Tony Judt, a well-known his­to­rian, has writ­ten an engag­ing essay called “Girls! Girls! Girls!” for NYR­Blog, The New York Review of Books blog, about how our stance towards sex­ual behav­ior on (and, by impli­ca­tion, off) cam­pus has changed over the years. I don’t agree with every­thing he says – and he would prob­a­bly say it’s because I am a prod­uct of my (and his) times – but what he says is thought-provoking. Here are some snip­pets, which, taken out of con­text, may lose some of the irony that informs them in the original:

Shortly after I took office [in 1992 as chair of NYU’s His­tory Depart­ment], a second-year grad­u­ate stu­dent came by. A for­mer pro­fes­sional bal­le­rina inter­ested in East­ern Europe, she had been encour­aged to work with me. I was not teach­ing that semes­ter, so could have advised her to return another time. Instead, I invited her in. After a closed-door dis­cus­sion of Hun­gar­ian eco­nomic reforms, I sug­gested a course of inde­pen­dent study — begin­ning the fol­low­ing evening at a local restau­rant. A few ses­sions later, in a fit of bravado, I invited her to the pre­mière of Oleanna—David Mamet’s lame drama­ti­za­tion of sex­ual harass­ment on a col­lege campus.

How to explain such self-destructive behav­ior? What delu­sional uni­verse was mine, to sup­pose that I alone could pass untouched by the puni­tive prud­ery of the hour — that the bell of sex­ual cor­rect­ness would not toll for me? I knew my Fou­cault as well as any­one and was famil­iar with Fire­stone, Mil­lett, Brown­miller, Faludi, e tutte quante. To say that the girl had irre­sistible eyes and that my inten­tions were…unclear would avail me noth­ing. My excuse? Please Sir, I’m from the ’60s.

***

[T]he anx­i­eties of con­tem­po­rary sex­ual rela­tions offer occa­sional comic relief. When I was Human­i­ties dean at NYU, a promis­ing young pro­fes­sor was accused of improper advances by a grad­u­ate stu­dent in his depart­ment. He had appar­ently fol­lowed her into a sup­ply closet and declared his feel­ings. Con­fronted, the pro­fes­sor con­fessed all, beg­ging me not to tell his wife. My sym­pa­thies were divided: the young man had behaved fool­ishly, but there was no ques­tion of intim­i­da­tion nor had he offered to trade grades for favors. All the same, he was cen­sured. Indeed, his career was ruined — the depart­ment later denied him tenure because no women would take his courses. Mean­while, his “vic­tim” was offered the usual counseling.

Some years later, I was called to the Office of the Uni­ver­sity Lawyer. Would I serve as a wit­ness for the defense in a case against NYU being brought by that same young woman? Note, the lawyer warned me: “she” is really a “he” and is suing the uni­ver­sity for fail­ing to take seri­ously “her” needs as a trans­ves­tite. We shall fight the case but must not be thought insensitive.

So I appeared in Man­hat­tan Supreme Court to explain the com­plex­i­ties of aca­d­e­mic harass­ment to a bemused jury of plumbers and house­wives. The student’s lawyer pressed hard: “Were you not prej­u­diced against my client because of her trans­gen­dered iden­tity pref­er­ence?” “I don’t see how I could have been,” I replied. “I thought she was a woman — isn’t that what she wanted me to think?” The uni­ver­sity won the case.

***

Here as in so many other are­nas, we have taken the ’60s alto­gether too seri­ously. Sex­u­al­ity (or gen­der) is just as dis­tort­ing when we fix­ate upon it as when we deny it. Sub­sti­tut­ing gen­der (or “race” or “eth­nic­ity” or “me”) for social class or income cat­e­gory could only have occurred to peo­ple for whom pol­i­tics was a recre­ational avo­ca­tion, a pro­jec­tion of self onto the world at large.

Why should every­thing be about “me”? Are my fix­a­tions of sig­nif­i­cance to the Repub­lic? Do my par­tic­u­lar needs by def­i­n­i­tion speak to broader con­cerns? What on earth does it mean to say that “the per­sonal is polit­i­cal”? If every­thing is “polit­i­cal,” then noth­ing is. I am reminded of Gertrude Stein’s Oxford lec­ture on con­tem­po­rary lit­er­a­ture. “What about the woman ques­tion?” some­one asked. Stein’s reply should be embla­zoned on every col­lege notice board from Boston to Berke­ley: “Not every­thing can be about everything.”

Full dis­clo­sure: One rea­son this piece engages me as much as it does, is that I have the same response as Judt to the ques­tion he poses at the end of his post:

So how did I elude the harass­ment police, who surely were on my tail as I sur­rep­ti­tiously dated my bright-eyed ballerina?

Except in my case she was a dark-haired and com­pellingly dark-eyed woman from Iran. And I have made the answer my title.