Consent: A Memoir
Jill Ciment
(Pantheon Press)
The name Dominique Pelicot has been all over the news, all over social media. A 72-year-old French woman’s husband spent a decade drugging her and inviting dozens of men over to rape his unconscious spouse, something it’s apparently not difficult to find men willing and eager to do.
There are evil men in the world, getting away with things left, right, and centre, undeterred by #MeToo, the 2017 movement that fleetingly made women’s safety the thing everyone who cared cared about. The Taliban for all I know saw the hashtags yet proceeded, undeterred.
***
“Me Too?”
Jewish writer and academic Jill Ciment’s 2024 memoir, Consent, is a mere 145 pages long (I wince at the expression slim volume), but the gist of it is found in that two-word question therein.
The purpose of the book—for it has a purpose—is to address whether a relationship that began under what would now be called problematic circumstances is forever tainted by the initial encounter. “Was my marriage—the half century of intimacy, the shifting power, the artistic collaborations, the sex, the shared meals, the friends, the travels, the illnesses, the money worries, the houses, the dogs—fruit from the poisonous tree?”
The question itself is perhaps less interesting than the addressee. Because it’s clear-cut what Ciment is grappling with, and why easy answers would be out-of-reach. She got together with American-Jewish painter Arnold Mesches in 1970, when he was 47 and she was 17, and in a jurisdiction (California) where the age of consent was 18. (Born in Montreal in 1953, her family moved to Los Angeles a decade later.) She was also his art student—not in a for-credit capacity, but still, there was the power imbalance of the sort a #MeToo analysis must flag. But they had a long and good marriage, one during which her own career blossomed (her novel Heroic Measures became the 2015 Morgan Freeman-Diane Keaton film 5 Flights Up). Can the marriage itself retroactively cancel out its inception or nah? There is no answer.
But who is concerned about this? Mesches—she calls him Arnold, and I will follow suit, since it is Arnold-the-character I’m acquainted with—died in 2016, so there’s no one knocking on his door, accusing him of having committed statutory rape in 1970. Ciment herself knows that the relationship, against many if not all odds, worked out great, for reasons too idiosyncratic to project onto other such pairings. What, in 2024 (or, given the book publishing timeline, in the years just before) prompted this reassessment?
Ciment imagines—projects—what others see when they look at her, judgments they may or may not really be making. This is both at the level of specific scenes, wondering what others see when they see her with Arnold, and on that of the book itself.
So she is implicitly addressing any #MeToo-driven detractors her relationship may have had, but also, in a sense, the critics of #MeToo who would point to the existence of happy couples (perhaps their own parents!) who’d met when she was his student, or when he was her boss. Maybe the point is less that she had the epiphany that her relationship began creepily (this much was clear even in 1970!) and more that exceptional stories like this get held up as examples of why it’s fine, contrary to what #MeToo killjoys claim, for men to lunge at their underage female students.
Consent is a kind of referendum, both of the early 1970s, when she first got together with her much-older husband, who was a whopping 30 years her senior, did I mention he was an older man, and of the 1990s, the more recent before-times, during which right-thinking North American liberals still strove to be sophisticated and French about such matters, feminism be damned.
It was 28 years earlier that Ciment published her first memoir, Half a Life, and Consent is a kind of self-directed J’Accuse, faulting her 40-something self for not having the mores of the post-2017 landscape. She had, she now believes, let her husband off the hook, giving too much credence to the idea that she had seduced him. Much hinges on who initiated the first kiss, something the two memoirs dispute. Having not been in the room, I cannot say.
California’s age at consent at the time was 18, which speaks to bad judgment on Arnold’s part, but in Canada it’s 16, and she was not—she spells out—a child-child. Their relationship began when she was 17, an age at which it is normal for many Canadians to start college or university. She was an emancipated minor, a category that recognizes the neither-here-nor-there aspects of the late-teens years. She highlights her own relative lack of sexual experience at the time they got together, but there’s nothing remarkable about having had a handful sex partners prior to meeting one’s spouse.
