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By Kate Lý Johnston
Professor G. to Lynn (Privately)
Want to do this together again?
Me to Everyone
Those words, that simple sentence, was the most romantic gesture Lynn’s experienced in all her time in Zoom school. He wants me... to keep working for him! Her heart leapt. She didn’t hesitate for a second in responding:
Lynn to Professor G. (Privately)
I thought you’d never ask.
Me to Everyone
Oh, to be in love! As a joke, of course. Sometimes Lynn, a USC senior, wonders why she can’t have a simple relationship, like the one her smarter and more stable roommate Alyssa has, and why she ends up ghosting every man who appears nice and normal and respectful, who isn’t the weirdly flirty, overbearing yet questionable, slightly fetishizing professor she works for as a teaching assistant.
The romance is a joke! She’s sworn that to herself more than anyone. That’s how she justified getting herself into this mess with Professor G. in the first place, a digital intimacy that never had tangible consequences, until she realized emotions are lasting even through a screen, and that she allowed herself to become reliant on a man who’s almost as old as her dad for emotional validation.
But let’s backtrack, though it helps Lynn to describe her relationship with Professor G. with a certain element of narrative drama. (And anonymously.) Processing requires distance, and the whole thing feels less real to her that way. Not that anything feels real over Zoom.
And maybe that’s the problem.
As college campuses have shifted online this past year due to Covid-19, students are learning how to navigate a new virtual environment where harassment, manipulation, and power dynamics can all look very different, and where Zoom calls from bed can blur the boundaries between the personal and the professional.
U.S. studies on sexual harassment in cyberspace this year are limited, but anecdotal evidence and some international studies suggest it has ballooned during the pandemic and online school and work. In India alone, for example, the anti-cyber harassment nonprofit Akancha Srivastava Foundation saw a 200% increase in online sexual harassment reports since the start of the pandemic.
Since the online shift practically happened overnight, as Covid-19 overtook the world at an unprecedented (cringe) speed, Akancha Srivastava said a lack of clear guidelines and policies around online sexual harassment have “left a lot of room for abuse” within institutions that have no precedent for handling these cases.
As discussions around boundaries have grown more complex, abusers have too. Many people face challenges identifying what sexual harassment looks like in this new, transitional environment. This has definitely caused confusion for Lynn – when every interaction has been through a screen for a year, how can she know what Professor G. really means when he calls her cute, or sweet, or his “queen?” She can’t answer that, but she does know three things:
First: That Professor G. has either never been around a gay person, or is too much of a boomer to know the slang use of the word “queen.”
Second: That she’s gotten much too familiar with the recurring sense of dread she feels whenever she hears a Slack notification, a small trigger of panic that acts as validation that her relationship with her boss has not been appropriate or normal. And she needs all the validation she can get, after a year of wondering whether anything real was actually happening, since she’d just been sitting in her room the whole time.
Third: That just because we’re online, that doesn’t mean sexual harassment isn’t a problem anymore, especially on college campuses. Now, it’s just harder to spot.
Harassment isn’t new, and boundaries get violated.
Fight On(line)!
Me to Everyone
Colleges and universities have long had a problem with sexual violence, especially USC. A 2019 survey from the Association of American Universities showed that one in four female undergraduates from leading colleges across the country have been sexually assaulted on campus – but at USC, the Los Angeles Times reported, that number is nearly one in three.
As for harassment, over half of USC undergraduates on the 2019 AAU Campus Climate Survey said they experienced sexual harassing behavior. Whether these reports persist at the same scale online is yet to be seen, as USC’s public relations office stated that harassment statistics during the pandemic school year will not be available until December 2021. Both RSVP and Title IX declined multiple requests for comment. (Title IX doesn’t have time to “accommodate interview requests for class projects,” wrote their Deputy Coordinator in an email. Well okay.)
Across the city and all the way in Westwood, fourth-year UCLA student Maddie Ostergaard took a quarter off from school to process trauma from a sexual assault she experienced her first year of college. When she came back to school, she was determined to be a good student – she pursued honors credit in her behavioral neuroscience course, going to office hours to complete extra work. It was at these pre-pandemic, in-person office hours that her professor started crossing lines.
