It's about a sociopathic sexual predator with a vagina

December 31, 2013 1:18 PM

Is Alissa Nutting's 'Tampa' the most controversial book of the year? Or just the most controversial of the summer?
posted by mediocre (37 comments total)

Some may feel this book to be entirely too sensationalistic to be given much real value as literature. When reading it however I felt that the author was more or less forced to go to at times pornographic extremes in her description of the wants, and actions of the main character as a blunt force means of getting past what seems to be a large portion of societies innate forgiving tendencies towards attractive women who prey on pubescent boys. Only in making the prose as dirty as possible could it start to remind people that this is a predator, and the boys she are after are not lucky.
posted by mediocre at 1:23 PM on December 31, 2013 [3 favorites]

I'm always wondering how you do this kind of thing without pandering. I'm reminded of something Truffaut is supposed to have said -- that it was impossible to make an anti-war movie because the act of making a movie about it inherently glamorized war. For a lot of people, the raunchier the language, the more titillating it will be.

And that's before we ever get into the way it could prop up paranoid male fantasies about predatory women.

It could basically be a twofer, appealing to fans of abusive porn and people who are desperately threatened by female power.
posted by lodurr at 1:30 PM on December 31, 2013 [2 favorites]

... all that having been said, I wonder if it's not all a metaphor for drug addiction.
posted by lodurr at 1:31 PM on December 31, 2013

Sounds interesting. Mediocre and others who have read it, does it manage to avoid the issue lodurr raises? (That ended up being one of several things that pretty much ruined The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo for me.)
posted by kyrademon at 1:33 PM on December 31, 2013

Female pathological sexuality -- so unthinkable it must be a metaphor.
posted by modernserf at 1:34 PM on December 31, 2013 [7 favorites]

no, actually i was just thinking that some of the descriptive passages strongly resemble drug-seeking ideations. Probably I'm thinking of that because of a short story I read some years back, describing an obsessive sexual relationship that was clearly mixing-metaphors with drug use. (Couple quits jobs, sells possessions, moves into flophouse, spends entire day fucking without even stopping to eat or clean, etc....)
posted by lodurr at 1:37 PM on December 31, 2013

> does it manage to avoid the issue lodurr raises?

Absolutely not. It could be very easily read as porn for people with such fetishes.

But as someone who was a victim of sexual abuse from a female authority figure in sixth grade, it was also damn close to straight up triggering long dormant PTSD over the episode. Which tells me that its depiction of the boys as valueless and non-human, and her ultimate betrayal of that level of mentor/student trust so predetermined, her damage to the boys such a non concern, that it was sufficient to establish that this is not a character to sympathize with.
posted by mediocre at 1:39 PM on December 31, 2013 [1 favorite]

This is on my to-read list, but I haven't yet read it. I like books with unreliable and uncomfortable central characters -- Lolita is probably the classic example, where you so thoroughly get into Humbert Humbert's head that the crazy starts making sense.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:45 PM on December 31, 2013 [3 favorites]

Started it, didn't finish. Nothing I read suggested to me there was anything in it but a desire to exploit a bit of controversy to sell some otherwise pedestrian books. Maybe it got better towards the end.
posted by Segundus at 1:48 PM on December 31, 2013

mediocre: My wife has an interest in trauma and will be doing her dissertation research on secondary retraumatization in classroom, so I've become a lot more sensitive to it over the past few years. One of the things she deals with is the prevailing idea that being triggered is a good thing. (Short version: for people that it hurts it's very bad indeed.) It's particularly common in the 'writing to heal' community. So this pushes a lot of buttons for me and I hope it's not pushing your buttons in a way that's unhelpful.
posted by lodurr at 1:49 PM on December 31, 2013 [1 favorite]

No, it never gets better, as it were. I just thought it an important book since it looks at a POV of predatory sexual abuse that has not been seen much action for lack of a better term; and is sufficiently ugly in its portrayal to cast the predator as a predator.
posted by mediocre at 1:52 PM on December 31, 2013 [2 favorites]

> the prevailing idea that being triggered is a good thing.

