Academia

News outlets do a stand-up job of publicizing incidents of impropriety on the parts of teachers, whether it’s because they are sleeping with students or because they are hiding previous involvement in some facet of the sex industry, but we never hear about the harassment that teachers and other faculty face at the hands of their own students. It’s not that it doesn’t happen — a survey by the American Association of University Women found that 36 percent of high school students report instances of student-on-teacher harassment, with four percent of students polled self-disclosing their harassment of a teacher.

Camille Paglia has a compelling essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the dogma that seems to dominate academic discussions of kink. The short of it: the dependence of gender studies on postmodernist thinkers is making it impossible for us to observe, understand and comment on sexual trends.