I’ve written a few times about student crushes and their meaning, starting with this post that still gets loads and loads of hits from search engines. My basic thesis:
There’s an old axiom in pop psychology: we don’t just get crushes on people whom we want, we get crushes on people whom we want to be like! Students don’t get crushes on me because they want to go to bed with me or be my girlfriend or boyfriend; they get crushes on me because I’ve got a quality that they want to bring out in themselves. They’re externalizing all of their hopes for themselves. And rather than encourage the crush to feed my ego, my job is to turn the focus back on to the student, encouraging him or her to take their new-found curiosity or enthusiasm or passion and use it, run with it, indulge it, let it take them places!
One thing I’ve really started to notice in the last two or three years is an interesting, satisfying shift in the way that some of these crushes seem to play out. Something shifted in my relationships with my students right around the time I became old enough to be their father. The crushes that students got on me — and the way they made those crushes known — were qualitatively different when I was 30 than they are today at 40.
Leaving me out of it, I know that some student crushes on their teachers are explicitly sexual. But most really aren’t, even if they appear externally to be motivated by physical desire. Young people, you see, have a good vocabulary for sex. Romantic longing and sexual fantasy are part of the discourse of most college students. But we don’t have the same vocabulary for wanting a mentor, or even a father-figure. When a 20 year-old college student says of her professor, “I think he’s hot”, her friends may or may not agree — but they understand her frame of reference. They’ll likely take what she says at face value.
But what if that same gal told her friends “I really want him as a mentor”? It’s likely she’d be teased; “Yeah right, you want him as a mentor! Puhleeze! Can’t you be honest about it?” We live in a culture that insists on eroticizing our desire to be guided and cared for to such a degree that it is assumed that anyone who insists that his or her longing to be nurtured isn’t sexual at its core is, well, lying. As a result, we don’t have a way to let young people ask to be mentored, guided, even loved in a safe, non-sexual and yet intimate way.
Talking about sexual desire also sounds so much more adult than talking about a desire for a father figure. We live in a culture where many young people see lust as evidence of maturity. Saying about your teacher: “I want to do him” makes you sound grown up, aggressive, sophisticated, a “together woman.” Saying about that same person, “I want to spend time with him, he’s kind of like a Dad to me” may seem — to peers if not to the young woman saying it — like evidence of immaturity. “What, you’re still not over your father issues?” Too often, I think the vocabulary of erotic desire masks something else, something more tender and raw.
Over the years, I’ve noticed that some female students will flirt with me early on in visits to my office hours. It’s not particularly flattering, and it’s not evidence of my desirability. What I’m convinced it is is simple: so many of these young women, particularly first-generation college students, have been taught by their parents (or by bitter experience) that “men just want one thing.” If they want guidance and mentoring, if they want to be noticed for their ideas, they figure they have to get a male professor’s attention first by using their sexuality. They sometimes don’t trust their own inner worth enough to assume that they could get that attention without being flirtatious, and often they don’t believe that men — even older men in positions of authority — will really give them as much validation if they don’t wear certain kinds of clothing and behave in a certain way. Once a relationship is established that feels safe and entirely non-threatening, I notice the tendency to flirt usually goes away.
I’m opening myself up to several charges here: narcissism, for one, for assuming that so many folks do get crushes on me (regardless of the meaning of those crushes). Two, I’m being presumptuous about what young people, particularly young women, “really” want from me. I make no secret of my longing to be a father (seven chinchillas, an active avocation for youth ministry); maybe I’m just projecting my own need to be a Daddy onto my students. I’ve got a colleague who just assumes that all of his female students “want” him sexually; he preens like a rooster (though he’s old enough to retire with full benefits) and talks graphically and embarrassingly about his students’ dress. His ego needs tell him that legions of women thirty-five years his junior long to go to bed with him; is it not possible that my ego needs lie to me as well, telling me that a great many of these young people think of me as, if not a father figure exactly, at least a mentor? Perhaps I flatter myself as badly as my lecherous colleague.
But even if I do exaggerate the case, I think the “daddy crush” is more real than we know.
I tend to get crushes on all of my professors (men, women, small space aliens,…) unless they’re really jerks. Judging by your photos, I imagine you attract more than your fair share of student crushes. I don’t think you imagine it, but I also think it’s best not to dwell on. (I don’t mean the topic, of course, but whether individual students do or don’t have crushes on you.)
I have a thing for small space aliens too.
I think it’s important to write about this for a variety of reasons, not least for my fellow profs, who sometimes need their bubbles burst.
Slightly off topic, but eeeewwwww…. I would have been COMPLETELY disturbed if any of my male professors (in undergad OR graduate school) had any sort of sexual inclinations towards me or thought I had any towards them. I just could never see them “that way,” no matter how much I may have respected or admired them. I can see why young people get crushes on someone they admire, but still, gross.
