Breaking the Boys’ Club
We live in the house the patriarchy built. And sometimes, we try to rearrange the furniture while the foundations are still cracking beneath our feet.
Dark Academia has always loved a clever girl, but only if she knows her place. She can be precocious, mysterious, even rebellious, but rarely is she allowed to want. Wanting, in these stories, is dangerous. It marks you. It makes you messy. And most of all, it makes you visible. Which, as any woman will attest, being seen isn’t always a good thing. Not in the current state of the world.
In this week’s episode of The Curriculum, we’re digging into the question: Can championing sexuality help dismantle sexism in Dark Academia? And this post is the more reflective and cerebral partner to that conversation, where we pull it apart like a ripe orange, and taste what kind of fruit we’ve grown.
The Aesthetic of Repression
The Dark Academia genre is often praised for its aesthetic: tweed, candlelight, the intoxicating hush of a library at midnight. But that aesthetic rests on a deeper mythology, one of intellect over emotion, restraint over chaos, and the mind as a purer domain than the body. Academia is holy.
In this hierarchy, sexuality becomes suspect. Women who express desire risk being cast as a distraction, a disruption, or a warning sign. Queer desire, too, is frequently sublimated; present, yes, but lurking beneath the surface, coded as tragic or forbidden. Wanting is a vulnerability. A risk.
But I think it’s also a kind of resistance. It’s an interesting foray into human nature and how much we’re willing to repress or celebrate all of the parts that make it so.
