By Jason Schwalm
Despite my uninterrupted tenure in the Bingham Humanities Building, I actually am acquainted with one person who is majoring in a hard science. He uses words like “bacteriostatic,” and promises me that he isn’t making them up. Despite such words’ conspicuous absence from the dictionary, I believe him.
He is enrolled in an upper-level Biology class in which they are currently studying reproductive endocrinology. Confirming my suspicion that the class has something to do with sex, he recently showed me a few pages of his notes from class. There was nothing initially spectacular about the lecture notes that my friend acquired from the Internet.
However, just below a drawing of the female urinary tract was a photograph of a pair of mice engaged in intercourse, graphically wrapped in a sexual position best described as “nontraditional.”
This is not particularly troubling to me; my friend did not seem phased either, exclaiming, “Look, mouse porn!” I mention the furry amorists only to ask a question. Under different circumstances and a different audience, would the photo become the subject of a lawsuit?
Demanding a requisite level of sensitivity is a fundamentally good thing, but to believe it is possible to avoid ever offending another person is bizarre. Some professors, intentionally or not, are cruel, but most are just exhibitionists who occasionally get a little over excited at the sight of such a sizeable, willing audience.
Not surprisingly, unacceptable is an extraordinarily fine line to draw. What is so innocuous that, while it goes unnoticed in nine classes, it cost a professor her job in the tenth. How do we define what degree of rhetoric goes beyond such a threshold?
I have absolutely no idea. I imagine any rigid definition will not be effectively totalizing, and would inevitably decide quite a few ambiguous cases in an artless and heavy-handed manner. Unfortunately, we seem to be drawing ever nearer to such a hard-line definition. Now expressing disagreement is attacking someone else’s values. And when did we forget that certain opinions, however strongly held, can still be empirically wrong?
Whether evident in the fraternity blackface incident from a few years ago, or the more recent election-season comments by a U of L sociology professor that prompted outrage, claims of insensitivity appear to be a reality of our campus culture.
And while both of those events are, to a certain extent, legitimate subjects for complaint, no student group so aggressively rallied in support of the woman who was raped on campus this December.
Defining the criteria by which we designate what is acceptable is a complicated matter. However, such difficulty does not give students license to create this definition from a cross-fertilization of theatricality and the lowest common denominator. But, in the meantime, I’m glad that we can let rodent pornography slide.
Jason Schwalm is a junior majoring in English and a columnist for The Cardinal. E-mail him at: jschwalm@louisvillecardinal.com
