Far from the Seventies

In the past five years two memoirs have come out bearing the title Consent. Both are about sexual relationships between teenage girls and significantly older men, and both titles ring with irony. In 2020 Vanessa Springora, the editorial director of the French publishing house Julliard, published a memoir about a sexual relationship she had at age fourteen with a prominent novelist, Gabriel Matzneff, who was fifty when they met in the late 1980s. During the year of their involvement, Matzneff deceived and manipulated Springora while also having sex with other teenagers and preadolescents, then wrote a novel about their relationship using her real first name. France did not, at the time of Consent’s publication, have a legal age of consent, meaning that a relationship between an adult and a teenager or even younger child could be defended on the grounds that the minor was a willing partner. The irony of Springora’s title is barbed and provocative: Is this what we mean by consent? How can we justify it?

The American novelist and memoirist Jill Ciment’s irony is more elliptical—a raised eyebrow rather than a derisive glare. Her Consent, which came out this year, is about her former drawing teacher, the artist Arnold Mesches, with whom she began having an affair when she was seventeen and he was forty-seven. He went on to become Ciment’s husband of more than forty years. She reevaluates their relationship, especially its beginnings, in the light of Me Too, and though she poses serious questions about his culpability, by the end of the book the title seems to be asking: Is this not consent? Was I really incapable of it at seventeen? What can it mean to make this judgment retroactively?

Springora’s memoir has taken its place as a document in France’s Me Too movement, spurring public debate and eventually the legislation that established, in 2021, a national legal age of consent at fifteen. By contrast, Ciment’s memoir ends up complicating the movement’s dicta. She has a light touch and does no more than raise questions, but in doing so she leads us to the areas of ambiguity and irresolution in Me Too–era thought about sexuality: the somewhat arbitrary nature of an age of consent, our reliance on the testimony of self-described victims, the vexing question of how to account for the values of an earlier era in our moral appraisals.

Why does Ciment, after forty-five fruitful years of marriage, go sifting back through her earliest years with Mesches? She’s disturbed, in part, by some of her own distortions and omissions in an earlier memoir, Half a Life, published in 1996. That book, written while her husband was still alive, is mostly about growing up with a difficult father who raged at his family for minor household infractions, rarely made eye contact, and hated to touch or be touched by his children. (Ciment later came to believe he had undiagnosed autism.) After her parents divorced, her father made little attempt to see the children. Ciment, her three brothers, and their mother lived for years on the edge of poverty.

Mesches is only a bit player in Half a Life, the married art teacher whom Ciment pursues as an impulsive, besotted teenager. But the scene she wrote of their first kiss contained a small yet significant falsification, Ciment now tells us: though she described herself as the initiator of the kiss, it was in fact Mesches who had kissed her when she stayed to talk to him after class. Why did she rearrange their parts?

There is empowerment in remembering oneself as the sexual aggressor…. But I don’t believe that was my motivation. Was I protecting Arnold? The statute of limitations had long ago passed. Was I protecting my marriage? We had just celebrated our twenty-seventh anniversary.

Ciment can’t say why she did it, but the question itself, with its unnerving suggestion of a self-motivated cover-up, sends her poring over their early days.

Ciment was a sixteen-year-old aspiring artist when she first saw one of Mesches’s paintings in a Los Angeles gallery window while driving home from school. She parked and got out for a closer look. That night she asked her mother to call the gallerist and find out if the painter gave lessons. (She was too shy to do it herself.) It turned out that the painter taught drawing classes out of his LA studio to local amateurs and dabblers, mostly retirees. Ciment registered and “halfway through the semester,” she writes, “I caught him looking down my blouse,” an event she found “thrilling.” During another class he whispered, “I wish you were older.” She had turned seventeen by the last day of the course, when she stayed after class to get his advice about her upcoming move to New York City. She had fantasized about her art teacher for six months before he kissed her.

