{"id":30674,"date":"2025-09-19T02:06:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-19T02:06:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/30674\/"},"modified":"2025-09-19T02:06:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-19T02:06:08","slug":"a-curiosity-worth-sweating-over-inside-story","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/30674\/","title":{"rendered":"A curiosity worth sweating over \u2022 Inside Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

Madison Griffiths\u2019s probing new book begins with \u201ca curiosity worth sweating over.\u201d She\u2019s on the other side of a relationship she had in her early twenties with a man who was once her university teacher. In Sweet Nothings<\/a> she wants to explore \u201cwhether or not it was a love worth defending, both institutionally and socially,\u201d given that it left her \u201cbitter and confused.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now in her thirties, Griffiths has established herself as a welcome feminist voice who brings perceptive sensitivity to her investigations into reproductive rights, violence against women and children, and abusive relationships and their aftermaths. With her professional and personal background, she is, in vital respects, the ideal author of a book-length contemplation of the thorny topic of men in universities who sleep with their younger, female students. Griffiths purposefully focuses on this most commonplace of student\u2013teacher relationships, fruitfully analysing them as a \u201cgendered phenomenon\u201d that is both \u201cpart of the sexual economy of academic institutions\u201d and \u201csymptomatic of a larger cultural mess.\u201d<\/p>\n

While she returns to it intermittently, Griffiths doesn\u2019t dwell for long on her own experience. Casting her net on social media for personal stories, she received \u201chundreds of responses\u201d and settled on \u201cfour tangled accounts of power, lust and learning\u201d to which she felt \u201can immediate, unshakeable pull.\u201d Partly to preserve their anonymity, she assigns these women pseudonyms \u2014 Blaine, Elsie, Cara and Rose \u2014 and fictionalises elements of their accounts.<\/p>\n

Creative non-fiction also allows Griffiths to imbue each of these women and their stories with the kind of interiority, character and specificity more often found in novels than in conventional reportage. This approach helps to centre the women\u2019s own accounts of their lives, and in parts is reminiscent of American writer Lisa Taddeo\u2019s bestselling Three Women (2019). Elsewhere, the narration can clash with the entwined saga of Griffiths writing the book and wrestling with the subject matter.<\/p>\n

Of the four women, Rose leaps most vividly off the page \u2014 perhaps because, as Griffiths writes, they recognise elements of themselves in each other. Both \u201cwriggled\u201d their way into higher education \u201cout of a small, plodding town on the outskirts of Melbourne.\u201d And each of them sought in their own way to orchestrate the \u201cundoing\u201d of an ex-boyfriend.<\/p>\n

In Rose\u2019s case, the ex is Samuel, her \u201cteacher-turned-lover,\u201d a \u201chardly-as-bad sort of man,\u201d with whom she had a four-year relationship marked by the usual milestones. Rose was the first student Samuel pursued, but certainly not the last. While they were still together, albeit in diminished form, an anonymous complaint was made about his \u201cinappropriate behaviour with female students,\u201d and later Rose filed her own report of a \u201chistorical act of sexual misconduct.\u201d The portrait of Rose \u2014 seething with anger, but also somehow reborn \u2014 is Griffiths at her best.<\/p>\n

Blaine, Elsie and Cara take longer to come into proper view, though each of their stories offers new angles and insights. Blaine is now an academic herself, and one of her colleagues is the teacher with whom she had a clandestine affair when she was a PhD student. Back then, Greg \u201cminced her thesis to bits.\u201d Years later, she\u2019s \u201cimmediately repulsed\u201d when she receives an \u201cout-of-the-blue\u201d message from him to thank her for introducing him to her own student, Jenna.<\/p>\n

While Elsie was in a relationship with her forty-something tutor Harrison during her twenties, \u201cthe two had discussed the concept of grooming at length\u201d and \u201cwhile wrapped in each other\u2019s bodies, decided that this wasn\u2019t that.\u201d Two years later, she\u2019s not so sure. Cara, meanwhile, \u201cthe kind of woman men slump at the feet of,\u201d never had sex with her teacher Ivan. But she is still compelled to share her story, not just about \u201ccartoonishly dorky\u201d Ivan, with whom she spent chaste nights in his candle-lit apartment, but also about other men she wasn\u2019t supposed to be drawn to, who took advantage of her attraction to them.<\/p>\n

