The Double Standard
Adding another layer to the narrator's complexity is her perspective of the double-standard in the MeToo generation. Just one description of one of her students gives an indication of similar descriptions of other students. "Kacee, clad in a flowered baby doll and lace stockings with a Japanime hairstyle—two buns, one on each side of her head— a girl who would attach a pen cap to the fat bottom part of her lip during class and `accidentally' pull her shirt down so that one nipple was exposed, a girl who always laughed too loudly at anything the one very handsome boy said in class." This imagery occurs in the middle of scene in which female students are confronting her over continuing to support her husband. The point of the precision of details is to reveal Kacee as emblematic of young women hypocritically using their sexuality as power.
Florence
About midway through the novel, it is finally revealed why the single mention of the name Florence at the beginning has the narrator feeling bolts of anger emanating from her vagina. Florence is a faculty member who is taking the side of the students against the narrator. But it is not just that she is not taking the narrator's side. "She was around forty, and her uniform was aggressively `hot': short dresses, high- heeled boots, big earrings, ripped tights. She had enviable long legs, which she would furl and unfurl excessively, like an anthropomorphized spider." It is not enough that Florence refers to the narrator's husband as a "rapist" and leads the call to have her removed from the classroom. Florence takes course while also being indistinguishable—the narrator—from students half her age. Thus she represents a kind of dual-edged hypocrisy which is at the heart of what makes the narrator's blood reach the boiling point.
