That Sinks It: I’m Going Back To College!

by Coleen Singer at Sssh.com Porn For Women and Couples

During my senior year of college, I took a course in which all we did was study the works of John Milton, primarily his epic poem Paradise Lost. What really stands out in my memory isn’t the text of the poem, however, but the brutal perfectionism demanded by the professor, who for the purposes of this post I’m going to affectionately refer to as “Dr. Picky.”

When a student turned in a paper with more than two errors in it of any kind – typos, grammatical flubs, or any other error, no matter how minor – Dr. Picky would refuse to finish grading it. He would simply stop when he reached the third error, return it to the student and tell them to fix and resubmit the paper.

Since most students turned in first drafts with far more than two errors, the process would often repeat several times per student, with Dr. Picky marking three new errors on each submission, sending the student back to the drawing board again and again until the work met the baseline standard. Then, after all that, Dr. Picky would finally get around to telling you what shit the paper was from an analytical perspective, once all the obvious, simple errors had been excised from it.

Needless to say, Dr. Picky was not popular among his students. Personally, I loved the course, mostly because it forced me to focus on the details of my writing in a way I’d never done before, and, quite honestly, which I’ve never done again since – including in the process of writing this fragmented, grammatically problematic non-sentence you’ve just finished reading.

These days, I’d probably join my fellow students in hating the class, in large part because I have a hard time focusing on anything now, and seemingly endless poems written in an attempt to justify the ways of God to men, in particular. Plus, I have enough trouble with carpal tunnel syndrome as it is; the last thing I need is to spend six hours rewriting every paragraph to satisfy an obsessive academic with a very particular bug up his ass.

Bright College Days, Oh Carefree Days That Fly

College has changed too, though, it appears. For instance, in my day, while the early roots of the internet did exist, very few people were aware of that fact, much less using the internet on a daily basis to do research, watch cat videos or viciously troll total strangers for no good reason.

Nowadays, the internet is part and parcel of the college experience, and one college professor has derived the perfect form of online training for his students: A course called “Wasting Time on the Internet.”

According to a female student who took the course, assignments included “spreading rumors across the internet” and the class sitting in a circle while playing “the same porn video on our computers at the same time on full volume.”

“It created a very uncomfortable environment for us,” the student said. “Some of the class even got up part of the way through and left because they were uncomfortable.”

I’ll say this much for Dr. Picky: If you tried to get up and walk out on his “Wasting Time on the Internet” class, he’d slap a big, capital-I ‘Incomplete’ on your transcript without hesitation. No matter how offensive the porn was, every student in the room would know we’d best remain glued to our seats until the credits roll – or at least until the cum stopped dripping.

Wasting Time, But With Purpose

The professor behind the internet time-wasting course, Penn’s Kenneth Goldsmith, maintains that despite its name, the course isn’t merely a waste of time.

Goldsmith told Slate he encourages his students to “attend to the stuplime” – ‘stuplime’ being the point “when the stupid flips over into the sublime and you can’t pull the two apart.” 

“Something is so stupidly sublime or sublimely stupid that it becomes transcendent,” Goldsmith said.

I’m not sure if that statement is sublimely stupid, or stupidly sublime, but either way, it definitely sounds like the sort of thing which would come out of an academic’s mouth when trying to justify the fact he gets paid to oversee students who are supposed to be doing nothing at all.

One point in Goldsmith’s favor: He doesn’t box in his students in terms of how, exactly, they waste their time on the internet.

“Nothing is off limits: if it is on the Internet, it is fair play,” Goldsmith said. “Students watching three hours of porn can use it as the basis for compelling erotica; they can troll nefarious right-wing sites, scraping hate-filled language for spy thrillers; they can render celebrity Twitter feeds into epic Dadaist poetry; they can recast Facebook feeds as novellas; or they can simply hand in their browser history at the end of a session and present it as a memoir.”

Holy shit; they can hand in their browser history as a memoir? As an increasingly lazy ex-student, all I can say is where was this man during my whole college life? 

Here I thought I didn’t have time to write a memoir, but it turns out I’ve been generating one for years! If only I’d been archiving my browser cache, I’d have one hell of a personal retrospective to shop to publishers – albeit a highly disjointed and largely incomprehensible one, given my proclivity to follow random advertising links on right-wing news sites run by people who think we all need to know that right goddamn now is a good time to start stockpiling food, buying up shares of silver and/or preparing for a massive electromagnetic pulse bomb going off, because Obama.

Time to Pick a Major!

Unfortunately, even at Penn there’s no College of Wasting Time on the Internet, just Goldsmith’s course, which is (somehow) part of Penn’s English curriculum. Since I already have an undergraduate degree in English, it seems redundant to go get another one, even from Penn, so the challenge now becomes figuring out which other majors within which Goldsmith’s course could fit as an elective.

I’m thinking a degree in anthropology would be a good fit, particularly if my specific field of inquiry was millennials who waste time on the internet. Who knows: Maybe instead of composing a formal thesis, I can just turn over my notes from Goldsmith’s course and call it a “field journal.”

About Coleen Singer:

Coleen Singer is a writer, photographer, film editor and all-around geeky gal at Sssh.com (@ssshforwomen), where she often waxes eloquent about Female Friendly Porn, sex, pleasure products, censorship, the literary and pandering evils of Fifty Shades of Grey and other topics not likely to be found on the Pulitzer Prize shortlist. She is also the editor and curator of EroticScribes.com. When she is not doing all of the above, Singer is an amateur stock-car racer and enjoys modifying vintage 1970s cars for the racetrack. Oh, she also likes porn.

Visit Coleen at Sssh.com for more kinky sex news and original movies for Women and Couples.