Two thoughts…
1. “we don’t just get crushes on people whom we want, we get crushes on people whom we want to be like!”
This links to the discussion yesterday about the marriage of complementary but incomplete persons vs. the marriage of two complete persons. “I am attracte to this person because she/he has a quality that I am attracted to but that I don’t have” is a similar concept. I agree that often the tendency is to be attracted to someone who has a quality that you want adquire. However, I think there is also an element of being attracted to someone who can balance you, meaning that you don’t necessarily want to adquire the quality for yourself. Either way, it is an attraction from the perspective of an “incomplete” person.
2. “I want to do him” makes you sound grown up, aggressive, sophisticated, a “together woman.”
I agree with this to an extent. Aggressive, blunt, TMI, barely appropriate talking about sex also show sexual and emotional immaturity. Emotionally and sexually mature people do not feel the need to talk about sex at every turn, at every opportunity in the most aggressive manner that they can manage. So, I agree that amongst peers in a college setting, this kind of language may be percieved as sophisticated, grown up and of a “together woman.” However, from the perspective of a woman who is slightly older, is comfortable in her sexuality and is comfortable with herself in general, this language often to be a facade.
Rereading what you said, I guess I am agreeing. This language masks something other than sexual desire. However, I am not sure that it masks a desire for “mentoring” or a “father figure.” I think it masks insecurity in her person, sexual and emotional immaturity and insecurity with the sexual immaturity.
So, Hugo, I get the crush thing. I can relate to that as well. But what about developing healthy mentoring relationship?
I am 51 years old. I have had some good mentors in the past and some not so good. Several things have changed recently: job change (self-employed now), left an unhealthy church environment that also left some long time friendships more distant.
At 51, I believe that I need mentors both professional and personal. What is your advice for finding those kinds of enriching and mutual relationships, and how does one get what one needs from them?
Excellent question, Glen, and that will get a blog post unto itself sometime soon.
I think I’ve told you that you are a great father figure and Christian mentor to me. My supervisor at work is also a GREAT father-figure and mentor. I tend to get crushes on people my own age. And people like Leo DiCaprio (in the ’90s). *Giggle.*
My boyfriend and I noticed one girl in our old humanities class that seemed to drool everytime you spoke… kinda reminded me of Indiana Jones. HA!
I don’t see this as always being a “daddy crush.” To have another person show up and truly be present for you can be (and I can’t think of a better word) a really intoxicating experience. While there’s young women who probably flirt simply because they’re conditioned to do so, or they think it’s the only way to get attention from a man, there’s probably also the ones who get a crush on you because an adult male is dealing with them in a way that is positive and encouraging, but on more of an adult-to-adult basis, and not so much in a paternal way. Do they get a crush on you, or on the way that they feel when they’re around you, because they don’t feel lusted after, but they also don’t feel like they’re dealing with a rule-setting father? I recall the first professors who sat down and talked to me on an adult-to-adult basis — it initially shocked the hell out of me that an older male with a PhD would address me as an intelligent person who didn’t need to be spoken down to or lectured. I think getting a crush on some of the first men who treat you in this way is a natural process, and it wears off after a while. In some ways, it’s like falling in love with your own ability to be a thinking, grown-up person, but the crush is transferred to the person that helped you realize this fact.
Jeanne, your last sentence perfectly sums up — better than I did — my original point in my “student crushes” post of last year.
Each relationship you have with another person reflects the relationship you have with yourself.
-Alice Deville
Wow! That’s really sharp — and it applies to other situations besides this. It’s very easy to lump sexual needs and emotional needs together without realising that the two are actually separate. I suspect I’m not the only one who occasionally thinks ‘I need a lover’ when a friendly hug would do (although I don’t mean to deny the reality of genuine sexual needs in other situations).
Great post.
The discussion around mentoring could be fascinating– as one area in which students’ emotional/ social/ spiritual growth is taking place in the classroom and office hours.
Separate from the “men only want one thing” indoctrination, young women who lacked male nurturers can tend to default to sexuality as a way of relating to men, even if what they need is respect and affection.
Wonderful post, albeit one that makes me cringe while remembering my burning crush on my college advisor. You wouldn’t know what to do with yourself if the crush-object actually made a sexual advance, but somehow you never think that far ahead . . . .
This is a bit off topic but I had a thought that related to what you wrote:
“We live in a culture that insists on eroticizing our desire to be guided and cared for to such a degree that it is assumed that anyone who insists that his or her longing to be nurtured isn’t sexual at its core is, well, lying. As a result, we don’t have a way to let young people ask to be mentored, guided, even loved in a safe, non-sexual and yet intimate way.”
