Genevieve Scott's The Damages explores sex and consent in the late-90s

The Next Chapter19:23Genevieve Scott explores the complicated sexual dynamics of the 90s in The Damages

Set in the 1990s era of girl power, sex positivity and the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, the novel tells the story of a Canadian student named Megan who mysteriously disappears.

Originally aired on Sept. 23, 2023.

In her latest novel The Damages, Genevieve Scott uses the late-90s grunge and girl power movements as the backdrop for a story about consent, trauma and the cost of lies. 

Protagonist Ros is excited to go to university in Ontario and totally reinvent herself — but when she meets her roommate Megan, Ros knows she is a social liability. During an intense ice storm, the students throw a reckless days-long dorm party; Megan goes missing and Ros ends up being blamed and shunned by her newfound friends.

Two decades later, Lukas — Ros's ex and the father of her young son — is accused of sexual assault and Ros is forced to face her mistakes from the past and reflect on the era she grew up in through a post-#MeToo lens. 

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Genevieve Scott is a Toronto-born writer and filmmaker based in California. She is also the author of Catch My Drift and a story editor for the 2020 feature film Jump, Darling.

Scott spoke with The Next Chapter's Ryan B. Patrick about sexism within different generations.

The novel is a note-perfect rendering of time and space. What did you want to explore in terms of that dynamic of how women were perceived in the 1990s?

A conversation I was looking to bring about is the duplicity and dishonesty of the decade in a sense. In the late 1990s, Canadian universities were admitting more women than men into their programs. At the time, I really believed that sexism and chauvinism were a thing of the past and that that we had entered a new era.

That was still a confusing space for us — understanding consent and boundaries.- Genevieve Scott

I was naive about that because there was a lot of toxicity, sexism and misogyny in the way we still partied and joked and socialized on campus. Although, at the time, I wouldn't have said there was a problem with sexism.

My friends and I felt we were empowered to do things like have casual sex and make crude jokes — and there's nothing wrong with that. But then we weren't quite sure what to do when someone was harmed as it was still a confusing space for us — understanding consent and boundaries.

You insert Ros, which is our protagonist. She heads off to Regis, which is the fictionalized university set in Ontario. Ros is hell bent on reinvention. What is her plan?

She was very isolated in high school. She had friends, but they felt like "small f" friends. I guess she wanted to really find her people.

She wanted to hitch herself to the funnest and coolest people she could find. She wanted to be around the best looking, the ones with the most interesting stories, the most rebellious — and let that glow rub off on her. 

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What was it like creating an unlikable protagonist in Ros?

What I was really trying to do was create a believable, insecure young woman. I wanted to create this real, complicated character who made mistakes and had flaws and wasn't always likeable — because none of us are.

One thing that we have to remember about Ros, too is that she is looking back on her experience retrospectively and she is going to be her own harshest critic.

I think in our culture there's also this general expectation that women and literature be likeable, that they be good or aspirational in some way. Or if they aren't, that they'll have some kind of triumph by the end of the book that makes them that way. I don't know that that's the most truthful way to write a character.

I wanted to create this real, complicated character who made mistakes and had flaws.- Genevieve Scott

So let's flash forward 20 years in the future. Ros is now a mother to a son. Her former partner and son's father is accused of sexual assault. What does this crisis shake loose within her?

The accusations against Ros's former partner, what they do is put her into this position of having to decide and think about what she believes. There's a parallel with that and what happened to her in the 90s. Who she believed and who she trusted, whose instincts she believed, not her own. She kind of went along with what the crowd thought.

Thirty years later, she's figuring out whether she can trust her own instincts about a person and about herself, and also consider the way in which her attitudes have changed about abuse and what constitutes sexual abuse, what constitutes assault, what constitutes a violation of boundaries? And just because she felt a certain way about people's behaviour in 1998, doesn't mean that she can't evolve and feel differently about that 25 years later.

And that's something I wanted to capture.

Comments have been edited for length and clarity.