I've heard this argument. I give it no credit personally, while intentionally allowing ones self to be triggered when engaging in a "writing to heal" exercise may be emotionally cathartic in positive ways for many it is not like they are doing that every day. They do it once, maybe, to induce a cathartic episode that allows some amount of healing that their emotional walls over the trauma have kept from happening. Also, I would argue that intentionally seeking out a trigger isn't a true trigger.
posted by mediocre at 1:58 PM on December 31, 2013

Mod note: Heya, poster, totally understand that you probably posted this because you found it interesting but the thread needs to not be a de facto personal chat space; please let it breath and be its own thing.
posted by cortex (staff) at 2:10 PM on December 31, 2013 [1 favorite]

There's a strong movement in humanities -- especially in creative writing, but also believe it or not in composition studies -- to encourage students to produce material that has a lot of dramatic emotional disclosure. Foundational essays in the field of composition instruction exhort teachers to look for more and more "honesty", where "honesty" is a stand-in for dramatic disclosure. One case my wife showed me had the teacher describe a student who turned in a piece about baking bread with her family that was unsatisfactory; the teacher demanded something with more emotional content. (The same teacher said she separated her students work into three piles, like Goldilocks: "not enough pain...too much pain...JUST RIGHT." Pain, IOW, was inherently good. And of course she'd know if it was faked.)

This is typical, apparently, along with instructors reconceptualizing their roles as 'therapeutic', but failing to do basic stuff like establishing safety. My wife sees this personally in her teaching colleagues.
posted by lodurr at 2:11 PM on December 31, 2013 [7 favorites]

> poster

Apologies, I tried to not address any personal-chat-space flagbait initially. Became more difficult the further I responded. I'm off to enjoy festivities for the eve anyway, so it won't be a concern from me.

> This is typical, apparently, along with instructors reconceptualizing their roles as 'therapeutic'

donaldglovermyemotions.gif

Not as flippant as the reply may sound. It came from an episode with a class where Troy was advised to dig deep for trauma to improve his performance.
posted by mediocre at 2:19 PM on December 31, 2013

I just finished the fourth chapter (Overdrive library ebook), and some of the black comedy in it is starting to grow on me.

Is the movie described at the beginning of chapter five real? Because, although I appreciate the litany of anti-aging treatments, I could still do with some more Phil Collins and Huey Lewis.
posted by box at 2:48 PM on December 31, 2013

I dunno, the most explicit I can remember Lolita being is a few references to sex and orgasms, and it made the mind of Humbert Humbert an amazing and horrible thing to explore; this book and its sexy cover just sound horrible.
posted by angrycat at 2:54 PM on December 31, 2013

It sounds like the argument is that Nabokov didn't need to be explicit for the reader to be clear on the fact that Humbert Humbert was a predator; older men having sex with young girls is usually seen that way inherently. But because there is far more apologia for older women having sex with boys in some quarters the explicit porniness was necessary to shock the reader out of any such pre-conceived notions.

That argument may be true. But it makes me uncomfortable because, undoubtedly by sheer and utter coincidence, it allows... nay compels the author to write pornographic and titillating scenes which garner widespread attention and an increased audience of both pervs and anti-pervs at the same time. I'm put in mind of Dave Chapelle walking away from tens of millions of dollars when he realized racists were sometimes laughing at him and not with him. Nutting clearly has no such compunctions. Sell books to the victims, sell books to the abusers, sell books to the people wanting a wank. But sell books.
posted by Justinian at 3:21 PM on December 31, 2013 [1 favorite]

"Only in making the prose as dirty as possible could it start to remind people that this is a predator, and the boys she are after are not lucky."

Is dealing with the emotional aftermath or damage to the victim's psyche not sufficient to convince most readers that a particular character is predatory?

I can understand why explicit detail might increase the sense of reality and bring the reader into the story and generate a deeper understanding of the effects of a predatory relationship .. but that's about triple underlining a reminder in order to get the reader in the gut - not about a "start to remind".
posted by striatic at 3:44 PM on December 31, 2013

I dunno, I've read books that do a fine job, without any porniness at all, of depicting boys as genuine victims of abuse from older women.

"The Perks of Being a Wallflower" comes to mind. It's not a great book overall, but it does succeed in keeping your sympathies with the victim, and I can't imagine anyone reading it and thinking "Oh that lucky boy! All the handjobs he wanted!"
posted by Now there are two. There are two _______. at 4:02 PM on December 31, 2013 [2 favorites]

The character seemed one dimensional to me. Everything in her life is about fucking teen boys; her chosen career, the husband she has inflicted a loveless marriage on, her every waking thought, all about getting her opportunities to fuck teen boys. In other respects it's not poorly written, but the lack of depth and the focus on setting up the sex do seem to have something in common with porn, albeit not as threadbare as that.

Humbert Humbert is profoundly different. In a way he's worse because he's a complex reflective human being, not a sex robot on a mission; but he's much more interesting.

