TRANSCRIPT 🔗
Ksenija: while I myself am absolutely for all the positives that the Me Too movement brought about, I can't help but wonder whether it did go too far in certain aspects. we're discussing Vladimir by Julia May Jonas, and in this story, the protagonist's and narrator's husband gets caught up in the Me Too wave of being accused by former students for having affairs with them. The narrator, his wife, is in an open marriage with him, so she knew the whole time, and she judges them and not him. She feels that they were in consensual relationships, and this was a different time when it was not frowned upon the way it is today. He she says that every girl dreams of sleeping with her professors, that it's a power play, that she felt powerful for being with him, and here we have a whole sequence of women who try to to get their justice and she is simply not supportive. In that sense, she's considered quite unlikable as a character. Now, we have a situation, and here's a little spoiler, where colleagues, and among them is a colleague with whom This woman herself had an affair years earlier, are asking her to relinquish her classes and step down because the students are uncomfortable that she is still staying with her husband and that she didn't condemn him publicly. So the book toys a lot with these contradictions of virtue signaling and when
Sue: Mm-hmm.
Ksenija: they go too far. Do you think that the students requesting that of her is a step too far? Or do you think that they're entitled to feel uncomfortable and to ask for a professor to be removed for something
Sue: I'm with you.
Ksenija: that is? In the end, her personal life. Hillary Clinton comes to mind. I don't know why. Yeah, why she comes to mind, but yeah.
Sue: Literally that was what I was thinking when you were describing it. The standby your man. I I I mean, they're entitled to ask. I think it would be ridiculous if the administration caved to that at the university. if we go back to some of the other discussions we've had about the morality of working for dictators and things like that, there are things that I would find much more abhorrent and difficult to support as a student studying from a professor than you know that sh you she's being asked to step down because of her husband's behavior. I mean that seems absolutely insane to me.
Ksenija: Because she didn't renounce her husband and because she is still with him. That's complicit.
Sue: No, I mean there might be a million reasons that she isn't in a position to renounce her husband. a and frankly, what's going on in the relationship is their business, not the students' business. And I think also, you know, when I was eighteen, I was incredibly moralistic about other people because I always knew what was right. And that
Ksenija: Didn't we all
Sue: Didn't we all? God, wouldn't we love to be 18 again and and so sure of absolutely everything in our lives? so part of that is your morality as a teenager is pretty undeveloped. You haven't been
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tested. You ha a lot of teenagers haven't been through, you know, many sort of ethical or moral choices in any way, shape, or form. So that they're judging somebody else's choices and decisions. feels a bit flawed to me. And and that's where it really can go too far in terms of the you know, when it's no longer the individual's behavior who's in question, but a second order effect on their marriage. I think that's a little bit ridiculous.
Ksenija: I am that's the woke part where I start getting pissed off and getting very iffy. The whole safe space thing and the whole like I I believe that we are indulging the young generations too much in this labeling things as safe space. They everything is now anxiety. You cannot be stressed out, you cannot be under deadline, you cannot. No, no, you're anxious. You're suffering from anxiety. You're suffering, like they're too quick to call things depression, to call things anxiety. There is such a thing as true anxiety, as true depression. And I think that when we name everything that way, we start to devalue the real one, like the boy who cried wolf. And just this thing of giving students so much leeway to weigh in on things that are frankly none of their business. Because her marriage is none of their business. They can have an issue with him, with his behavior. So that's one aspect that bugs me to no end. The other one, again, like when we spoke of LGBTQ or of the trans community and how it is demanded of people to accept things immediately, even though they're not ready for that. They're not where you are or I am or somebody else who is ahead of me. So maybe I'm 10 steps behind that guy and somebody is a thousand steps behind me. We cannot all get there at the same pace. This woman is 58. She comes from a different time. She comes from a time when it was not as frowned upon for a student to have a relationship. I mean, a college student, obviously not a high school student, to have a relationship with her professor. I know of couples that came to be because she was a student and he was a professor. That was not so awful. And I know when Me Too events happened in my country, it was very hard to speak to older women and to get them to accept that somebody spoke up after 20 or 30 years. You know,
Sue: interesting.
Ksenija: they will say, Where was she ? Now she remembered because somebody else said and so now she remembered that it happened to her 20 years ago. No, she's trying to have her minute of fame or whatever. These women In the book were in a consensual relationship with their professor. And back then in the 80s, nobody was talking about this kind of power disbalance and how this is abusive. It didn't exist as a concept. So that to me is looking at things from today's perspective and judging things from 30, 40 years ago. We can judge them, but We will not get everyone to understand it. I don't know if I'm making
Sue: I think that's true.
Ksenija: sense.
