It’s one of those very hectic mornings.
I’m tired of discussing Sarah Palin and the merits of the other various candidates for president. (I might feel rejuvenated within 48 hours — it’s entirely plausible I’ll be right back to bloggin’ about politics again soon).
The BBC reports a study this morning: Declaring Love Boosts Sex Appeal.
Telling someone you fancy ‘I really like you’ could make him or her find you more attractive, research suggests.
Making eye contact and smiling have a similar effect, says Aberdeen University psychologist Dr Ben Jones.
His study, involving 230 men and women, found such social cues - which signal how much others fancy you - play a crucial role in attraction.
In other words, people are apparently much more likely to be attracted to you if they think that you find them attractive. I’m no psychologist, but it seems to make good sense. We all have our inner narcissist, after all — many of us will naturally be drawn to people whom we think see in us what we long desperately to be seen.
I’m thinking about this in terms of my own work as a youth worker, college professor, and mentor. One of the things it took me a long time to learn was how closely connected flirting behavior and straightforward active listening are in our culture. I suppose it’s a lesson that every therapist learns early on — clients often fall in love with their shrinks because they are so overwhelmed by the experience of having someone listening so attentively and with such evident interest. In our culture, one of the simplest ways to flirt and signal sexual interest is to listen attentively, making eye contact and offering encouraging cues (like little nods or smiles). Good mentoring and youth work involves using similar techniques.
Students get crushes on me less often than they used to, thanks to two things: one, I’m getting older, and two, I’m much more conscientious these days about carefully distinguishing between sexual intent on the one hand and enthusiastic interest in their lives and work on the other. I also work hard to make sure that the “safe, married, even vaguely asexual” vibe gets projected hard.
But I’m still aware of how difficult it is for youth leaders/teachers/mentors to send these “safe interest signals” in ways that will be clearly understood by young people. In my work with teens at All Saints Church or the Kabbalah Centre — and at the college –I’ve discovered the entirely unsurprising truth that those teens who want the most time and attention are usually the ones who are most emotionally vulnerable. And when I sit with them, even in public with others around, and make eye contact and listen attentively and offer what I hope is thoughtful feedback, I know very well that there’s a slight chance that my interest will be misinterpreted.
Ten years ago, when I was just discovering boundaries anew, I often made explicit declarations of sexual non-interest. “Just so you know”, I’d say, “I’m completely safe.” Sometimes that was appreciated, and other times it served to be confusing and repellant — particularly when the presumption on the part of the young person had been that of course I was as safe as pie, and now they were bewildered as to why I felt the need to affirm that. I learned, slowly, that “safety” (meaning completely non-sexual interest) could be signalled with non-verbal cues.
The trick, however, was in taking what so many people see as markers of flirtatious interest (eye contact, affirming facial expressions and gestures) and completely de-sexualizing them. One way I did this was to reverse what I had always done when I was intentionally flirting! I thought about the ways in which I had consciously tried to imbue simple gestures with (usually) subtle sexual signals (a trick I started learning in high school). So much of flirting, I realized, was where my own consciousness was. While I would never claim always to have been successful as a seducer, I was successful often enough when I put my mind to it. Perhaps, I realized, creating a safe environment for students or mentees in which crushes or suspicion could be defused was also primarily a matter of my own consciousness.
So many young women experience older men as one of three things: predatorily sexual, patronizingly dismissive, or paternally over-protective. So many young men experience older men as uninterested in their needs, uncomfortable with gentle candor, or brutally judgmental of the younger man’s fragile and still-developing masculine self. Good teaching, particularly in the gender studies field, requires being something completely different: safe in every sense of the word except intellectually (where dangerous provocativeness is an asset.) Good mentoring requres that same ability to affirm without flirtation, to stimulate ideas while deliberately not stimulating romantic desire. It’s an increasingly easy set of distinctions to make, but it requires that I be very intentional and very aware of pedagogical and psychological dynamics.
But to the degree that I am effective at “safe” mentoring, it’s in no small part because my spiritual and emotional needs are getting met elsewhere. If I’m not connected to God, if I’m feeling distant from my wife, then I’m much more likely to use (in seemingly innocuous ways) my students and mentees to validate me and “fill up the hole” that isn’t getting filled where it ought to be. My soul runs on spiritual gasoline, and if my tank isn’t full when I’m siting down with a group of teens or a distraught student, I’m in danger of using these young people to fuel me. Even if I don’t sexualize a conversation with a young person, the moment I start thinking about how it is that he or she is making me feel (wise, needed, powerful, etc.) is the beginning of trouble. I have a pretty damn voracious need for validation, and if I’m not on top of my spiritual work (prayer, meditation, journaling, etc.) then I’m at risk of, at the least, sending mixed signals to those for whom I am charged to care.
We all know the old rule of attraction: the secret to being interesting is to be interested. The corollary for those of us who teach and mentor is that we’ve got to be assiduous about re-directing a young person’s interest away from us and towards the subject we are teaching — or back towards their own lives. We’ve got to be passionately interested without the intent of arousing interest in ourselves. That’s sometimes easier said than done, and it requires a hell of a lot of self-awareness and accountability. I’m grateful to the mentors in my own life who have shown how this can be done, and grateful for those whom I still rely on today to hold me accountable.
