Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} Some Questions of Sex and Power by Helen Garner’s The First Stone is outdated. But her questions about sexual harassment aren’t. ‘Change is hard. We need warriors who will brook no self-doubt to get it done. But we also need our Garners, our worriers, unafraid to be accused of treachery to the cause.’ Photograph: James Broadway. ‘Change is hard. We need warriors who will brook no self-doubt to get it done. But we also need our Garners, our worriers, unafraid to be accused of treachery to the cause.’ Photograph: James Broadway. Last modified on Sun 11 Mar 2018 05.59 GMT. More than 20 years ago, Helen Garner wrote a book about sexual harassment at the University of Melbourne, the “Ormond College case” as it became known. To call The First Stone a controversial book is doing it an injustice. It was savage and whiny and journalistically flawed and it was, in Garner’s style, full of self-doubt. It tossed and turned about what was bubbling beneath this campus incident, what it had to say about women, men, sex and power. “The daily papers were awash with endless outrages against women, as if victimhood were the sum of our experience,” she wrote, long before social media gave us the power to ignore or shape the daily paper’s agenda, and long before “identity politics” became so fraught. Over the past few months, every woman and man I know, of all ages and backgrounds, have been talking about sexual harassment and what bubbles beneath it. These have been deep and challenging conversations, with far more honesty than those in 1995, when The First Stone was published. Yet this was the case, and this was the book, that opened up the conversation in Australia, much as Anita Hill’s 1991 testimony accusing supreme court nominee Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment did in the United States. Revisiting The First Stone at this convulsive moment is to be irritated all over again, to feel how dated it is, how much the currents have shifted. It is to be confronted, too, with Garner’s uncomfortable truths, her questions that remain, not just relevant, but crucial if we are to navigate what so many of us hope to be a permanent cultural leap with grace as well as vengeance. I know it’s not quite the time for it – this is still the bomb-throwing stage, the rage stage. Change is hard. We need warriors who will brook no self- doubt to get it done. But we also need our Garners, our worriers, unafraid to be accused of treachery to the cause. The book on one level is innocent compared with the astonishing tumble of powerful and monstrous men in the United States and the nascent widening of the discussion beyond individuals to structures, to culture. After decades of silence, of open secrets in plain sight, women feel the power of looking out for each other, of being heard and believed. One friend told me that, for the first time, she felt people “had her back”. On one day, she had been harassed – mildly, but annoyingly – twice. Why should she have to put up with that? For the first time in my life, there is an almost scary sense that, actually, we shouldn’t have to navigate that as the price of being female, that this moment could signal a change in the way we behave towards one another. The beginning of the end of patriarchy in the west? Could that even be possible? In Australia, accusations against former gardening guru Don Burke were almost unbelievable. The Lord Mayor of Melbourne, Robert Doyle, a respected former Victorian leader of the Liberal party, is on leave following claims by a fellow councillor that he harassed her, including grabbing her breast. Doyle has denied wrong-doing. Now several women have accused actor Craig McLachlan of harassment and indecent assault. He also denies the allegations. We are at the beginning of all this. There will be many more revelations and accusations, some amounting to serious sexual assault, others clumsy lechery. The First Stone was about one, relatively minor, incident. It dealt with an Ormond College end-of-year dinner at the University of Melbourne in October 1991, after which two students claimed that the residential college master, Alan Gregory, had groped them. One woman said he twice squeezed her breast during a slow dance, and the other that he invited her into his office, said he had “indecent thoughts” about her and grabbed her breasts. The master said none of this happened. Garner was jolted when she read a “desolate little item” in the Age about Gregory being up on an indecent assault charge in the magistrates’ court over the dance incident. She put her reflexive reaction in a letter to Gregory that as a life-long feminist, it was “heartbreaking” to see feminist ideals “distorted into this ghastly punitiveness … the most appallingly destructive, priggish and pitiless way of dealing with it”. Why did the women go to the police? Why was the punishment of the master – who was eventually cleared by the courts but forced out of the university – so out of proportion to his crime? Garner frets away at those questions, telling of her own experiences of unwanted sexual attention and railing against “puritan feminists” consumed by rage and fear. The women’s supporters loathed her for it, and many still do. When Garner wrote her book, sexual harassment had only been nationally unlawful since 1984. More than 30 years on, it remains poorly understood, with a definition too broad, encompassing everything from leering, to sexist jokes, to crimes such as stalking to sexual assault. Inevitably, particularly in minor cases, the way people react is subjective. But to look at the bare facts of The First Stone now – huh? There is no way the head of a residential university college should keep his job if he did what was alleged. Sorry, you’re a leader, you set the tone, and to grab a student’s breasts even after a few drinks is going to get you into trouble. There are messy grey areas but this is not one of them. Then, the women did not garner great public sympathy. There was no #metoo to share