"Erase & Rewind" Premieres in Toronto This Saturday
Clique Pictures' short film based on my short story makes its debut and some conflicted thoughts about rape culture and feminism.
Hi everyone,
It’s been a while since I posted and I’m sorry about that! It’s been a busy and exhausting couple of months (not in a bad way). I’m still polishing up the longer essay about “gifted kids” that I promised a while back, and it should be ready to share with you soon.
In the meantime, I wanted to quickly share that Clique Pictures’ adaptation of my short story, “Erase and Rewind” (also the title story of my 2021 collection) will premiere this Saturday, 2:30pm at the Canadian Film Fest in Toronto. I obviously won’t be able to make it, being on the other side of the country and all, but if you’re in Toronto and want to check it out I included the program details and relevant links at the bottom of this post.
Short Synopsis (from Clique Pictures):
After being assaulted, Louisa realizes she can rewind time. Has she done this before? She can’t remember. The chance of erasing the experience and memories pushes Louisa to rewind through her assault and relationship with Nick, forcing her to experience it for a second time with a new view of what happened.
“Erase and Rewind” sounds like a “Me Too” story, but it was written at the beginning of 2016—over a year and half before the Harvey Weinstein allegations hit the press—and submitted as an assignment to a fiction workshop I was taking at UBC with novelist and short story writer Timothy Taylor. The idea came to me in a wave while I was singing the Cardigans’ song (“Erase/Rewind”) in the shower, and I wrote the first draft in a feverish three day binge-writing session, fuelled, as I often was back then, by Blue Buck and youth.
Hey, what did you hear me say
You know the difference it makes
What did you hear me say
Yes, I said it’s fine before
I don’t think so no more
I said it’s fine before—Cardigans, “Erase/Rewind”
It’s unclear whether the Cardigans’ song is about sexual assault. I’m not the only one to interpret the lyrics this way, but most listeners seem to think it’s just about a woman ending a relationship. I think it’s a bit of both.
Certainly, I can’t the only woman out there who has dated and hung out with men who pushed things further than I would have liked / consented to, and reacted to the situation by ending the relationship without an explanation.
When you’re in your late teens/early twenties, a functional alcoholic and a bit of a low-grade slut—I was down for making out, but always told guys I didn’t want to go past second base; most respected this—“I’m breaking up with you” or “I don’t want to see you again” and its variations are a hell of a lot easier to say than “Hey, so you just sort of started having sex with me while I was pretty drunk and we hadn’t done that before and you didn’t ask me because if you’d asked me I would have said “no” and I think maybe that was rape or like grey-rape or something, and I’m kind of upset about it.”
In the short story—which is told in reverse, from Day Twelve to Day One—Louisa, a third-year math major, has been dating Nick for just over a week after meeting him in an astronomy class (Day One). On Day Eleven, they go to a bar with friends, get wasted, and smoke weed. He invites her to go home with him, and she agrees but tells him she doesn’t want to have sex. He “jokes” that he’ll be able to change her mind, and, too drunk to see this as a red flag, she laughs, tosses a comeback, and still agrees to go.
After the sex—which Louisa views as a rape and Nick thinks is consensual—Louisa leaves and walks home even though Nick tries to convince her to sleep over. The story begins at this point, in the early hours of Day Twelve as Louisa is walking home alone, drunk and high, and realizes she can rewind time. She impulsively decides that she is willing to relive the assault and the entire relationship, in reverse, in order to make it un-happen so she doesn’t have to deal with it. She doesn’t think anyone will believe her—in the story, she lists all the reasons she’s not credible as a victim—and the idea of trying to confront Nick or reporting him scares her more than reliving the whole thing. But as she rewinds and catches things she missed the first time around, she begins to question her decision.
Ostensibly a “feminist” story, “Erase and Rewind”, in my view, like a handful of other stories in the collection, actually depicts how feminism fails vulnerable young women. Prior to the story’s events, Louisa and her friends had become superficially interested in feminism via popular celebrities like Beyoncé and Emma Watson. But Louisa is intimidated by how judgemental the feminist movement is and put off by its more “extreme” elements; she’s so terrified of “getting feminism wrong” she censors her own opinions while sponging up the ones she reads online. During the rewind, the feministic and activist rhetoric she’s learned only sends her spiralling into guilt and shame. I’m not sure this came across, however. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that my fiction tends to be a little too subtle (also “blunt”), and I think the role feminism plays in the collection ends up being ambiguous more than critical.
