The Naked Professor
According to InsideHigherEd.com, Diane Blaine, a lecturer at the University of Southern California,
is posing topless on
her blog because her students "wanted more of me after class ended."
Ms. Blaine is a professor of feminist studies who has spoken out against rape at USC, writing in an op-ed that she "hold[s] every single male on this campus responsible." Her posing has apparently kicked up a campus controversy.
Writing about the reaction, Ms. Blaine says...
We can see the obvious puritanical dynamic that the United States has had since, well, the Puritans came over from England where their particular brand of fanatical Christianity proved too much even for the fanatical Protestants breaking away from the Catholic Church in the Reformation. The Puritans loathed the body and tried to exert strict controls on sexuality, particularly female--read The Scarlet Letter for all you'll ever need to know about this. We continue to have their reactionary discomfort with the body, and so we too find it an object of obsessive fascination. Basically, by making nudity taboo, we've guaranteed its centrality. As Feminist Scholar Susan Griffin notes, the priest and the pornographer operate on the same value system--both mark human sexuality as disgusting, and then one says "turn your eyes away," while the other says, "look here, look here!"
Don't you like the way she capitalizes "Feminist Scholar"?
In truth, Blaine sounds like an interesting, intelligent woman, although perhaps a bit over the top.
One of her student critics,
writing under the blog name Cardinal Martini, is actually sort of funny about all this.....
