Part 2: A Teen’s Powerful Body
No slut shamming, but Alisson was not a virgin before she had sex with Mr. North. “I had slept with all three of my serious boyfriends in high school.” And it’s worth noting that it was Mr. North’s idea that they wait to consummate their age-gap affair until after Alisson turned 18, and she graduated from Hunt high school. Wood wrote: “[...] I wanted so badly to be seen as a woman, as someone worthy of attraction. I wanted Mr. North, Nick, to want me. And I didn’t understand why we had to wait, anyway; once I turned eighteen, I didn’t understand [...]” But on page 283 Alisson wrote: “[...] I was asking for the support I desperately needed. I wasn’t asking to be fucked.”
Subsequently, in her white cap and gown, Alisson shared that all she could think about was how much she wanted her time with her teacher to start. “It was all I wanted.” Consequently, the night after graduation, Alisson went to her English teacher’s apartment, and they made love for the first time. But it wasn’t like the boys who had sex with her in the corner of the basement who: “[...] apologized for how quickly it all came and went.”
Wood wrote that she was a beautiful 17-year-old who boys called a “Disney princess”. Yet it wasn’t until after she met Mr. North that she said: “I wasn’t suicidal anymore.” Alisson’s suicidal ideations stemmed from the fact that she felt that her body was her: “[...] only possible source of power.”, which she blamed on Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, MTV, Fiona Apple, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Victoria’s Secret.
However, Alisson used the power of her body on her English teacher. Alisson shared that she knew that she had power over Mr. North but that she wanted the power of sex and the safety of childhood: “[...] my breasts, all of the things that shifted the way men looked at me. If this was power [...] I wanted the safety of childhood and the power of sex. I wanted it all, in my life and in my body.”
Consequently, while Mr. North was teaching, Alisson learned over while on her knees with her back to Mr. North so that she could share her black lace underwear and a strip of skin with her English teacher. After the bell rang, Alisson arched her back, sat up slowly, and tossed her long black hair. “This must be what power feels like.”
In addition to her nubile body, Alisson came to the realization that she had an additional power over her teacher. After Mr. North reminded Alisson that she could go to the principal and get him “[...] fired in a minute.” Alisson wrote: “It was interactions like these that made me think I had power in the relationship, that I wasn’t just an eighteen-year-old being manipulated by her twenty-seven-year-old teacher.”
But that didn’t stop Alisson from using the power of her young body. After she gave her English teacher a topless photo that her boyfriend, a college student, had taken when she was 17, Alisson was convinced that she had power: “I had shown him I was capable of creating desire, that I could do this, that I wasn’t just some dumb, clueless girl. This was a power I had, too, that I was his equal in all this. The wanting went both ways.” Thus, another seeming contradiction. Is Alisson espousing that she was equal in the age-gap relationship with high school English teacher and that, despite their age-gap, she wanted Mr. North as much as he wanted her or, as she espoused in parts ii and iii, was she a vulnerable victim?
Oh and by the way, Alisson shared: “I always wore short shorts and skirts because I knew he liked my naked legs.” And on another occasion, Wood shared: “I knew he was watching me. I tried to walk sexy, with a wiggle, like Jessica Rabbit. I tossed my hair as I passed through the threshold of his door. The second bell, ringing through me.”
On closing night of the school play, Alisson tried to will Mr. North to kiss her: “Kiss me just kiss me please kiss me”. He didn’t. However, during the night of the cast party, Christina, another Hunt nymphet, hugged Mr. North and, “in the darkness of the doorway”, gave him a kiss on the cheek before she turned and smiled at Alisson. And Sarah, a member of the Hunt slam team, “[...] was all over him. And he just let her flirt with him, openly." (Mr. North and Alisson weren’t the only teacher-student “romance” at Hunt high school. Mr. North shared with Alisson that a math teacher was having an affair with a girl on the softball team.)