I wrote the story with the intention of provoking men. Somewhat to my surprise, it worked. “Erase and Rewind” was received very positively by both Timothy Taylor and my mostly-male fiction workshop, and their feedback was incredibly helpful in turning what was then an unruly manuscript into a publishable short story. After the story was published online in the now-defunct journal The Minola Review, I got messages from a handful of men I knew saying that the story had “got” to them. That Nick seemed like a realistic character, the situation between him and Louisa like something that happened frequently.
After Erase and Rewind was published, one of the reviews I appreciated most (even though it was only a 3-star one) came from a writer named Zachary Houle, who, although not a fan of feminism, had this to say:
“The story [Erase and Rewind] was thought-provoking for me because it probed the boundaries of what might be considered consent, and why more women don’t go to the police after being raped. It was food for thought — that a woman doesn’t necessarily have to come out and say “no” for a sexual interaction to actually be a sexual assault, and that there are other signs that may imply that the female is not “out for a good time.” It made me wonder if that capacity exists in all men, even the ones who proclaim that they are “feminists” themselves.”
Houle is not alone here. Several male readers have told me that “Erase and Rewind” is their favourite story in the collection.
Eight years after writing “Erase and Rewind”, I find myself even more uncertain about “feminism” than I was back then. I always disliked the “girl-boss” variety, now I loathe it and think mainstream corporate feminism has done far more to hurt women than to help us. If I can be said to subscribe to any branch of feminism nowadays, it would be some modern variation of “maternal” feminism, which is rooted in the idea that motherhood is a valuable societal role.
“In an effort to guard women’s rights, children’s rights were thrown under the bus.”
— Erica Komisar, “Motherhood, Feminism and Child Outcomes”, YouTube
I’ve spent the last two and a half years as a stay-at-home mother (combined with some freelancing and writing at home) and I’ve talked to countless other moms, and I’ve noticed that STAH mothers and their children are thriving more than moms who have to work full time—I say “have to” because the majority of working mothers I’ve talked to have said they wished they could work less or take longer maternity leaves or quit altogether to be with their children (and the data backs this observation up). They can’t afford to. The part time jobs aren’t available. The push for universal daycare pushed by “left-leaning” “activist” types and World Economic Forum-sponsored puppet-politicians like Trudeau, ironically, strikes me as an example of further colonizing childrearing.
Call me backward or whatever other names you want, but I think a healthy society is one where parents, in particular mothers, at least have the goddamn choice to stay at home and raise their children, even if that means, *gasp* the majority of workplaces are male-dominated. (I also think stay-at-home dads are a good option, and that grandparents and other relatives can fill the primary caregiver role too; I just think kids do better when raised by family who love them and are a consistent part of their lives instead of an ever-rotating cast of paid caregivers who might like them fine but objectively do not love them).
So I never liked the girl-boss stuff. But I really, truly, used to believe in movements like “Me Too”, and that mainstream feminism cared about the well-being, health, and physical safety of women and children (at least girl-children), and now I don’t know what to think about that either.
Why are so many “feminist” and “sexual assault awareness” campaigners silent on the issue of male sexual predators exploiting the gains in transgender rights to self-ID into women’s prisons? (Look, 15 years ago, I doubt there were very many heterosexual rapists coming out as trans to access vulnerable women, because that crap wouldn’t have worked back then. But as a society we changed the rules, and so the dicks who would game the system changed how they play. This isn’t complicated. See also: mediocre male athletes self-identifying into medals in competitive women’s sports. To be clear, this doesn’t mean I have a problem with transgender people, this means I have a problem with opportunist penis-havers and rapists. If you cannot tell the difference, this says way more about you and what you think about transgender people than it does about me. Capisce?).
It seems to me like there are an awful lot of activist-y and “feminist”-identified women out there defending privileged white women who probably lied about being sexually assaulted for careerist or revenge-y reasons (it’s rare, but it happens) while having nothing to say about very credible stories about women in prison— who are disproportionately likely to be BIPOC and/or survivors of childhood abuse and/or domestic violence—being raped by trans-identified biological males who were in prison for sex crimes in the first place.
