Consent: A Memoir

by Jill Ciment

What do I call him? My husband? Arnold? I would if the story were about how we met and married, shared meals for forty-five years, raised a puppy, endured illnesses. But if the story is about an older man preying on a teenager, shouldn’t I call him “the artist” or, better still, “the art teacher,” with all that the word teacher implies?

But did I have the agency to consent? The teenage brain is impulsive. There is a mismatch between the limbic system, which is the center of emotion, and the prefrontal lobe, which controls logic and reasoning. California’s age of consent is eighteen.

Did the art teacher’s behavior—the extra attention he gave me in class, the evening he used my arm to demonstrate how the tendons cross over the elbow, the night he looked down my blouse—qualify as child grooming, a term that psychologists use to describe a pedophile’s recruitment techniques?

“Can I ask you something?” the homeless woman said. “How much do you get paid to take care of him?”

(If you leave your wife for another woman, you might horse-trade for the better car, but if you leave your wife for a teenager, you take only your toothbrush.)