{"id":418072,"date":"2010-03-11T14:29:00","date_gmt":"2010-03-11T18:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.nybooks.com\/post\/441569341"},"modified":"2010-03-11T14:29:00","modified_gmt":"2010-03-11T18:29:00","slug":"girls-girls-girls","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/418072","title":{"rendered":"Girls! Girls! Girls!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tony Judt<\/a><\/h4>\n
\n<\/p>\n
F\u00e9lix Vallotton<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In 1992 I was chairman of the History Department at New York University\u2014where I was also the only unmarried straight male under sixty. A combustible blend: prominently displayed on the board outside my office was the location and phone number of the university\u2019s Sexual Harassment Center. History was a fast-feminizing profession, with a graduate community primed for signs of discrimination\u2014or worse. Physical contact constituted a presumption of malevolent intention; a closed door was proof positive.<\/p>\n

Shortly after I took office, a second-year graduate student came by. A former professional ballerina interested in Eastern Europe, she had been encouraged to work with me. I was not teaching that semester, so could have advised her to return another time. Instead, I invited her in. After a closed-door discussion of Hungarian economic reforms, I suggested a course of independent study\u2014beginning the following evening at a local restaurant. A few sessions later, in a fit of bravado, I invited her to the premiere of Oleanna<\/em>\u2014David Mamet\u2019s lame dramatization of sexual harassment on a college campus.<\/p>\n

How to explain such self-destructive behavior? What delusional universe was mine, to suppose that I alone could pass untouched by the punitive prudery of the hour\u2014that the bell of sexual correctness would not toll for me? I knew my Foucault as well as anyone and was familiar with Firestone, Millett, Brownmiller, Faludi, e tutte quante<\/em>. To say that the girl had irresistible eyes and that my intentions were\u2026unclear would avail me nothing. My excuse? Please Sir, I\u2019m from the \u201960s.<\/em><\/p>\n

The life of an early-\u201960s adolescent male was curiously confined. We still inhabited our parents\u2019 moral universe. Dating was difficult\u2014no one had cars; our homes were too small for privacy; contraception was available but only if you were willing to confront a disapproving pharmacist. There was a well-founded presumption of innocence and ignorance, for boys and girls alike. Most boys I knew attended single-sex schools and we rarely encountered women. A friend and I paid hard-earned money for Saturday morning dance classes at the Locarno Ballroom in Streatham; but when it came time for the annual social, the girls from Godolphin & Latymer School laughed at us all the same. We cut the experiment short.<\/p>\n

Even if you got a date, it was like courting your grandmother. Girls in those days came buttressed in an impenetrable Maginot Line of hooks, belts, girdles, nylons, roll-ons, suspenders, slips, and petticoats. Older boys assured me that these were mere erotic impedimenta, easily circumnavigated. I found them terrifying. And I was not alone, as any number of films and novels from that era can illustrate. Back then we all lived on Chesil Beach.<\/p>\n

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And then, to our surprise, we learned that we were part of the \u201csexual revolution.\u201d Within a matter of months, a generation of young women abandoned a century of lingerie and adopted the miniskirt with (or without) tights. Few men of my acquaintance born later than 1952 have even heard of\u2014much less encountered\u2014most of the undergarments listed above. The French pop star Antoine sang optimistically of buying contraceptive pills in the Monoprix (approximately France\u2019s K-Mart). At Cambridge, cool and worldly, I helped a friend arrange an abortion for his girl. Everyone was \u201cplaying with fire.\u201d<\/p>\n

Or claiming to. My generation was obsessed with the distinction between theory and practice\u2014I knew a man in California whose doctoral dissertation was devoted to \u201cTheory and Practice in theory and in practice.\u201d Sexually, we lived the contrast. In theory we prided ourselves on being the cutting edge. But in practice we were a conformist cohort: shaped more by our \u201950s youth than our \u201960s adolescence. A surprising number of us married young\u2014often to our first serious girlfriend. And of that number, many have stayed married. Championing the inalienable right of everyone to do anything, we had scant occasion to do much ourselves.<\/p>\n

Our predecessors had grown up in the claustrophobic world of Lucky Jim<\/em> and Look Back in Anger<\/em>. Constrained by the limits they were taught to respect, they might try to seduce an office junior or a female student but were instinctively rule-bound: they did not expect to live out their fantasies. We, by contrast, had trouble distinguishing our fantasies from everyday life. The solipsism of the \u201960s\u2014\u201cmake love, not war,\u201d \u201cdo your own thing,\u201d \u201clet it all hang out\u201d\u2014certainly destroyed taboos. But it also muffled the conscience: nothing was off-limits.<\/p>\n

In 1981, shortly after arriving at Oxford, I invited a student and her boyfriend to dinner. My wife and I lived in a country village and by the time the young couple arrived it was snowing hard. They would have to stay overnight. I casually pointed out the tiny guestroom with its double bed and wished them good night. Only much later did it occur to me to wonder whether the pair were sleeping together. When I delicately alluded to the matter a few days later, the young woman patted me on the shoulder: \u201cDon\u2019t worry Tony, we understood. You \u201960s types!\u201d<\/p>\n

Our successors\u2014liberated from old-style constraints\u2014have imposed new restrictions upon themselves. Since the 1970s, Americans assiduously avoid anything that might smack of harassment, even at the risk of forgoing promising friendships and the joys of flirtation. Like men of an earlier decade\u2014though for very different reasons\u2014they are preternaturally wary of missteps. I find this depressing. The Puritans had a sound theological basis for restricting their desires and those of others. But today\u2019s conformists have no such story to tell.<\/p>\n

