Power Dynamics in the May-December Romance: Jenny Trout's CHOOSING YOU

One day over lunch, a work colleague/friend and I were exchanging "first time" stories. I remember feeling so shocked, and not a little confused, after my friend revealed that her first lover had been a man much older than her mid-teenaged self, and a teacher of hers to boot. My friend was so well-adjusted, so normal, with a long-time boyfriend her own age; how could she have experienced such a traumatic sexual coming of age without it having done her irreparable damage?

My assumption that such a disparity of age between two lovers must signal a negative, exploitative experience stemmed from many different sources: my reading of 1970s and 80's young adult problem novels; the fairly recent cultural openness surrounding childhood sexual abuse; feminist discourse surrounding unequal power in male-female relationships, an inequality compounded when relationships of authority (such as student/teacher) also come into play. Never mind American cultural suspicion of teenage sexuality in general.

Yet my friend calmly stated that her relationship with an older male teacher had been an entirely positive one. With his greater sexual experience, he was more confident, and more attentive to her needs, than a teen her own age would have been. Neither one became obsessively attached to the other, and when the relationship ran its course, they parted amicably, still friends.

The memory of this conversation kept popping back into mind as I read Jenny Trout's New Adult novella, Choosing You. Its first-person protagonist, white American twenty-year-old Madison Lane, arrives in summertime Wales, eager not only to begin her class on Arthurian mythology, but also to nurse her crush on its teacher, 38-year-old Welsh professor Thomas Evans. When Thom runs across Madison a few days before class starts and invites her for breakfast, Madison can't but dream a little about what it might be like if her handsome teacher liked her just a little bit, too.

When Thom responds to Madison's verbal sparring by asking "Are you flirting with me?" Madison realizes her relationship with her teacher is on the verge of change. Even knowing how awkward it would be if Thom responds with the "I'm flattered, but..." talk, Madison decides to take a risk: "Yeah. I am. A little bit." (Kindle Loc 266). Thom acknowledges his own attraction, but takes care to point out that Madison is his student. "I don't want you to think I asked you to take this course so that I would have a chance to..." he tells her, a worry that Madison eagerly, and confidently, dispels:

     "I don't think that at all." And I really didn't. "I have a freaking amazing GPA and I'm an English lit major. You apparently loved my final paper, you practically drew hearts in the margins—"
     His embarrassed laugh interrupted me.
     "Trust me. I don't have any suspicion that you were trying to perv on me by inviting me here." Partially because I hadn't wanted to get my hopes up. Which I wasn't proud of; I knew I shouldn't view classroom favoritism as proof of some deep emotional connection. My education was worth more than that. (277)

Flirting leads to exchanging of truths, which leads to kissing, and later, to sex. Their first time together is revealing, not about their own relationship, but about cultural expectations that leave young women ready to accept, even to expect, sexual experiences that are less than satisfying. As Madison tells Thom, she's had intercourse with a few other young men her own age before, but none had focused much on meeting her sexual desires. She never reached orgasm with any of them; none ever even went down on her ("My last boyfriend thought it was unhygienic," she tells an amused Thom [866]). Significantly, her thoughts about her lack of orgasms focus not on her own dissatisfaction, but, as good girls are taught, on how her boyfriends might have felt: "I always felt so bad for the guys when I didn't come. I didn't want to make them feel bad about their skills" (876). Because she's been taught by the movies that "people just had crazy, fulfilling sex without talking about it. In the heat of the moment, they just knew what to do," Madison never communicated with her partners about her own likes or dislikes, never even talked with them about why she wasn't reaching orgasm (significantly, not a problem when she was by herself).

Thom, with far more experience, and a far more mature approach to sex than any of Madison's previous lovers have had, introduces Madison to the pleasures of mutually-gratifying sex. As Thom croons while kissing her, "There comes a time... or there should come a time... in every man's life... when he realizes that what he's seen in magazines and pornography... isn't necessarily required for good sex" (886). Further, he tells her, "Let me know what you like, and what you don't. I want this to be good for you" (895), modeling for Madison the idea that communication between partners is the cornerstone of fulfilling sexual relations.

