So, she’s upset they violated *her* human rights, but it was OK for her to do that to someone else?

Thank you!

In my experience, graduate departments are incestuous, gossipy and often sexually predatory battlegrounds in which the student are cannon fodder for the intra- and inter-departmental struggles for dominance. Anyone who asks, did you enjoy graduate school, has either never been to one or is being ironic. There ARE ethical professionals in academia but the impact of the nasty fuckers is huge and basically tolerated; what’s a student compared to a peer and the schhol’s reputation and liability, after all? Student go away in time – and sometimes earlier than scheduled.

You WILL get out of there. Take care of yourself and if that includes getting your degree – do it.

As to mixing lifestyle and workplace dependencies, let me add to my Beloved Master’s statement: mixing sexual dynamics in to any situation in which you have real workplace power over someone is IMHO just stupid. If you are a vanilla professor and have a sexual relationship with a current student who is in your classes or department, if you have a sexual relationship with someone you supervise or review, or if you are kinky and do it, you cross an ethical line and usually some agreed upon workplace standards of behavior. I really enjoyed _The Secretary_ as a movie.

But it’s bad risk and bad ethics. There’s nothing puritanical about saying, just don’t do it. It’s inextricably predatory and creepy.

Meanwhile – it sounds like you endure witness intimidation and harrassment, violations of privacy, and that a bad work environment is being created and tolerated. If you email us directly at BDSMquestion@gmail.com and would like us to connect you with a kink aware and friendly lawyer – let us know, we’ll talk.

I’m pissed that she keeps making it about kink, as if kinky = total lack of self control or awareness of professional ethics. I find it frustrating that so many people seem to conflate kink with unprofessional behavior, as if it is impossible to have and exercise self control if you are kinky. The lines have been blurred here, as you suggest, for tactical reasons. I resent the fact that Chavez is using sex worker lobbies and people who are interested in freedom of sexual expression to cover up seriously unprofessional behavior, some of which is not actually even about kink.

I worked for the same service as a dom before Chavez came on and quit, partially because the service makes you screen your own calls, gives you no support for dealing with bad callers (and in one memorable case, forced me to take a call with a client who had been trying to get my home address out of me and whom I had refused to talk to again) and puts pressure on you to do things I was unwilling to do. I quit and didn’t look back; that was a bad, bad working environment.

As far as the college goes, I worry about what happens to consent when someone holds a position of authority over you. I am kinky, and I realize that often in-session play gives the appearance of going over consent boundaries, but it ought to be negotiated, with the informed consent of both parties, and ought to not put your career or your normal life at risk, especially without warning. Adult does not mean unaffected by power dynamics at work, in academia, etc. Adult also does not mean able to anticipate all the ways something can go wrong. Life and people are occasionally kind of random. Adult also does not mean not naive. There are plenty of people in the program I am in who are naive. Freshmen are usually naive, kids who went straight from a good home to college are generally naive. Even adults sometimes miscalculate. And if those adults do not have previous experience with the kind of working environment they’re entering or are not adequately informed, they end up in situations where they are taken advantage of.

All this is to say that informed consent is really important, and is part of the problem with this case. Personally, I can tell you that a lot of what happened to me happened because I did not know what to expect and took my advisor’s advice (Chavez.) No one told me she was untrustworthy ahead of time. Moreover, I’ve never been in a graduate environment and know no one who had, so I walked in utterly blind of what kind of gossipy, predatory, incestuous dynamics tend to show up in graduate departments.

Who knows, maybe there are good departments out there? This is my only experience with a graduate school. And so far? It’s terrible.

All of this cost me. It continues to cost me and the other 7 students who ended up writing letters to the investigators about Chavez’ behavior. One left (lucky bastard) and the rest of us couldn’t afford to leave and have had to weather all the crazy shit Chavez has been telling people about us. We can’t afford lawyers (most of us are not rich), and the school refused to dismiss me at Chavez’ request, so we’ve had to stay and try to finish out our program with our professors fighting openly with one another and Chavez saying horrible things about us, the administration telling us we have to not talk about it, and our fellow students repeating the rumors Chavez has spread about us.

I can’t wait to get out. It’s not a matter of being unable to do the work, I just am fucking sick of dealing with the fact that Chavez knows she can get away with most anything she wants. And continues to behave poorly as a result of it, while the new director tells us to feel sorry for her because Chavez is so ‘devastated’ by what happened.

The problem in this case is that it is really hard to find out what the actually truth is, as everyone puts some prestige into the matter and lifestyle matters and discrimination gets mixed into it. The line between work ethics and lifestyle might have been blurred for tactical reasons.

Even tho it is adult people attending the courses she has, going into that sort of relationships with students undoubtedly create strings of dependencies. In Sweden we have policies for this at the universities, but they are hard to follow up on due to the work laws here – And relationships are formed anyway by the students and faculty member, but at least the involved parties know the danger.

Keep posting here if you want as you have the “inside view”.

I am a student in that dept, and one of the students in the lawsuit. The point is not kink, the point is that Chavez was making money off her student. She was also belittling her students, threatening and slandering people who disagreed with her, inviting her students to attend sex shows, falsely reporting Virginia Tech style school attacks, etc.

She’s the bad dom. The one you don’t play with because they don’t respect your limits. She’s the dom that will hurt you without meaning to because she has no self-control. The dom who is vain and makes you constantly kiss their ass, even though no flattery is ever enough. She’s the dom who sics people on one another for fun and cannot imagine what’s wrong with that as long as she likes watching the fallout. And she brought it with her to classes she was teaching. People who are dependent on you for career advice or who are dependent on you for their working or academic lives have a diminished ability to consent because of the consequences. If you are told, as a graduate student who has just gotten into a program, that a professor can ruin your professional life if they want to, it’s real damn hard to say no.