Ciment moved to New York shortly after the kiss (to spend four miserable months pretending to be an artist in an East Village squat alongside drug-addicted runaways), but she and Mesches corresponded—polite, decorous letters in which she sought and he offered professional advice and contacts. When she returned to LA she went to see him in his studio, and at this point, Ciment writes, it was definitely she who initiated their first sexual encounter.

She went home and waited expectantly for his call. A devastating silence followed. (“It never occurred to me that he might be scared witless to call me at my mother’s house.”) Finally, a month later, she received a short letter from him that, she speculates, must have been worded very carefully so as not to “alarm the mother should she open it, while at the same time lure the daughter.” The letter in its entirety read:

Dear Jill,

Are you ever coming back to class? Please call.

All the best, Arnold

At the time she was overjoyed to get it. Looking back, Ciment finds this letter to be “creepy” and “sinister,” a locus of culpability. It marks the point at which Mesches is no longer casually hitting on a student who happens to have walked into his class but actively pursuing her in the face of her own silence.

There’s a further damning detail. Though he asked her in his letter to “please call,” Mesches didn’t wait for her to do so—he called her himself. “He not only wrote a solicitation to an underage girl; when he didn’t hear back from the girl, he called her,” Ciment writes. “Even after more than four decades of marriage to him, try as I might, I cannot imagine how he was justifying his behavior to himself. Was he telling himself that a seventeen-year-old had bewitched him?”

But the answer to this question seems implicit in Ciment’s description of the spirit of the times. To Arnold’s wishing that she were older, the teenage Ciment had replied firmly, “I’m old enough.” It’s not hard to imagine that a man of the 1970s might well take a seventeen-year-old’s air of self-assurance at face value, and he wouldn’t have to be monstrously selfish to do so. The atmosphere among adults in Ciment’s world seems to be a combination of idealistic yearning and unapologetic lechery. The teacher, the mentor, the boss: if they were male, they were satyrs first. Or so a young person would be wise to presume based on the evidence of the teacher looking down her blouse, the college dean massaging her shoulders while she did her work-study secretarial job, the acting coach insisting they do naked breathing exercises together—all of which Ciment had encountered before she was twenty.

Ciment’s mother wasn’t pleased that she was dating a middle-aged married man, but her main concern was for his abandoned wife and children. Far from seeing her strong-willed daughter as a potential victim, her mother hoped that the affair might at least “tame” her. At the same time, Ciment’s mother was experiencing her own version of sexual liberation, which left her little ground to object to her daughter’s affair: she was dating two men, one fifteen years her junior, the other married to someone else. What should the new rules be in a society trying to free itself from sexual hypocrisy, shame, gendered double standards, and financial regulations that made married women economically dependent on their husbands? Nothing in her mother’s experience suggested that pairing off with a man your own age was a reliable path to stability and harmony: her agonizing youthful marriage had left her a poor single mother. “My mother had warned me never to become reliant on a man, never to allow myself to get trapped in marriage and have to chew off my own leg to escape, as she had,” Ciment writes. Where did a much older boyfriend fit into this picture? Who was to say that a middle-aged lover might not be more generous and levelheaded than a fellow teenager?

Even among American feminists, the hazards of sexual exploitation hadn’t yet assumed a central place in the discourse. Shulamith Firestone’s best-selling work of radical feminist theory, The Dialectic of Sex (published in 1970, the year Ciment met Mesches), includes the sexual liberation of children alongside that of women among the goals of an egalitarian society. What she primarily has in mind is to free children from the shame and guilt imposed by adults and to allow adolescents to engage in sexual activity with each other. But the word “consent” does not come up as a qualifying factor, nor does she draw a line when it comes to adults and teenagers having sex. She articulates only a positive freedom to: women and children can do “whatever they wish to do sexually. There will no longer be any reason not to.” Feminists would soon think of some reasons not to—by the mid-1970s sexual violence became a primary concern—but for the moment feminist thought was in formative flux. It was possible for Firestone to criticize men pressuring women for sex in one chapter while in another welcoming the prospect of free sexual expression for women and children, without considering how the former might impinge on the latter.

