I am an alumnus of the University of California at San Diego not that it matters much these days. The University used to call me and send me emails until I wrote a rather scathing letter stating I would not donate a dime to an institution that tacitly supported the BDS movement. Since then? Absolute sweet silence. But being an alum I nevertheless pay attention to news stories about my alma mater. Most of the time UCSD makes the news about computers or medicine but every once in a while there’s a story like this:
Naked Final Exam at UCSD Sparks Mom’s Outrage
In this Visual Arts class all students and the professor must get naked in a candlelit room in order to pass the final exam by performing “a gesture that traces, outlines or speaks about your ‘erotic self(s).”
Uh-huh. So a bunch of teens and twenty-somethings have to get naked with a middle aged male professor in a candle lit room in order to pass a class.
I used to hang out with visual arts majors. In fact I minored in photography so I ended up taking a lot of VA classes. One of them involved crawling on my hands and knees through a paper tunnel covered with images while being blasted with news headlines from hidden speakers. Not exactly Piss Christ but UCSD has always been the ignored sibling compared to UCLA and Berkeley, making it the UC version of Downton Abbey’s Edith in a way. So I’m sure Professor Ricardo Dominguez and UCSD as a whole is basking in the media attention.
But I find it ironic that in order to pass a class one has to get naked with the professor. Against one’s will.
Isn’t that sexual coercion? Even perhaps rape?
Look, VA majors can waste their and their parents money if they want by taking useless classes just as I did. But I’d like to see how many of Dominguez’s students would choose to get naked with the prof if given the choice.
If you watch the embedded video in the Breitbart link (you don’t have choice, it’s set to autoplay in the browser) you’ll hear the mother of the student break down into tears over the issue. A few thoughts on that.
First, while creepy the experience is not going to scar her little flower for life the way she states in the ABC interview. If it does, then I have some news for her: her daughter is in for much, much worse in Life. Good luck trying to protect her from that.
Second, I think the mother would get much more traction by attacking the prof along Title IX lines rather than making it a moral issue. The Left doesn’t have a moral compass anymore thanks to its corruption by Relativism, but the fact that a woman must submit to being naked in front of an older man stinks of patriarchal privilege. Attack the professor with feminism. It will be harder since he is a minority which is why he’s probably gotten away with it so far (if he was a white guy I’m sure this tactic would have already been taken much earlier.)
After all by forcing students to get naked isn’t Dominguez a type of rapist?
Would my perception would change if the professor was a woman? Perhaps it’s because I’ve been influenced by feminist culture or maybe it’s opposite but I think there would be a big difference. The power issue would still be there – getting naked in front of a superior in order to do their bidding – but it wouldn’t creep me out as much. Maybe it’s because I’m a middle aged man and see the reality of men and women differently.
Men and women are different. Men have been cursed with the sex drive necessary to maintain the species, and that drive often leads us to madness. Are there women sexual predators? Of course. The news is full of female teachers sexually assaulting their male – and female – students but the vast majority of sexual deviants remain male. And that results in a high creepiness factor for me in this story.
Would it matter if Dominguez is a gay man? Nope. The predatorial aspect would remain. If he were a lesbian? Yes but honestly I’d have to think for a while why.
We need to really pull back from the sexual aspect of the story and ask ourselves, “Is it really appropriate to force someone to undress in public?” I remember being terrified to undress in the boy’s locker-room in high school and I believe the bottom line is that our sexuality is sacred and it should never be toyed with by another human being for the sake of anything let alone “art”, especially by an aging third-rate Leftist hack like Dominguez.
In the meantime UCSD kids: Just say “No” to getting naked with a creepy middle aged dude. If it’s too late to withdraw and take a “w” then don’t worry about the GPA hit. No one takes VA grades seriously anyway.
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