Campus tales of power and desire typically produce neat narratives of victimhood: lecherous, middle-aged male professor preys on nubile female student. Vladimir, the Netflix series adapted by Julia May Jonas from her bestselling novel, complicates this gendered phenomenon and its predictable dynamics.

The sleazy professor, John (John Slattery), takes a back seat to his sexually voracious, yet vulnerable, postmenopausal wife (Rachel Weisz) – the unnamed 58-year-old protagonist. The central object of desire is a young man: Vladimir Vladiniski (Leo Woodall), a junior colleague at their small liberal arts college in upstate New York.

The English department is in crisis after John – once its chair – is forced to stand down following multiple accusations of sexual misconduct involving students, euphemistically dismissed by his wife as “affairs”. Our protagonist, who describes her marriage as “sexually free”, is standing by her man – but it’s not that simple.

Both book and series deliver a sharp commentary on sexual misconduct in the academy – and a deeply engrossing examination of female desire, in all its inconvenient complexity. Vladimir raises difficult questions about female solidarity and the so-called generational divide between younger and older feminists in the wake of #MeToo.

For Jonas, the title of Vladimir is “a nod to novels that name themselves after the young woman who the man is obsessed with,” including, of course, Lolita. “I wanted to flip the script and have it come from a woman’s perspective,” Jonas says.

The book is just one example of post-#MeToo campus fiction that breaks the tidy binary of abuser and abused. It opens:

When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me […] What I like most about old men now, however, and the reason that I often feel that perhaps I am an old man more than I am an oldish white woman in her late fifties […] is that old men are composed of desire. Everything about them is wanting.

When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me […] What I like most about old men now, however, and the reason that I often feel that perhaps I am an old man more than I am an oldish white woman in her late fifties […] is that old men are composed of desire. Everything about them is wanting.

The delirium of falling

Vladimir is structured around two predation plotlines: one grounded in reality and the other in a fantasy that is secretly harboured, obsessively rehearsed and ultimately enacted.

The first narrative thread introduces us to the narrator and her predicament. John’s affairs, she assures us, were consensual and “conducted with [her] vague understanding........

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