Why are mainstream feminists actively suppressing the evidence that hormonal birth control pills have significant adverse effects on the physical and mental health (and fertility) of girls’ and women? It really seems the “conservatives-are-coming-after-the-pill!” crowd are in favour of suppressing information and thus informed consent in the name of ideology. And don’t even get me started on informed consent and puberty blockers. I’m not saying we should ban anything, but, holy crap, people—especially children and teenagers—have the right to know what they’re putting in and/or doing to their bodies and the potential consequences. (I feel this way about Big Pharma and their profits-over-people motivations in general).
I could keep ranting but I think I’ve digressed enough already. This was meant to be a post about my short story being adapted into a short film, which is very cool and I’m grateful that director Lauren Grant saw the potential and pursued this. She and the other good folks over at Clique Pictures are probably cringing right now, so please keep in mind that they had absolutely nothing to do with this essay and were just trying to make a good movie that addressed date-rape and sexual assault and its’ impact on women in a nuanced way.
But the launch of this film has triggered me, I’ll admit it. I’ve had a hard time engaging with the film and the story collection in general because the stories were written by a naive, depressed (maybe something to do with the birth control pills?), and confused young woman in her twenties, and the thirty-something post-mushroom-hero-dosing new mother and housewife I am now feels like a very different person—in a good way (I, personally, prefer being barefoot in the kitchen to wearing heels in an office).
But the screwed-up girl who wrote “Erase and Rewind” and the rest of the “depressing” stories in the collection is still a part of me. And she wanted me to write this. Because while I blamed “patriarchy” and “rape culture” for men like Nick when I wrote “Erase and Rewind” back in 2016, now I understand that hook-up culture and men’s expectation of sex is also a product of the feminist-led sexual revolution. After all, one of the points of “Erase and Rewind” is that Nick genuinely doesn’t think he did anything wrong.
It occurs to me, for example, that the jerk who sexually harassed me in undergrad while loudly identifying as a “feminist ally” and claiming to believe in “female sexual liberation” was a feature, not a bug, and that many of the uncomfortable situations I found myself in with men when I was young had a lot to do with men no longer thinking sex is a big deal for women because we were “empowered” to avoid pregnancy thanks to birth control. And maybe it’s not a big deal for some women. But it was for me, and it still is for a lot of young women.
What I want for women (and men, and children, and LGBTQ+ people, and almost everyone) is for as many of us as possible to be as healthy, happy, and physically safe as possible. What I’m afraid of is that modern feminism is doing the opposite. Child mental health has never been worse. Women are burnt out and miserable. Men are resentful. Something like a seventh of us are on psychiatric medication. The near-doubling of the workforce and consequential depressed wages combined with the influx of women into prestigious university spots and high-paying careers—because we ARE talented and we CAN compete!—has resulted in a shortage of men who earn enough to support a family. There also, it seems to me, to be something deeply un-feminist about relying on poorer women (who are disproportionately immigrants and women of colour) to do all the care work for us (including, in many cases, actually gestating our children).
The only people seemingly benefitting from all of this are our profit-obsessed corporate and government overlords, a handful of career-minded #girlboss high achievers, and apparently also predators and opportunists who have found all sorts of new ways to take advantage of the “equitable” new landscape.
Now, when I think about many of the activist ideas I used to uncritically repeat, the Cardigans’ song starts playing in my mind again …
I changed my mind
I take it back
Erase and rewind
‘Cause I’ve been changing my mind—Cardigans, “Erase/Rewind”
Thank you for reading. Film details are below.
Erase & Rewind (director: Lauren Grant) will premiere in at the Canadian Film Fest on Saturday, March 23, 2:30pm at the Scotiabank Theatre Toronto as part of the “Homegrown Shorts 6” program. Tickets are $16.
Festival Website: https://www.canfilmfest.ca/films-2024
Tickets: https://filmfreeway.com/CanadianFilmFestToronto/tickets
Interview with Director Lauren Grant at GirlTalkHQ
Interview with Director Lauren Grant at Cinemorata