One of the unexpected pleasures of teaching was discovering that I am actually pleased when students trip me up and force me to rethink things. I had always hoped that I was the sort of person who would be pleased by this, but until I was actually teaching, the idea hadn’t been tested.
Recently a student tripped me up about a panel in Dan Clowes’ graphic novel, Ghost World. His protagonist, Enid, is viewing a computer-generated pornographic image of a child. Clowes’ image (or rather, his image of an image) is very rudimentary and cartoonish, but it upset one of my students nonetheless.
In retrospect, I’m kind of amazed that I hadn’t thought about this in advance. I did have my reasons, but still. First, though, here are the reasons:
1. I am so focused on the fact that sexual assault usually occurs between acquaintances, and that child abuse happens within families or by family friends, that I can lose sight of the fact that this isn’t always the case.
2. I was more worried about how students might react to portrayals of Enid’s sexuality, including losing her virginity at 16, and one of her masturbatory fantasies.
3. I am familiar with strong arguments that it is misguided for law enforcement to direct their limited resources toward catching those who possess child porn instead of prosecuting actual child abusers and aiding its survivors. Given the family issues often involved, going after the consumers (rarely the producers) of images is a tempting target that can siphon resources away from the more difficult prosecution of child abuse (or the producers of the images). James Kincaid’s Erotic Innocence was my starting point.
4. I subsumed the virtual nature of the porn in question to Ghost World’s larger questioning of issues about simulacra and simulation. This is a topic I also take up with Fight Club (think of Ed Norton in front of the Xerox machine), the book we read after Ghost World.
5. I plan on teaching Lucky, Alice Sebold’s account of being sexually assaulted her first year of college, for the same students next term. I had thought ahead about inviting a counselor from the local sexual assault counseling and support service, in before teaching that book. So I was focused on that book instead of this moment in Ghost World.
6. To the extent we can make out Clowes’ view, and certainly Enid’s, there is no sympathy for the producer of this porn, and the man who owns it is later prosecuted for child abuse.
So yes, I had my reasons, but still.
But having a student brave enough to speak up about the issue has pushed me to rethink it. Besides wanting to bring up the issue in advance, I may need to rethink when I teach Ghost World. Though I moved it before Fight Club because I wanted to start with two girls confronting marketing before we looked at the boys’ club that is Fight Club.
More generally, the issue has pushed me to a better understanding of why Enid, the protagonist, might divide the men she sees into poseurs, on the one hand, and on the other, pervs.
In the widest context, though, I will be doing some reflecting on balancing two, somewhat conflicting goals as a teacher:
1> to seek out portrayals of strong female characters capable of standing up to a world that is often both dangerous and uninviting when it comes to positive portrayals of female sexuality,
and 2> to acknowledge the reality of sexual assault, the damage that it causes, and to be aware that in most of my classes, statistically, some of my female students have already had to contend with it.
