At the end of 2015, after Cal Louise Phoenix had already taken multiple classes with one of her sociology professors, he invited her to his home. The invitation was presumably to talk about how Phoenix could proceed through the final months of her degree. Her professor had additional plans in mind.
In Studies in Lechery (Atmosphere Press, 2024), Phoenix’s narrator details the subsequent sexual relationship, built on manipulation and deceit—an all-too-familiar journey, unfortunately. The distinction here, however, is that the memoirist is able to capture events in real time because of her meticulously detailed journal entries from the period. Phoenix’s book also serves as an ethnography and pathological study of a predator’s patterned history, offering readers a closer look at the mind of a man hellbent on exploitation and control.
I spoke with Phoenix via Zoom, where she discussed using journals for writing this memoir, the process she calls “cognitive flip-flopping,” the necessary healing she has since experienced, and how her Jewish roots have given her a sense of resiliency.
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The Rumpus: The prologue begins by referring to the sexual predator as “Jack,” a name you use for him throughout the book. Diary entries start off calling him “JB” or “Dr. Blair,” before addressing this act of switching names and titles, depending on circumstance. You write, “I know they’re synonymous, but comprehending this fact is surprisingly difficult and requires a lot of cognitive flip-flopping.” While writing the memoir, what did you see as the effect of referring to your sexual predator by multiple names?
Cal Louise Phoenix: I think it speaks to how the relationship went from this professional, casual friendship into the realm of intimacy, and then into this abusive relationship. The choice in keeping it that way in the diary entries, referring to this guy as “JB” and “Dr. Blair”—those were the labels that I used to address him. Over time, as the intimacy was introduced and as the abusive relationship happened, I used a more intimate name with that person and started referring to him as “Jack.”
The other thing, too, is that he’s a phantom character. After all of this, I have no idea who he is. He had these variations in name because, at any point, that individual I’m addressing could become a different person, depending on his social context and what his ultimate agenda was.
Rumpus: Did this act of name variation require a sense of removal and distancing? What effect did this have on you as the memoirist? Has your perception of this individual changed since you wrote the book?
Phoenix: I don’t know that my perception has shifted all that much. When I refer to that act of “cognitive flip-flopping,” I’m really referring to the act of jumping between how I acted around him based on those differences in our social contexts. There was always a different way to act or be around him when we were on campus, and there was a completely different way when we were off campus, in the more intimate setting of his home.
Of course, it was the same person, but that also speaks to the problems of being intimate with people who have power over you. You’re used to obeying this authority figure and looking up to them as a role model, and then suddenly we’re in a sexual relationship and he’s putting his penis in my mouth. How, then, do I go about and make sense of that flip-flop in my mind? It’s a bit of a mindfuck, you know?
Rumpus: How did you choose which diary entries to use in the memoir?
Phoenix: Let me start by saying that I was really committed to using the form of a diary to tell this narrative. And as somebody who had been avidly journaling for many, many years, I knew I already had all this material here. I knew I couldn’t start at the beginning and just use those original diary entries for reference material, though—there was no way I could write about what happened to me from scratch. It would have been way too painful.
I also felt it was important for the reader to feel that kind of anxiety and that kind of tension, the same anxiety and tension I felt when I was writing those entries. But there were a lot of things that happened with Jack that didn’t end up in the [book] because the manuscript was already so long. These were things that happened over the eleven months of this fucked-up relationship. There were the necessary entries that talked about what the aftermath was like. So, there were originally hundreds of pages that needed to go. A lot of it felt like it was continuously proving the point of how Jack was doing some strange shit that I didn’t understand, and how I felt he was lying to me about certain things. I didn’t need to keep repeating that.
Rumpus: Did you find yourself sharpening any of the diary entries for your audience?
Phoenix: I remember removing things that felt necessary to me, as a victim, because I didn’t want to give the impression that’s all I was. I ended up pulling out a lot of material that felt like it was just me expressing pain and confusion, and parts that felt like I was mourning a part of myself that had been lost during that relationship. I’m more than my pain, and, ultimately, I’m a resilient person. I didn’t want to communicate this thing over and over.