“He was being really pushy about why I had taken some time off from a lab I was researching in,” Ostergaard said. She resisted telling him the details of her absence at first, but became worn down after multiple days of persistent questioning. “He wasn’t gonna let me stop,” she explained. “If you’ve been in a situation like that, it’s in your best interest to just go numb and answer, but I really didn’t want him to know. It felt really invasive.”
The professor claimed to come from a place of concern. She remembers him saying that as a teacher, he needed to know if she reported her assault to Title IX. She did report it, and when she told him she didn’t want to discuss it further, he said she shouldn’t feel ashamed. “I’m not ashamed of it,” Ostergaard said. “But it’s still personal, and I don’t have to tell you.”
Despite her pushback, her professor’s invasiveness only escalated once the semester moved online the following year, something Ostergaard said she could have never anticipated. Many people have felt similarly unprepared for the “wide spectrum of harassment that can happen” in online environment now, according to Ariel Weindling, chief executive officer of #NotMe, a misconduct reporting platform for workplaces.
When it comes to digital communication – whether it be Slack DMs, Zooms, emails, or texts – Weindling said he’s seen a lot of reports this year of “things you probably wouldn’t say to someone if you saw them in person.” Over the internet, professional relationships can veer toward the personal, causing uncomfortable situations. Srivastava has seen complaints about bosses scheduling Zoom calls late at night, then attending these calls in inappropriate attire.
Lynn is no stranger to late night talks with her boss. If you told her that a year ago, she might find that creepy. A year ago, she didn’t even know Professor G. They were set up on a “professional blind date” by another USC teacher, who thought the two of them would get along. She thought correctly. Not halfway into her Dulce matcha latte, Professor G. asked Lynn if she’d want to be his TA that coming fall.
But Lynn and Professor G. wouldn’t get to know each other in the way she expected, when classes went virtual two months later. Though there were talks of hybrid classes that fall, USC announced classes would be completely online a week before the semester began. They’d remain that way through all of Lynn’s senior year.
Lynn felt determined to make the most out of a frustrating situation, desperate to find some kind of meaningful experience through being a TA. When the semester began, she and Professor G. texted constantly, which definitely felt a little excessive, but the two of them just got along well – their messages were about 50% work, 40% banter, and 10% risky texts. Sometimes the riskier texts made her wonder if he was flirting with her, but she didn’t seriously consider that.
Admittedly, though… it was hard not to feel flattered when Professor G. would tell her how well she was doing at her job, how clever and creative she was, and how much their students loved her. Their students, he said! “We’re doing this together,” he told her. That’s a high compliment, she thought, for someone who just takes attendance and grades quizzes.
Alyssa, the aforementioned roommate, was the first to point out Professor G.’s issues with boundaries. Her concern started two weeks into the semester, when Professor G. asked Lynn to do a task for him at 2:30 a.m.
“YOU ACTUALLY DID IT?” Alyssa confronted Lynn that next morning, outraged on her behalf. She warned Lynn that this would only set a bad precedent in their relationship: “By letting down boundaries in the area of work hours, which is such a simple thing to do, it leaves the door way too open for him to make comments about other aspects of life that happened outside of work time,” she said.
Lynn knew Alyssa made fair points, but she didn’t mind Professor G.’s intensity. Sure, the workload was a lot, and sure, he fell into a pattern of being highly complimentary then overly demanding, stressing Lynn out, but she was making bank! He would sometimes Venmo her money to do extra work for him over the weekends. He generously rounded up hours and totally overpaid her, she thought. (“There’s no such thing as being overpaid,” her therapist reminded her.)
The first turning point came when, two months into the semester, Professor G. told Lynn she shared a similar birthday to his wife. Then, the big reveal: His wife is also Asian.
Of course Professor G. has an Asian wife! “Why does that make so much sense?” Alyssa said when Lynn told her. Under his white male gaze, the relationship would never feel the same. Lynn started noticing the language he used to describe her: cute, sweet, hard-working. He gave her unsolicited, animal-themed nicknames, none of which were particularly clever, but he at least tried to make her laugh. Now, everything he did, she wondered how it fit into their dynamic of white male boss and young Asian girl TA.
