Adam Adamson was young enough to know a kiss was not just a kiss. The prosecutor delivered her summary in a voice which could snap carrots. Adam’s kiss was sexual assault perpetrated on a young woman who never saw it coming. The jury of nine women and three men nodded. The reporter’s knees in the back row were crunched together. A packed house. Melinda Salem, the prosecuting attorney, could taste blood. Adamson, 24, of The 100 Acre Pines, an eastern suburbs gated community, was going down.

Let us go Huckleberry Finn-style, back along the mystic river of time and voyuer-like, witness what happened that sunny morning.

Adam met Virginia Gerlach at a Sea Shepherd fund-raiser on the lawns outside the university library. Adam was an Honours literature major, whose imagination and mien were kidnapped by Jack Kerouac. He wore a red and black checked shirt, faded blue jeans and talked in a rough Canuck accent, which frequently slipped back in to his private school patois, which sounded as if the horses and hounds of Suffolk lived next door.

As a first year sociology student, Virginia paraded a white Country Road shirt, jodhpurs and hippy toe sandals. Pretty rather than beautiful with a cute upturned nose surrounded by light freckles. Her long blonde hair fell between her shoulder blades down to the T7 vertebrae. Virginia was passionate about saving animals. If a toddler and a seal were drowning, she’d rescue the seal.

Few women would say Adam was handsome. His light red hair and scrawny arms were unappealing. The Kerouac persona was silly but there was charm in his silliness. He was intelligent and well-read. Could quote anything from Shakespeare to Heller. Adam was old fashioned. He stood when an older woman entered the room, which was odd in the 21^st century. Virginia – although a modern woman well versed in third generation feminism – found this quaint and oddly attractive. A Mr Darcy in Levis and Blundstone boots.

The walls of the reality asylum did not shake when, in a tremulous voice, he introduced himself that hot Friday morning. He’d tried many times before but bravery fled. When it came to women, Adam was a mouse. Spending seven years in a private boys school didn’t help. Virginia was popular. Male and female friends orbited her like moons. Virginia noticed him at the start of semester and was waiting for him to talk to her. A big ask for a mouse.

Sexual pressure rose in Adam with every failed attempt. Yet to a bystander, as he walked meekly towards her that morning with the wisteria in flower with the sun rising over the physics building, he seemed a normal, if under-fed young man.

Vanessa was carrying Intercourse, by Andrea Dworkin. As a literature student he didn’t know the book was a trenchant attack on men, which stated sexual penetration was degrading and doomed women to submission. Virginia had stuck small yellow sticky notes between the pages. A good sign Adam thought.

If Andrea was right she mused, then having babies was an act of enslavement. She went back n forth over that. If so, then why were so many women getting pregnant? Was it just false consciousness as the Marxists said? While her experience of sex was limited, she did go ‘all the way’ with her two first boyfriends and then worried about STD’s.

At ten metres, Adam’s courage failed again and he bent down to re-tie his shoe laces. Virginia’s mind was caught in the strange currents and eddies of post modernist thought. Surely Dworkin’s argument was just another narrative produced by the western academy. It was no more valid than Newton’s theory of gravity or why Jodi Picoult’s novels were on par with Hemingway’s. In fact, Dworkin’s use of logic was a male construction of reality. It denied women their own mythology.

Virginia turned and saw a young man with scrawny arms and light red hair, smiling at her like an idiot.

“Hi, I’m Adam. Are you a member of Sea Shepherd or are you just browsing?”

She ignored the rhetorical question.

“We’ve seen each other around campus haven’t we?” she said.

“I’ve seen you a lot actually. You’re studying sociology. What job do you reckon you’ll do?”

Adam had been stalking her. That was almost romantic but creepy too.

“I haven’t thought much about it. Probably flip burgers at Maccas”

Adam didn’t laugh as his thoughts were racing.

“I was wondering if you’d like to walk with me to the library and we can talk”

This was the most forward thing Adam had said to a woman and later, he regretted it bitterly.

They walked into an almost empty library. Students accessed it from home and downloaded the documents they needed from the subject database.

They caught the lift up to the fourth floor and walked to Dewey 170, amongst the books on ethics and morality.

