People often think of progressives as being more comfortable with sexuality, but attacks on free expression like this suggest otherwise.
A Massachusetts College of Art and Design professor claims he’s being forced into early retirement after he was accused of sexual harassment for showing a video that contained brief nudity.
The professor, Saul Levine, made the claim in a Facebook video, which he titled “Free Speech.” According to the video, college officials met with Levine after some students objected to a showing of one of his films, Notes After a Long Silence, for class.
The Boston Globe reports that the video contained “images of Levine naked and having sex with his partner”; however, two people who wrote letters to yhe Globe say that this is false:
“Did anyone actually watch the 1989 film, ‘Notes After Long Silence,’ the subject of Malcolm Gay’s April 1 Globe article, ‘Film shown at MassArt leads to professor’s departure’?” one of the letters asks. “I would contend that no administrator at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design could have seen it, or they wouldn’t reportedly have called in professor Saul Levine and accused him of sexual harrassment [sic].”
“In between are occasional shots of human body parts so herky-jerky, abstract, and quick on screen that you can barely grasp that there’s something sexual going on,” it continues. “Very important: At no point do we see the filmmaker on screen as a person having sex.”
I also watched the video, and I’d agree that it’s completely impossible to tell who is pictured having sex. In fact, there’s barely even any sex at all, and the images in question indeed are “herky-jerky, abstract, and quick on the screen.” I didn’t feel offended in the slightest, let alone sexually harassed. It wasn’t offensive; it was just kind of weird.
“Weird,” by the way, is something that these students should have expected. As Reason’s Robby Soave points out:
It seems to me that if you enroll in a prestigious art college and sign up for a class taught by an avant-garde artist who makes bizarre experimental films, you don’t have much room to complain about some brief, blurry nudity.
Soave is right. We’re not talking about a math teacher here; we’re talking about a class headed up by a guy who is known for experimenting and making strange films. When you sign up for a class like this, you’ve got to expect that you’re probably going to see some crazy stuff — so complaining about having seen some crazy stuff seems more than a little ridiculous.
Honestly, stories like this only further my view that the people on the left have become the new Puritans. People may often think of progressives as being more comfortable with sex and sexuality, but these kinds of attacks on free expression suggest otherwise. It’s obviously very important to report real, true instances of sexual harassment — and I’d even argue that reporting them doesn’t happen often enough — but there is certainly a new movement that has an obsession with the idea that we are all owed a “safe space” from even the most slightly uncomfortable things, and this push is not coming from the right.
The bottom line is: College students are generally adults. By the time that you’re an adult, you really should be able to handle a few seconds of blurry nudity without having to tattle on the person who showed it to you.