From Bathsheba to Brokeback Mountain
Kurt Blankschaen's Sex, Love and God course covers issues we should all be thinking about.
Here at Yes, Misstrix, I often have the pleasure of speaking with amazing people doing fascinating work in the realm of sex, sensuality, sexuality and desire. This is part two of three of my interview with Kurt Blankschaen, an assistant professor at Daemen University who teaches (among other things) a course called Sex, Love and God. Read part one here.
Yes, Misstrix: When we left off, we were talking about some things for people to reflect on before assuming the ally title. Now, I want to return to the class you inherited and hear about how you’ve taken the topic and run with it. What are you hoping your students get out of the Sex, Love and God course?
Kurt Blankschaen: One of the things I tried to do was to build a long list of what I thought were these common-sense notions—the kind of slogans that fit on a bumper sticker—and really put pressure on these ideas. One assumption was that most college students are fairly socially liberal about sex. So, I started with a fairly conservative viewpoint, one from Natural Law, which is a traditional Catholic theology about the notion that sex is for procreation. It’s this conjugal view that non-procreative sex acts are immoral because they’re sort of disintegrating the body.
I try to present that idea as strongly as I can to the students and see what the response is. Here, the usual response I got was, ‘No, consent is all that matters.’ So, the next week, we looked at an article about consent, and I started to press on that: ‘What do you need to know for consent?’ Obviously, no one is going to say consent is not important to sex, and clearly, it is, but what if you forget to ask something?
For instance, if A and B have sex, and A forgets to ask about STIs and they contract something, is A entitled to be angry about that? Or should A have asked? And what if you happen to ask a poorly phrased question? So, if A asks B about AIDS, and B says no because they have HIV and it hasn’t progressed to AIDS, B would be answering honestly and truthfully, but they haven’t really answered what A asked.
And what about extramarital affairs? So, does it matter, for instance, if the person hasn't told you that they're in a committed relationship, would it matter for you if you didn't know the person you were with was also stepping out on somebody else? I think it puts pressure on this idea of what you mean by consent. And how much consent do you need? How much do you actually need to know this other person? The more you start feeling you need to know the other person, the more complicated things get for looking at consent and anonymous or casual sex.
One of the surprising discussions we had then was about casual sex. Maybe you don’t know that much about the person you’re being intimate with. And that got us in this really interesting conversation about what makes sex good? Not what makes for good sex, for the really passionate, panting, and fulfilling sex you remember 15 years later, but what makes sex good or morally choice-worthy beyond it being fulfilling immediately? But, if all that matters is if the sex is immediately fulfilling, then you really shouldn’t care if the other person is in a relationship. And that seems like, well, wait a minute, there has to be something else in addition to pleasure and in addition to consent. What is that thing? We spent a lot of the semester working through that.
Another topic we were looking at was the ways power matters in relationships. We were looking at racial relationships, and there's a really provocative article called, Do Black Men Have a Moral Obligation to Marry Black Women? The immediate response that Charles Mills, the author, gives is that if your reaction is this automatic knee-jerk 'no!, you just love the person you love' then you're not really being honest about how race makes a huge difference in the way people move through the world.. He doesn't defend that there is a moral obligation, but instead is interested in looking at what might justify the obligation if there is one. We looked at his arguments about how larger social and historical patterns get mixed in with sexual desires and political hierarchies.
So, Mills thinks that racialized sexual desires are not just about what turns someone on, but how racialized desires also draw on larger stereotypes in society. So, for example, the stereotype that Black women are promiscuous and can't control their sexuality makes them an object of sexual desire, but not 'marriage material,' which in turn affects who gets seen as "respectable" or gets a say in other political decisions about race and sex.
We also looked at the King David story. In First and Second Samuel, David is ‘The Golden Child.’ God loves David, and David can do no wrong. He saves Israel from Goliath, and he's dashing, he's handsome. He's clearly on the ascendancy. Then, it all starts to go south.
It starts in Second Samuel when David stops taking the kingship duties seriously. So, he doesn't go personally console the son of one of his neighboring kingdoms when his father dies. David sends an emissary, and it starts a war. But the real sign that David loses God's favor is when he notices Bathsheba and summons her to the palace and forces her to have sex. There’s a question there about how to navigate power in relationships, especially ones with a formal power structure.
Did Bathsheba really have an option to say no to the king? And then there's this further, complicated dynamic of David getting her pregnant, and he can't let that be public knowledge because that would raise questions about who gets to inherit the throne. So, instead of just saying, ‘Look, we had this affair. I'm owning up to it, and we'll sort this out some way,’ he arranges to have Bathsheba’s husband killed.
So first, he tries to get her husband to go home by saying, ‘Why don't you take this time off and go home to your wife?’ The husband doesn’t want to do that, and David really tries to pressure him to go home, so there is some kind of plausible deniability about him being the father, but the guy won’t do it. And so, instead of just owning that they had this affair and that he forces Batsheba to have sex with him. Bathsheba, he arranges for her husband to be killed and there’s this fall from grace. It raises interesting questions like, ‘Why is sex not just what individuals do? Why is it also a political matter?’