The atmosphere of social permission liberated cruel impulses as well as salubrious ones. Sometime after Ciment and Mesches became a couple, she learned from her mother that her youngest brother, seven-year-old Pete, had been molested by a man posing as a local divorced dad. Ciment’s mother was at work all day, and though a teenage brother was nominally in charge of watching Pete after school, the boy ended up wandering the neighborhood aimlessly, susceptible to the kind attentions of grown-ups. After Ciment’s mother reported the neighbor to the police, an investigation uncovered that his permanent residence was a house shared by twenty-nine men who belonged to a pedophile community. Ciment wonders if Mesches, who had joined her in rushing to her mother’s side as she filed a police report and dealt with investigators, felt in some way distantly implicated: “Sleeping with a willing seventeen-year-old is in no way analogous to child molestation, yet he must have been aware that he, like Burt, had benefited from the vulnerability of fatherless children.”

Springora too sees the absence of her father, who had been verbally and physically abusive toward her mother before the two divorced when she was five, as one of the main reasons she was magnetized by the first man outside the family who paid attention to her. For several years after the divorce, Springora’s father occasionally took her out to dinner. When she was about nine years old he stopped showing up for their dates.

She met Matzneff as a shy thirteen-year-old at a dinner party she attended with her mother. Springora was struck by Matzneff’s looks and voice. He stared at her intently all evening. “How could I not feel flattered that a man—not any man, an actual ‘man of letters’—had deigned to lay his eyes on me?” Matzneff began to write her letters, sometimes as many as two a day, “exquisitely charming and dripping with compliments.” Springora had by then already rushed to a bookstore to read one of his novels. Shortly after her fourteenth birthday she worked up the courage to write back. He began to hang out in her neighborhood, arranging to bump into her frequently, then sent a letter suggesting they meet. She imagined they would go to a café and chat, but when she arrived at the appointed street corner, he invited her up to his apartment, where they kissed. Springora initially swooned, felt “an utterly unfamiliar joy” at his romantic attentions.

Her mother at first forbade the affair, but when Springora protested she canvassed multiple friends for their opinions. “No one, apparently, was particularly disturbed,” Springora writes. Her mother came around and let the affair continue. Like Ciment’s mother, she too had been married young to a man her own age only to find herself trapped with a controlling husband, and she too was unsure where to set the boundaries of her daughter’s romantic life.

All this took place in the 1980s, but in the casual social acceptance of the mismatched couple, Springora sees the lingering atmosphere of the 1970s:

In the name of free love and sexual revolution, everyone was supposed to be in favor of the liberation of physical pleasure. Repressing juvenile sexuality was considered to be a form of social oppression.

In 1977 two open letters (one of them actually drafted by Matzneff) calling for the decriminalization of adult sexual relations with minors ran in Le Monde. They were signed by prominent leftist intellectuals including Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Derrida.

As the teenage Springora and Matzneff kept seeing each other, he became increasingly manipulative, deceitful, and controlling. He discouraged her from socializing with kids her own age and told her what to eat to avoid acne and weight gain. Though he acknowledged that he had had sex with other young teenage girls and boys, he told her that she was different and that he would give up his dissolute ways.

He did, in fact, bring her as his date to public events, including his appearance on the literary talk show Apostrophes, where he introduced her to colleagues and producers over drinks backstage after the filming. She was fourteen and he was fifty, but Springora writes that “no one appeared in the least bit shocked or embarrassed by the contrast between G. and my plump, girlish cheeks, bare of makeup and any signs of age.”

Matzneff encouraged her to read most of his novels, but he warned her—like Bluebeard—that several of them were forbidden. For a time she obeyed. But nearly a year into their relationship, as she began to have the first stirrings of doubt and antipathy, she read the forbidden books. There she found detailed descriptions of the autobiographical narrator having sex with teenage girls and with boys as young as eleven and twelve. Springora writes:

I thought about his readers. I imagined drooling, physically repulsive old men, transfixed by these descriptions of prepubescent bodies. Did being the heroine of one of G.’s novels mean that I too would become the medium for the masturbatory practices of his pedophile readers?