“This is where I sit,” Adam said, pointing at an old desk. “Nice and quiet. Few people come up here”

She looked around the stacks. A young couple was kissing in the corner. She’d never been to the fourth floor. A light musk smell came from Adam. He’d been eating musk sticks. She looked at his desk with her name written in black ink on the laminate. It could be another Virginia but she chose to not to believe that. It was sweet. She was about to sit down when he grabbed her around the waist and kissed her like a sailor home from war.

At that moment, Priscilla Fotheringham – or ‘Full Froth’ as the staff called her – the university student councillor, walked past on her way to a secret cigarette on the roof. She saw Adam kiss Virginia and saw her flee. She put the cigarette lighter back in her jeans and made a mental note to talk to the Registrar about the behaviour of young males on campus.

xxxxxxx

“Tongue in or out?”

Vanessa squirmed in the witness box. Her parents sat in the second row behind Ms Salem. Her mother dabbed her eyes with a tissue. Her stony-faced father sat next to her, his fists knotted on his knees.

“I’m sorry Ms Gerlach to put you through this,” the prosecutor said, her fingers knitted in sympathy in front of the witness stand. “It’s important we establish the gravity of the assault. I’ll ask you again. Was the tongue in or out?”

Four months had passed since they’d gone to the library, since Priscilla had told the Registrar, who told the Vice Chancellor who called the police. The police radio was monitored by the local newspaper. A small three paragraph story on page seven was picked up by national talk back radio and before one could say ‘Ed Murrow’, Adam had to barricade himself in his parents house, as the reporters pressed their flat noses against the kitchen windows, yelling out his name and wanting to know how he felt.

Vanessa brushed fluff off her crème cashmere top and smoothed her sensible tartan skirt.

“It’s hard to say,” she said. “One minute I was standing there, the next, he was on me like a mountain lion. He smelt of musk. I’ll always remember that”

“The tongue Ms Gerlach, can you tell us whether Mr Adamson’s tongue was in your mouth or not. Was it a French Kiss or just lip contact?”

Virginia looked at Adam wearing a black suit one size too small. His red eyes looked everywhere but hers. A nice boy but that was the problem Priscilla said. Well-educated boys with good grades and good parents, used their conviviality as a smoke screen. He manipulated her to the library, where, to use an antiquated expression, he hoped to have his way with her. There was nothing she could do.

“It was in, just a little bit”

An audible inhale of breath echoed around the court and the journalists scribbled on their note pads.

“Thank you Ms Gerlach. That will be all. I’d like to call Mr Adam Adamson to the stand”

Adam walked past the red nails of the female judge, tapping on her bench, waiting for him to take a seat in the witness box. He looked out at the court room at the 160 pairs of eyes staring at him. He felt like a deer, lost in the Serengeti.

“Mr Adamson, you write short stories and publish them in magazines don’t you?”

“I do”

“I have one of your stories here,” Ms Salem waved a sheaf of paper in front of her. “A few of the young men in my legal firm thought it interesting but the women reeled back, as if someone had put a spider on their computer. Why do you think that is?”

“Its hard to say. Taste is so…”

“Let me refresh your memory. In one story called ‘Beirut Nights’, there’s a scene where a young woman, about Ms Gerlach’s age, also with blond hair, gives fellatio to a man with light, ginger red hair. Her wrists are tied and she is on her knees. Ring any bells?”

“That’s only one scene. The story is about an English journalist who’s trying to track down an old girlfriend as the Israeli missiles fall on the city. It’s a love story…”

“I see. We have also obtained a copy of your first year essay on the novel, Lolita. In the book, an old man – Humbert Humbert – seduces and has sex with an underage girl. You wrote that Lolita was manipulating her assailant for her own ends. Hardly a condemnation of rape, would you say Mr Adamson?”

To defend the Nobel Prize winner’s work would further implicate him in the charge. He looked at his parents who were looking at the jury. The jury was looking at Adam. He looked up at the judge.

“Your Honour, the prosecutor has made a statement, not asked a question. Of course I condemn rape and all sexual assault but Lolita is a literary work, written in the 1950s. It’s drawing a long bow to create a parallel argument between my first year essay and defending pedophilia”

The judge looked over her silver spectacles and shifted in her chair. He could tell she did not like him. Had categorised him as an over-educated, skinny twerp.

“You will answer the question, Mr Adamson”

A shaft of light poured in through a window, high in the west wall of the courtroom. Tiny motes danced in the sunlight. As a child his Labrador, Chew, used to sit and watch motes for hours, as if conducting a canine physics experiment. Good old, Chew. He folded his hands in his lap. The court was a farce. He was going to swing for the kiss.

