I may destroy you reviews7/27/2023 ![]() ![]() Consider the popularity of something like “ Cat Person ,” the 2017 short story by Kristen Roupenian, about a repulsive, dissociative sexual encounter or even the viral 2018 article about Aziz Ansari, which plenty of people decided was an example of a young woman complaining about bad sex - but was perhaps a better example of shortfalls in precision and empathy when it comes to talking and even thinking about intimacy. Stories that speak to complicated - and unpleasant - sexual experiences tend to find large audiences online. ![]() The experience, which is marked by skepticism and lack of action on the part of the police, is also not uncommon for sexual-assault survivors, and is what advocates point to as one reason why so many sex crimes go unreported or un-investigated.Īnother reason, which Kwame also experiences, is articulated by a woman in an assault-survivors support group Arabella visits later in the show, who explains what happened when she tried to report an instance of workplace harassment: “They ask you what happened, and then you try to define what happened, and I hear myself out loud and I end up undermining myself.” When Kwame attempts to report his assault, the cop he speaks with is uncomfortable and flippant, and Kwame, unsure about what happened to him in the first place, simply gives up and leaves. When Arabella names one of her rapists, for example, she does so in a public forum and it goes viral on social media, a sequence that almost parodies a Me Too–esque takedown. Kwame is horrified, and unsure enough to Google whether nonconsensual humping (frotteurism) is a crime ( it is).īoth encounters reflect troubling realities: how there’s often a muddled sense of what constitutes sexual assault and rape (in both legal and social arenas) how over half of assaults come from an intimate partner, and nearly half from an acquaintance and what might happen when a person reports (or attempts to report) an assault or speak out against a perpetrator. In another instance, Arabella’s friend Kwame (Paapa Essiedu) is sexually assaulted by a man right after they have consensual sex. Feigning curiosity, she asks the officer investigating her initial case about nonconsensual condom removal - essentially if it “counts” as anything. Several weeks after she is raped, Arabella has sex with a colleague who slips off his condom without her knowledge. A genre whose harbingers - Bombshell, The Assistant, The Loudest Voice - have often framed these stories as not only straight and white, but unambiguous. In doing so, it engages more capably and thoughtfully with the narrative of victimhood and the nature of harm than anything else in its genre. Rather than immediately reducing bad sexual encounters into a singular label, it digs, peeling back the layers of power and privilege that are always at play when a person is assaulted. This curiosity is what distinguishes I May Destroy You from others in the cadre of post–Me Too entertainment. “There are so many different kinds of sexual assault,” Arabella huffs after a visit to the police station about her case - coming to terms with that fact is partially the point of the show. ![]() Arabella’s experience, which she reports to the police, becomes I May Destroy You’s through line, and to develop it Coel moves from the violent assault into more seemingly ambiguous sexual encounters. The encounter is modeled on something that happened to Coel, who in 2018 said she was drugged and sexually assaulted by strangers while writing Chewing Gum, her first show. She doesn’t remember much until a squeaky door spurs a flashback from the night before: a tiny red room and a door banging in time with a stranger. She wakes up the next morning in front of her laptop and she’s confused, bruised and bleeding from a cut on her forehead. She’s unfocused, racing to finish a draft of her second book on a deadline, and decides to meet up with friends for a break. Arabella, played by Coel, is this story’s center, a writer living in East London. Michaela Coel’s new HBO show I May Destroy You pushes this script much further (warning: spoilers ahead). I know many people who have had similar experiences, and have used similar language to describe them: It wasn’t bad it wasn’t good I don’t remember much probably not again did I want it? I’m not sure. ![]() Maybe more disconcerting occasions, too, like when a partner said, playfully but firmly, they wouldn’t wear protection, or an instance with an older boyfriend from my teenage years I’ve mulled over for a decade, wondering if it “counts” as something more than bad sex. In the “bad” bucket, where I do myself the fewest favors in this exercise, I might put the sex that was uncomfortable in some way, or the murky hookups and one-night stands. I would probably drop my sexual experiences into several imprecise buckets, something like: great, okay, weird, and bad. Michaela Coel as Arabella in I May Destroy You. ![]()
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