Her doubt and antipathy deepened. Not only did she find sex with Matzneff increasingly mechanical and tedious but, after reading his pedophile books, “something tacky and sordid now tarnished these intimate episodes in which I could no longer discern the slightest trace of love.” He received letters and calls from other teenage girls (often weeping on the phone), and one day she ran into him with another girl on his arm: he was cheating on her. Matzneff’s hold on Springora loosened, but it would take another year for her to extricate herself from the relationship, and much longer to recover from the alienation—from her own body, her friends, boys her own age—and the anxiety in which their affair and breakup left her.

Ciment and Mesches’s relationship may have begun in lechery, but it turned into something else. After about four months of meeting for sex in his studio followed by dinner in the Chinese restaurant downstairs, he told her that he loved her. She gave him an ultimatum: if he wanted to stay with her, he had two weeks to leave his wife. He left his wife.

Their balance of power began to shift. She was accepted as an art student at California Institute of the Arts. Mesches took up painting again a decade after having given it up in despair. He had been a thriving leftist social realist painter when the mode fell out of fashion in the postwar era. As he gingerly picked up his brush again, he seemed to look to Ciment for approval. To her hipster art student eyes, his vulnerability had an extra dimension of pathos: like most people at CalArts in 1971, Ciment “no longer believed that painting was relevant.”

Relevant or not, he set up a storefront studio on Crenshaw Boulevard and entered the most productive period of his career. When Ciment decided to start writing fiction, he helped her with the basics of grammar and spelling that she missed while cutting class for most of her school years. The couple ate and slept illegally in the back of the studio, which “suited my fantasies of how artists and writers should live.” They taught by day and painted and wrote in the evenings, sometimes pulling all-nighters.

We were both in a fervent state of uncharted creativity—me for the first time, him for the second…. We critiqued each other’s work—brutally, lavishly, meticulously—not as teacher and pupil, but as collaborators. If I saw something lacking in his painting, I would pick up a brush and make my corrections directly on the canvas. If he read a digression in my story that petered out, he would excise it with a thick pencil stroke. Sometimes I would cry and rip up all my pages, but he would invariably collect the shreds out of the wastebasket and tape them back together.

Where did Arnold get his energy? From me, of course. But please don’t equate this with an old vampire drinking a maiden’s lifeblood. To offer someone you love energy when you are practically bursting with it feels heady and magnanimous.

Following the promise of representation at a New York gallery, the couple moved to the East Village. Within a few years, Mesches was preparing for his second solo show—and also recovering from cataract surgery. There’s a painful irony to his wave of success, for at sixty-three he was now entering old age in earnest with Ciment as his caretaker. Checking on his recovery one night, she found him, eyes bandaged, snoring loudly from anesthesia: “He looked helpless and blind and unbearably old, and I feared that the most difficult part of my life was about to begin.” She was thirty-three. They would be together for another thirty years, until his death at ninety-three.

Ciment doesn’t want us to be naive readers of her memoir. She draws our attention to the artistic choices and necessary artifices of the genre: “Note that I use the term scene, not memory,” she instructs us—“scenes in a memoir are no more accurate than reenactments on Forensic Files.” With this caveat, she goes on to note that in the two scenes of physical intimacy in her first memoir, “Arnold is passive, either lost in thought or asleep when I appear like a nymph in the forest.” She had chosen to depict herself as the aggressor, even when it involved straying from the facts of their first kiss. Perhaps seeking to balance the picture, in Consent she offers more graphic description of their sexual encounters. More precisely, she offers graphic detail on one subject: the state of Mesches’s penis.

In the first memoir, Ciment writes that while they usually met in his studio, “sometimes our brief assignations took place at Bob’s Big Boy, or Four-and-Twenty Pies, or a deserted beach, or a park no wider than a bowling alley that edged Santa Monica Boulevard.” In Consent, she returns to that park, this time noting that it’s where she “practiced fellatio on him in the tall grass.”