Alisson gave at least two examples of how her “dark romance” with her high school teacher “went both ways”. After Mr. North inappropriately shared with Alisson that he imagined her naked, Alisson wrote: “Romance and sweetness. It was then that I realized he was not like my other boyfriends.” Consequently, outside the diner and between the cars, Alisson inappropriately informed her English teacher, “I love you.” Aww. “He just smiled at me and said good night.”
And after Mr. North shockingly asked Alisson for her bra size, she shockingly said, “I’ll trade you [...] You tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine.” 32C. 7¾. Alisson wrote that she knew that asking her English teacher to share the size of his penis was seductive. She asked: “At what point does a girl turn into prey?”
Part 3: The End of a Dark [Teacher-Student] Romance
During her freshman year college, Alisson ended her “dark romance” with her former English teacher for two reasons. She wrote that she ended it because Mr. North was controlling (i.e., Mr. North wanted to continue to keep their “dark romance” a secret while Alisson desperately wanted an open age-gap relationship.) Alisson wrote that the relationship was “problematic and unhealthy.” And she wrote: “[...] our relationship was built on lies, that he isolated me in high school and continued to while I was in college [...]” “I was tired of being alone to hide our relationship.”
And she ended it because every time they had sex, unlike with boys, it hurt. Alisson didn’t clarify if Mr. North had a rough sex fetish or if she suffered from a degree of vaginismus. However, she did explain why she simply never told him to be gentle: “[...] it hurt the whole time, so much I made noises, but I didn’t say stop [...]” “I didn’t want to ask him to be gentle because I didn’t want him to think I was a child [...]” However, she had a secret code: “[...] moan means go, that means stop, an inhale of please, my nails were really, please stop [...]”
Mr. North even told Alisson, “I love you so much, I’m so in love with you, I would never hurt you.” But Alisson didn’t use that as an opportunity to tell Mr. North that he did hurt her during sex. Once during sex, Mr. North even asked Alisson, “What’s wrong?” What Alisson's reply, “Nothing, I love you. Don’t stop.”
And Alisson wrote in the latter parts of her memoir: “Now when I think about the first ten years of my life after the teacher, I see a clear impact [...] I thought it was supposed to hurt.” As you can see, this simply isn’t true. Alisson never expressed that she thought that it was supposed to hurt. Just the opposite.
Very interestingly, in part ii, Alisson wrote that she was just a child when she 17: “[...] I was a child. I was barely 110 pounds, I had been only with other teen boys, all of us children. I was eighteen [when I first had sex with my English teacher], but that didn’t matter [...]”
Here’s Oxford Languages’ definition of child: "/CHīld/ [noun] a young human being below the age of puberty or below the legal age of majority." And I’m assuming that it’s safe to assume that Alisson doesn’t support 18-year-old porn stars who rarely do professional porn with other 18-year-olds. Or maybe Alisson only supports sensual teen porn but with a minimum weight requirement.
Alisson opened chapter 13 with: “The first thing I did when I got to college was fuck a stranger.” She described the sex with her college mate as “gentle” and painless, which appears to have erroneously solidified in her mind that non-age-gap sex equals “gentle” and age-gap sex equals “pain”.
Alisson’s back and forths are dizzying. Another example: One page 272 she wrote, for the first time, that Mr. North had “power” over her, but on the very next page she wrote: “I still wonder if I have just exaggerated things, if I am the unreliable narrator in this story, if I truly did seduced him [...]” But then on page 275 she wrote that she was groomed and abused: “[...] the teacher was a predator, that he spent our school year grooming me to be the perfect subject for abuse [...]”
On page 284 Alisson wrote: “The last thing I wanted was for him to not think I was the strong, powerful, sexy woman I was [during senior year of high school].” But on the very next page, Alisson wrote: “[...] I wasn’t some powerful, sexy grown-up. I was a child being manipulated, being preyed upon. I was the victim of a predator [...]”