“Vladimir Nabokov was one of the finest writers of the 20^th century and Lolita is a masterpiece”

Ms Salem turned slowly to the jury and smiled.

“Thank you for your honesty, Mr Adamson. I only have a few more questions. I have your personal journal here. It was taken as part of the police investigation. You wrote two months before you assaulted Ms Gerlach…”

“Objection your Honour,” Adamson’s lawyer said, who was looking at his phone.

“Sustained”

“You wrote before you took Ms Gerlach to the library, that she was the most beautiful woman you had ever seen. You quote some lines from Shakespeare’s sonnets and Keats to support your ardour. But I note further passages of a more gratuitious nature. Let me refresh your memory”

“I dreamt of Virginia last night. We’re riding horses along a beach and we come to a cave. The air is moist and warm. Ferns hand down over the cave’s entrance. We enter and a large brass bed with crisp, white Egyptian cotton sheets, stands at the back of cave, next to a small open fire. We throw off our clothes and crawl into the bed. I am shy and can’t get an erection so she lends me her hand. Darkness falls and a full moon rises. Then the bed floats out to sea. I gently bite her neck as I enter her and in German she wants me to fuck her harder and I do and she is writhing beneath me, her legs wrapped around my lower back and we have become one, my skin is her skin, my body her body and below the bed, below the ocean, I hear a rumble, then a roar and the sea starts to bubble and a volcano erupts and I wake and wonder how I’ll clean the sheets without Mum knowing”

“Did you write that Mr Adamson?”

Adam looks over at his lawyer who has found Tetris on his phone. Surely an objection on the grounds of relevance was in order.

“I did but this is a product of my imagination and …”

“It’s a clear and graphic representation about how you portray Ms Gerlach. How you objectify her as a sexual plaything, devoid of feelings of her own. She is – and I hope your Honour will forgive the crudity – nothing but a semen depository”

“That was not how I saw Virginia,” Adam said, his temper rising. “She was – is beautiful. You are prosecuting the subconcious. I wasn’t in control of the dream. I was the canvas. It was the brush. All men and women have dreams like this”

Ms Salem wheeled on her heels and addressed the people sitting in the court.

“Have any of you had dreams of this nature? If so, put your hand up now? The defendant says dreams of sexual fantasy involving rape, BDSM, beastiality and more, are pervasive and inhabit us like a parasite. Is this true? If so, I would like to see a show of hands”

The hands stayed resolutely folded on laps. Some men drove their hands deep in to their coat pockets.

“I never wrote about rape or animals and even if I dreamt of those things, it’s not me who is the prime mover. We’re apes and these things are taboo but we still conjur them. That’s a theme in Lolita. We are more than a face”

“That’s interesting Mr Adamson. You claim there is some other agency driving these perversions, some other force beyond yourself. Tell me, what alien puppeteer is making these naked characters dance in your mind while you sleep? I put it to you that you are the sole author of these scenes born from Sodom and Gomorrah and they are the product of your mind and your mind alone”

Adamson’s lawyer lifts his phone in the air and yells, “Got it, you little beauty!”

The judge asked Adam if he had trouble controlling his sexual fantasies. Then asked the clerk to bring her a soy chai café latte.

“You Honour, I have no more trouble controlling my impulses than you do. Literature has been hijacked. We’ve taken a spectacular crap on 300 years of Enlightenment thinking. It’s like McCarthyism married the Chinese Cultural Revolution and gave birth to bourgeoise trolls who use literature and the media as a weapon to close down debate. It’s like accusing a woman of witchcraft and throwing her in the river. If she floats, she’s a witch. If she doesn’t, she wasn’t. Substitute ‘woman’ for ‘man’ and here we are”

“My, my, Mr Adamson,” Ms Salem said. “You are angry. I suggest your anger is directed at those women who are sick of years of domestic violence and sexual abuse; who are sick of being second class citizens and are fighting back by any means possible. You highlight all that is wrong with society. You are guilty as the day is long”

xxxxxxx

“Mr Adamson, please rise,” the Judge said.” The jury finds you guilty of sexual assault. The fact you did not warn the victim or seek her permission to kiss her compounds the offence. You sought only to gratify your desire. I therefore sentence you to five years community service and to complete the male re-education program.”