Wedged between Santa Monica Boulevard and Barton Way, the park was more a center divider than a pastoral setting. Its foliage had been designed to look sumptuous from a speeding vehicle, but to a crawling Beverly Hills patrol car with a suspicious spotlight, the tall grasses and queen palms were not especially concealing.

One evening, a beam of light crossed us. I froze, held my breath until the beam moved on. Arnold did not lose his erection and that surprised me. In his studio, he lost his erection anytime the phone rang.

Instead, he got harder in my mouth.

Set off with a dramatic line break, Mesches’s mounting erection seems pressed into service to mean something. But what? His apparent enjoyment of semipublic sex is immaterial to moral questions about pursuing a teenager. I can only guess that a kind of literary displacement is going on: his slight streak of exhibitionism stands for a slightly questionable aspect of character. The man who is a little bit perverse is also a little bit blameworthy—but no more. We can be assured he’s not too far gone thanks to another scene tracking his tumescence. Before Mesches and Ciment moved into a place of their own, she writes, they stayed in the temporarily unoccupied home of a friend who offered them his young daughter’s bedroom. Their first nights together as a couple were spent on a purple-canopied children’s bed with Barbie-themed sheets. “The irony of our landing in a pedophile’s daydream was not lost on me. I found it funny, but it troubled him. He could not get an erection on the Barbie sheets.” Phew, I think we are meant to think. He’s not that bad.

Ciment doesn’t tell us how she felt about sex in the parkway median. Did she too find the threat of exposure exciting, or did she feel freer in the privacy of his studio? Was she letting him lead the way because she wasn’t yet sure what she liked? Did she find some aspect of their age difference hot? While writing her first memoir, she tells us, she found it difficult to summon thirty-year-old memories of Mesches’s body. She only brings up the conjunction of age and eros once, to describe something she noticed just before they had sex for the first time: “His…middle-aged neck sagged. I found it repulsive, yet I chose to overlook it.” Strictly speaking, you can’t choose to overlook something—either you notice it or you don’t. Ciment’s suggestion of a rational and willed operation gives the impression that for her, in that moment, sexual desire is taking a back seat to other kinds of desires (for his arousal, for his attention). But it’s only an isolated moment; it is impossible to know whether it reveals something broader about their sexual relationship.

Getting an erection on Barbie sheets would not, of course, have made Mesches a criminal or a bad person, just as failing to get an erection on those sheets doesn’t absolve him. But in the absence of any clues to Ciment’s own erotic experience, and in the absence of much commentary generally (she’s of the show-don’t-tell school), her partner’s erections gather an excess of significance, as if they might tell us something about his nature. It’s an unfortunate effect in a memoir raising difficult questions of sexual ethics: an associative muddle of arousal, actions, fantasies, and intentions in the situations where we might most want to disentangle them.

The culpability of a Matzneff, someone who manipulates and seduces adolescents, is clear enough. How do we weigh the culpability of a Mesches? While Ciment expresses incredulity at his long-ago, unscrupulous pursuit, one thing that she never says is that she feels wronged.

“A vulnerable adolescent is always going to seek love before sexual satisfaction,” Springora writes, making the relationship with an adult a treacherous one for a young person who unconsciously longs for the kind of intimate and holistic affirmation that is more properly the province of the good parent. Yet she also writes, quite startlingly, that the trouble with Matzneff is not so much that he seduced her when she was fourteen but that he did not love her when he did it:

It might indeed have been unique and infinitely romantic if I could have been sure of being the first and the last [teenager in his life]—if I had, in short, been the exception in his love life. If that had been the case, how could anyone fail to pardon his transgression?

By that definition, much depends on the older partner’s sincerity, in which case we certainly must pardon Mesches, who was not only sincere but steadfast. Though her example seems like a daredevil trick one shouldn’t try at home, Ciment did succeed in getting what she needed from her paternal stand-in: his keen attention and undivided devotion. The marriage she describes is one of enduring mutual support and love.