What would have changed had things been consummated after her 18th birthday, or for that matter her 24th? Arnold could still be accused—as she quasi-accuses him—of having groomed her, that is, of setting the stage for a future relationship, gaining her at an age where she was too young to know what she was doing. Ciment writes about the teenage brain’s limited decision-making capacities, something regularly (if questionably) invoked to cast doubt on whether anyone under 25 is really enough of an adult to make life choices.
***
#MeToo didn’t invent the lech. The skeezy teacher was a trope long before Harvey Weinstein’s 2017 downfall, with episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The Golden Girls devoted to adult-education instructors who tried to get adult-adult with uninterested female students. That skeezing on one’s of-age (or late-middle-aged!) students was already frowned upon in liberal-minded sitcoms in the 1960s and 1980s, respectively, suggests that there was no mythic mid-century era when a man hitting on his underage art student was considered noble behaviour.
The environment Ciment grew up in recalls the 1998 film, The Slums of Beverly Hills—Jewish Los Angeles, but populated by kids without money rather than grown-up movie producers. Good fodder for a moment when Jews stand accused of infinite privilege, at any rate.
Boundaries are in short supply in the now-71-year-old Ciment’s world during the 1960s and ’70s. She recalls when her mother first received oral sex, something I cannot imagine anyone wanting to know about a parent, but there it is. She took a college class where everyone masturbates together, because they hadn’t yet invented (or, returned to) listening to a professor drone on about Hegel. That she pairs off with an old dude is a curiosity but more in the sense, in the context, of being a bit rebellious, a bit chic. Someone selected her. And not just anyone. An artist.
***
Despite the title, consent itself is in some ways less central to the proceedings than Ciment’s role as the younger woman. Arnold was older. This isn’t the only thing the reader learns about him, but it’s certainly his primary attribute. The repeated references to his age start to seem a bit like when a man won’t stop talking about his “Japanese girlfriend.” Often, in relationships, differences that feel salient at the beginning recede in importance, supplanted as they tend to be with more mundane questions to do with the loading of dishwashers. An age difference of a couple years might seem immense to two teenagers and not to those same two individuals decades on. Not so, perhaps, one of three decades. The older man is, soon enough, an old man.
The age gap is the point. Of the book, and, possibly, the relationship itself. Ciment remembers finding Arnold’s aging body revolting in certain respects when they first got together, despite being sexually attracted to him. She refers to their relationship as similar to sugar-daddy ones minus the wealth, but it’s clear—clear, that is, because she spells it out—that the transgression itself is the turn-on, that, or the feeling of being appreciated as a real grown-up. Something, at any rate, makes Arnold’s old-dude-ness a feature rather than a bug. As with all turn-ons, there isn’t a clear-cut explanation. She had a strange relationship with her strange-sounding father, but this does not send every 17-year-old into the arms of a 47-year-old. “The heart wants what it wants,” as Woody Allen infamously remarked, but it cuts both ways.
In Consent, Ciment fixates on her own then-youth, at times in ways that come across as erotic. She writes repeatedly about her bralessness, about how bras were not fashionable at the time, and how she, personally, was not wearing one at this or that moment. This detail is dropped in a way that indicates her sexual magnetism at the time, as though an underwire or bralette was all that stood between her life’s trajectory and conventionality, safety, something else. She was so young and so braless.
Ciment has long since reached the age at which no one cares if you’re wearing a bra (past 35 or 40, bralessness reads as leaving the house in pyjamas), but she is immortalized in the text as the sort of woman (or, girl) about whom this would be a fascinating thing to know. The cover image is Arnold’s first portrait of Ciment, as a teenager. In a kind of twist on Oscar Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray, artistic renderings—her own memoirs, plus this painting—allow a woman now in her 70s to project youth forever. Pardon the cynicism, but for women, youth is often relevance. Even if more interesting things happened to you after you turned 20, the world may not be as bothered.
Consent in some ways recalls Lucinda Rosenfeld’s 2023 essay in The New Yorker about an ill-fated affair Rosenfeld had with her college professor. It’s a complicating of the #MeToo narrative, wherein the younger woman is the victim, preyed upon, without any agency of her own, without sexual desires or her own baggage.
But the essay that came to mind more consistently was “The Case for Marrying an Older Man,” a viral essay by Grazie Sophia Christie, which I talked about back in April. In cool, rational terms, Christie determines not just that her dating marketplace value is higher while she’s young, but that there’s something to be gained by being the younger woman. Sure, you’ll get older, but you’ll be fixed in your husband’s mind as the slip of a girl he was fortunate enough to snag.
