Blame It on the Blush
On the Sexual Objectification of Female Professors
This article is part of Philomela’s Tapestry, a series designed to address issues of harassment in the fields that study Greco-Roman antiquity.
The student came to inform me that he was taking a leave of absence from college, his second in the space of three semesters. He had, he said, some business to take care of, some financial circumstances that he needed to arrange. A pity, I said, but that makes sense, and of course I wished him the best with figuring it all out.
I had been confused that morning when he had come charging into the classroom, shoved his textbook at me, and said, here you go. Bye. It was the third week of class, and I had spent the previous week helping him organize a tutor, get his study materials set up. Over the weekend he had sent an email telling me how excited and determined he was to succeed. Perhaps the actual material had confused him? This student, I knew, faced a lot of challenges. A mature student with a troubled past and present, he had struggled over the previous year with fitting in, finding his footing, and learning how to learn again. In a course the previous fall — the first on campus for both of us — I had witnessed his frustration and had at times been the object of his (ultimately self-directed) anger. The fact that he had signed up for my next class was, I hoped, a reflection of how far he had come.
And I had a stake in it as well. As a professor entering my second year on the tenure track and the sole person responsible for rebuilding our Classics program from the ground up, I am always, constantly, worried about how my teaching impacts enrollment and, following on that, the viability of the whole project: the loss of even a single student immediately prompts the question of what I should have done differently. But at least this case seemed like it wasn’t personal, just an accident of difficult circumstances for which I felt only sympathy.
I was wrong. As the student started to walk out the door, he turned and almost casually said, I should have known better than to enroll in this class. If I do come back, I promise you won’t see me in your classroom again.
Oh. Ok, I said, with some bewilderment.
You don’t get what I’m saying? I guess I should explain.
Only if you want to, I replied, if something happened with class, wondering how on earth Latin had complicated his financial struggles.
So, I guess it was fall 2017 [a year ago, yup, when we started the last class], and there I was sitting in the Epic class waiting for some lecturer to show up, but then you walked in, and I dunno, you had this like rosy glow on your cheeks, like maybe you were blushing a bit …
And then I said something I have never said to a student before: Please stop talking.
He didn’t. So yeah, I guess it’s just that my romantic feelings for you made it really hard for me to …
Ok, I said, I get your point, and I think that’s enough. He left, giving me his card and an invitation to grab a beer.
So there it was. My face was the problem. Maybe my body. Unclear. My enthusiasm, my passion for the material, my voice, had gone unheard. My Ph.D., six long years of work and discovery and enjoyment and struggle, counted for nothing as soon as I blushed. Reduced to an object, I am a distraction from my own class.
I could give a long history of catalytic blushes, thanks to those same many years of study. The epic tradition—the focus of my research—is, in some ways, an extended study of men reaching a fever pitch — usually in battle, but always over something they desire: a country, some cows, a woman. In the twelfth book of Vergil’s Aeneid, for instance, Aeneas and his Trojan followers have finally, after many years of wandering, reached their destined home. There Aeneas is welcomed by the local king Latinus, who offers not only a share of his kingdom, but his daughter Lavinia’s hand in marriage to this Trojan arrival. Well and good, we think, until Lavinia’s erstwhile fiancé, Turnus, under divine influence, goes to war against Trojans, eager to stake his claim. After a whole lot of (very unnecessary) slaughter, both sides seem ready to call it quits. In the name of public interest, Turnus bids Latinus make a treaty with the Trojans and offers single combat to Aeneas over their contested bride. His friends advise against it: although a good fighter, Turnus isn’t really up to facing Aeneas. But Turnus won’t — can’t — listen. He is all fired up for battle not when he sees his countrymen dying, but at the sight of a rosy blush spreading over the cheeks of his intended:
Lavinia heard her mother’s voice,
drenching her burning cheeks with tears; and a deep blush
cast its fire and spread across her heated cheeks.
As when someone stains Indian ivory
with blood-red dye, or when white lilies blush,
mixed with roses, such colors the maiden’s face brought forth.
Love maddened him, and trained his gaze on the girl;
he burns for weapons all the more…
—Vergil, Aeneid 12.64–71 (all translations my own)
Lavinia’s blush makes Turnus unable to think straight. Spoiler alert: he dies, taking even more of his countrymen with him.
And this image looks even further back. In the fourth book of the Iliad, both sides are ready for a draw after ten long years of fighting over one man’s wife, Helen, the most beautiful of female objects. As the tenth year begins, her two husbands, Menelaus and Paris, finally do what the audience suspects they should have done at the beginning: fight a duel, winner takes the woman, and strike a truce between the two sides. But in the course of the battle Paris is rescued from the battle by Aphrodite, leaving Menelaus to roam angrily in the space between the two armies while both sides watch in bewilderment. More divine interference ensues: the gods provoke one of the Trojans into breaking the truce, by firing an arrow straight into Menelaus’ leg:
The arrow just grazed the topmost layer of the man’s skin,
and straightaway the cloud-dark blood flowed from the wound.
