The reception her remarks received was predictable. It unleashed a fury of denouncement for making light of sexual harassment, for implying that such behaviour provoked "ambivalence" instead of outright condemnation, and Beard was painted as some sort of defender of the indefensible.
I've blogged previously about the slipperiness around sexual harassment. As policy stands, from even an initial overture, an "unwanted" act can be harassment. The difficulty being, of course, that until one ventures there, one can't know if the overture is wanted or not. Assume not, then, to be safe. So then... however do _wanted_ (consensual, reciprocal, chosen) erotic exchanges get underway?
It would seem they don't. That even mutually chosen, fully consensual and intensely reciprocal interactions of an erotic nature are undesirable, and somehow out of keeping with the academic project - be they between "equals" or across any (or any combination of) of the myriad of power differentials that weave into social relationships. Learning and eroticism have, since the 80s, been forcibly uncoupled.
And yet, most learners of any age will agree that learning takes place best in the presence of passion. And, similar to Freud's notion of transference in the therapeutic relationship, an argument can be made that the process of education is itself erotic, that notions of desire and passion are central to its engagement.
The sterile model, desexed and stripped of its bodily dimension, sits like TS Eliot in a cold bath drinking tepid tap water while its fulsome cousin cavorts intoxicatedly like Dylan Thomas in the jacuzzi. It's hard not to see it as a loss.
Which is not to support, or excuse, sexual harassment, or any other abuse of power. But intelligent people - and surely, it is those we'd encounter in a university? - should have no problem making that distinction.