Long after the media left his parent’s house asking how he felt, after he dropped out of university and tried to find a job – and failed – he found himself standing in front of a morning assembly of private school girls. Their tam o’shanters placed on their tartan skirts. Their long hair glistening. Five hundred pairs of clear, blue, green and brown eyes stared up at him on the stage, behind the microphone.

This was his 12th community re-education talk on why girls and women needed to ‘arm-up’ against predatory males, such as himself. Adam recounted his infatuation with Virginia and how that infatuation, turned by the little fidget wheels of time and longing, into desire. But he did not use the word ‘desire’. He used ‘lust’ as per the re-education style sheet. He projected a timeline on PowerPoint, to show the beginning of his sexual fantasies and how these led by a chain of cause and events, to the fourth floor of the library. Some of the young women made notes. His court appointed guardian, Ms Arrow, was watching him from the wings. He could answer questions but there was to be no contact with the girls. When he finished the 30-minute presentation, he would be whisked away.

Adam provided the girls with an algorithm for dealing with men.

“Point one: if a man or boy shows interest in you, always assume he wants sex”

“Point two: never believe people who talk about the ‘fallacy of generalisation’. There are no grey areas when it comes to male lust. It can only be fulfilled by consummation. “You,” pointing to the girls, “are the red rag, the male is the bull”

“Point three: never be alone with a man, especially if consuming alcohol. Always ensure there are people around who can help you if it gets physical. It’s a good idea to learn some basic Wing Chung moves”

The re-education program made him recite all 25 points. Then he took questions.

A girl with glasses, black hair and skin as pale as plaster stood in the back row.

“I’m confused. You say your dream supported the prosecutor’s case for a conviction, but a person must be conscious to commission a crime”

“Not any more”

A Year 12 student with swimmer’s shoulders and curly red hair pulled back in a scrunchy raised her hand. She tried not to play with a cold sore on her lower lip.

“My question is a bit odd but do you ever have dreams where the woman is on top?”

A raucaus cry went up with a barrage of ‘woo hoos’ and ‘way to go’ and ‘ride ‘em cowgirl’.

“Yes”. Adam wanted to get off the stage and in to the car as quickly as possible. “Yes I do”

“I’ve got a follow up question. It’s for the school. By a show of hands, how many girls here have had a sexual fantasy or an erotic dream? Tell the truth or I’ll punch your face in at lunch time”

A couple of hands rose in the front row including two prefects. Then amongst the tittering, like flowers rising towards the sun, more hands slowly rose as heads swivveled to see who’s hand was up. Ms Genet, the history teacher’s hand went up. 30 seconds later most of the school had their hands pointing at the ceiling. Adam wanted to cry. It wasn’t a vindication but it was a crutch he could shore up against the ruin of his reputation.

A young girl with plaited flaxen blonde hair, a Heidi look-alike, stood and smoothed her skirt. Adam heard the headmistress mutter, ‘oh no’.

“Mr Adamson, it’s very brave of you to come and talk to us today but I fear you have wasted your time. Most of us have an enyclopaedic knowledge of the male sex drive and I’d say 50 per cent of us have engaged in hand-to-hand combat with boys. We are not empty vessels to be filled – no pun intended – with fear of the opposite sex. As women, we take responsibility for our own welfare. We will pick and choose who we see and who we have sex with”

“Thankyou for the reassurance but…” Adam said.

“Please don’t interupt when I’m talking. I suggest if anyone is the victim here, it’s you. The media has turned sexuality in to a contact sport and women are scripted as damsels in distress. This dynamic is reinforced by a small faction of academics and opinion writers who have the temerity to call themselves feminists. According to them, all action is the domain of males and women are passive recipients of whatever comes their way. It’s bullshit. You have been crucified by a power dynamic best described in Arthur Miller’s The Crucible”

The headmistress rose quickly from her chair and strode the microphone.

“Thank you Briony for your insights. Please give Mr Adamson a round of applause. He’s a busy man as he has another two presentations to give today”

The girls clapped and whistled. Adam blushed and walked to Ms Arrow, who was jangling the car keys. He didn’t know what to make of it. He got in the back of the car when Briony poked her head in the window and handed him her phone number, scrawled on a piece of paper ripped from an exercise book.

“Typical of a man to give a presentation about sexual harrassment and spend the entire time talking about himself. I can help you there,” Briony said with a wink.

The car pulled from the curve and Adam slipped the paper into his coat.