On Bad Teachers, “Naughty” Fantasies, & the Awkward Space In Between

Me on my last day of high school in 2011.

Content note for this one: sexual assault/abuse/exploitation of minors.

 

Recently a media arts teacher at my old high school was arrested for sexually assaulting and exploiting two of his female students.

You know when you hear a piece of news that ought to be surprising, even shocking, and yet somehow it just… feels true, completely and immediately? That’s what happened to me when I heard about Mr. Field.

It’s not that I’d ever seen him being overtly creepy in school – after all, many long-term abusers get good at flying under the radar, operating on such subtle levels that their victims can never quite tell for sure whether they’re being manipulated and mistreated or not. But as I reflected back on my time at Rosedale, I remembered that he had “favorites” every year – students, usually girls, who he spent extra time with, heaped extra praise onto, and had extra expectations for. A close friend of mine was one of these girls, and I saw the micro-level boundary-overstepping time and time again – most notably, an occasion where Mr. Field needed something from my friend’s locker for some art project, and she wasn’t at school at the time, so she just texted him her locker combination. I shudder now to think of what he could’ve done – what he maybe did – with that information.

The reason behavior like this went unremarked-upon at Rosedale was that odd relationships between teachers and students were sort of the norm there, especially since it was an arts school whose student body and staff lineup alike were always packed with nerds and weirdos. Not all of these relationships were abusive or problematic by any means – in fact, feeling able to trust some of my teachers in a way I’d never trusted a teacher before was one of the major things that helped me get through high school as a person with chronic depression and anxiety. I felt supported and cared for in a way most schools would frown upon. But I can see how that core belief Rosedalians held – “Our teachers are cool teachers, and it’s cool to be friends with them” – could easily devolve into grooming and exploitation in the wrong hands.

In the wake of the allegations against Mr. Field, I started hearing rumors about other teachers at Rosedale. I don’t know anyone who goes there anymore, but lots of people I know have younger siblings or friends who still go there, so I hear things through the grapevine sometimes. I heard a male English teacher got fired for having a mental breakdown at school and acting erratically toward his students (which he was already doing when he taught me in the 10th grade); I heard a civics teacher who I always disliked had been dismissed from his job for making creepy comments toward teenage girls; I heard one of the heads of the music department was kicked out for trying to kiss a student; and, most terrifyingly for me, I heard that the man who’d been my very favorite teacher – let’s call him Mr. J – had (maybe) gotten fired for (maybe) having sex with a student while (maybe) high on cocaine.

Now, granted, rumors are rumors, and it’s hard to know for sure what’s real and what isn’t. (I reached out to Rosedale’s administration for comment/confirmation, but as of this writing, they had not gotten back to me after four full weeks.) But like most people of my feminist ilk, I believe that the immense bravery and difficulty involved in coming forward with sexual abuse allegations are a sturdy enough barrier that false accusations of this sort are vanishingly rare (and the research bears this out). I tend to think that if the rumor made its way to me – particularly from multiple sources, which was the case with this one – that it contains at least a kernel of truth. And that fucking sucks. My heart goes out to every victim of every perpetrator of abuse and exploitation at that school and everywhere else.

This favorite teacher of mine, Mr. J, was an upper-level humanities instructor who brightened my days and changed my life. Ever-cheerful and ridiculously smart, he taught me things I still think about on a near-daily basis, made jokes that made me cry with laughter when I was supposed to be doing my readings, and wrote notes in the margins of my essays that made my heart jostle jubilantly in my chest. I became one of his “favorites,” I guess, and while I’d often been a “teacher’s pet” throughout my days as a nerdy, anxious goody two-shoes, this felt different; it felt like he actually liked me as a person, not just as a student. He took me aside before class on occasion to ask what I’d been reading lately (“I know you share my love of the written word!”) or what I’d been writing (“Did I hear that you won a poetry award?!”). He praised my answers in class discussions until I blushed and slunk down in my chair, too shy to talk to most of my classmates but never too shy to talk to him.

