Anatomy of a Mid-life Crisis

A student, working on an article for a features-writing journalism class, asks, "Why do professors endanger their careers and livelihoods to have sex with their students?"

Ah, to answer this question is to unlock one of the academic heart's profoundest secrets! The mid-life crisis has become such a pop culture cliché that it's now difficult to fathom how real and wrenching this phenomenon is to those who experience it. But it is all too real to wake up one morning, and suddenly realize that the number of days you've lived now exceeds the number of days have left. You're then quickly flooded by a list of things you never did, a list that will likely include the standard adventures ("I've never seen the pyramids! I've never driven a race car!"). But the most galling realization at that moment for the middle-aged professor is what his years of self-denial during youth (because the professor single-mindedly pursued the monastic discipline of advanced academic study) made him miss. When he was 22, he wasn't surfing or skiing every day, and nailing a smörgåsbord of delectable chicks every night. Add to that the fact that most professors are/were nerds when they were in their early twenties, and that therefore the young women in their early twenties who were the object of those professors' longings looked at them like they were some kind of disgusting insect, and the pain of having arrived at the sunset of one's days becomes even more acute.

But into this gloom, this despair, though, a ray of sunshine breaks when a beautiful young woman, 21 or 22 years old and therefore the reincarnation of the gorgeous babes who wouldn't look the professor's way when he was that age, longingly gazes at him, or even (I hear this sometimes happens, though it's never happened to me) throws herself at him. What's he to do? Very few men are capable of turning down an offer of freely available sex; and when that offer comes in the midst of a thoroughgoing existential crisis, it's even more irresistible. At that moment, other considerations fly out the window--"I thought," says the professor to himself, "that I was finished, that Death was walking beside me with his spectral arm around my shoulder, whispering sweet blandishments and leading me gently on to my eternal sleep; but this young woman wants me! She's heaving with vitality and flushed with desire! FOR ME! For this desiccated shell of a man, in whom the fires of passion have long since burned out, and for whom the giddy transports of youthful ardor are just dim memories! For me, who was always an outcast from life's feast! For me, in whom professional ambition and temperamental timidity have conspired to keep me living life at an arm's length from the elemental passions I've been too frightened or too busy to experience! I've studied life, but I've never LIVED! And here is life, throbbing, beautiful, and authentic, offering itself to me in the very twilight of my days! I've still got it!"

When that much is at stake, when life itself seems to be slipping through your fingers, what do job, family, and reputation matter? "This is my last chance!" cries the professor to himself. "When I was young, I never lived, and now death is staring me in the face! I'm entitled to grab one last morsel of life before I die! I've served humanity selflessly; now it's my turn to get a reward for all that self-denial, for all the looking-on I did when everyone around me was indulging in life's bacchanals! If I don't do it now, I never will, and I'll die in an agony of torture because I'll know that when life gave me once last chance, I turned it down!" How can something as meaningless and trivial as "career" stand up to realizations like these?

Of course, I could be reading entirely too much philosophy into what is, in the end, just male horniness, which can never bag too many hot babes.