MENTOR RAPE

It's common practice, indeed, even an academic standard, to institute mentorships for untenured professors.  While I had little use of advice from the highly unstable, toxic, revolting, and mediocre English and World Literature faculty --their morals were absent and horrors were forms of daily entertainment--I did everything fathomable to enforce high standards, create an ethical environment where only haunting was permitted, and shepherd my students toward their goals--that is, I had to do without adequate, professional, and appropriate collegiality and my gender/sex/ability identification was in fact the sole fixation on which these "mentors" would fixate. 

Never could I expect that they would engage in enlightened or polite conversations on the latest theories, new methodological advances, or best practices in instruction.  Far more remote were chances my own particular practices in manuscript analysis, translation, philology, and archival projects, would distract them from the single obsession they placed on my anatomy--moral, physical, ethnic, and intellectual.

The marring of my atmosphere, the squelching of my student research products, and the continuously-nearing proximity of their menacing mendacity, administered at an intensifying frequency. The hazing was acute, repetitive, and grew to include officers of the college, its board, administration, and faculty committees. This experience was a nightmare of insomniac persistence.  

It began with persistent propositions from another professor and the spouse of the President Trombley both of whom I rejected vociferously and to no avail for Trombley took it upon himself to ignore my rejections and sexually assaulted me.  He groped my ass with a disturbing and horrifying claw that traced the entire length of my spine just before it found my glute muscle and demonically squeezed me as though I were an animal about to be butchered.

This pattern of atrocities would follow the hierarchy of command from the sordid President's office down to the two professors just below her on the scale of salacious ambition.  The ominous perversity paired with abysmal intellectualism grew closer and closer to what I call mentor rape, a term I will define in a series of blogs on the topic. Rape on sexual grounds commuted to intellectual ones. This form of rape demands not only the excessive use of power to acquire forceful consent, but also, the farcical defeat of knowledge by racial and ableist fantasy forced sex.

Sex was the single fascination that presented itself in their imagination, collective and individual.  As a scholar, these regularly occurring group rituals of humiliation based around my biological being, were so shocking that they inured me to a state of "numbed terror"-- a phrase I borrow from the poet, Dr. William Carlos Williams, who, after all, had never grimaced at or demurred to, the sensuality of an aesthetic life.

The scenes in which the mating of my scholarship with the obsessive sexual predation of the literature faculty--are as clear in my memory as they day they occurred.  I can still see Laura Harris slithering on the open door of my office as she asks me for a lunch date after several bullying incidents in which she laid bare her agenda to discredit me for rejecting her inculcation in what was clear to me was an exploitative pecking order. 

Though she claimed she was a lesbian, it became clear she was merely marketing herself, for she is a four foot tall Napoleonic macho midgit without even a shred of femininity. Her emasculated omnipotent butchy hysteria she tried with the might of an infantile ego complex, to sate by annihilating any appearance of beauty, wisdom, or education in her realm of treacherous perversity.

 Given that she passes as white with a ludicrous theory of herself as a radical black woman who pulled down welfare while borrowing money for student loans, all of which she boasts in a laughable track record of feminist quasi-confessions regarding her femininity, femme claims, and feminist ethics, her proclivities are particularly bizarre.   

And in her case, the Pinocchio effect has had its full epidemiology expressed.  A nose larger than the size of a padded CV added to her height, may have been the cause of her dire tactics. Altogether this assembled puppeteer holds to the reins with a debased career in letters, the supplicants of her macho command structure using it to recruit to her "tormentorship."

Yet, she was not alone in her racial masquerade.  But teamed up with her as her own best frenemy--was Masilela Ntongela, a South African who promotes the benefits of English colonization of Africa and even of apartheid's ultimate helpful legacy on the enemy of his fathers, the Indigenous African cultures, expounds upon a comprador sentimentalism for the black plantation, its righteous antecedent and legacy in his view, and the dire picture of any innocence that will have to be dismembered by a precolonial brutal fantasy he sees and both desires and abhors in the African village, the African tradition, or its African philosophical heritage which he converts to what he sees as basely superstitious and laughable. He annihilates Africa and with that power, seduces through "mentorship." 

He refers to his own minstrelsy as "Modernity."  I recalled the horrific grimace a European scholar expressed at a conference at the annual conference of the regional Modern Language Association, held that year in Riverside,  when Ntongela Masilela assured the European scholar that there were no lingering feelings of dispossession or dismay of Africans for European colonization. 

The young slattern who had flown from Vienna to present his research, was left with a staggering jaw-drop -- a below-the-belt blow for the blond and blue-eyed research scholar.  Clearly, he had never fathomed that he'd find a supporter of colonialism in Southern California. But it must have been the sight of him that must most perturb him today: for he looks like a vile spider-bellied house servant of hell's ugliest creatures which in itself may have been the cause of his dire tactics.

More to Come