Teaching Taboo

Collected by Kristina Smith kristina.l.smith@vanderbilt.edu

Summary: The tale is about an adulterous affair between a professor and a student at an unnamed university, and the horrible revenge that the student took on the proffessor for ultimately giving her a bad grade in the class.

Text: A female student, in her senior year at a nameless university in the United States, went into her psychology proffessors office to talk with him about a term paper. She apparently walked into the office to find him sitting at his desk with his shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, and a fan blowing through his hair. (I suppose she found this very sexy, although I am not sure why.) She bent over to pick up a piece of paper, and when she looked up he was staring at her (apparently he found her sexy too). They ended up having sex on top of his desk. Well she got her paper back and had made a D. I guess she thought he was actually grading their little fling, and she decided to get revenge. She wrote a letter detailing thier whole sexual expierience, and took it to his house. She delivered it to his pregnant wife, and left. The next semester, she noticed that the professor wasn't working at the university any longer.

Notes: Well I should say not!, of course he isn't working there anymore, and he probably isn't married anymore either. I found this story very shocking, and disturbing, to say the least. I think it originated from one of those "shocking story pages" of a woman's magazine, like Glamour, or Cosmopolitan. I have heard similar stories, which tend to be popluar, but without the revenge part. Like people on a long, overseas plane ride getting drunk from free bottles of liquor, and having sex with a total stranger in the plane bathroom. This reminded me of the Carnival example that we discussed in class today about everyone having sex with total strangers at Mardi Gras, and similarily, I am sure that this, too, isn't characteristic of people's behavior on overseas flights. However, these are the stories that are passed around in our culture having to do with sexual desire and taboo.

Context:
Tale Type: Professional and Marital Taboo
Tale Motif: Desire and Revenge
Comments on the Tale: This is the type of story that is told at SATCO on friday afternoon, after a hectic day of class. A group of people are sitting around, blowing off steam, and the conversation rolls over into a competiton of w ho can outshock everyone else with the best story. The story is like a confession that you aren't supposed to hear. It is the infatuation with the sick, or taboo, that reveals the repression of sexual desires by society, and the attempt to express these desires through tales such as this. There is that edge to it that results in this type of story being passed around quickly.

My informant heard this story, from a friend, in a similar situation to the one mentioned above, some time in October, 1998. Apparently my informant's informant won the shockability contest.

My informant:
Age: 21
Sex: Female
Place of Birth: Boston, MA
Ethnic Group: Caucasian
Languages Spoken: English, Greek
Religion: Greek Orthodox
Year in School: Senior
Exracurricular jobs: Waitress
Date Collected: November 6th, 1998