anticipated having a ritualistic quasi-religious experience, were confused. What they had enrolled to hear, and wanted to hear, and demanded to hear, was not what they heard. Some of them blamed her for not replying adequately. They had been angry. It had been humiliating. She had little with which to respond to simple, clear points having to do with fetal endocrinological hormonalization studies, hormonal inoculation studies, animal studies, and such, let alone the overwhelming cultural evidence with which she was confronted. She insisted, of course, on the irrelevance of biology, the insignificance of human nature, if it might, in some trivial sense, exist, the importance of ignoring millions of years of evolutionary history, the meaninglessness of genes, of inherited behavioral templates, and such. But the semester, by then, was muchly lost. How she hated a student who thought, who criticized, who challenged! Did he not know he was there not to question but to learn, or subscribe? He could have had at least the courtesy of pretending a hypocritical conversion to the prescribed doctrine. Others did, surely. One supposes he could have done as much, but he had not. Politeness, if not prudence, would have seemed to recommend such a course. She insisted on the importance of social artifacts, for example that men and women were not natural beings, but mere social artifacts, the manufactured products of culture and conditioning, that that was all. He had then asked for an explanation, or speculation, as to why all cultures, without exception, had designed their social artifacts in exactly such a way as to produce the various constants at issue. Since the most obvious, simplest, uniform, universal explanation for this fact would seem to be congruence with biological predispositions, with human biogenetic templates, she had dismissed the question as naive and pointless. She had declined to clarify why the question had been naive or pointless. Lastly, she had insisted, in anger and confusion, on fashionable postmodernistic analyses, on the alleged social aspect of, and role of, “truth,” as a weapon of ideological warfare, on the right of the scholar activist to alter, conceal, suppress, invent and falsify in order to comply with political requirements, that “truth” must be politicized, that propaganda must have priority, that one must practice the pragmatics of intimidation, that reality, objectivity, truth, and such, were only deplorable inventions, manufactured by men to oppress women, and such. He then asked her, if this were her view, if her earlier assertions, and such, had surrendered any possible claim to objective truth, and might be dismissed as mere propaganda. She refused to respond to the question. He then asked her if her general views on truth itself, its alleged subservience to political ends, its relativity, subjectivity, or such, were themselves true, or not. Did she claim that her theory of truth, that there was no objective truth, was itself objectively true, or not? Again she ignored the question. She looked away from him, dismissing him, and his questions, and addressed herself to others in the class, inquiring into their views of an assigned reading. After the class she detained him, to speak with him alone. “Why have you taken this class?” she asked. He had shrugged, looking down upon her. Now, it seemed, it was his turn not to answer her question. How she then hated men, and him! He was so large, she felt so small, almost insignificant, almost intimidated, before him. She was older than he, of course. She, at that time, was in her late twenties. He may have been in his early twenties. This difference in age, as well as her status as the instructor, should have given her dominance in this encounter. That she knew. But, oddly, it did not seem to do so. He seemed muchly different from other students. Suddenly, unaccountably, before him, she felt strange, unusual sensations, which seemed to swell