I thought that was important for the reader, too, because I think we generally get uncomfortable around suffering. I didn’t want any readers to feel like I was just hammering the point home again and again. That didn’t speak to the amount of recovery I’ve experienced since then. It was enough to show what he did—that appeared enough in the text, I felt—along with how I rose above that.
Rumpus: The top of each diary entry in the book is marked by the mood of the narrator and a song they’d been listening to at the time. The narrator talks a little bit about this, how “music has made a slow comeback, but it doesn’t always cut it.” Were there any songs or bands you were listening to during these events in 2016 that you still can’t listen to? What does hearing these songs, even by accident, now evoke in you?
Phoenix: When I sat down to write in my diaries, I would always have music playing in the background. I write like a millennial, or a very late Gen-Xer, in that I had a blog and a DeadJournal. Back then, you could start off each DeadJournal entry with your mood and what song you were listening to. I still have my account, by the way—I’ve had it for at least twenty years.
There’s some music from that time that I can still jam to, that’s still okay. But there is definitely music I can’t ever listen to again. At the drive-in, for example. They were in heavy rotation during some of the events in the book, and I can’t listen to them at all now. The last time I tried, I sent myself into a panic attack and then had a PTSD episode. I can’t listen to [From] Indian Lakes at all. I can’t listen to sóley. She’s a singer-songwriter, and I can’t play her music. I can still [listen to] Mars Volta, though. It’s touch and go. My husband, Alex, and I saw them live recently. [It was a] great show, but they played a song that hit such a nerve for me that I had to leave the auditorium, go to the bathroom, and shut myself in a stall. I just cried and cried and cried. Then, I thought to myself, “Okay,” and I went back out there and did my best for the rest of the show because I wanted to be there and be present. I finished that concert and bought a t-shirt afterward.
I love this music. I wanted to celebrate these bands who put this work into their art and whose music meant so much to me for so long, but now so much of it is caught up in this corrupted twist to things.
When I was finishing up the book, I put a note in there about music making a slow comeback. That is all still true. It’s still kind of touchy for me. Depending on the day, I have to listen to a podcast or an audiobook or some kind of video lecture, and I just need some kind of narration I can follow. I can’t just have music sometimes because the mind wanders, you know? I still need my thoughts tethered some days.
Rumpus: Do you think it’s important to follow along with someone else’s narrative so you don’t concentrate on your own?
Phoenix: Oh, yeah. Because things can go to some dark places pretty quickly, you know?
Rumpus: 2016 was the year before the #MeToo movement. Did the testimonies from men and women who had experienced similar trauma from sexual predators contribute to the book’s shape and purpose?
Phoenix: If I’m being completely honest, I didn’t see a correlation between myself and #MeToo until someone pointed it out to me. At the time, I remember the movement being very tied to celebrity. I’m just a little Jewish girl who lives in Kansas. I’m not Salma Hayek. I’m not a film goddess. I’m just a short, stubby, little gal who got fucked over by somebody she shouldn’t have. But the events absolutely apply to #MeToo, in terms of really looking at these types of power dynamics and at what coercive control within an institution looks like.
I started writing it in 2017. I completed a final draft in 2020 and had it published this year. That was pretty fast, and I worked my ass off to do it. #MeToo reminded me that these kinds of things have happened before, and that they’ll continue to happen, so I don’t need to kill myself trying to get this book out there. There was always a point I’d reach where I needed to take a long break from it.
Rumpus: Similar to a lot of other sexual predators brought into the light by #MeToo, Jack didn’t appear to reap a lot of consequences from his actions. Why do you think it’s important to mention how Jack continued to work in his chosen field after being found out, and even after he had removed himself from his previous position?
Phoenix: I think it shows his motivations and his interests in working with vulnerable populations. He went back to his hunting grounds, as it were. I’d spent so much time with him, at work and on campus, that I knew, ultimately, he was motivated by exploiting people. This was something that brought him a sense of control and comfort in his life. It made sense to me, then, that the employment roles he would ultimately pick up would be where he was working with vulnerable persons, like those affected by domestic violence, or ride-alongs with patrol officers, or doing sociological work. Those fields are populated by individuals in need, and he can exploit that need or provide a service while also fulfilling his own sick, twisted desires.