Was she reading too much into it? Unclear, but the situation was, at least, totally weird. Better repress it! Worrying about the way Professor G. saw her felt both embarrassing and pointless, but she couldn’t help it. As the two of them got closer, Lynn started to notice how good Professor G.’s validation made her feel, a personal red flag. She knew herself well enough to admit her heart is particularly susceptible to affection, made worse by the loneliness of the pandemic. She’d learned to recognize her habit of basing her worth on other people’s validation, especially when she knows they desire her.
But Professor G. didn’t desire her, so this was different! He was her boss, so this was the good kind of validation. It was her own fault if she made it into a weird attraction thing, bringing discomfort onto herself. Sure, Professor G. probably texted her way more frequently and casually than other bosses would, and at much later hours of the night, but aren’t we all in need of a little more connection right now? She was probably also bored, she realized, dreaming up an illicit romance in her head to entertain herself and her friends with flirting that was too absurd to be serious.
And yet.
Professor G. liked to talk about his European country of origin a lot. One night in October, Alyssa had over a friend from the same country as him.
Note: The following texts were originally exchanged over iMessage at around 10 p.m. They are recreated here for your viewing purposes.
Lynn to Professor G. (Privately)
My roommate’s friend wants to chat with you!
He is also [national origin] and doesn’t know many.
Professor G. to Lynn (Privately)
[National origin]s are so persistent aren’t they
How can you deal with them
Happy to chat with [name]
Lynn to Professor G. (Privately)
He says thanks
Professor G. to Lynn (Privately)
Is he teaching you some [language] at least
Lynn to Professor G. (Privately)
[Phrase that references having a drink]
Professor G. to Lynn (Privately)
Now that you say it so well you’ll better have one with me someday
The next morning.
Professor G. to Lynn (Privately)
Hi that [course material] you found has some very useful footage thank you!
End of messages.
Me to Everyone
From then on, Lynn knew Alyssa was right – the boundaries were broken. Professor G.’s immediate pivot to work the next morning filled her with dread, reminding her of her obligation to answer him.
No use worrying about it, she eventually told herself. Since they were online, she could forget he ever sent those texts. If he’d said that to her in person, maybe it’d be a bigger deal, but for now, she was shielded by the screen.
Alyssa was more upset. “This man is absolutely nuts!” she said. “I’ve never had a relationship with a boss like that, online or offline.”
Defining sexual harassment isn’t hard, except when it is.
Me to Everyone
When a situation feels unclear, Weindling said sexual harassment should be defined by the emotional impact the behavior has on the recipient, regardless of the perpetrator’s intentions. “If it’s offensive to me, that’s it,” he said. “That’s sexual harassment.” Srivastava similarly defined harassment as “any repeated action which makes me feel uncomfortable,” becoming sexual when the action “makes you uncomfortable about your body or bodily space.”
To Ostergaard, the UCLA student, the impact of her neuroscience professor’s increasing invasiveness – no matter how well-intentioned he claimed to be – was detrimental to her body.
At the start of the online fall semester, Ostergaard needed someone to write her a letter of recommendation for graduate school. She knew her former neuroscience professor could speak to the quality of her work, and since it’d been a year since the uncomfortable office hours interaction, she didn’t see it as a big deal anymore.
The neuroscience professor agreed to write her recommendation, and during Thanksgiving break, he asked her to hop on a Zoom call. Almost immediately when she entered the call, he started asking blatant questions about her sex life: Have you had sex since the assault? With guys or girls? How much sex have you been having? Have you been seeing anyone in quarantine, male or female? How far did you go with them?
Though Ostergaard’s instinct was to go numb and answer, her body decided to react for her this time. She remembers wetting herself and becoming incapacitated, manging to say she needed to reschedule before losing consciousness. When she woke up a few minutes later, she was spasming on her bed.
She didn’t know what was happening at the time, but Ostergaard has since determined with medical professionals that she experienced a seizure-like trauma response. “It was so shocking to my system to have him ask about the assault and my sex life so early in the conversation,” Ostergaard explained. “My body for 24 hours just shut down.”
