Why aren’t the students and professors who demand trigger warnings for discussions of rape in literature at the forefront of those denouncing Hamas’s atrocities?
About ten years ago, when I was a young assistant professor at Bryn Mawr College and new to academia, I was taken by surprise when one of my students complained about an assigned text—Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Specifically, her concern was about Ovid’s lack of sensitivity on the subject of rape. The Metamorphoses is a poetic compendium of ancient Greek and Roman myths; one of its common motifs is male gods erotically pursuing females. I was particularly surprised by the student’s comment because Ovid’s elegant and witty text is remarkably sympathetic to the female characters. But I knew that Mawrters are famous for the intensity of their beliefs; it makes sense for students at a women’s college to feel so strongly about violence against women.