Thanks for this thoughtful post, Hugo. As I am just beginning to teach Human Sexuality at the college level, I have felt a need to think and talk about this. I’m generally considered too old for the teenagers I have been teaching - and I have gotten quite good at that boundary. But the age difference between me and the college students is less - they are in some cases older than me. I’ve realized that, particularly given our subject matter, I need to attend more closely to projecting that “safe, married, and vaguely asexual vibe” as clearly as I can.
Excellent post. I find myself fascinated by my philsophy professor because he doesn’t want to personally mentor students. He just throws out brilliant ideas (some of his own, most from other philosophers) and wants students to think for themselves. So, students don’t fall in love with HIM, but rather his ability to make you think for yourself. And that is what, I think, I crave most of all for myself. No longer relying on approval and authority to believe what I believe in.
I’m sick of discussing Sarah Palin, too. I was sick of it a week ago. It was honestly refreshing to read something one of my “daily reading” blogs today that wasn’t political.
What was with that horrible last sentence of mine? Forgive my grammatical and spelling errors in my previous comment. I am very tired and distraught at the moment.
that makes a lot of sense, except for some reason that backfires with me. i find it generates initial interest which tends to evolve quickly into dismissing the other person. i suppose, sometimes it’s no fun if everything is out in the open and guys find it boring once the chase is over.
i had a male teacher who came off as a bit nosy, started asking if i was dating certain guys and whatnot. so adding to your last, i’m gonna add “blinded to personal boundaries.”
TVC, watching personal boundaries is huge — asking about a student’s dating life is something that I only do after I have a long-established mentoring relationship with that student, and after that student has already volunteered that degree of personal information.
Hmmn, I most definitely get your point, but I think I’d find it hard to talk to someone who was “vaguely asexual”. Besides, I thought it was part of the deal of therapy to handle the transference. NOT that I think therapists should flirt with their clients. Or are you talking more about students and mentorees?
Might part of the problem not be that in drawing attention to sexual attraction, discussing and dissecting it, you are creating the very internal conflict you seek to dispel?
They say the subconscious lacks both irony and humour. If you tell it “I’m going to lose weight” it thinks “weight”. If you tell it, “I’m not going to think or discuss sex”, it hears “blah blah blah blah sex blah blah blah”
Perhaps less emphasis on any fleeting thoughts that run through the head about such things might be a good way forward?
Hysperia and Ideealisme, your two responses — which on some level reflect diametrically opposed views — illustrate the touchy nature of all this.
And yes, I am writing about mentor/mentee relationships, which are decidedly very different from therapist/client relationships in most respects.
Well written post.
“One of the things it took me a long time to learn was how closely connected flirting behavior and straightforward active listening are in our culture.”
I’ve always been good at straightforward active listening and unfortunately this was almost always misinterpreted by males as romantic interest or sexualized in some way. As a means of self-protection I’ve learned how to distance people when their behaviors are inappropriate. Women on the other hand tended to intrepret active listening as therapeutic and lacked internal boundaries wanting me to acts as their therapist with little or no connection of how I experieced their behaivor. Having good listening skills hasn’t served me well with people. You’re quite right about the inner narcissist part. Some people are very needy and deeply desperate, but lack internal controls or even the ability to empathize with others. I’m all for clear communication and drawing boundaries, but some people remain resistant to even hearing clearly expressed communication. One man I worked for prattled on and on about sex all the time. He was inappropriate. After he left the room I reapplied some lipstick and when he returned he actually made a comment to me that he noticed that I had reapplied my lipstick and intrepreted that as possible sexual interest. How completely inappropriate and bizzare is that. What an ego. Desperate, poor communicators and inappropriate people like that are everywhere. This was a good post…wish there were more people like you willing to discuss these issues.
I often think back upon when I was in my early teens how I took to pornography as an outlet for my sexual desires and wonder how that energy could have been redirected into the real world and real relationships. In real relationships, when you are a teen there’s really no acceptable place for the fullness of your sexual desire to go - not into your peers and especially not into adults. So for me I went into fantasy which I still struggle with in my forties. So how effective can an adult mentor really be when they represent a place of no entry - are the teens then thrown back onto themselves to look for outlets? So is pornography the thing that ultimately gets settled on? I wonder if the pressure of sexual desire would be different if everything around us were more sensuous in nature, I mean all the basic things in life like food, clothing and shelter - make them all more sensuous. How we walk and talk. I don’t know. Maybe having unruly, sensuous art and poetry rather than efficiency and production be at the core of modern life is the answer. This is something too far off. But for now what can be done for teens to choose something better than porn?
You are not “vaguely asexual.” You can be safe without losing your sex appeal, and in no case do you project a total sexlessness. You’re a sexy man and I suspect you know it. But what I do note, as a former student, is that you aren’t flirtatiouis.
I think what I mean is that you manage to project “safe” while also projecting “sexual”. It’s just that you’re not inviting us (your students) to respond to that sexuality. But you aren’t exactly hiding it either, Mr. sharp dresser.