The memory that stands out the most to me about Mr. J is the time I was standing in the cafeteria line and I suddenly realized the two girls behind me were talking about him. They were a year or two younger than me, and were enthusing at each other about how cuuuute he was and how they wished they were taking one of his classes. Just then, he appeared, as if by magic. He greeted me, we bantered like we always did, I blushed like I always did, and then – without consulting me, without making a big deal about it – he quietly told the lunchlady to put my pasta salad on his bill. I didn’t fully realize what he’d done until he’d already paid and was out the door, and by then I had a free container of pasta salad in my hands, two jealous girls staring at me, and a brain soaked with syrupy infatuation and looping the thought, “Did that really just happen? Did that… really… just happen?”

I’ve been wanting to write an essay about this since I first heard the news about Field in August, and I thought the main point of the essay would become clearer in my mind the more that I thought about it, but it hasn’t. And that’s because… this is complicated. I had a crush on my teacher Mr. J, obviously. He thought I was cool, obviously. But what’s less obvious is: Was he grooming me, or was he just friendly and supportive? (Nothing overtly creepy ever happened; what I’ve described here is the closest he ever got to anything like that with me.) Are the rumors about him totally true, or totally inflated, or totally false? Should I be drastically revising my mental image of him?

The other thing that makes this complicated is that some of my biggest kinks first showed up in those interactions with Mr. J all those years ago. I mean, there’s a reason I talk about him in my “I’m a good girl” blog post. The idea of being “teacher’s pet,” of being “the favorite,” of being smart and good and celebrated and praised – these all loom very large in my present-day sexual psyche and they have for a very long time. Part of the reason I had a crush on him was that he inadvertently put me in a role that is, I now realize, kind of an erotic one for me. And yeah, that creates a weird dynamic where maybe I was (unbeknownst to him and even to myself) getting some kind of gratification from our relationship that he hadn’t necessarily consented to. But then, if these rumors are true and he’s a predator, maybe he was also getting something from me that I didn’t know about or consent to. Honestly, it makes my head spin to think about it.

What this ultimately points to, for me, is a fact I already know and would do well to keep learning until it’s completely drilled into my head: Fantasy is different from reality. I am sure that many predatory teachers’ “favorites” have, at some point or another, entertained fantasies of a romantic or sexual sort about their teachers. Abusers of this type actually work to create that feeling in their victims, often through horrible psychological manipulations that bear some resemblance to pickup artist techniques (neg them, play them hot and cold, keep them guessing, et cetera). But fantasizing about something doesn’t necessarily mean you want it. Or maybe it means you want it in fantasy but know it’d be a bad idea in reality. Or maybe it means you think you want it, but if it ever happened for real, it would horrify you and traumatize you.

I’ve felt very conflicted about my past feelings for a teacher who may or may not have preyed on my fellow students, but when I look at it through a consent-first framework, I can see that there’s nothing I need to feel guilty about. Having ached for some kind of relationship with Mr. J in fantasy does not mean I wanted one in reality, or that it would’ve been acceptable for either of us to pursue that. I was his student. True consent cannot exist in that situation; the power dynamics are too, well, powerful.

I still don’t know whether the rumors I heard were true. I still don’t know whether I need to denounce my past crush even though it was such a formative experience for me. But I do know that this experience has made me even more aware of the divide between fantasy and reality, between desires and behavior, between whims and decisions. I wasn’t wise enough back then to know that stuff, so I felt guilt for no reason about dreamily “wanting” things I didn’t actually, literally want. But the only person who ought to feel guilty, in situations like this, is the person in power, the person doing the victimizing. The atrocities they enact should only ever, at most, exist as fantasies inside their heads – and they ought to know better than to impose those fantasies on people too vulnerable and scared to even understand what’s being done to them.

