Looking Back and Cringing

Strap yourselves in, because this blog is going to wander a bit.

I never had “The College Experience,” and for a long time I was pretty resentful about that. But now I have a different perspective.

Sure, I went to college—three of them, actually—and after changing majors a few times I did eventually get a degree. (They gave me one if I promised to leave.) But I never had the kinds of adventures that all those 80s movies I grew up watching had led me to believe I would have.

There were two major things I felt like I was missing out on. First, I wanted to have the academic and intellectual immersion that I had been hoping for and wishing for throughout my public (and briefly private) elementary, middle, and high school days. I wanted to go to a place where knowledge was prized, where learning was cherished, where people went not to get trained to do a job and be “productive”—which of course is capitalist code for being a useful revenue-generating tool of the plutocracy, trading your time for a few bucks as a worker and then trading your money for frivolous material things as a consumer, all for the sake of funneling wealth upwards to the ruling class—no, not just that. To become wise, informed, enlightened citizens; that was the goal. I wanted to go to a place where people stayed up late talking about writing and philosophy. Well, long story short, it didn’t happen. It turned out to be less of a goal and more of a fantasy.

The second thing I was looking forward to was the party scene. Having spent my childhood and early adolescence watching HBO and Cinemax, I was expecting college to be a non-stop riot of naughty, bawdy fun. I did not find this to be the case. For one thing, I never drank in college. (I didn’t start drinking until I was almost 30.) So a lot of the binge culture sort of failed to connect. Also, I had no friends. (That’s not exactly true, but if you round to the nearest ten, I had no friends. If you round to the nearest five, I had five, but just barely.)

Looking back, I’m really glad I wasn’t a part of that world, because now I understand that what I was seeing in those cheesy movies wasn’t harmless fun, it was misogynistic violence. Breaking into sorority houses to steal underwear? Spying on women in the shower? Secretly filming sexual encounters? Tricking women into having sex through elaborate plots involving mistaken identity? Using water-soluble material to leave women naked in the ocean? Those are not harmless youthful high jinks, that’s criminal behavior. The fact that Hollywood normalized it is horrifying in retrospect.

Sexual discrimination and assault stand out as persistent recurring themes in the Victoria da Vinci series. The main characters are accosted, molested, threatened, harrassed, terrorized, and marginalized in a multitude of ways that any modern-day female reader would find familiar and plausible. (Not much has changed.)

Indeed, being unfairly pushed out of the scientific community came to be the central, defining struggle of Victoria’s life. The unwillingness of male academics to accept her and take her seriously forced her down the path of secrecy and subterfuge.

In 2010, when I first started working on this story, long before it began to expand into a full-length novel and then eventually into three novels, I did not know that when I finished the trilogy at the end of 2017 there would be such a watershed moment happening. It was the year of rising awareness, with #MeToo trending and a group of “Silence Breakers” on the cover of Time magazine — a term I don’t actually care for, since there was never any real silence. Women have been screaming about this problem publicly for decades, and men have been downplaying and dismissing it.

Now that I’m an adult, I have on numerous occasions gone to parties where things do sometimes get quite out of hand (in a good way), and plenty of crazy stuff happens. But there is an important difference: empowered consent . The key word is “empowered.” In a situation where the dynamic is wildly lopsided, sex is always problematic, even when it is technically consensual. It is questionable whether a woman can truly consent to sex when she is under arrest and a police officer is propositioning her. It is questionable whether a woman can truly consent to sex when she is a low-level employee who desperately needs her job and a senior executive is propositioning her.

I am in no way anti-sex. To be clear, I am pro-sex. I am super-pro. But not without stipulations. When a young woman gets naked and/or performs a sex act in a swimming pool at a party at her friend’s house, for example, and it’s not because she particularly wants to but mostly because she is afraid that she will be rejected or ridiculed by her peers unless she does it, that is absolutely not cool. It’s just another form of subjugation; in that scenario she is being involuntarily commodified, and she is likely to deeply internalize that for a long time. If she does it when she’s 47 and married and her partner is standing nearby holding a beer and enjoying the show, on the other hand, it’s not only cool, it’s awesome. She’s having a good time for her own reasons and in her own way, not because she feels obligated but because she freely, willingly chooses to do it and thinks it’s fun. Nobody is pressuring anybody to do anything. Everybody is having a good time. Even more importantly, if another woman at the same party chooses not to do that, it’s also fine and no one is judging her for it.

To summarize: it’s OK to regard a woman as a sex object under two—and only two—circumstances:

(1) when she is in a position that enables her to grant empowered consent;

(2) when she makes it abundantly, enthusiastically clear that she wants to be regarded as a sex object . . . right now. It doesn’t mean it will be OK tomorrow. Or even ten minutes from now. This is a moment.

The VdV series is about burlesque dancers, so I'll use that as an example, When she is up on stage dancing for you, by all means, go ahead and look at her. (And don’t forget to tip her.) Hoot, clap, and whistle. She wants you to. But understand that it's her job. And once she's standing outside in the parking lot in her civilian attire waiting for her Uber, it is no longer all right to lurk in close proximity, ogling and leering. That will rightly make her feel nervous and uncomfortable. To summarize: on stage during the show=OK. Parking lot after the show=not OK. It's really not a difficult concept.

I do not blame cable TV for my college social failings—just for the false expectations. I was never a very outgoing or extraverted kind of guy. I was always socially inept. Not shy, just incompetent. I don’t lack confidence, I have just always lacked the ability to interact with other human beings in any normal way. (I have come to know that this is called “being a writer.”)

These days, I’m still socially inept, but now the Internet exists. So I can surround myself with other interesting people who are also mostly socially inept, and it’s all good. (Hi, everybody!)


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My author page:
www.AustinScottCollins.com

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