Would you like to read these?

There has been a lot of talk about a student who has accused her human sexuality professor of harassment because of the assignments she was given. I have to say that I see her point especially as this was a mandatory course for her degree; although I think she will have a hard time proving her case because she was not singled out but, rather, the entire class had the same assignment. It puzzles me, however, that the press is so stunningly incurious about some aspects of the story.

The term paper for the course requires students to write a 12- to 14-page sexual case study on themselves.

The project begins with a sex history -- including a directive to reveal any instances of abuse -- and continues through sexual values, arousal patterns and atypical issues such as fetishes.

Can I confess something? If someone left me alone in  a room with a stack of those assignments, I would read all the ones written by the women in the class. And I'd make a note of the really "interesting" sexual histories so that I could check out to see what the women responsible for writing them looked like.

Another assignment from that year (this is the one that the harassment charge concerns) for the students was to masturbate and then write about their experiences. A question I'd have for the professor is, Do you ever masturbate after or while reading these assignments? No, I don't know what he would say or what he actually does but I'm stunned that no one else seems to have worried about this. No one who has spent much time at a university would entertain, even for a split second, the notion that academic professionalism would be a serious barrier to such a thing happening.

Another thing about this case that would be interesting would be to find out if there is any correlation between the sexual attractiveness of the men and women who write these assignments and the marks they get. I mean, you'd worry if the hot-bodied 19 year girl who wrote about her secret desire to be dominated by another woman got especially high marks while another woman who wrote, equally if not more honestly, about her lack of interest in sex got poor marks wouldn't you?

Today, Ann Althouse highlights a similar  story about a professor who likes to take photographs of himself with his students.