Some reactions to trauma only appear internally, making it more difficult for certain people to realize when they’re feeling violated. This can get harder on Zoom classes, where sexual harassment can manifest through subtle, undetectable behaviors. Many students have described unwanted Zoom interactions on the USC Subreddit, which they see as a semi-anonymous outlet to vent. All of the following users consented to sharing their experiences under their Reddit screennames, like Pomegranategurl, a sophomore at USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering.
Pomegranategurl once had a guy take a screenshot of her on Zoom and text her the photo. While she doesn’t think the guy was being malicious, she said the experience made her uncomfortable ever turning her camera on in class again. “I can't be sure that someone isn't looking at me or taking pictures of me,” she wrote. “CS classes are like 80% men, which makes it even worse.”
Reddit user jadeflowersxox also recalled turning off her camera after a classmate she’d never spoken to privately messaged her on Zoom, asking for her number. Reddit user _imaniman_ keeps her camera off too, after having someone go to more extreme lengths for her attention. “I had a guy message me on zoom, email me, and track down my Insta to DM me all during the first class meeting last semester,” she wrote. “My camera remained off for the remainder of the semester💀”
The at-home element of Zoom – people laying in bed, or logging into class in their pajamas – can make people feel more vulnerable. When Nathan, a senior at UCLA, wore a tank top to a work meeting, he said a co-worker repeatedly made comments about his body in front of their boss. He recalled feeling embarrassed and ashamed when his co-worker kept joking: “Oh my god Nathan, look at those guns!”
Reddit user threerat, a student at Arizona State University, has also faced issues with unwanted comments on Zoom. “One of the guys that hit on me gave me his number,” she wrote. “I passed it along to my fiance, who gave him a nice reality check.” Another guy stopped messaging her after she took screenshots of his Zoom DMs and threatened to report him. Just a few minutes later, the same guy started hitting on another girl in the class’s public Zoom chat.
“The whole class chewed him out,” threerat wrote. “I don't understand why people think Zoom is a dating site.”
In-class Zoom flirtations are more than welcomed by some students who’ve grown tired of dating apps or live at home, eager to tap into the USC community. An Instagram account called USC Missed Connections has cultivated thousands of followers this year for its sole purpose of allowing people to anonymously shoot their shot with their classmates. Some of the messages are wholesome: “Nadia I love you – myself.” Others, not so much:
Note: The following messages were originally seen on Instagram. They are recreated here for your viewing purposes.
USC Missed Connections to Everyone
“Theodore L, can you pin me against your beautifully curated poster wall harder than I pin your Zoom video 😩 😩”
USC Missed Connections to Everyone
“I wanna rail you while we do Ops hw Katie W. And make sure you wear those glasses.”
USC Missed Connections to Everyone
“Bobby L in snu, I heard you fuck a lot. I want to die under you.”
End of messages.
Me to Everyone
Explicit messages like these may have the potential to come off as harassing if the sexual attention is unwanted by the recipients, especially on a public account. To avoid putting someone in an uncomfortable situation, Srivastava said that students must make an extra effort to consider people’s boundaries online, also taking into account the fact that many students are still in the process of figuring out what their boundaries mean to them.
USC Missed Connections may be full of thirsty college kids, but some people are simply not comfortable pursuing relationships with their classmates in the online space, even when they know there’s mutual interest. Tata Vivas, a USC senior double majoring in Theatre and Narrative Studies, is one of these. On the first day of spring classes, Vivas recognized her friend’s roommate in a large film lecture. She texted her friend to ask about him, who told her his roommate recognized her back, also texting him to say he’s interested.
But since that first class, Vivas has been too nervous to slide into his DMs. She’d only private message someone on Zoom if she was absolutely sure she wanted to “commit to the flirt,” she said. “In person, I would’ve probably sat next to him and been like, you look familiar. We probably would’ve been flirty by this point, but now there’s that weird barrier.”
Now, when Vivas logs onto class every week, she feels “some weird psychological shit” going on whenever she and her friend’s roommate both have their cameras on during lecture. “Zoom flirting is like, when one person smiles and then the other person smiles," she said.
