- The subversive potential of sexual desire will become a major theme for Marcuse. He finds that society tends to repress sexual impulses in order to keep a tighter grip on individuals, defining what and how they should consider appropriate when it comes to pleasure and satisfaction. And in this way keeps them part of a properly working capitalist society. Today we'll focus on how this mechanism of repression works according to Marcuse.
Trying to focus on the topics she had to go through in the following two hours, took Alex's mind off Turnons for a while. She was standing in the middle of the classroom. It was an ordinary day, but the students seemed interested and engaged, for a change. It was probably due to the name her professor had chosen for the seminar: "The erotic impulse as means of liberation in Nietszche, Freud and Marcuse".
And it wasn't just the usual suspects who decided to take her seminar. It was a pretty big class actually. The small room was made to accommodate about twenty persons, but today the attendees were thirtytwo. A few of them grabbed some spare seats from the corridor and were now sitting behind the last row of desks. Alex had to offer her own desk to a couple of students who couldn't find anywhere else to stay, and she promised that she would have asked professor Grant to arrange for a bigger classroom.
Alex was probably too modest or too naive to admit, even to herself, that half the male students attending the seminar were doing it just because she was the lecturer.
Seminars in May were always crowded, full of guys trying to earn a few extra credits. Little she knew of how often her name came up in private conversations in the boys room or in locker rooms. Since she started covering teaching hours for professor Grant, social science classes drew more students by the week. And this seminar, the first she was allowed to do without anyone from the department nannying her, seemed to be bound for success judging by the number of show-ups at the first lesson.
Alex didn't want to build her self-esteem too much, but she had to be good at this. Teaching suited her after all, it brought out the best of her: as soon as a lesson started, all of a sudden she was absolutely brilliant and charismatic, none of her shyness or indecisiveness was there anymore. Never in the world she would have imagined her popularity among students had anything to do with her looks. She missed the malice to perceive how attentive guys got when she walked by their desks, or how they followed the gentle swaying of her breasts, and the harmonious movements of her legs and butt.
That was also the kind of thinking her uprising and years of study tried to eradicate, making her focus on hard work, intellectual gratification and knowledge as the only means - and reasons - to be appreciated. Even more so in the academic circles, where the number of men in leading positions, whether lower than before, was still high.
At 25 Alex was one of the youngest PhD students of the campus, she was the youngest woman in the department, and the youngest teacher considering all bachelor degree courses. She had to be proud of all that, but she also felt the burden of living up to the expectations.
One hour into her speech on Marcuse she stopped to take a few questions. After answering concisely a request for further explanations on Marcuse's take on Freudian psychoanalysis, she noticed Robert Brooks, one of the students sitting at her desk, raising his hand.
- Yes, Bobby? - He was one of Grant's students. She knew all of them by name, since she had to attend classes and tests even when she was not directly involved.
- Your phone's buzzing. There's a red notification with a timer or something. It says Turn..
Fuck.
- Yes Bobby, thank you. - Answered Alex getting to her desk in a hurry. How could she be so stupid to leave her phone there?
She took a quick glance at the screen. There was no way she could do anything but dismiss the notification and so she did. Immediately Turnons app opened up showing a red screen that read: "You failed a flash dare! You have 0 attempts left. If you fail another flash dare you will also fail your current dare from SubtleG."
She hoped that wouldn't get SubtleG too upset.
Why? Why would her mind even shape that thought?
- Sorry guys, let's get going. Anyone else has a question?
The lesson kept going for another fifteen minutes before her phone, now safely in her hands, buzzed again. It was a chat message this time.
Susie, a first year from professor Hopkins' political science class, was reading an abstract from "Eros and Civilization". Alex got to the back of the class, near the door, and took another look at the message.