But again, I didn't read it all, there might be things I missed.
posted by Segundus at 4:31 PM on December 31, 2013

Earlier this year, I asked a question on AskMefi about disturbing books. I got a huge response and I remember coming back into the thread to suggest everyone who participated read this book. My tastes in literature are a little weird, but I loved this book.
posted by SkylitDrawl at 8:22 PM on December 31, 2013

Truffaut is supposed to have said -- that it was impossible to make an anti-war movie because the act of making a movie about it inherently glamorized war

I just... No Man's Land... inherently glamorises war?
I know Anzacs did, but I am sure there are other examples that disprove that.
posted by Mezentian at 3:56 AM on January 1, 2014

I don't know the larger context for Truffaut's claim, but when i've had discussions with people in the past I've fleshed out the idea to my own satisfaction and I mostly buy it. (Assertions like this are hardly ever fully categorical, after all.)

Here's how I see it: You've invested a lot of effort, usually on the part of a lot of people, to create a very larger-than-life story, and to the extent that you have sympathetic, rounded characters, you're inviting identification. That larger-than-life aspect is critical -- Truffaut as I understand it was big on the physical instrumentality of it (anyone who knows his writings I beg you to correct me if I have that wrong), that there was something special about the projection of images onto an external eye, and that may be right; I find it sufficient (and more relevant for the current discussion) to stop at the fact that we seem to be narrative animals, and telling a story about something makes it special, gives it power. We made heroes out of Coyote and Anansi, and even Loki was apparently once a culture-hero before he got lost in the shuffle of similarly amoral cult-gods.

As for when this doesn't work: I don't know No Man's Land, but Ebert used to argue for an exception on the part of Das Boot, because it was so cramped and horrible and ended with the ultimate insult (they one place they thought was safe was violated, and the one man they thought immortal, killed). I actually don't buy Ebert's argument for Das Boot, at least not completely -- I think that for some people, they'll still find that narrative of transcendence through grim group-identification in that film. There's a certain perceived glory, for a lot of people, in the impossible cause. But then, Rule 34 (or maybe "34.1: something is always pandering to somebody").

Similarly, I think it's going to be extremely difficult to make anti-porn porn. Trivially I could invoke Rule 34.1, but I think it goes farther than that. If you're exciting sub-rational responses, then you can't be sure those responses will be vulnerable to rational critique. You just got excited reading a sex scene -- what do you do with that? It's a really big question. One of the main questions around sexual abuse is "did s/he enjoy it?", but the question only very seldom gets the most obvious and sensible answer: "What the hell does that even mean?" It's eminently possible, even common, to enjoy something you were coerced into doing. A lot of apologists (for everything from surprise parties to gang rape) argue that excuses everything. Is there a bright line that lets you say, "means [a] is justified for end [b], but means [x] is not justified for end [y]"?
posted by lodurr at 6:46 AM on January 1, 2014

Re. the book itself: Having read a couple of chapters into this, I have to say I consider this a really well-written, badly written book. It basically reads like some of the better-styled alt.erotica hard-bondage stuff, and that is NOT intended as a compliment.

If the actual goal is to cast the predator as predator and in so doing to cast the predator in a negative light, creating a cartoon predator and funneling the experience through their constantly aroused PoV does not strike me as a means that is remotely likely to be effective.

In any case, as I noted above, one of the biggest problems with victimization and particularly problematic for sexual victimization, is what you do with the associated pleasure. This book essentially does not deal with that question at all, beyond saying in effect 'it was hot.'
posted by lodurr at 6:54 AM on January 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

The greatest anti-war movie ever made is Renoir's Grand Illusion. There's not a battle scene in it. What Truffaut is reacting to is painting war as so terrible and miserable that you see the soldiers as romanticized victims, that undergoing horror is in and of itself heroic, and... Okay. Let's put this thread back on the tracks: think of the controversy surrounding the Dragon Tattoo trilogy. Does depicting violent acts against women strike a blow against that violence or does it simply add another bit of salacious material to the totality of porn?
posted by CCBC at 2:12 PM on January 1, 2014 [2 favorites]

W.r.t. the Millenium Cycle (Dragon Tattoo etc.), I personally reached the conclusion that its success was more about prurient appeal than it was about righteous inspiration for women, but was much more about kick-assery than either. I hear a lot of talk about it, but most of that talk is about its qualities as thriller-fiction, very little of it is about raising awareness of the exploitation of women. And at any rate, what solutions does it suggest, other than 'be more like a good Swedish civil libertarian'?