Guinevere, Lancelot, and a (jealous?) Arthur

While sex between Madison and Thom proves far better than anything she's experienced before, over the course of the summer Madison gradually begins to realize that "besides fucking and talking about mythology, what is there?" Though Thom is no jerk, Madison is quick to reassure her fellow classmate and friend Zoe, "there's just no spark, personality wise, between us.... It's like, are orgasms enough?" (1284). Class debates about the ethics and feminism of Guinevere's love for Lancelot, as well as her own attraction to a hot young man her own age who works at the pub below the room she's rented for the summer, lead Madison to think not just about Thom's needs and desires, but also her own. And to make choices about her life, and her relationships, accordingly.


I can't say that I would be very happy if I discovered my own mid-teen daughter was dating a man far older than herself, especially a man in a position of authority over her in some way. Yet the memory of my friend's experience, as well as Madison's, make me wary of assuming that every such relationship must and will inevitably lead to trauma. If, instead of casting all teenagers in the role of potential victims, we accept that some teenagers are able to make wise, informed decisions about their own sexual lives, we may be able to acknowledge that some May-December romances may be less about abuse of power or the creation of permanent emotional damage than about a positive opportunity to learn and grow.

Jenny Trout

Choosing You

(originally published as "A Choice Fit for a Queen"

in the anthology If Ever I Would Leave You)

self-published, 2014

Free to Be... A Feminist

I was musing the other day, wondering when it was that I first became a feminist. It must have been in college, I guessed, after first taking a course in Women's Studies and being introduced to the central ideas of the second wave feminist movement. But my memory is remarkably bad, something brought home to me yet again after reading these great posts by Dan Kois on Slate about the 40th anniversary of the making of the record album Free to Be... You and Me, which was first released in November 1972. Marlo Thomas and the myriad talented authors, songwriters, actors, and musicians that she recruited to create this groundbreaking album never used the word "feminist" in any of the songs or skits on the record. Yet the examples they set before these (at the time) seven-year-old ears clearly had a lasting effect, allowing me not just to dream of a world where I could "be almost anything [I] want to be," but to take it for granted that such a world would exist when I became a grown-up. Yes, I first became a feminist not in college, but after listening to "Parents Are People," "My Dog is a Plumber," "The Sun and the Moon," and all the other stories, poems, and songs on Free to Be...

The record album is long gone (did one of my younger sisters score it during one of the many "please move your stuff out of our house, we're not your offsite storage" kicks my parents went through over the years?). But I still have a copy of the book, originally published in March of 1974 as an expanded companion volume to the album. Interestingly, the copyright page of my edition reads "Bantam edition/December 1987," dating not from my childhood but from the months right after I graduated from college. Was it a nostalgic purchase, a last glance back at childhood before I moved definitively into the working world of grown-up-ness? Or was it simply a recognition of my roots as a feminist?

Given that the Free to Be project aimed, in the words of one of its co-creators, Letty Cottin Pogrebin, to "dispel myths that distort reality—like pretty-equals-good, and all-mothers-stay-in-the-kitchen, and big-boys-don't cry," to "challenge stereotypes that have imprisoned children's imaginations [and] stunted their emotional development," it's hardly surprising that romance stories are hardly to be found amongst the album's track or the book's pages (12). Yet the story that first comes to mind when I think back to Free to Be... is a romance, at least a romance of sorts: Betty Miles' retelling of the Greek myth of Atalanta.

Second-wave feminists began arguing that folk and fairy tales socialized young children into patriarchal ideology around the same time that Marlo Thomas was putting together the original Free to Be... album. Marcia Lieberman's " 'Some Day My Prince Will Come': Female Acculturation Through the Fairy Tale" (College English 1972) first took issue with the sexism in many familiar fairy tales, and many feminists debated the role such stories should play in childrearing throughout the 1970s and 80s. Some wished to toss out folklore and its outdated sex roles altogether, sex roles that taught girls that beauty and passivity were the highest feminine virtues. Others, arguing for the psychological importance of this literature, decided instead to collect relatively unfamiliar tales that featured stronger, more active female characters (for example, Rosemary Minard's 1975 Womenfolk and Fairy Tales). Still others chose to rewrite the "classic" tales in ways that challenged conventional views of gender socialization and sex roles (Jay Williams' The Practical Princess, published in 1969, and Jack Zipes' 1986 collection, Don't Bet on the Prince).

