Teacher Boobies

A lecturer at the University of Southern California said she started a blog because her students wanted “more of me after our class time has ended,” she wrote. And they got it.


Diana Blaine, who lectures on feminist theory, recently linked her blog to an online photo album that has topless photos of her near a painting of a topless woman, and at Burning Man, an annual weeklong festival in Nevada where clothing is optional.

After a student who has made a habit of criticizing Blaine on his blog, “ Cardinal Martini,” linked to the photos, an NBC station in Los Angeles reported that the pictures are “causing concern,” bringing Blaine even more exposure.

NBC’s claim of “concern” about the photos, however, seems dubious, as Blaine said she hasn’t heard from any of her colleagues or the university about it. A USC spokesman said that no policies have been violated, so the university is not pursuing the matter.

The undergraduate who blogged about Blaine, under the pseudonym Andrew Winthrop Cunningham III, said that the professor first caught his attention with an editorial she wrote in the student paper last year that called on all men at USC to take responsibility for rapes that occur on campus. “I hold every single male on this campus responsible,” Blaine wrote, “because every single male on this campus has the responsibility for stopping rape.… Because they all rape? Of course not,” she added. “But because only men rape and only men can stop other men from raping.”

Blaine said that she had “every expectation” the article would infuriate some conservative students at USC.

Cunningham said that he and the other two bloggers — one man and one woman, he said — “are all Republicans … although I am pro-choice and pro-gay rights, and so therefore consider myself a moderate,” he wrote in an e-mail. He would agree with the “infuriated” classification, however.

With regard to Blaine’s editorial, Cunningham said he finds “it morally abhorrent to hold any person, let alone the entire male student body, responsible for a crime he has not committed.”