As when some Maionian or Carian woman stains ivory
with purple, to be a cheek-piece for horses;
it lies in an inner chamber, and many horsemen
long to have it; but it remains a treasure for a king,
both an adornment for the horse and a source of pride for his rider;
just so, Menelaus, your thighs were stained with blood,
and your shapely legs, and the noble ankles below them.
—Homer, Iliad 4.139–47
Menelaus’ blood becomes an objet d’art, a “kingly treasure” for which a hero might contend, or a wealthy gift from one noble to another. Transformed in this way, his physical wound bleeds over into another year of violence and death as both sides contend for their human trophy. Vergil’s invocation of this image draws a link between two wars fought over a woman, the high cost, we might say from our 21st-century perspective, of objectifying a human being.
I am the first to admit that I too get distracted by Lavinia’s epic blush, by the bright blood spreading across Menelaus’ white thigh, the simulacra of that first act of penetration by which Homer’s and Vergil’s men stake their claim on the women over whom they fight. In my research, I explore the ways in which epic trophies — tangible or intangible — misguide those who pursue them, how the dazzling surface blinds the one who seeks it to the potential consequences of their actions. I may even have expanded on this theme in that same class on ancient epic, but I don’t remember.
It’s one of the many topics that get me all fired up, the amazing passages that I want to share with my students. In both blood and blush, Homer and Vergil describe the natural physiological responses that underscore their characters’ humanity: Menelaus’ wound, Lavinia’s embarrassment, Turnus’ passion for love, status, Lavinia. I’m human too, and my flush was that of excitement, nerves, a first class at a new university. But instead of giving me dimension it seems to have flattened me out, to have made me into the kind of visual object that both Lavinia and the metaphorical cheekpiece represent, causes of the loss of self-control.
Her blush made me do it. Your blush distracted me.
I in no way mean to catastrophize from one student’s words or behavior. But I was — I am — startled by this echo from the past in my 21st-century office, to know that I can be flattened out into a face, a blush, an object, not just by some casual onlooker but by a student with whom I had worked for over a year. Nothing, it seemed, undid the damage of my first step into the classroom: not the entire semester (180 credit hours, if you want to know), not the texts we read, not the papers he wrote or the stories we encountered. In so many words, my student had told me exactly the problem with which I presented him: I was waiting for some lecturer to show up. Subtext: lecturers don’t look like you. In the wake of my rosy cheeks, he would not — could not — reconcile his reading of me as a sexual object with the authoritative role of a professor in the space of the classroom. Only one could be true, and, therefore, he could not learn from me.
This sort of flattening is particularly insidious for female teachers. In recent months we have become increasingly aware of how women move in the classroom and beyond, and, conversely, how our bodies, movements, and voices are policed by those who see in us only a reflection of their own identities.
Perhaps this student thought he was paying me a compliment. But in facing up (or not) to his academic struggles, he saw in me a way to rationalize his own experience and behavior — Turnus, again. Defining himself through his inability to learn, he asserted the right to define me as a purely visual object, a distraction. Manspreading and -splaining are not the only ways in which women are displaced from authority: we are also drowned out by typecasting.
In thinking about ancient narratives, I try to show my students how the authors of Greece and Rome often try to control their female characters by slotting them in — and moving them between — different prescribed roles. Wife, mother, maiden, whore, witch: each category an opportunity to praise or blame an individual for adhering to or breaking the rules of engagement. Labels create distance, objectification, a way to prescribe and enforce each person’s value. And although I am aware that such typecasting is alive and well in our modern world, I am still shocked at being deconstructed in this way. Face: mouth: cheek: red, ivory.
It is by reducing someone to their physical traits that we lose their dimension, their voice. And, furthermore, that we lose our own agency. By saying I couldn’t help it, we rob ourselves of the fact that we can, actually, help it. We deny ourselves the dialogue that lies behind someone else’s face and body. We deny ourselves the opportunity to learn. I have fair skin that flushes easily, it’s true. But it is the product of a mind that thinks, speaks, and resents being silenced.
As I write this, I am aware of all the ways in which I am not silenced. White, cisgender, on the tenure track, and living in one of the most liberal cities in the country, I am extremely lucky in so very many ways. I am also, however, highly aware of the responsibilities that come with this position. As in my classroom, in speaking up here I know that I am vulnerable to others’ perceptions, but to me it is worth the risk to put my voice back into the body that caused this trouble.
Perhaps Menelaus should have had thicker skin. Perhaps I should. Or perhaps we should train our students and ourselves to look below the surface, however brightly shining, to see the impact of what we project onto those around us, as Homer and Vergil wanted us to.
Jessica Blum is Assistant Professor of Classical Studies at the University of San Francisco. Her research focuses on imperial Latin poetry and the epic tradition, with a particular interest in the intersection of genre and Roman social discourse. She is currently writing about Hercules and the Argonauts.