And Alisson wrote that as a negative consequence of having a “dark romance” with Mr. North: “I found myself seeking out or at least choosing relationships where I was the secret - illicit affairs, married men, guys who couldn’t commit [...]” but two pages later she wrote: “I began to understand that I was making choices to get myself into these situations [...]” [Emphasis mine]
Wait, how about a non-fiction plot twist. Alisson wrote: “Three years after the relationship ended [...] I needed to see Nick’s face [...] I showed up at his apartment unannounced [...]” “I had so much I still wanted to say, that I wanted to ask him - Did he really love me then? Was I really special? [...]”
And 23-year-old Alisson: “[...] sent Nick and an email out of the blue, asking him to get a coffee sometime [...]” They had lunch: “[...] outside, at a cute restaurant on the water.” Alisson found out that Mr. North was in a relationship that was “basically over”. She told him to call her when it was completely over. She followed up a month later with an email, but he never replied. Why did Alisson attempt to reconnect with someone whom she said took advantage of her vulnerabilities and made her a victim? She shared: “Sure it was totally fucked up, I could say, but it wasn’t rape. I wanted it as much as he did. It was never abuse abuse.”
GIF from Who Will You Be? Written by Emily Ratajkowski & directed by Lena Dunham
29-year-old Alisson co-led a weekly “girls-only comprehensive sex education and leadership program” at the Boys & Girls Clubs of America. The girls in the program were: “[...] all seniors, seventeen and eighteen years old.” Here’s a conversation Alisson overheard:
Nicole, “Girl, it’s no big deal. I’ve had sex with three guys. Just relax and have a good time. And if you’re not having a good time, it’s your problem, because you gotta ask for what you want.” The third girl agreed, “Yes!” Alisson wrote: “[...] I was thrilled that they were talking about sex without any accompanying shame.” But “[...] [f]or all her bravado, Nicole was a child.”
child: /CHīld/ [noun] a young human being below the age of puberty or below the legal age of majority. (Oxford Languages) Thus, I’m assuming that Alisson was implying that Nicole had the mind of a child?
After the session, Nicole helped Alisson clean up, and Nicole put a handful of condoms into the pocket of her lavender slicker. How did Alisson react? She wrote: “I offered her candy for helping me clean up. “Thank you, Miss Alisson.”
I won’t discuss the misleading and erroneous errors that Wood wrote about Lolita. Like when she wrote of Lolita leaving Humbert: “She fled, she got out. Let’s not focus yet on where she ended up.” But it’s misleading if you mention that Lolita fled from Humbert but not mention that she fled to Quilty - another much older man. But I won’t discuss that topic.
Alisson taught an introductory undergraduate creative writing course. And guess what book she taught at the “culmination” of the semesters. You guessed it - Lolita: “[...] the only convincing love story of our century,” said Vanity Fair”. That’s correct. She taught the novel that she said her high school English teacher used for grooming. And Alisson shared in the penultimate chapter of her memoir - her final contradiction: “In many ways, I still want to be like Lolita.”
In the end, I suspect that Alisson Wood wrote Part i of Being Lolita for writer fame slash money. And that she wrote parts ii and iii to avoid being canceled, which may have been prompted by one of the over 50 people Alisson acknowledged in the acknowledgments.
Part 5: It’s Normal for a Nymphet to Crush on her Teacher
Kaia Gerber had Alisson Wood on her Instagram Live book club (November 13, 2020). To promote the event, Geber posted a picture of Alisson’s memoir, and Kaia wrote that she read Being Lolita: [...] four times and filling the margins with endless annotations [...]”
Before Alisson joined the live stream, Kaia said that in Being Lolita, Lolita: “[...] becomes a backdrop to their connection that blooms from like a crush into a romance and a relationship.” Thus, Kaia confirmed that Alisson had a “romance” with her English teacher.
