The University Of Missouri Now Offers A Course About Sibling Incest

Rob Fox12 years ago

So I guess not everything about moving to the SEC is great.

A public university plans to offer a course this spring on “sibling incest in theory and literature,” Campus Reform learned on Tuesday.

According to the University of Missouri’s official description, the class will “examine the deployment of erotic desire, love, and sympathy as political, economic, and textual strategies, and analyze the gender dynamics involved in such deployment.”

The class is offered under Women’s Studies, as well as German, which seems odd, though I suppose you can’t talk about extreme sexual depravity without including the Germans. I have a feeling that this class is going to be filled with the most repulsive, awkward GDIs on campus.

Why? Not even because it’s a Women’s Studies course, but rather because there is no way any normal human being with siblings can sit through talking about brothers and sisters banging for three hours a week all semester without eventually cringing so hard they turn themselves inside out. The moment the professor says, “Now consider your own brother or sister,” would be the moment I dry heave, leap out of my desk, light my book on fire, and sprint to a strip club to wash away the shame with better, socially acceptable shame.

“DANCE FOR ME CANDY! DANCE UNTIL I FORGET!”

I’m assuming the professor who dreamt up this course, Stefani Engelstein, has a pretty free reign, and admittedly there is probably enough weird sibling incest stuff in the world of literature to (un)comfortably fill a semester long course. But still, why? WHY? What do you actually learn from this course? “Don’t take everything at face value kids, you never know when someone is fucking their sister?”

I took enough writing classes in college to know that most of the time, people in classes like these, students and professors alike, go looking for things that aren’t there, and they try so, SO hard to say that those things are in fact there. That’s because to them, simply understanding a book doesn’t make you smart, out-understanding everyone else is what REALLY makes you smart.

Or, to be more illustrative, it’s like this:

This is an actual conversation I once had with my screenwriting professor while at Mizzou. At the time the course was offered through the theater department, so you can imagine the type…

Professor: One thing I noticed, is that I think your two main characters might be gay.

Me: They’re not.

Professor: Well they spend a lot of time together in the story…

Me: Because they’re friends.

Professor: They seem very close.

Me: They’re friends.

Professor: And at one point one of them tells the other one to “blow me.”

(*Sighs*)

Me: That’s…it’s a saying. They’re not gay.

Professor: How do you know?

Me: …Because I wrote it.

But really, if you want to get an easy A in a writing or literature class, just say everyone is gay, and if you’re writing something, make it either a really funny or really sad story about being gay. That’s why my final screenplay for that class, Two Gay Clowns Get Married On 9/11, was a runaway A. It’s about two gay clowns who finally get to have their wedding after years of being denied their right to marriage, but they have it on the morning of September 11th, 2001, on the roof of the south tower, in full makeup. There’s a hilariously heartbreaking scene where one of the clowns, Zonko, attempts to save his partner, Mr. Twinkers, by tying hundreds of helium balloons to him. Crazy clown hijinks ensue and Mr. Twinkers dies tragically. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and quite frankly, you’ll reflect. Production begins next spring. Now if my composer could just figure out the perfect balance of whacky sad trombone and mournful strings.

Anyway, this class seems embarrassing and relatively useless, though I’m sure the seven weirdos who signed up for it will have a blast. As a Mizzou alum, I’m just going to forget this exists, like Norfolk State.

[via CampusReform.org]

h/t to @TimPDion