With classes about to start at the college next week, it’s a good time to be thinking once more about teaching and mentoring. This one comes from September 2008.
The BBC reports a study this morning: Declaring Love Boosts Sex Appeal.
Telling someone you fancy ‘I really like you’ could make him or her find you more attractive, research suggests.
Making eye contact and smiling have a similar effect, says Aberdeen University psychologist Dr Ben Jones.
His study, involving 230 men and women, found such social cues – which signal how much others fancy you – play a crucial role in attraction.
In other words, people are apparently much more likely to be attracted to you if they think that you find them attractive. I’m no psychologist, but it seems to make good sense. We all have our inner narcissist, after all — many of us will naturally be drawn to people whom we think see in us what we long desperately to be seen.
I’m thinking about this in terms of my own work as a youth worker, college professor, and mentor. One of the things it took me a long time to learn was how closely connected flirting behavior and straightforward active listening are in our culture. I suppose it’s a lesson that every therapist learns early on — clients often fall in love with their shrinks because they are so overwhelmed by the experience of having someone listening so attentively and with such evident interest. In our culture, one of the simplest ways to flirt and signal sexual interest is to listen attentively, making eye contact and offering encouraging cues (like little nods or smiles). Good mentoring and youth work involves using similar techniques.
Students get crushes on me less often than they used to, thanks to two things: one, I’m getting older, and two, I’m much more conscientious these days about carefully distinguishing between sexual intent on the one hand and enthusiastic interest in their lives and work on the other. I also work hard to make sure that the “safe, married, even vaguely asexual” vibe gets projected hard.
But I’m still aware of how difficult it is for youth leaders/teachers/mentors to send these “safe interest signals” in ways that will be clearly understood by young people. In my work with teens at All Saints Church or the Kabbalah Centre — and at the college –I’ve discovered the entirely unsurprising truth that those teens who want the most time and attention are usually the ones who are most emotionally vulnerable. And when I sit with them, even in public with others around, and make eye contact and listen attentively and offer what I hope is thoughtful feedback, I know very well that there’s a slight chance that my interest will be misinterpreted.
Ten years ago, when I was just discovering boundaries anew, I often made explicit declarations of sexual non-interest. “Just so you know”, I’d say, “I’m completely safe.” Sometimes that was appreciated, and other times it served to be confusing and repellant — particularly when the presumption on the part of the young person had been that of course I was as safe as pie, and now they were bewildered as to why I felt the need to affirm that. I learned, slowly, that “safety” (meaning completely non-sexual interest) could be signalled with non-verbal cues.
The trick, however, was in taking what so many people see as markers of flirtatious interest (eye contact, affirming facial expressions and gestures) and completely de-sexualizing them. One way I did this was to reverse what I had always done when I was intentionally flirting! I thought about the ways in which I had consciously tried to imbue simple gestures with (usually) subtle sexual signals (a trick I started learning in high school). So much of flirting, I realized, was where my own consciousness was. While I would never claim always to have been successful as a seducer, I was successful often enough when I put my mind to it. Perhaps, I realized, creating a safe environment for students or mentees in which crushes or suspicion could be defused was also primarily a matter of my own consciousness.
So many young women experience older men as one of three things: predatorily sexual, patronizingly dismissive, or paternally over-protective. So many young men experience older men as uninterested in their needs, uncomfortable with gentle candor, or brutally judgmental of the younger man’s fragile and still-developing masculine self. Good teaching, particularly in the gender studies field, requires being something completely different: safe in every sense of the word except intellectually (where dangerous provocativeness is an asset.) Good mentoring requres that same ability to affirm without flirtation, to stimulate ideas while deliberately not stimulating romantic desire. It’s an increasingly easy set of distinctions to make, but it requires that I be very intentional and very aware of pedagogical and psychological dynamics.
But to the degree that I am effective at “safe” mentoring, it’s in no small part because my spiritual and emotional needs are getting met elsewhere. If I’m not connected to God, if I’m feeling distant from my wife, then I’m much more likely to use (in seemingly innocuous ways) my students and mentees to validate me and “fill up the hole” that isn’t getting filled where it ought to be. My soul runs on spiritual gasoline, and if my tank isn’t full when I’m siting down with a group of teens or a distraught student, I’m in danger of using these young people to fuel me. Even if I don’t sexualize a conversation with a young person, the moment I start thinking about how it is that he or she is making me feel (wise, needed, powerful, etc.) is the beginning of trouble. I have a pretty damn voracious need for validation, and if I’m not on top of my spiritual work (prayer, meditation, journaling, etc.) then I’m at risk of, at the least, sending mixed signals to those for whom I am charged to care.
We all know the old rule of attraction: the secret to being interesting is to be interested. The corollary for those of us who teach and mentor is that we’ve got to be assiduous about re-directing a young person’s interest away from us and towards the subject we are teaching — or back towards their own lives. We’ve got to be passionately interested without the intent of arousing interest in ourselves. That’s sometimes easier said than done, and it requires a hell of a lot of self-awareness and accountability. I’m grateful to the mentors in my own life who have shown how this can be done, and grateful for those whom I still rely on today to hold me accountable.