the time, to decline. One consequence is that the situation the young man, Luke, has found himself in is rare.

But that patriarchy is a real thing only masks that power is often situational/structural rather than innately gendered. In other words patriarchy has insured men generally have the keys, not that only men are capable of driving.

So. If women mostly haven’t been initiators (blame patriarchy) and if women mostly haven’t been in academic mentoring relationships to younger men, then…

Well, then a couple of things shake out. First, obviously, it was harder for both Luke and his mentor to recognize that what she had proposed was really inappropriate. Second, I get the impression that it made it harder for him to recognize that the same recourses (both informal and formal) are available to him that would be available to a young woman in a similar situation. And finally, should he raise the issue it might be harder for him to be heard correctly — either by her or his college — than it might be for a similar young woman. (No, finally it might be harder for his mentor to get a “fair trial” since on the one hand there are expectations that her gender doesn’t do that sort of thing but on the other hand there are MRA/what-about-the-menz types who’d foghorn it endlessly. And in either case she have trouble being listened to for the part she actually played rather than what everyone’s stories would be.)

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One of Hugo’s commenters, Placebogirl, made the point that the situation stood out because the mentor was so much older… even though that itself is problematic from a gender-role perspective (i.e. women “old enough to be my mom” aren’t supposed to have sexual attractions.) It’s a good point. The situation for Luke might have been even more complicated had the age difference not been so great. Because as she points out we do have some narratives, mostly negative, about “desperate” older women falling “foolishly” in love with younger men. See the character Ruth in “Pirates of Penzance” who, from my perspective, isn’t even that old at forty-seven years. Anyway, had the mentor been in her 30s instead of 50s some of the other complications that have been raised here, like the expectation that men shouldn’t “turn down” sex, might have come into play such that he would have been spun longer by the power differential.

The one… I don’t know if I’d call it good but maybe I’ll call it fortunate… thing about this role reversal is that it’s setting people back just enough to consider that such relationships can be walked back towards something professional, appropriate, and ongoing. Something that may have been lost when the discussion was only about older men and younger women.

I’m not absolving anybody here, just saying that just as the heated attractions of those teaching and studying in a current course can fall back to normal when the course ends, so mentor/protege relationships that haven’t been egregiously manipulative can also be guided back to normal after an appropriate intervention.

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“My annoyance at the ‘men are victims too’ campaign is rooted less in a denial of the fact that men can be hurt by women and more by the implication that the patriarchy is an unreal construct, and that women have just as much agency and possibility and safety (if not more) than men.”

Agreed. But over time, as gender and other traditional imbalances continue to normalize I’m hoping we’ll start seeing more use of the word kyriarchy — the generic term for abuse of any and all power differentials.

So. About Luke. First of all I think he’s doing the right thing by talking about what’s happened. And I think it’s incredible that he’s recognizing that if he stays in academia he too might have… well… innocently isn’t the right word but maybe unconsciously is… wound up putting a student of his own in the same position he’s in. But I think it would be good, after talking to others about it, to communicate clearly but without any sense of obligation to his mentor, to let her know that he’s conflicted, that he felt maybe the unfamiliarity of the gender switch distracted them from warning signs that would otherwise have been really obvious, and that while he’d like to continue working with her (it sounds like it is) that she has to exercise her own responsibilities.

Because the thing is his situation is not an oddity, it’s a early indication. She’s not the only woman to find herself in this position, nor is he. Instead similar dynamics are almost certainly happening elsewhere already and as gender becomes more power-normalized it’s definitely going to turn up more and more often.

At least until everyone recognizes that what’s going on and stops whistling “it can’t happen here.”

It would also be great if he, and ideally she, could to continue modeling an appropriate, non-galvanized approach to resolving the situation. It would help all kinds of people who find themselves in their situation. In both non-traditional power gradients and… perhaps in traditional ones as well.

Update: Sungold of Kittywampus, herself either a women’s studies or women’s history professor, points out in comments that it’s really unlikely that a professor in her 50s would have been ignorant of what she was doing when she propositioned her student. It’s possible that there were mitigating circumstances, but since they either weren’t included by Luke or weren’t relayed by Hugo they’re out of the scope of our text. And therefore have to be out of scope for our assessments either. Not cool on the professor’s part.