The name Dominique Pelicot has been all over the news, all over social media. The 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.

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“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?”

Review by Becca Rothfeld: Jill Ciment’s new memoir, “Consent,” is an unflinching reappraisal of a life-defining relationship. https://t.co/1TQV0VY4Ql

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, 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.

CONSENT by Jill Ciment reexamines her decades-long marriage through the lens of #MeToo, questioning past behaviors & power dynamics. HALF A LIFE humorously explores her tumultuous childhood &........

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