When Mesches returned to painting in the early days of their cohabitation, one of the first small canvases she finds him working on is a portrait of her, naked and sitting on a bed, her head turned squarely to the viewer. She is entranced by the vision:

The girl in the painting had a steely confidence in the knowledge that she was loved.

I had never seen that girl before.

I had seen someone who looked like her in the mirror, but whenever I caught my reflection, I became stiff and my expression turned artificial.

With this painting, she writes, he “showed me who I might become.” It’s troubling, the influence of an older lover, even under the best of circumstances, as these surely must be. And we have to balance the revelatory painting against a bombshell Ciment drops in passing later in the memoir. Before she turned to writing in her twenties, she had a brief period of uncertainty. She had trained as an artist, but by graduation she had lost faith in the kind of conceptual art practiced at CalArts. Yet she didn’t feel she could go back to drawing and painting either:

[I] feared I would become Arnold’s lifelong apprentice, forever mired in the emergent state of promising. He had not only taught me how to draw; he had taught me how to see. I would forever perceive the physical world through the veneer of his interpretation.

She went silent as a visual artist because she feared the shadow of his influence? Seems like a significant item for the ledger, but Ciment floats away from its implications—maybe because she quickly found her vocation as a writer (and therefore no harm done), or maybe because she doesn’t want to spell out the obvious: that having the same person as mentor, lover, and domestic partner can be hazardous to the young artist.

Given the volume of rape, coercion, and harassment claims brought to light during Me Too—claims of harm that were ignored or covered up or retaliated against for years or decades—it can seem foolish to spend much time weighing the ethics of what amounts to a kiss, a letter, and a phone call that were welcomed by their recipient and led to a satisfying partnership. But what if our concern is not so much to arrive at a verdict on the Mesches of 1970 as to figure out what our own present-day positions and choices should be? How young is too young, and how big an age gap is too big?

Ciment was under the legal age of consent in California when they met, but statutory rape law is of limited use as a guide to ethics. (If Ciment had had sex with someone her own age, for example, they both would have technically committed a misdemeanor in California, where having sex with a minor is a crime even if you are a minor yourself. If Ciment and Mesches had met in New York, where the age of consent was seventeen, there would have been no legal violation.)

Though the legal age of consent still ranges from sixteen to eighteen, the unofficial, crowd-sourced age of consent has shifted upward dramatically, as high as one’s mid-twenties. Parts of the Internet smolder in disapproval over heterosexual May–December relationships in which she’s an early May and he’s a December. Some of us seem to be in no mood to authorize any particular age of consent, preferring to maintain a vigilant suspicion of all much older men. (Female Decembers get a pass or even a high five if they date young men, demonstrating that the scrutiny is as much about fighting sexism as about protecting young people from abuse, though the two are often unhelpfully collapsed.)

But if we tremble for the vulnerability of a May, our unease should cut against the conservative tendency to idealize and promote committed relationships as a solution to the hazards of dating. In a world where young people, particularly women, can’t trust their casual dates (or their bosses, colleagues, coaches, doctors, or clergy), it’s tempting to see long-term relationships as safe harbors from the dangers and dissatisfactions of uncommitted sex, as well as salves against a wantonly exploitative social hierarchy. Yet enmeshment has its own dangers, a fact that many of us seem to perceive most clearly when contemplating a young woman entering a relationship with an older man. Apart from the potential for domestic violence, a steady partner can have an unsettling degree of influence over career choices, social life, and sensibility. Long-term relationships can be nightmares of manipulation, and inequalities within them can exact greater compromises from one partner than the other.

This can be true even without an age gap and in any gender configuration. Domesticity is not the solution to the problems of casual sex and dating—it’s just a different kind of minefield. Or you could say, a touch more optimistically, that it offers a different set of risks as well as pleasures. I kept returning to the stifling same-age marriages of the mothers in these books, and in particular to the relief of Ciment’s mother in escaping her husband and freely seeing other men. Even she, however, did not get everything she wanted from dating. Eventually, she married again—two more times.