'I should learn to see the truth as great men have seen it': Male Mentoring, Seduction, and Sexual Harassment in Higher Education

In her book, Woman, Native, Other, filmmaker and feminist theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha writes about the importance of women and storytelling. Every woman has her own story to tell and a storyteller is simultaneously "guardian," "transmitter," and "creator" of a vital narrative ( 1989,.p. 149). She writes: Tell it so that they can tell it. So that it may become larger that its own in/significance. [...] A lifetime story. More than a lifetime. One that will be picked up where it is left; when, it does not matter. For the time is already set. "It will take a long time...," the grandmother ends. "It began a long time ago," the granddaughter starts. The time is set, she said; not in terms of when exactly but of what: what exactly must be told, and how. "There must not be any lies." [...] Even if the telling condemns her present life, what is more important is to (re-) tell the story as she thinks it should be told; in other words, to maintain the difference that allows (her) truth to live on( 1989, pp. 149-50). We were sitting in his office discussing Realist narrative when he suddenly grew silent, pensive. "What are you thinking?" I asked. "I'm thinking about making love to you," he responded. "You're so sexy and I haven't had a student for four years now. What I mean is," he continued, "I want to have an affair with you. Of course, it can only be for a couple of months, you understand. I wouldn't want to do anything silly, to annoy my wife. It will be just like Anne Sexton's poem, you know the one, 'For My Lover, Returning to His Wife.' He went on, "We can do it on my office floor or we could go to your apartment." Before I had time to say, "I can't quite remember Anne Sexton's poem," my professor and academic advisor over the past four years had his hands up the back of my shirt and his tongue nervously careening back and forth inside my mouth. If I had had the occasion to write a formalized essay of this kind prior to November 1980, there would have been no language to codify and categorize my experience. But now, largely through the efforts of feminist legal theorist Catherine A. MacKinnon, I can now articulate the realities of "sexual harassment." As Catherine MacKinnon explains: "When law recognized sexual harassment as a practice of sex discrimination it moved it from the realm of 'and then he ... and then he...,' the primitive language in which sexual abuse lives inside a woman, into an experience with a form, an etiology, a cumulativeness" (1987, p. 106)