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Nevertheless, the anxieties of contemporary sexual relations offer occasional comic relief. When I was Humanities dean at NYU, a promising young professor was accused of improper advances by a graduate student in his department. He had apparently followed her into a supply closet and declared his feelings. Confronted, the professor confessed all, begging me not to tell his wife. My sympathies were divided: the young man had behaved foolishly, but there was no question of intimidation nor had he offered to trade grades for favors. All the same, he was censured. Indeed, his career was ruined\u2014the department later denied him tenure because no women would take his courses. Meanwhile, his \u201cvictim\u201d was offered the usual counseling.<\/p>\n

Some years later, I was called to the Office of the University Lawyer. Would I serve as a witness for the defense in a case against NYU being brought by that same young woman? Note, the lawyer warned me: \u201cshe\u201d is really a \u201che\u201d and is suing the university for failing to take seriously \u201cher\u201d needs as a transvestite. We shall fight the case but must not be thought insensitive.<\/p>\n

So I appeared in Manhattan Supreme Court to explain the complexities of academic harassment to a bemused jury of plumbers and housewives. The student\u2019s lawyer pressed hard: \u201cWere you not prejudiced against my client because of her transgendered identity preference?\u201d \u201cI don\u2019t see how I could have been,\u201d I replied. \u201cI thought she was a woman\u2014isn\u2019t that what she wanted me to think?\u201d The university won the case.<\/p>\n

On another occasion, a student complained that I \u201cdiscriminated\u201d against her because she did not offer sexual favors. When the department ombudswoman\u2014a sensible lady of impeccable radical credentials\u2014investigated, it emerged that the complainant resented not being invited to join my seminar: she assumed that women who took part must be getting (and offering) favorable treatment. I explained that it was because they were smarter. The young woman was flabbergasted: the only form of discrimination she could imagine was sexual. It had never occurred to her that I might just be an elitist.<\/p>\n

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This story is revealing. When discussing sexually explicit literature\u2014Milan Kundera, to take an obvious case\u2014with European students, I have always found them comfortable debating the topic. Conversely, young Americans of both sexes\u2014usually so forthcoming\u2014fall nervously silent: reluctant to engage the subject lest they transgress boundaries. Yet sex\u2014or, to adopt the term of art, \u201cgender\u201d\u2014is the first thing that comes to mind when they try to explain the behavior of adults in the real world.<\/p>\n

Here as in so many other arenas, we have taken the \u201960s altogether too seriously. Sexuality (or gender) is just as distorting when we fixate upon it as when we deny it. Substituting gender (or \u201crace\u201d or \u201cethnicity\u201d or \u201cme\u201d) for social class or income category could only have occurred to people for whom politics was a recreational avocation, a projection of self onto the world at large.<\/p>\n

Why should everything be about \u201cme\u201d? Are my fixations of significance to the Republic? Do my particular needs by definition speak to broader concerns? What on earth does it mean to say that \u201cthe personal is political\u201d? If everything is \u201cpolitical,\u201d then nothing is. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein\u2019s Oxford lecture on contemporary literature. \u201cWhat about the woman question?\u201d someone asked. Stein\u2019s reply should be emblazoned on every college notice board from Boston to Berkeley: \u201cNot everything can be about everything.\u201d<\/p>\n

The playful mantras of our adolescence have become a way of life for later generations. At least in the \u201960s we knew, whatever we said, that sex was about\u2026sex. All the same, what followed is our fault. We\u2014the left, academics, teachers\u2014have abandoned politics to those for whom actual power is far more interesting than its metaphorical implications. Political correctness, gender politics, and above all hypersensitivity to wounded sentiments (as though there were a right not to be offended): this will be our legacy.<\/p>\n

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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

Why should I not close my office door or take a student to a play? If I hesitate, have I not internalized the worst sort of communitarian self-censorship\u2014anticipating my own guilt long before I am accused and setting a pusillanimous example for others? Yes: and if only for these reasons I see nothing wrong in my behavior. But were it not for the mandarin self-assurance of my Oxbridge years, I too might lack the courage of my convictions\u2014though I readily concede that the volatile mix of intellectual arrogance and generational exceptionalism can ignite delusions of invulnerability.<\/p>\n

Indeed, it is just such a sense of boundless entitlement\u2014taken to extremes\u2014that helps explain Bill Clinton\u2019s self-destructive transgressions or Tony Blair\u2019s insistence that he was right to lie his way into a war whose necessity he alone could assess. But note that for all their brazen philandering and posturing, Clinton and Blair\u2014no less than Bush, Gore, Brown, and so many others of my generation\u2014are still married to their first serious date. I cannot claim as much\u2014I was divorced in 1977 and again in 1986\u2014but in other respects the curious \u201960s blend of radical attitudes and domestic convention ensnared me too. So how did I elude the harassment police, who surely were on my tail as I surreptitiously dated my bright-eyed ballerina?<\/p>\n

Reader: I married her.<\/p>\n

\u2014This post is part of a continuing series of memoirs<\/a> by Tony Judt.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n<\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a> <\/img><\/a>\n<\/div>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tony Judt F\u00e9lix Vallotton In 1992 I was chairman of the History Department at New York University\u2014where I was also the only unmarried straight male under sixty. A combustible blend: prominently displayed on the board outside my office was the location and phone number of the university\u2019s Sexual Harassment Center. History was a fast-feminizing profession, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4208,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-418072","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418072","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4208"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=418072"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/418072\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=418072"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=418072"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=418072"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}