Though a smile on Zoom can be interpreted as flirting for some, to others, the screen can provide enough of a disconnect to mask sexual behaviors coming from both the perpetrator and the recipient. Over Zoom, Ostergaard believes her neuroscience professor “felt more empowered” to ask her violating questions: “Staring the physical person in the eyes, I feel like he would’ve had a little bit more guilt or realization of what he was actually doing.”
On the other hand, Lynn went through the entire semester denying that the discomfort she grew to feel around Professor G. was because his behavior was inappropriate. This was hard for her to realize, because nothing he did reminded her of a harassment that felt familiar. She continued to ignore the anxiety he caused her until November, when he invited her to his personal Slack channel instead of the USC one they usually used. There, his messages got riskier.
Note: The following messages were originally exchanged over Slack. They are recreated here for your viewing purposes.
Professor G. to Lynn (Privately)
what’s with your new Slack thumbnail in the USC workspace? 😃
Lynn to Professor G. (Privately)
What do you mean
Professor G. to Lynn (Privately)
Talking about beauty tutorials to me - pff
You caught the bug
Lynn to Professor G. (Privately)
I’m so confused
Professor G. to Lynn (Privately)
You’re so witty, yet it takes you so long sometimes to get things 😉
You have a good range in your photos… I think mine are boring
That’s why i don’t have one
Lynn to Professor G. (Privately)
People just use me as their model a lot so I have a lot of them lol
Professor G. to Lynn (Privately)
What a drag haha
Subtle way to flex, miss
Lynn to Professor G. (Privately)
I don’t see it as a flex
Professor G. to Lynn (Privately)
I bet
It’s just so much teasing you
so much FUN
End of messages.
Me to Everyone
Lynn didn’t even know how to begin crafting a response to that. Her first thought was, is this man drunk?, followed by, I need to remove my Slack photo immediately.
Despite all the comments he’d made leading up to that point, this was when she felt Professor G. explicitly violated her bodily space, as sexual harassment is defined. She now knew he saw her as an object of beauty, as something desirable. And the more she realized how uncomfortable she felt with all the ways Professor G. showed he perceived her, her body, and her identity, the more she wondered how she was going to work for him the rest of the semester.
She’d take it one class at a time. The next day, she logged onto Zoom with her video off, her microphone muted. She didn’t want to be perceived by him. She’d minimize Zoom and disengage in class discussions. He got upset when she was unable to make deadlines and made careless mistakes in grading, and it hurt her even more to not have his approval anymore, something that had fulfilled her so much up to that point.
Once she stopped engaging with Professor G. on a personal level, she lost all her confidence as a worker. Oh well, she thought. Let me be a bad TA. She simply couldn’t bring herself to care.
Hey, it’s not your fault. Seriously.
Me to Everyone
Healing is a process that starts with freeing yourself of blame, a step that can be difficult. In her own process, Lynn experienced many of the emotions that USC students listed on the Campus Climate Survey as consequences of their sexual trauma: difficulty concentrating, difficulty going to work, avoiding the person, feeling numb, helplessness. Feelings of shame are also common among those who experience unwanted sexual attention, Srivastava said, as victims often believe they played a part in encouraging that behavior.
From USC's Campus Climate Survey.
At first, Lynn didn’t think she encouraged Professor G.’s behavior – no, she knew she encouraged it. There was no denying that she savored his praise and affirmation, responding to his messages at all hours of the day in an attempt to win him over. She did this to herself. She was the one who responded to his 2:30 a.m. request months ago, and now, she was facing the consequences of her own failure to set boundaries early on.
Then, another voice:
Maybe it shouldn’t have been on her to be the one to set those boundaries. Maybe her responses to him were not because she was trying to please him, but because she just wanted to be a good employee. Slowly, Lynn made an effort to internalize something she often forgot: This was her boss. She was not, had never been, the problem in their relationship, because it was a problem already the way he talked to her, the language he used that made their relationship feel less-than-professional from the start.
All the emotional turmoil she now held may just be the very proof that he should have never made her feel those things to begin with. He is an adult, as old as her dad, and she’s never felt more like a child: vulnerable, dependent, longing for love from adults who hold her self-worth in their hands.
