![]() ![]() The striking UK book jacket, with its highly suggestive pink buttonhole, calls to mind that dodgy Bill Hicks sequence about the appeal of young girls (‘ Because there’s nothing between your legs. The book’s marketing and reception are ironically (or cleverly?) guilty of some of the same problems that Tampa sets out to satirise. Tampa seeks to expose the hypocrisy of society’s portrayal of gendered sexuality, where sex for a man is always a prize – therefore an adolescent male who gets it on with an older female is a lucky boy, not a victim – and women are the prize objects. ![]() Nutting was struck by the media handling of the case – so different from the approach seen with male sex offenders – which included photos of a bikini-clad Lafave posing on a Harley Davidson and an intimate interview on NBC it was Lafave’s looks, rather than her crime, that appeared to be the main focus of attention. The book was partly inspired by the real-life story of Debra Lafave, a Florida schoolteacher who had a sexual encounter with a fourteen-year-old student. Celeste is an extremely good-looking, apparently happily married twenty-six-year-old – with a pathological attraction to just-pubescent boys. This seems a logical precursor to Tampa, gleefully deemed ‘the sickest, most controversial book of the summer’ by Cosmpolitan: Celeste, Tampa’s protagonist, has a thoroughly wholesome job as a high-school teacher – but her motivations for taking the job are as unclean as they come. Alissa Nutting’s first book was the short story collection Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls. ![]()
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