Rumpus: Based on what you’ve seen in multiple roles—as a former student, as a current substance-use disorder counselor, as a member of the literary community—do you think colleges and universities have gotten better since 2016? Have they made advancements in preventing student-faculty relationships?
Phoenix: I don’t believe so. Not from what I’ve seen at least. Tara N. Richards, who I cite in the research and who has a survey of policies and procedures concerning this, says that we’re not doing a good job.
Overall, I know there’s not a lot of consensus in academia about this. To this day, I still can’t understand why there can’t be a line of consensus for the American Institution of Higher Education. And I say this in the book too—college professors and faculty in higher ed are considered to be “helping professionals.” As helping professionals, they should be—at the very least—highly, highly encouraged not to engage in sexual relationships with people who have less power than they do, i.e., their students. Meanwhile, every other helping profession has a code of ethics that explicitly advises against that in their manuals, but the [American Association of University Professors] does not.
I just don’t understand it. My own alma mater, where these horrible things happened, didn’t have this consensus, right up until they were forced to. It’s crazy.
Rumpus: While I was reading through your memoir, I was ecstatic to learn that you’d built this case against Jack, and that, as a result, your former institution finally enacted a policy that forbade sexual relationships between faculty and students. While it’s sad that this horrible thing happened to you, and to other students, are you glad that a policy was established as a result?
Phoenix: I’m really glad. I’m glad that it was my reporting and my act of bringing that situation to light that led them to know that they needed a policy there. While I was working on the book, I ran into a lot of individuals from that university who thought they’d already had a policy against faculty-student relationships in place. It had definitely been an oversight on their part.
Rumpus: You delve into your cultural identity in the book too. As a Jewish woman who describes herself as an atheist, how has your cultural, or even religious, upbringing helped you make sense of what happened? Has it helped make a framework of understanding for you?
Phoenix: I feel like there’s a very obvious answer here, but I would say yes. Jews have gone through a lot. Historically—and this depends entirely on the time and the place—we’re one of the most oppressed people on the planet. We have a long history of suffering, both as a group and as individuals, because we’re ethnically, genetically, [and] culturally ascribed to that group. One of the things that’s always been with us culturally, though, is the use of humor as a defense mechanism. There’s this old adage about how Jews make the best comedians because, well, we had to laugh a lot to keep from crying over the centuries.
I tried to tap into that sense of strength and that sense of ethnic resiliency, and that’s something I’m very proud of. I know that there will always be Jews, and that we will collectively survive. We’ve done it for three, four thousand years, and if my people can survive, I can too. Resiliency and survivalism are in my bones.
At the time that all this happened, I had a routine of really strong observation, of going to Shabbos services, of covering my head. This routine connected me to my cultural identity and that sense of collective support, and I stuck with that for a long time and after everything started to unravel. It gave me an anchor for a lot of it. Being able to meet with my rabbi and being able to have that conversation about how I could use Judaism to get through this, and him allowing me to say kaddish was really helpful. Normally, you would only be able to say kaddish as a group, and you’d have to have a minyan for all of this because, if you’re mourning or if you’re going through grief, you’d need to be with people. So you wouldn’t say this if you weren’t with people or if you didn’t have communal support. For my rabbi to give me permission to say kaddish alone? That was incredibly helpful.
I say this in the book: that I’m a Jew, that I’m a practicing Jew, but my sense of spirituality is also very individualistic. When my rabbi told me to read the Tanakh, I was, like, “Oh, yeah, I could do that.” Where I might have thought that doing so couldn’t help me, it turns out it was incredibly helpful. I was reminded that, for centuries, people have been dealing with deception, with pain. I’m no different than anybody else. I’m a recreation of a human universal here, and I can tap into those lessons and those prayers that have been given over time to support myself through this.
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Author photograph courtesy of Cal Louise Phoenix