Of course, Lynn only had these realizations after the semester was over, giving her time to reflect from a distance. She finished out the fall feeling like she failed as a TA, shattering her confidence. And she decided she’d never report the incident to USC, no matter how bad she felt – there was nothing to report, really. It’s not like he’d done anything serious to her.
Over 80% of the people who experienced sexual harassment on USC’s survey also did not choose to report the incident, one of the top reasons being because the incident wasn’t “serious enough.” Since the online environment contributes to people viewing their experiences of harassment as less legitimate, Weindling believes we won’t know the true scale of sexual harassment in online spaces until long after the pandemic is over, when people have had time to work through their trauma.
From USC's Campus Climate Survey.
Online and offline, there are many other reasons people choose not to report sexual harassment, including a fear of retaliation. The main reason Ostergaard didn’t report her neuroscience professor, she said, was because she was afraid he would rescind her letter of recommendation. Later, when she actually considered filing a report, she realized she also lacked evidence.
“I didn’t record any of the calls we had, and of course he wasn’t like ‘hey sexy’ in the emails he sent me,” Ostergaard said, feeling disillusioned about the flawed infrastructure put in place to deal with these incidents. “The body doesn’t leave that kind of mark anywhere else than psychologically, and they don’t even ask for your therapist’s info when they do Title IX cases,” she pointed out.
Ostergaard’s family and close friends have urged her to move on, which she’s fine with for now. Reporting her professor would require additional energy that could feel retraumatizing, but it’s a hard decision for her, since she’s “the only one that has the ability to get him punished.”
For those who do decide to come forward, Srivastava urges people to trust and believe them without question, “even if you’ve had a good experience with the perpetrator.” Doing so helps create a culture in which people feel empowered to speak up, making the community safer.
In that regard, Weindling said USC has a long way to go. “They’re so far behind in terms of thinking,” he said of USC’s administration. His team has met with USC twice to discuss the potential introduction of #NotMe to campus, but Weindling could not provide further details on what was discussed.
In the meantime, USC RSVP provides students with confidential services to report harassment, and will guide students through the available resources and follow-up steps upon request. Even if a student doesn’t want to file a report, RSVP still encourages them to document everything – screenshots, DMs, Zoom recordings – in case they decide to do so in the future. RSVP can be reached by phone at (213) 740-9355.
USC’s Office of Equity, Equal Opportunity, and Title IX handles incidents involving faculty or staff, and can be reached by phone at (213) 740-5086. A more comprehensive list of resources for students, including mental health help for survivors, can be found in USC’s Student Resources and Support Services Reference Guide.
It’s not just you.
It will never be just you.
Me to Everyone
Professor G. still wants to get drinks. It’s spring, and now that he and Lynn are both vaccinated, he hopes they can meet up at a brewery, or maybe for indoor dining. He told her that via text, right in the middle of sending her work tasks via Slack. Uncomfortable, but she’s used to this by now – so used to it that she might even say yes, just for the story.
Okay, probably not. But all this is to say, Lynn tries to prioritize rebuilding her confidence as a professional now instead of dwelling on how Professor G. makes her feel. His return offer felt like a new start. She’d been feeling so bad about herself for so long, that she latched onto the chance to prove to herself she could actually succeed at this job. And to avoid any further discomfort at work, she decided when she accepted the offer that she would never, ever tell him or any USC faculty how much he affected her.
And then something happened.
One of her students in Professor G.’s class from the fall reached out to her in April, and asked if she’s had uncomfortable interactions with him. That student – another Asian girl, Lynn noted – did not wish to be identified in this story. But in the process of talking to her, Lynn saw all her own experiences and feelings reflected back at her. She saw the messages exchanged late at night, the personal questions, the shame of being his favorite and then being his target for harsh criticism and disappointment.
And man, did Lynn hate herself in that moment. Her therapist had been right all along in saying that if it was happening to her, it was probably happening to other girls too. She just never believed it, because all this time, something inside her still felt she was to blame. But now, she sees once and for all that what happened to her wasn’t because she encouraged or deserved it, or did anything wrong. Now that there's another girl, she really believes it wasn’t her fault. She no longer has to feel guilty.
And USC will be hearing from the two of them.