Sue: Yeah, yeah, because it was, you know, it was a different time. And you know, just look at ads that were on TV, look at you know what was said in sitcoms, the whole the whole narrative in at least the US was really different about sexual harassment. Women were just coming
Ksenija: yeah. yeah.
Sue: into the workplace. in a major force. And you know, a lot of universities were still single sex in the 70s, 60s and 70s. So for many women, they were just becoming students at universities. and then you had the whole like You know, 60s sexual liberation, that sort of thing. You have the pill. Like, there were so many social dynamics going on about women becoming sexually liberated because they could manage their own birth control, and the dialogue that society had that was still quite traditional, and all of that was rupturing in the 70s and into the 80s. It's no wonder that Dynamics happened that now we look at and say, boy, that was wrong. But it was, it was changing, and there wasn't the same moral lens that there is now. And I I I certainly can see how women would say, and I've experienced it maybe more in just workplace dynamics, where people would say, Well, it's just what you put up with at the time. It was just the way things were. And and now if that happened in a workplace, somebody would be fired or somebody would be censured, because it's not acceptable. Yes. Yeah.
Ksenija: Remember mad men with them slapping the behind
Sue: yeah.
Ksenija: of the secretary and stuff like that? Of course that's unacceptable now or slapping somebody's child in their own house. That was accepted and normal and women smoking in the sir nursery and all that. But it just
Sue: Doctors smoking in the hospital.
Ksenija: I'm just not sure it would make sense to in twenty twenty six Press charges against that woman for endangering her child's health by smoking in his nursery back in nineteen sixty-five. That's what I'm trying
Sue: Yeah, I'm
Ksenija: to say.
Sue: I I do. And I think there certainly would be situations that were much less shades of gray where the woman really should be able to come forward. but
Ksenija: Absolutely.
Sue: it it it is just hard to separate out The and and you and I talk about this in terms of you know Montenegro and the values in Montenegro and the way you know relationships and families operate than the way in the US. So things that might be totally acceptable here would be completely unacceptable in Montenegro. And you know, we're yet we're both in 2026, but our our social environments are entirely different. and I've certainly had you know people tell me, well. just put up and shut up with that sort of behavior. you really and and I I remember being asked what were technically illegal questions in the interviews for jobs. You couldn't ask people if they were married, if they planned to have kids, things like that. It was illegal.
Ksenija: A children.
Sue: and yet people still did. And I had to kind of think to myself, all right, well, this guy's in his 60s. Do I really call him
out for this? Or do I just let it slide and joke? And I think much more in the 80s and 90s, we were trained to you just joke about it, you let it slide, and you move. on. But culture shifted and I think for very good reasons a lot of that really should called out be called out isn't really acceptable, but it does take quite a long time for society to change.
Ksenija: I agree. And I think part of maturing is realizing that you have to pick your battles. Again, I think the Me Too movement did a world of good to women worldwide because things have finally been labeled as unacceptable and women are not accepting them anymore. However, as in every positive and good movement out there, And every positive social fight, there is somebody who takes it too far, and then the other side just uses that example to know and and and and to to make the whole movement look wrong and so I I believe that this book, Vladimir by Julia J. Jonas, intelligently dissects this dynamic. this woman is so unlikable to readers because she challenges this dynamic. And I think that that's the reason why younger readers have such a hard time relating to her and just hate her,
Sue: Mm.
Ksenija: while and they don't understand her attitude towards her husband, towards the man she is obsessing over, towards herself, and towards the accusations against him. But I felt that in the culture where I live, I could understand her. I could understand her doubts. And I found that we we talked about what it means in another episode, what it means to be a hero. Sometimes to be a hero means to name things and to name feelings and doubts that are not popular today and are not acceptable in a society where students can require. for a professor to be removed because she didn't divorce her philandering husband.
Sue: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And things can go too far. You're right, and you know, when I think to the elections and some of the things that were good ideas taken too far where it became a source of ridicule. and that undermines the whole value of the movement and the change in a way that almost sets the clock back. And that can be incredibly frustrating. But I love what you describe with the the woman in the book. being nuanced and having struggles and thinking through things that maybe to a 20-year-old today seems so black and white, let's just wait until she's 50 and maybe she'll think differently about it too. because I remember being that 20-year-old and seeing moral issues as as really clear choices. Mm-hmm.
Ksenija: And you're entitled to but who the hell do you think you are to ask for a professor to be removed because she's not behaving the way you think she is? It's making you uncomfortable? Well tough it up.
Sue: Agreed.
Ksenija: Poor you wow.
Sue: my. Well let's hope
Ksenija: All right.
Sue: the other things don't go too far and we find a good balance for these.
Ksenija: Yeah, it would be nice. It would be a nice change. All right guys,
Sue: Yeah.
Ksenija: thank you for watching. See you next week.
Sue: Bye.