A Jian Ghomeshi Reading List

Trigger warning: this post and the links therein contain descriptions of physical and sexual abuse, as well as consensual BDSM in some cases. If any of that stuff bothers you, you should take care of yourself as best you can and feel free to skip this post.

If you live in Canada and/or follow the news, you’re probably aware that a HUGE scandal broke here this week. Media personality Jian Ghomeshi has been accused of physically abusing multiple women behind closed doors.

Normally this isn’t the sort of thing I’d write about here, but I am, for two reasons: a) the story has become unfairly entangled with consensual BDSM and I’d like to help reverse that however I can, and b) if I’m honest, this story has affected me profoundly on an emotional level, even more than these violence-against-women stories usually do. Maybe it’s because it happened in my own city, or because I’d seen so much of Jian and he always seemed like such a normal guy. Maybe it’s because the good, upstanding in folks in my sex-positive, kinky communities are getting conflated with abusers in the wake of this mess. Or maybe it’s just because violence is always a horrible, difficult thing to encounter, no matter how indirectly.

In any case, for those of you who haven’t been following the story, or who have but are interested in knowing more, I’ve compiled this reading list. It contains links and articles I think are important to understanding the full scope of what’s gone on. Feel free to pick through it, read what interests you and skip the rest. And if you start to find any of it difficult to read, don’t feel you have to slog through it. You do what you have to do to take care of you, okay?

• First off: if you need some context for who Jian is and what he does (professionally, not criminally), you can take a look at his Wikipedia page or his website. Basically, he’s a widely-known, widely-broadcasted radio and TV personality who hosted/co-founded a show called Q, which focused on arts, especially music.

• One of the things Ghomeshi is most known for is this interview with Billy Bob Thornton. It was applauded at the time because Thornton acted totally unreasonably and Ghomeshi kept calm and dealt with it well. We even watched this clip in one of my journalism classes last year as an example of good interviewing skills.

• One of the first pieces of evidence to surface about Ghomeshi’s abusive habits was this article by xoJane contributor Carla Ciccone. It doesn’t allege any violence, just creepy non-consensual touching and stalker-ish behaviors. Ciccone never outright identified who she was writing about, but many details led people to believe it was Jian, including the references to his book and band, the brand colors of his show, and – yes – his quiet reputation as a creep. Plus there’s this tweet, in which he says exactly what he says to Carla in the article.

• On Friday, it was announced that Ghomeshi would take time off to deal with “personal issues”. He had recently lost his father, so some people in my community speculated that perhaps he was depressed from that grief, though we were surprised it could be so bad that he’d need time off.

• Then on Sunday, the CBC changed their tune and said that Ghomeshi wasn’t actually taking time off for personal issues but actually had been fired, due to “information” they had learned about him. (Toronto Star investigative reporter Kevin Donovan has hinted that the Star will report on what exactly transpired over that weekend to cause this change.) Ghomeshi – or perhaps more accurately, his PR team – composed this Facebook missive claiming that he was fired because he partakes in consensual BDSM in his private life, and that the claims of non-consent all arose falsely from one “jilted ex-girlfriend.”

• Incensed by the usage of the word “jilted” as gendered code, Mandy Stadtmiller at xoJane wrote about other such coded terms and how they’ve been used to invalidate and insult women over and over again.

• For those interested in the literary references Ghomeshi makes in his statement, here’s some information about the Lynn Coady story he references alongside Fifty Shades of Grey. It’s from Coady’s Giller Prize-winning book Hellgoing. Incidentally, Ghomeshi was set to host this year’s Giller Prize ceremony, but was replaced by Rick Mercer after the allegations of violence were made.

• On Monday, the Star published a story alleging that three women had been physically attacked by Ghomeshi. The Star had been quietly researching the story for over a year. These women were all on dates with Ghomeshi at the times of their respective attacks but had not consented to what he did to them (punching, slapping, biting, choking). A fourth woman, one of Ghomeshi’s co-workers at the CBC, also alleged that he had touched her without consent and told her at work that he wanted to “hate-fuck” her.

