When Students Write About Sex

Mark Shaver for The Chronicle Review

By Stephanie Wilbur Ash

Recently I watched something bizarre unfold on Facebook.

An accomplished writer, teaching freshman composition for the first time — as an adjunct — complained about two "small-town rural girls" (her words) who had brought sex into a classroom assignment. One student had described her particular sex habits during an interview with the other student, who then wrote a profile using those details, which happened to deviate from vanilla. The instructor's complaint was not about the writing but about the "highly inappropriate" (her words) act of bringing your sex life to an audience of art-school peers.

There are layers of irony here. A student who shares her sexual preferences with a classroom of peers is off base, but her instructor can rant about it to 800 Facebook "friends"? Isn't art school one of those special places where you can create with any content you want? There are layers of privilege, too. Leave it to the small-town rural girl to be woefully uncouth, to be — as this instructor noted on her Facebook wall — "not a very interesting person."

And of course there is some evidence of a broken system that favors cheap, untested adjuncts over professionals devoted to the passion and pedagogy of teaching, especially of beginning writers. I vacillate between judging this instructor (whom I won't name) as an overzealous parent-­by-proxy and a slut-shamer.

But one thing I know for sure: I got lucky in my own undergraduate writing classes.

Twenty-two years ago I was an artistically inclined small-town rural girl myself, age 19, attending a Big Ten college while having complicated sex with my 30-year-old boss. He prayed for lost souls at abortion clinics on Saturday mornings and threw dollars at strippers on Saturday nights. In between he signed my time card and gave me a sexually transmitted disease. It was messy, it was harmful, it was one of the reasons I dropped out of college for a while. And it was fun to write about.

With all the grace and restraint of an injured she-wolf, I entered a classroom of seven other students and a frizzy-haired dynamo of an instructor. I'll name her because I want every young woman to bow to her the way I did: Professor Patricia Foster, teaching the personal essay and its politics to undergraduates at the University of Iowa.

Immediately I began writing what the dominant culture told me was the most interesting thing about me: my sex life. Blood. Guts. Boobs. Wombs. Wine-cooler vomit the color of a pole dancer's nipples. (I was particularly proud of that metaphor.) Content that would never pass through this publication. Content that would look pretty good in xoJane (had it existed), or a literary journal edited by Susie Bright. Content I don't care to revisit. Content I will never forget.

Prof. Foster deemed every single bit of it acceptable for our class workshop, even with multiple young men and a 60-something woman as my "audience." She treated this material as my precious and wholly owned experience, and the composition as work still emerging — a difference she made clear on Day 1, when she defined the word "composition" as the arrangement of elements into a whole distinct from the subject. Because of her leadership, my classmates and I learned to treat each other's work with the understanding that the life was not the writing. We were proud to help each other with the writing. We did not tell each other what was wrong with the content of our lives.

No one had to tell me what was wrong with my life. I was a small-town girl, barely legal (as the saying goes), having sex with her boss. The "normal" world (as defined by white, straight, middle-class, traditional American values) already did a pretty good job of informing me how wrong I was, even as it celebrated me in pornography. (Do a Google-image search of the phrase "barely legal" if you wonder what I'm talking about.)

Twenty-two years later, the message is still right there. Even more telling: Do a Google-image search of the phrase "small town girl." You'll get the cover of an album by the country-music star Kellie Pickler, wholesomely dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt, smiling sweetly. You also might get an image of a woman in a half-shirt and jean shorts cut into the shape of a thong, photographed from behind, leaning over a tractor tire.

Y'all know which one is the "bad" girl. The dominant culture tells a lot of people how wrong their lives are, especially those it most fetishizes.

Prof. Foster made it clear that it was not her job, as my writing teacher, to do that.

Rather, she told me what was right with my compositions — a well-written paragraph, a fully supported assertion, a strong and vivid detail. She also told me what didn't work, which we both hoped would result in improvement. And she pointed out where my writing really sang.

No one had ever done that for me. Who goes around telling unabashedly sexual small-town rural girls how terrific their writing is? And by faithfully poring over her notes on my highly confessional, sloppily composed essays, I learned what risky writing could be. When she invited me to talk about my world, I learned that my experiences were worth exploring and understanding. When she invited me to grad-school parties, where I got drunk and once ate an entire wheel of brie, I learned that I could make mistakes on the journey to becoming myself.

I did not learn in Prof. Foster's writing classes what was right and wrong about the content of my experiences, but rather how to understand myself through the unpacking of those experiences, and how to take a reader along on that ride. I learned how to see myself with reflective distance, and to accept myself as a work in progress.

Today I am a longtime magazine writer and editor with a focus on health and families. I am also a comedy writer who created the character "Steph," who desires a Goth girl who she sometimes hopes will slap her in the face before kissing her.

Is that highly inappropriate? Thousands of my peers applauded the particular desires of Steph the character. Thanks in part to my expert writing teacher, Steph the writer was able to make it work.

Stephanie Wilbur Ash is a senior editor at Mpls.St.Paul magazine and the leader of the a cappella cover band Goth Mother. She has taught fiction, composition, and media as an adjunct at Minnesota State University at Mankato and St. Cloud State University.

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