![]() 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. But watch the programme first for once, would you? It would seem to be the very least you can do.Michaela Coel as Arabella in I May Destroy You. If you’re one of the people who would like to go ahead and be racist and wrong about things now, I don’t suppose I can stop you. The friends are as ineffably, inexplicably funny together as friends always are, the counsellor who recommends handicrafts as a salve for sexual trauma is painfully amusing, and there are innumerable other points at which Coel’s script modulates smoothly and unerringly from comedy to tragedy and back again. It is, in short, an extraordinary, breathtaking achievement without a false note in it, shot through with humour and with ideas, talent and character to burn at every perfectly plotted turn. It highlights in passing the difference between unwanted and regretted contact, anatomises the multiple manifestations and pervasiveness of entitlement, and holds up to the light our ability to rewrite stories to make bad experiences bearable or put their damage to some use. It demonstrates the subtlety of power distribution and redistribution even within a single conversation. It scrutinises the different forms of consent (Kwame, for example, has consensual sex with a Grindr date, but is almost immediately then assaulted by him). It becomes, as her family and friends and the connections (and disconnections) between them are fleshed out, a meditation on our responsibilities to ourselves and each other. ![]() ![]() You have to take a moment.Īrabella gradually piecing the night together and substantiating her suspicions is the throughline for the dozen episodes, but each one takes in so much more it becomes almost – but never quite, because Coel’s discipline and sense of structure are as formidable as the rest of her abilities – dizzying. When everything is malleable, where can violation occur? Memory, feelings, are not enough. There’s an awful lot of relativism about. It sums up the contemporary world and sexual landscape Arabella and her friends (aspiring actress Terry and aerobics instructor and heavy Grindr user Kwame, played by Weruche Opia and Paapa Essiedu respectively) live in – the soft contours and shifting boundaries of which they are perpetually navigating in their early 30s. The detached “Huh” she gives to this revelation encapsulates in a syllable the drama’s unique tone and approach – always about 30 degrees off where you were expecting it to come from. The early morning finds her back in front of her laptop with little memory of how she got there except for a vision of a man looming over her in a toilet as a hazily remembered sexual assault takes place. Halfway through her final night of grace allowed by her publisher, she goes out for a break that turns into a night out. Coel plays Arabella, the author of a bestseller, Chronicles of a Fed-Up Millennial, based on her popular Twitter account, and now struggling to finish the first draft of her follow-up book on time.
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