• Ghomeshi then filed a $55-million lawsuit against CBC for defamation, breach of trust, and damages – though many experts are saying that the lawsuit is hopeless.

• Law professor Brenda Cossman wrote an article explaining that Canadian law does not recognize consensual BDSM and causing bodily harm to another is always considered illegal, even if the “victim” consented. (It should be noted that this is probably irrelevant to Ghomeshi’s case, since he seems to have assaulted many women without consent – but this legal information may still be of interest to actual kinksters.)

• Indie musician Owen Pallett, who is (was?) a friend of Ghomeshi’s, spoke out in defense of the alleged victims and said they ought to be believed, not dismissed.

• A post called “Do you know about Jian?” talks about how Ghomeshi being “weird with women” has been quietly known about by many people for a long time. Scary to think that so many folks felt silenced.

• Prominent sex writers Andrea Zanin and Dan Savage both wrote excellent posts essentially warning readers not to conflate kink with abuse. Dan’s tweet sums it up nicely: “I oppose the demonization of consensual kinksters. I despise abusers who cover for their crimes by claiming to be consensual kinksters.”

• Wednesday night, the Star dropped another bombshell: eight women have now come forward about having been abused by Ghomeshi, including TV actress Lucy DeCoutere from Trailer Park Boys. This latest Star piece contains many unsavory details, so definitely skip it if you think it might trigger you – but it is an incredibly fine piece of journalism that seems hard to refute or explain away. If you’re wary of media outlets that use anonymous sources, maybe it would help to remember that it was the Star’s investigative team who also broke the Rob Ford crack scandal last year – using then-anonymous sources.

• One of the weirdest details in the Star story was about Jian’s teddy bear, Big Ears Teddy; two of the women the Star interviewed have said that Ghomeshi turned the bear around to face the other way before assaulting the women, saying, “Big Ears Teddy shouldn’t see this.” Jian has spoken before about the bear’s significance in his life and in easing his anxiety. Some folks in the #JianGhomeshi hashtag speculated that there could be something more sinister going on with that bear, like a hidden camera, but there’s no proof of that and it seems unlikely.

• Also on the topic of the bear: Twitter account @bigearsteddy has tweets dating back to April of this year that allege Ghomeshi is violent toward women. The tweets are written by someone who claims to have been one of Ghomeshi’s victims and might be a Carleton University media grad but they are unsubstantiated so it’s hard to know for sure. (I wonder if one of the women from the Star article is also behind this Twitter account.)

• Steffani Cameron wrote about Canadian sexual context and safety in BDSM.

• Dan Savage found and interviewed a woman who dated Ghomeshi and says she engaged in completely consensual BDSM activities with him. But, as Savage points out in his post, it seems that Ghomeshi’s MO was to get violent/aggressive with all his romantic/sexual prospects as a way of “asking” for consent to do more, so in the case of the woman Savage interviewed, it seems Ghomeshi just lucked out and happened to find a woman whose kinks matched his and who didn’t object to his “reckless, abusive and dangerous” approach. One consensual case doesn’t outweigh or invalidate the many non-consensual cases.

• Ghomeshi announced today that he “intend[s] to meet these allegations directly,” whatever the hell that means, and that he won’t be speaking to media about it anymore (although it seems he hasn’t spoken to media about it at all anyway).

I think those are the most important pieces of the story so far. If you’re interested in following how this plays out, the Star is probably your best source; their investigative team is out-of-this-world amazing and their coverage has so far been fair, balanced, and (I believe) accurate.

If you take anything from these events, I hope it’s this: we need to work together to create a world where abusers like Ghomeshi are publicly shamed and identified as he has been, and a world where victims don’t feel ashamed and silenced as his did for so long, and as some no doubt continue to.