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Comment by RappingBoomer | Hacker News Reader

this nation has changed dramatically in the last few decades...the elites have clamped down on the little people in so many ways...so many laws and regulations now...i was reading a comic book from the 1950s the other day, and the premise was that a female college student was having an affair with her professor...and there were other plot elements...but the amazing thing was that the other characters did not think the relationship was unusual at all...nowadays, in a movie or in the media, such a relationship would be portrayed as scandalous...

the hit movie american graffiti from the 1970s showed a high school teacher having an affair with one of his students...but it was just a casual aside in the movie plot...no one made a big deal about it...

this nation is entering some sort of neopuritanical hell hole...and it aint gonna be pretty...

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And I remember a mystery novel by Isaac Asimov, set in the 1950s or maybe early 1960s, in which an affair with a student is mentioned as the sort of thing that could get a professor fired. And I remember a fellow I once met in the mountain west ca. 1976, who had dumped his wife for a 19-year-old student. He was no longer a professor, and I gathered that this was why.

> female college student was having an affair with her professor...and there were other plot elements...but the amazing thing was that the other characters did not think the relationship was unusual at all

Thats because females in 1950 USA had very little rights. It was barely 30 years into letting them vote, but only as long as they stay in the kitchen homemaking 'where they belong'.

>would be portrayed as scandalous

exploitative is the word, balance of power is pretty clear here.

>this nation is entering some sort of neopuritanical hell hole

because you cant willy nilly fuck people you have authority over? indeed end of the world.

???

An adult female and an adult male having a consensual relations is related to 'rights' in what way exactly?

Because I don't think that has anything to do with the situation.

Exploitative by whom? Students don't have to f** profs, it's never been that way.

Your posture is actually sexist, implying that somehow adult females cannot make their own choices.

> Exploitative by whom? Students don't have to f* profs, it's never been that way.

Unless they do or feel like they have to. That's the whole point, when there's a serious power imbalance like teacher - student, boss - direct report, consent is not so easy. The person with less power can have their life/career/studies depend on the more powerful one, and they can feel that they have to fuck them, or continue fucking them, or do that kinky thing they don't feel comfortable with, or else, even if that's not the case (but it sometimes is). That's why many places have strict policies that forbid such relationships, and it's up to the professor to know better even if they both want to.

Well, there's a big difference between a student banging a prof with whom they have no other connection, and one who has direct control over the student's transcript. You don't want professors exploiting students for sex, nor do you want lazy students exploiting professors to meet their requirements. Ethical mindfields like that should be limited to grad students.

Please watch this educational video. It's a video introduction to power dynamics https://youtu.be/-yUafzOXHPE

The 'elites' are stopping teachers having sex with school children like they used to do in the good old days of the 1950s?

Well, I for one welcome our new anti-child-abuse overlords.

"school children"

Incessant infantilization of college-aged adult people is part of the problem. A 21 y.o. is not a child by any standard I can think of.

They can take enormous debts in their name, enlist to the army and sacrifice their life, become professional firefighters or miners, use various legal drugs, do dangerous jobs such as sailors etc.

Please do not frame adult people as "children" only because they attend a college. It is patronizing and denies them self-control and agency. It also tends to produce bad, heavy-handed, intrusive and oppressive policies aimed to control them "for their own good".

He literally cites a scene from a film in which a teacher (called Mr Wolfe!) is revealed to be secretly dating a student called Jane.

https://kipsamericangraffiti.blogspot.com/2015/11/?m=1

A scene which was clearly written as an expose of real bad stuff that happened but that subtext flew past the commenter who thought it was accidentally included in a movie script because it was no big deal.

just because that blogger is apparently a neopuritan with psychological issues does not mean that scene was an expose...it was not...it was just showing a part of life, just like the whole movie was basically a chronicle of everyday life in america of that time..

As someone with family who had tenure at universities in the 70's, the one rule was not to sleep with the students. It certainly was scandalous when that rule was broken.

The quality of any given argument made on social is inversely proportional to the number of ellipses used to present it.

> this nation has changed dramatically in the last few decades...the elites have clamped down on the little people in so many ways

Wait until you learn about slavery.

> but the amazing thing was that the other characters did not think the relationship was unusual at all...nowadays, in a movie or in the media, such a relationship would be portrayed as scandalous...

Wow, it’s almost like standards for what’s acceptable evolve.

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