YM: That’s really fascinating. Power dynamics add a whole other dimension to things. Whenever I think about this topic, there’s this famous episode of the show Girls that comes to mind. Lena Dunham’s character Hannah goes to chat with a celebrated memoirist played by Matthew Rhys who has a shady reputation with young women. She wrote something about him exploiting his fans, and he seems to want to set the record straight. It always reminds me of this professor-student relationship dynamic that rides the line of sexual and can be troubling at times. I imagine that type of power dynamic might be something that speaks to your students in this course as well.
KB: I think that's a really interesting point to bring up, and it's one we spent half a class on. We looked at these formal and informal ways this plays out. So, is the thing that compromises or endangers consent when you're a student and professor, or does it even extend to the time when you're no longer in that professor-student dynamic? There’s a point where the professor no longer has direct control over your grade, but isn't there still this worry about them being friends with the faculty member who is in control of your grade? How does that impact things, even when the institutionalized relationship is no longer is there? I’m glad there are ways that pop culture is representing these issues, too.
YM: That brings me straight to my next question. I saw that the syllabus for the course concludes with watching Brokeback Mountain. Tell me a little bit about that choice and how the movie brings a lot of these topics together.
KB: One of the tricky things about the class was to find stuff that brought all three of the themes together. So, sex, love and God together. I tried to approach these themes through an article, "Feminine Masochism and the Politics of Personal Transformation," by Sandra Bartky. Bartky asks us to consider what sexual shame really means and how we could even articulate this questions when we don't really even have the language to talk about it in the first place?
She's looking at this woman who writes anonymously to this magazine and calls herself P. P is a dedicated feminist. She goes to Take Back the Night, she mans the phone bank, she does women's self-defense courses, etc. But P also acknowledges that she has these masochistic fantasies. These fantasies are not in the sense that she comes together with a partner and they map out things like, ‘I'm comfortable with this, but not these words, not those words.’ It’s more along the lines of like some strange man takes her when she's on the way home from the subway. She says that she has these feelings, but she doesn't know how to reconfigure her imagination or her sexual fantasy life.
So, while we were looking at that, and I think one of the things that Brokeback Mountain did really well was to show how sexual shame is embodied, not just in an individual way because neither of the characters can really talk about it, but also in how it affects other people. The sexual shame that both Jack and Ennis feel isn't just about how they interact with each other or how they understand themselves. It’s also about how it seeps into their marriages or their relationships with their kids. We see what happens when Ennis’ wife sees him kissing Jack, and she knows. She plants a little note in his tackle box, something like, ‘Catch us something good,’ and he never sees it.
It was also interesting to show the students that movie because we were in high school when it came out, and the focus was very clearly on Jack and Ennis having been forced to lie to the world. The idea was something like, ‘Look, it's not great, but there's this idea that there's nothing else they could do.’ Interestingly enough, all the students were focusing on the infidelity. That was the major topic. It was an hour-and-a-half discussion about how they were cheating on their respective wives. And if they really just wanted to do this, they could find a cabin in the woods and live their cowboy life out there. So, it's really interesting to see how 15 years changed what these students noticed in the film.
YM: Wow, I never even considered how the legalization of gay marriage and the way society has overall become more accepting of these relationships might change how this movie was received. Do you think those societal changes were the catalyst for your students’ reactions?
KB: Yeah, I definitely think a lot of the legal changes went hand-in-hand with social changes or, in some cases, have created this safe arena for people to show that if you legalize gay marriage in Massachusetts, the world's not going to end. Now, you know what's going to happen, so why wouldn't you want to legalize it in another state? But yeah, I think one of the most striking things to me was when I was in graduate school, I took an applied ethics course, and one of the articles was about whether gay sex is moral. If you were to ask my students that question, they wouldn’t really get it. They would understand the words, but it’d be no different than if I were to ask if interracial marriage should be permitted by the state. I think they would say, like, ‘Well, yeah.’ So, I think it’s been fascinating to see just how much has changed in 10 to 15 years.
YM: Given the way things have changed and progressed, what do you think are some of the topics that are top of mind for your students right now?
KB: I think a lot of them are really interested in talking about trans issues, which in some ways comes with this kind of deep fascination and concern, but also this reluctance to actually talk about these issues in a conversation. That’s because I think they haven't quite mastered a lot of the vocabulary. So, if I push on the difference and say, ‘What do you mean by trans?’ They don’t really know.
And so, we start talking about what it means to define being trans in terms of surgery or hormones, or changing a name and pronouns, or how social changes are not the same thing as changing legal documents. We also talked about if gender identity was independent from sexual orientation, and a lot of the students recognized they never thought about how each of these parts came together.
With pleasure,
Yes, Misstrix
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