Sexual Self-Disclosures in an Expository Writing Course

Imagine a university professor asking a student to reveal in class the most intimate details of a childhood trauma like sexual or physical abuse. We would all agree that such behavior would be shockingly unprofessional. And yet, every day in college classrooms and faculty offices across the country, students receive writing assignments requiring inappropriate self-revelation.

The above passage, appearing in a 1993 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, reflects one of the most persistent criticisms of self-disclosing writing. The two-page article, entitled “The Ethics of Requiring Students to Write About Their Personal Lives,” warns of the potential psychological dangers of compelling students to write on intimate subjects and then grading the essays. Many of the article's concerns about personal writing are legitimate, but the authors present a distorted picture by focusing only on the risks and ignoring the many benefits of autobiographical writing. For example, they make no distinction between requiring and encouraging personal writing: neither is acceptable to them. They correctly realize that students are ambivalent about writing on painful or shameful topics but incorrectly assume that this ambivalence cannot be minimized or overcome. They do not trust students to write about traumatic experiences because of the fear that students will be retraumatized; the authors maintain that even if students choose to write about past victimization, they will not know how to observe appropriate boundaries and later regret their self-disclosures.

Some of the authors' arguments suggest reverse sexism. They envision the male professor as a wolf in pursuit of Little Red Riding Hood or as a Humbert Humbert obsessed with his nymphet Lolita. Their desire to protect female students from exploitation is commendable; yet in arguing that “required personal writing may particularly perpetuate the ‘chilly classroom climate’ for women, in which a comp