Hippomenes and Atalanta at the Louvre

Betty Miles proved herself at the forefront of this trend with her retelling of the story of Atalanta for the original Free to Be... album. In the Greek myth, Atalanta, who has taken a vow of chastity in the name of the huntress goddess Artemis, has no wish to marry. After her father pressures her to do so, she agrees, but with one condition: she will only marry a man who can best her in a footrace. Many men try, and many men lose, forfeiting not only Atalanta, but their own lives. Until one young man, Hippomenes, calls on Aphrodite for aid. The goddess of love gives Hippomenes golden apples, which he throws at Atalanta's feet each time she pulls ahead of him during their race. Distracted by the irresistible apples, Atalanta veers off course to retrieve them, ultimately allowing Hippomenes to win the race and her hand in marriage.

The opening of Betty Miles' version of the story tells a similar tale, with small but telling tweaks. Atalanta is desired not for her looks, or for her bloodlines, but because she is "so bright, and so clever, and could build things and fix things so wonderfully" (128). Atalanta's father, a king, is constructed not as simply domineering, but rather as "a very ordinary king; that is, he was powerful and used to having his own way"(128). It is the father, not Atalanta, who comes up with the idea of the footrace, choosing it not only because of his daughter's resistance to marriage, but also because of his own inability to decide who will be the best suitor. In these opening paragraphs, it is not the king, but Atalanta who strikes the reader as the competent and confident participant in this joust over marital prospects.

As the story progresses, Miles makes even larger changes to Atalanta's story. First she re-imagine its hero. It is not Hippomenes, who claims the blood of Poisedon, but the far more prosaic "Young John, who lived in the town" who proves to be Atalanta's chief competitor. While Hippomenes desires Atalanta at first sight, the highly enlightened Young John wishes to meet the princess after seeing her "day by day as she bought nails and wood to make a pigeon house, or choose parts for her telescope, or laughed with her friends" (131). And while Hippomenes does not question the wisdom of winning a mate via footrace, Young John believes it "not right for Atalanta's father to give her away to the winner of the race. Atalanta herself must choose the person she wants to marry, or whether she wishes to marry at all" (131). He races not to win her hand in marriage, but rather for the chance to talk with her, to get to know her, to ask the bright, clever girl if she will be his friend. (On the album, both the patriarchal King and the feminist  Young John were voiced by Alan Alda, suggesting not just difference, but continuity between the two characters. A hopeful sign that the conventional view could easily be transformed into the progressive? Or an ironic warning that Young John might all too easily slip back into the role of dominating patriarch?)

Illustration by Barbara Bascove from Free to Be... You and Me

Miles also rewrites the outcome of Atalanta's footrace. It is not through the intervention of a goddess that John becomes the victor, but instead through his own hard work, running every night after his studies are finished. And Atalanta is not distracted by gaudy fruit, nor is she defeated. For she, too, has practiced every day until she, just like John, "could run the course more quickly than anyone had ever run it before" (131). Instead, John "ran as her equal, side by side with her" until "smiling with the pleasure of the race, Atalanta and Young John reached the finish line together" (135). The memory of Marlo Thomas' and Alan Alda's voices, joined in joyful celebration of their characters' mutual triumph, rings with pleasure in my head to this day.

Miles ends her story not with a wedding, but with adventure. After the two spend the day together, sharing their ideas and interests, each leaves home: "John sailed off to discover new lands. And Atalanta set off to visit the great cities" (135).

Yet the possibility of marriage, of a romantic relationship that develops out of shared admiration and shared interests, remains temptingly open between these two friends: "Perhaps some day they will be married, and perhaps they will not," the narrator teases. The openness of that ending offers young listeners, and young readers, the opportunity to envision either possibility, without insisting they choose one or the other. The story ends by assuring us that no matter which we chose, Atalanta and John would both be "living happily ever after." A feminist fairy tale conclusion indeed.


Do you have any Free to Be... memories? And can you remember when you first considered yourself a feminist?



Photo/illustration credits:
Atalanta and Hippomenes statues: Oregon Live

Next time on RNFF:

Subverting romance conventions in Eloisa James' Your Wicked Ways