(Also, the damn books are such a struggle to read. The man desperately needed a developmental editor.)
posted by lodurr at 3:57 PM on January 1, 2014 [1 favorite]

Since we're asking semi-rhetorical questions about Stieg Larsson: do we judge the fiction of a muckraking journalist differently than we do the fiction of an MFA who went to high school with somebody who went on to become a teacher who had sex with her students?
posted by box at 3:59 PM on January 1, 2014

Answer: Obviously not, which is good, because CCBC's question is essentially a different phrasing of the same query.

Question in response: What's the function of posing the question that way? I mean, why in the world would anyone think it's ethically relevant that Nutting went to the same high school as LeTourneau? And since it's clearly not ethically relevant -- why ask if it is?
posted by lodurr at 4:08 PM on January 1, 2014

Shrug--I don't think it's the same question. I could've probably phrased it better, though.

It seems like a lot of controversy about 'Tampa' revolves around whether it's sensationalist exploitation, heartfelt activism, a literary experiment, some of these things, all of these things, etc. For some readers, that's at least partially a question of authorial intent. And for some of those readers, Nutting's background might be something that might be part of their considerations.

There are probably some folks, too, who, even if they don't think it's ethically relevant, think it's an interesting tidbit or whatever, in a where-do-you-get-your-ideas kind of way, which is, I would guess, why Nutting mentions it in interviews.
posted by box at 5:29 AM on January 2, 2014

kyrademon, I read the book as someone who might have found it titillating, in an OK-to-fantasize-about-not-OK-to-do sort of way. But even the pure sex scenes were way too grotesque, vulgar, and over-the-top to be titillating to me, and beyond those the story spins entirely out of control in a way that is so over-the-top disturbing it would be comical if it weren't so thoroughly fucked-up. Imagine someone made Reefer Madness (the original, not the fantastic parody) about female teachers preying on young boys. It's insane. (And I guess that could support the metaphor-for-drug-addiction theory, but I didn't really see that in the book at all.)
posted by rhiannonstone at 10:26 AM on January 2, 2014

FWIW, I don't it was intended as a metaphor for drug addiction, but you can see aspects of that in it.

And I find the Reefer Madness comparison very apt.
posted by lodurr at 12:25 PM on January 2, 2014

It may be apt in terms of tone but I think it fails otherwise. Reefer Madness is stupid because marijuana is so relatively unobjectionable that the over-the-top nature of RM makes it hilarious. But raping children is an incredibly serious and real thing and so is much more difficult to approach in a REEFER MADNESS style.

I mean, imagine the brutal rape scene in IRREVERSIBLE except with the Benny Hill music over it and the dude talking about how awesome it felt.
posted by Justinian at 3:27 PM on January 2, 2014 [2 favorites]

I think it's just about shock.
posted by aryma at 4:08 PM on January 2, 2014

Right, I certainly don't intend to imply that marijuana use and sexual predation are on the same level, nor do I want to in any way diminish the very real and serious damage that a sexual predator can do to a young person. But the ridiculously over-the-top scenario that played out after Celeste and Jack got caught is truly ridiculous and over-the-top, and in real life, the consequences of an adult taking advantage of a child aren't usually so... bloody.
posted by rhiannonstone at 2:25 PM on January 3, 2014

And it reminded me not just of Reefer Madness, but also of the insanely unlikely scenarios my friends' and my parents used to make up to try to discourage us from doing things, scenarios so ridiculous we couldn't take them seriously, while a more realistic risk-assessment probably would have worked much better.
posted by rhiannonstone at 2:28 PM on January 3, 2014

I finally had the time to read the book this weekend. Overall I liked it -- I thought she did a good job of imagining the internal monologue of a totally crazy and creepy predator (while also capturing why because the perpetrator is a beautiful younger woman we are less likely to call her "creepy"), while also subverting the narrative. So like right in the middle of the first big sex scene in the car, which could have easily read as plain old old smuttiness, the narrator says:

I could smell the mint chewing gum on his breath -- he'd indeed prepared himself for the make-out session. Could consent have been any more transparent?

She's a self-delusional predator who (at this point in the story) has calculatedly groomed and molested a 14 year old boy, and the narrative both explores and deconstructs that.

Other aspects I thought didn't work as well -- the over-the-top stuff that rhiannonstone describes, for example. The real life cases she was drawing on were crazy enough, and the further afield it went the easier I felt it was to lose the tight connection with the narrator and her delusional logic.
posted by Dip Flash at 7:31 PM on January 6, 2014