Just as I was having this thought, I got to the part of the book where Ciment spells out—with admirable self-awareness—that this is indeed the point of being the younger woman. “How does one grow old as the younger woman? One doesn’t. I always looked fresher than he.” This leads to her taking on a caregiving role as Arnold ages, about which, she asks, “Were my acts selfless, or was this the price I was willing to pay for my own eternal youth—to always be the younger woman? After all, I suspected that my Shangri-la would vanish upon his death and I would become old overnight.” She may have feared this in vain, given that the vibe I got from the book was extremely young-woman, so young, this despite being the same amount younger than Ciment by the same number of decades as Ciment was her late spouse.
***
Arnold was the right man for Ciment, in that lid-for-every-pot sense. Not because 17-year-old girls generally ought to pair off with 47-year-old men, but because in this case, that is how it played out. On paper, it shouldn’t have worked, but it did. He aged out of caddishness (as men will), while she didn’t stay 17 forever.
She wasn’t a muse, tossed aside in favour of an even younger woman (or girl) when the time came. They didn’t have kids (having-it-all perhaps not the apt phrase), so she wasn’t stuck home with a baby while he gallivanted artistically around the world (as his first wife was, a violation arguably more art-monster than the fact of having slept around). She remains, at least as of writing the book, enthralled with his artistic genius, which is I’m sure something artists would like in a partner. Ciment nevertheless proceeded with an artistic education and literary career of her own, not held back by the respected-artist husband. She wasn’t relegated to wife-of, but rather made art often inspired by their relationship. Maybe he was the muse! She read her work to him. He was what most everyone’s supposed to want: a supportive spouse.
***
You can see all this, you can accept that some relationships that begin as they should not end up working out, and still come down on the side of, 47-year-olds should keep it in their pants and leave 17-year-olds be. Even 17-year-olds pestering them, should this be their plight. Maybe it’s my bourgeois morals, maybe it’s having daughters, but this is alas where I side.
It gets trickier once you factor in the newer, more questionable quasi-taboos. #MeToo has long since stopped being the of-the-moment fixation, but it has left its mark. Relationships between what would have once been deemed consenting adults now get picked apart for imperceptible or theoretical power imbalances. It’s squicky to meet someone at school or at work, even absent any supervisory capacities, because (supposedly) women find it threatening to be hit on, even by men who take no for an answer.
Facilitated by the existence of dating apps—that is, by the possibility of meeting someone only after vetting their willingness—we now have a generation increasingly convinced it’s weird and problematic to flirt with someone your own age, with whom there is no power imbalance, in a public space. A woman should be allowed to go to the supermarket without some man talking to her! (Never mind that most women will at some points in their lives want this sort of thing, or initiate it, even.) Age-gap discourse is not, in its current incarnation, particularly concerned with what would legally constitute statutory rape. Rather, it’s all about whether it’s a violation (of what? of whom?) for a 30-year-old to date a 50-year-old. #MeToo’s legacy is, in part, this proliferation of relationship categories that are a bit hmm, one that will soon enough encompass all potential love affairs.
If you issue blanket bans on an ever-wider range of relationships, you avoid heartbreak and exploitation, but you also cut off the possibility of human connection, and in many instances, of the creation of new life. This—along with what to do, justice-wise, regarding the bad men—is the unaddressed aspect of #MeToo. Are we better off alone than partnered with someone who wasn’t born at the exact same moment we were, whose marketable skills are not precisely the same as our own? I don’t think anyone sat down and decided as much—there is no Council of #MeToo—but this is effectively where you’re left, if you nod along to this ever-greater list of fraught categories without any sort of counterbalance. All relationships have power imbalances, age gaps, and—if opposite-sex—the baggage of millennia of sexism. But the bar needs to be higher than hmmm… for getting in the way of love.
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The CJN’s senior editor Phoebe Maltz Bovy can be reached at [email protected], not to mention @phoebebovy on Bluesky, and @bovymaltz on X. She is also on The CJN’s weekly podcast Bonjour Chai.