I formed a friendship with someone of the same sex and I’ve grown very fond of her and can for the first time say without any doubt that I love her although unfortunately I haven’t been able to tell her (I have the inability to communicate my emotions)even though she’s told me that she loves me. However I feel guilty because there are times that I feel I love her too much and that this love at its core may be sexual. After reading this entry I realized that maybe it’s true that young people do have this feeling that everything has to be eroticized because althought I’ve never fantasized about her I feel that loving her too much must mean that it is linked to sexual desire. Or I could be wrong but reading this entry instantly reminded me of this.
I find the subject fascinating, mostly because I have spent so much time deconstructing the paradigms surrounding what I often come to feel as the absence of sense. Being a top student, ambitious, very respectful of the professors, but also very much aware of being «pretty», I often feel female-student attractiveness to be a fault in an academic setting, since, in my experience, even if I’m not flirting, I feel as if the others assume either I want to, or the male professor will sooner or later get to some form of it. Every body talks about student crushes, but some very respectable professors out there aren’t discouraging these intelligent girls at all.
I have developed the crush, like so many others, which is beyond my understanding. On my defense, he is gorgeous and genius, but also has a serious girlfriend, which I have met and quite enjoy actually. Here’s the thing: she’s not pretty at all. All the students are stunned, and I’m no exception. How superficial, I know. Anyhow, we (former professor and I) meet for theses lunches sometimes, just the both of us, and he always looks at me with such adoring eyes, that I feel uncomfortable (in the sense that I’m wondering if he’s encouraging my own bedroom eyes locked on him). And so I ask, what is there to gain from these former professor-student relationship if sexual tension is involved? Should one person step away? I’m getting tired of the sexual ambiguity, yet I respect the professor in him.
human emotions are very confusing to work on period. are we low on eq now? okay i agree completely on what you’re saying Hugo about we’re externalizing what we really want to be, achieve on people whom we have crushes on but knowing and not to acting toward the crushes are 2 separate deals. I’m a firm believer that student-professor relationship just does not work out even though i have not engaged in one. When we come to school, we want to learn, be educated. Period. So what crushes do come just enjoy it (not physically though) and let it go. The crux here is being mature enough to not dwell on it. Flirting is fine w/ me but don’t let it go further. That way we as students have both–fun/education.
really appreciate your insight on this issue- it resonates with me. I am a female highschool student. I recently wrote a short erotic story about a math teacher and a female student who corners and takes advantage of him, making the character of the teacher very weak, and the character of the girl very manipulitive.
Yet the whole time I was writing it, I was aware of the dynamic- I wanted the passion.
I want a mentor and that sort of interaction, a friend, a safe person to be exited about something, anything, with.
There was a definate sexualization of my crushes for very passionate, enthused and excited teachers. I liked to this about how their passion in the classroom would translate into sex- I am a sucker for passion.
However, its only the passion I want, not the sex. In any circumstance. Our society over sexualized evrything, and so I’m taught to use my body, right. And so I do, finding the way to get into and surrounded by someones passion in a way I could control, was to direct their passion into a desire for my body.
I am almost as happy to just listen to anyone talk about anything they are passionate about, no matter the subject, the difference is that in sex, they passionate about something I care about and have a lot of investment in.
Hopefully when I get to college, I will be able to find people who care about things I do, and we can listen to each other.
And I feel like the way to solve most peoples problems is to give them something to be passionate about. It’d just be less dysfunctional.
finding the way to get into and surrounded by someones passion in a way I could control, was to direct their passion into a desire for my body.
Bingo, Mackenzie. Thanks for writing in.
And yes, when you get to college, it will get easier to find people to talk to. Not as easy as you might like, but easier. That was my experience, it is the experience of many young people with whom I work, and I suspect it will be yours.
I could be Mackenzie Sowers, I swear. On the other hand, I like everything about your post except the use of the “daddy” word. I think you can find a mentor sexually attractive, as I think some of the women you mentor find you, and at the same time not want an actual sexual relationship. Sometimes you want to be mentored and nothing more, but you want to be mentored by someone hot. The fact that you’re reasonably goodlooking for a man your age, Hugo, probably makes you a more appealing mentor. That doesn’t mean most of your female students actually want to fuck you, but it may explain why they are so eager to come and see you. Doest that distinction make sense?
Like Sheena said above, you can find a mentor sexually attractive. When you were first my teacher, I was attracted to you, as I am sure you could tll!! And don’t take this the wrong way, but I was less sexually attracted to you the more I got to know you. Not that you are bad looking, Hugo, but I think I got past the initial attraction because I did realize I wanted more mentoring and advice than I wanted sexual or romantic things to happen with you. I also happen to have a huge respect for marriage. Knowing you were married was and is a bigger barrier than that you are/were my teacher.
Whatever you were like in the past, you are safe now. As I get ready to leave PCC, I wanted to thank you publically as well as personally for that.