These are important and fascinating stories, deepened by the passing of time. But Griffiths, despite what are clearly very good intentions, sometimes gets in their way. Aside from the four women, she talks to a wider range of people \u2014 others with experiences to share, academics, her boyfriend, casual acquaintances \u2014 but these conversations can be as distracting as they are enlightening. She makes an especially powerful detour into what good teaching entails, but other lines of inquiry are left dangling or could have more effectively been brought together.<\/p>\n

At one point, Griffiths writes that \u201cI don\u2019t want this book to be muddied with question marks.\u201d But Sweet Nothings is saturated in questions. On the one hand, this is understandable \u2014 consensual relationships between adults involving power differentials and a duty of care are an ethical minefield \u2014 but the ruminations can tip over into self-indulgence. The key arguments, though, are delivered directly: \u201cFor a student to feel entitled to justice, they must first feel entitled to care.\u201d<\/p>\n

Given the subject matter, and the book\u2019s concern with questions of \u201csex and power,\u201d Sweet Nothings has inevitably been compared to Helen Garner\u2019s controversial The First Stone (1995), a book Griffiths confesses to finding \u201cat least a little compelling.\u201d But where Garner represented universities from her outsider perspective as sites of feminism-gone-wrong and overreach \u2014 places where decent men can easily and swiftly be disproportionately punished for minor transgressions \u2014 one of the central achievements of Sweet Nothings is to show a different dynamic.<\/p>\n

Thirty years on from The First Stone, whether the issue is sexual harassment or sexual misconduct or worse, the current systems appear to be overwhelmingly inadequate, over-burdened and\/or non-existent. Perusing universities\u2019 codes of conduct, Griffiths is rightly \u201cstruck by the obscurity of their language, how up-in-the-air they seem.\u201d Both Rose and Elsie lodge complaints with their universities\u2019 Safer Communities offices \u2014 a process implemented across the sector in recent years to support student safety \u2014 only to end up in months of limbo. For Rose, the support of a senior feminist academic withers to nothing.<\/p>\n

In this respect, Sweet Nothings is a worthwhile companion to feminist theorist Sara Ahmed\u2019s blistering Complaint! (2021). Rose comes to learn that \u201cfor every man who keeps his job, a woman is burdened with another, more back-breaking job: the job of becoming the complainant.\u201d And, unlike Garner in The First Stone, Griffiths puts the women right up front.<\/p>\n

Griffiths asks us to take seriously the question of whether relationships between university teachers and their students should be banned, as some universities have already done. Where some feminist thinkers (or outliers) like Jane Gallop back in the 1990s, and more recently philosopher Agnes Collard, have celebrated the eros of pedagogy, Griffiths follows Amia Srinivasan, the author of The Right to Sex (2021), in asking whether good teaching and real love can co-exist. While mindful that some of these relationships can mature and flourish like any other, Griffiths and her informants show that it is the younger women who most often bear the brunt of the fallout.<\/p>\n

If at times Griffiths overburdens the reader with details of her labours \u2014 \u201cI will wake in the middle of the night, vexed, feeling like a hyphen between two words\u201d \u2014 ultimately it was worth the effort. Sweet Nothings is a thought-provoking and welcome intervention. \u2022<\/p>\n

Sweet Nothings: Power, Lust and Learning<\/a>
By Madison Griffiths | Ultimo Press | $36.99 | 320 pages<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Madison Griffiths\u2019s probing new book begins with \u201ca curiosity worth sweating over.\u201d She\u2019s on the other side of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":30675,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69,479,17514,8600,2248],"class_list":{"0":"post-30674","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz","13":"tag-relationships","14":"tag-sexuality","15":"tag-universities","16":"tag-women"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30674","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30674"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30674\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/30675"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30674"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30674"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30674"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}