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Professor X is the name the narrator gives to the amalgamation of the male professors whose work on women she reads at the British Museum. His work is tinged with anger and sweeping pronouncements on the inferiority of women. The narrator finds herself illustrating Professor X and imagining his backstory. She creates a disagreeable, hideous man who feels slighted by women because they are not attracted to him. Although the narrator later walks back this caricature as one created in anger, the figure of Professor X looms throughout the essay in figures such as the Beadle who shoos the narrator off the quad and the insecure male writers she describes in Chapter 6. He represents all male artists or academics who fear losing their assumed authority and superiority over women and thus consider any advances toward the equality of the sexes a personal attack. Although his words are misogynistic and upsetting, they reveal more about him than women because they are spoken out of a psychological need for them to be true.