But then Kaia said that, via Lolita, Mr. North, “[...] convinces her that that book is a love affair when in reality it is not [...] as time kind of progresses in the book and in Alisson’s life, ‘cause it is a memoir, you see how his grip on her tightens and how the relationship quickly becomes abusive.” Wait, is Kaia implying that Alisson’s “romance” with her English was not initially abusive, but that it became abusive after they had rough sex, which was after Alission turned 18, and she graduated from high school?
Kaia said misleadingly, “As a young woman you think you’re in control - a lot of the time. And realizing what consent is and when you can give consent. And as a minor that is something you cannot give to an adult.” I don’t know whom Kaia was referring to, because there’s no way that she was (correctly) referring to Alisson, because Alisson was not a minor when she had sex with Mr. North. In other words, there’s no state in the US that has an age-of-consent that’s higher than 18. (Note: 19-year-old Kaia was 18 when she began a romantic relationship with 26-year-old Pete Davidson.)
Remember that Alisson and Kaia related that Mr. North used Lolita to groom Alisson, but just like in the memoir, Alisson confessed that she didn’t actually read Lolita, “When I was in high school I didn’t actually [...] I didn’t really, like, carefully read Lolita. Umm, I read the parts that he read to me and, like, you know, sort of skimmed through it. And but I got bored by the second part. I was like, “This so boring and it is long [...]”
Then Kaia implied that it wasn’t Lolita but that Mr. North took advantage of Alisson’s mental issues (i.e., suicidal tendencies) to “control and abuse” Alisson. And Alisson agreed that Mr. North noticed that she had those vulnerabilities and took advantage of them, but there’s no explicit mention of that in the memoir. One could take a long stretch and make that inference, but there’s no explicit mention of that in Being Lolita. On the contrary, Allison explicitly related that Mr. North’s seduction methods were (excerpts from) Lolita, which, once again, she didn’t (fully) read, and control (i.e., Despite Alisson’s wishes, Mr. North made Allison keep their affair a secret.)
Here’s the penultimate (seeming) contradiction from the book club discussion.
Alisson, “Oh, I didn’t want a woman. I didn’t want any reader to come away from this book thinking, “Oh, she was ruined. She was broken.”
Kaia, “And I think that’s what’s so cool. While you are the victim. You don’t victimize yourself - especially in the beginning.”
Alisson, “I completely agree.”
But throughout the book club discussion, Alisson implied to Kaia that, as a consequence of her romance with Mr. North, she was a victim and that she had been ruined and broken.
And now for the final (seeming) contradiction from the book club discussion. Allison confessed that it’s completely natural, totally normal, and completely developmentally and socially appropriate for a high school student to have a crush on her older teacher:
Alisson, “That’s completely natural. It’s normal for a teenager. It’s totally normal for, like, a teenage girl to have a crush on her older teacher.”
Kaia, “Yes.”
Alisson, “And I was not the only one at my school to have a crush on him.”
Alisson, “It was totally normal for me to have the [sic] crush on the teacher.”
Kaia, “Yeah.”
Alisson, “Like that’s fine. Like, that’s completely developmentally appropriate. It’s socially appropriate.”
Lastly, in what is arguably Alisson's most pertinent statement, “Like that’s not the problem. The problem is that an adult man was like, “Hey, she’s got a crush on me, like, let me see if I can sleep with her.”
And that’s exactly what happened. Mr. North noticed that Alisson had a crush on him and, per Alisson, he correctly assumed that she inappropriately wanted to have sex with her high school English teacher, but Mr. North should have waited to begin the (non-sexual and sexual) romance after Alisson had graduated from Hunt. (Although, despite Kaia's own consensual age-gap affair, it appears that she would have (openly) objected to that scenario as well.)
Lastly, let me be absolutely clear, Mr. North should not have had an (non-sexual) affair with Alisson - his high school English student. But Alisson should not have had an affair with Mr. North - her high school English teacher. Like Alisson Wood wrote: “The wanting went both ways.”