"Fuck, I'm risking my entire life to be with you! I wish I could just stay here with you, but I--I can't, and I fucking feel like a terrible person."
--Claire, A Teacher (season one, episode five)
"Do you know how long it took me to figure out that I wasn't responsible . . . that--that you were the one creating those moments? Do you know how long I hated myself because I thought that I hurt you? . . . I saw my brother the other day. He's 17 now. Same age I was. He looks so fucking young. I was just a kid, Claire."
--Eric, A Teacher (season one, episode ten)
As an artistic accomplishment, A Teacher is a well-acted exploration of a highly controversial relationship. However, is actually the boldness of its premise in this or any recorded era, as well as the timing of its release, that makes it especially significant. From the beginning, A Teacher takes sexual relationships between female teachers and male students seriously. It is a critical reflection of the present philosophical climate that the director is a woman, the very author of the book the story is derived from, who cares enough about issues of sexual consent and power imbalances to repeatedly come back to a story of a female teacher and her sexual relationship with a male high school student. No matter what assumption-driven sexists on the political left and right might pretend, there are both men and women who deeply care about such issues whether or not their own gender is being victimized in a given instance. There will never come a time when this fact does not need attention. No, there is not actual rape in A Teacher, and therefore switching the genders of the teacher and student therefore would of course still not involve rape, but this is a show that finally, unflinchingly holds a light over the double standards that drive people to overlook women for the very same acts that they might hate men for. In fact, a minor character is perhaps the best example of a true, self-professed feminist that I have ever seen in all of entertainment.
Set in Texas--a state known for its asinine conservatism (not that liberalism is much better)--A Teacher follows a married teacher named Claire as she meets and bonds with a boy named Eric in her English class. SAT tutoring outside of school, following each other on social media, and flirtatious looks and comments culminate in Claire leading Eric away from a homecoming dance to have sex with him. Eric was not raped, though it is both possible and not abnormal at all for women to rape men of any age, but he was still taken advantage of by a married woman who encouraged their relationship even in moments when Eric specifically says he is confused and that he wants more than just a brief sexual escapade. Even as someone who initially celebrates having sex with his teacher, thinking under the influence of explicit sexism that demonizes male teachers in this situation but praises or ignores female teachers, he admits to Claire that he wants more than just a sexual relationship; he respects other parts of her personhood, including her supposed intelligence (she is clearly irrational and adulterous, not to mention seemingly sexist, so she is far from philosophically intelligent).
His affection for her seems genuine, genuine enough for Claire to confide in a friend both that she is having an affair and that it is an affair with her student Eric. Kathryn, Claire's new teacher friend, does not even object to Claire having adulterous sex, something many characters of A Teacher actually downplay quite a bit, but she immediately shows concern. She unhesitatingly calls this scenario "a monumental abuse of power." Some of Eric's friends seem to at first praise Eric for having sex with an attractive female teacher, only for some unexpected characters to suddenly insist that what happened is actually disturbing. The members of a college fraternity Eric eventually joins treat it as automatically positive, not even bringing up the obvious cultural double standards against men here, but a fellow collegiate Eric has sex with later tells him that, as a feminist, she wishes she had not brought up the teacher incident and trivialized it. His mom talks as if he has been mistreated. Now, Eric is not a rationalist by any means; he is confused by the conflicting claims of those in his life and has not yet realized the sexism against men that leads to some sexual encounters being condemned or praised simply because of which gender each participant is.
Half of the 10 episodes of the limited series portray the relationship as it develops and becomes sexual, showing just how a maritally frustrated adult and a youth who is almost 18 might fall for each other without thinking about the ramifications for how society would pretend like the relationship is different if the genders were reversed. In the second half, the series starts to gradually show just how severely this relationship has destroyed Eric's life even despite it not involving actual rape. Upon coming home a decade later and finding his younger two brothers grown up, Eric, after struggling with confusion and the wildly differing responses from people who either actively exploit his relationship with an older female teacher or are deeply concerned for him even when he himself is unsure of what he believes, realizes that his brother is now 17--exactly how old he was at the start of his relationship with Claire. Talking with Claire for the last time in a restaurant, Eric finally puts into words what Claire's actress Kate Mara calls "the truth." He, no longer confused, scathingly confronts her about how seeing his 17 year-old brother has helped him see just how young and vulnerable he was. Instead of celebrating his sexual encounters with Claire, he now thinks that she explicitly used him when he was too young to know better.
Of course, there is nothing sexual about teachers and students of the opposite or same gender bonding outside of the classroom. Eric and Claire could have had a purely platonic relationship of respect that extended beyond the classroom. The sexism that is so ingrained in Western society nonetheless prompts many to irrationally assume (for all assumptions are irrational) that men in positions of power are somehow capable of or predisposed to certain sins that women are supposedly innocent of. Flip the genders in almost any heterosexual relationship at all, and many people would make assumptions about each person's motivations, desires, and capacity for sexual abuse or manipulation. This philosophically false and idiotic framework has been used to excuse sexual assault of both men and women: women by pretending like women who do not dress "modestly" are inviting sexual assaults from the "monsters" that men are, and men by pretending like women cannot rape or otherwise abuse men because men always want sex. Now, if a man fought off a female rapist, he would almost certainly be hated for hitting or forcefully pushing a woman--even though she is a malicious aggressor--or for not wanting to sleep with any woman he could.
Ironically, both because of how small her role is and because the problem with Claire's relationship was not that she raped him, it is a very minor character with only around two scenes that best represents the kind of person who will stand up for all sexual assault survivors. The girl that Eric briefly sees as a sexual partner in college says she wants to take their own sexual relationship slowly for his sake after she thinks about his background with his teacher. I say all of this as I fully realize that is a sense in which pretending like arbitrary ages of 17 or 18 years suddenly make sexual relationships morally alright when they were supposedly evil only days before is an irrational submission to cultural norms. This is not to say that pedophilic acts are not sinful; it is simultaneously true that a 17 or 18 year old of either gender should have long been sexually mature in a physical sense and has had plenty of chances to develop intellectual, emotional, and introspective maturity. This is almost secondary in some ways to the story of A Teacher, as the selfishness of Claire and way Eric is treated merely because he is a male are the focus almost the whole time. All of these things are true at once, even if they seem to only seldomly be grasped all at once by the same person. In some ways, few shows are truly as thematically complicated as A Teacher. The abuse of Claire's position over Eric is ultimately presented as rightly problematic even if she is not a rapist.
A simple difference in social standing does not make sex between sexually mature men and women, regardless of which gender is in power or which is the older or younger person, nonconsensual or otherwise abusive. The more overlooked issue that A Teacher illuminates is simply that men are not always the ones in power, and that they can be sexually victimized by women, even if Claire is not truly a rapist--and if the character was a male teacher having an affair with a 17 or 18 year old, female high school student, he still would not be a rapist. The biggest and most culturally needed aspect of the entire show is merely the student being a boy and the teacher being a woman, something that could force many sexist viewers to reevaluate their assumptions and hypocrisies. The double standards around situations like that of the show are at the very heart of what A Teacher is meant to explore. Even if the actual relationship was not adulterous and there was no manipulation, would all viewers have the same stance if the genders were reversed? It would of course probably have been a far more controversial work of media if the genders were reversed. It is therefore incredibly significant--a philosophical and artistic step forward--for A Teacher to explore the exploitation of men by women and refuse to support the stereotypes that hurt so many men and women, even though it does not feature rape. The heart of the series is an affirmation of how it is irrational and harmful for men to be treated differently than women in sexual encounters.
No comments:
Post a Comment