stories about how prevalent this was, and how often it became persistent and debilitating. To speak out was dangerous. Now, my guess is that most people would be sympathetic to the women. Not only privately, but publicly. Social media, for good and bad, has changed everything. The treatment of the women in court – and even by Garner, who whinges that they will not speak to her, as if somehow they had an obligation to do so – is shocking to read now. Yet the assumptions persist, about how women dress, how they flirt, and why they stay silent. Here’s how Garner describes the QC questioning one young woman in court: “You were wearing,’’, said the QC, consulting his notes, ‘’a black tight short skirt with a low-cut top.” Woman: “With straps.” QC: “Otherwise no covering?” said the QC smoothly. And here’s the punchline, so recognisable now. QC: “The first time (the master squeezed your breast), you didn’t move away from him.” Woman: “I didn’t want to believe that someone in that position would have done that.” QC: “Why didn’t you slap ‘im?” Garner almost gasps. “You bastard, I thought – every woman in the room could answer that question.” In hindsight, the story of The First Stone is really about how the university dealt with the complaints way back in 1991 and 1992. The women would not have gone to the police – I agree with Garner that it was a disproportionate response – if the university had processes in place to handle it, if they had taken it seriously. It failed, and acknowledged that failure, its old-boys’ inquiry moving too slowly and coming up with a non-answer. It determined that the women’s complaints were made in good faith but declared full confidence in the master. Garner understood what the women felt, what women have felt forever. It was “as though they hadn’t been heard ”. Only as the months dragged on, and the publicity did its damage, did the university lose “confidence” in the master, tossing him aside. Universities have put enormous effort into responding better to sexual harassment and assault, particularly after the Human Rights Commission’s report last year found 51% of respondents had been sexually harassed in the past two years. Putting more resources and energy into dealing with complaints is self-evidently a good thing, particularly in serious cases. Yet, to channel Garner, we have to get serious about where the problems really lie if we are not to go down the alarming path of the campuses in the US, where due process has been abandoned by too many universities, even in allegations of serious sexual assault. The culture wars may have been tedious in the early 1990s; they are killing reasoned debate and finding solutions now. The commission’s report was worthwhile, but flawed in its methodology and its conclusions, and it is not letting the side down for progressives to say so. It was a voluntary survey, its response rate low. The 51% included harassment on or off campus. Just over a quarter happened on campus, and half of those were staring or offensive comments, with no clarity on how serious or persistent these transgressions were. The most common location for sexual harassment was not on campus, but on public transport travelling to or from university. Just at this hopeful moment, we have a parallel force that risks taking women backwards, a puritanism that places victimhood as central to female experience. It was there when Garner wrote The First Stone; it is soaring now, insisting its purpose is to empower women. Garner spoke to an academic who wanted to forbid staff-student relationships. “Isn’t this a bit bloody Islamic?” Garner asks. Could a student and a teacher go to the movies, have a coffee, hold hands? Where’s the line to be drawn? Garner and the academic laugh together, without convincing each other. The rules are getting tighter, the complexities lost. As a university student, Garner had an affair with an older tutor. It ended badly, but she never thought of it as sexual harassment or as an abuse of power, but a relatively minor thing, “part of my stores of experience”. Today, there’s a push to not just discourage relationships between staff and students, and to watch out for conflicts of interest, but to ban them. They are a “massive abuse of power” according to some, instead of messy, consensual relationships. Do women, who fought so hard for sexual freedom, with all its attendant risks, really need protecting from men to this extent, in all cases? Garner is “aware of the immense weight of men on women, the ubiquity of their attentions, the exhaustion of our resistance”. But through the book, there is no sense that that could change. It just couldn’t be comprehended at the time. It is hard to overstate what a mind shift that has been over the past few months, what an explosion of insight and possibility. For this moment is not really about sexual harassment. It is about the unfinished project of equality between men and women. That has much more to do with disadvantaged women with casual jobs than Hollywood stars with all their privileges. But most women, from all classes, all backgrounds, recognise that “weight”. Yet Garner won’t let women off the hook, not for a moment. She reminds us that feminism is about justice. Unjust is the word for the behaviour of men who use their position of power as a weapon in forcing women to endure their repeated sexual approaches, or who take revenge for a knockback by distorting a woman’s career or making her workplace intolerable or sacking her. Unjust does not apply to a clumsy pass at a party by a man who’s had too much to drink. These days, it does, and mostly should, if that man is a leader in an organisation. But her point about proportion, about gradation of offence, rings true today. The hardline view that every transgression reinforces rape culture and misogyny is a hindrance, not a help. “The ability to discriminate must be maintained,” writes Garner. “Otherwise all we are doing is increasing the injustice of the world.” The First Stone. The First Stone: Some questions about sex and power by Helen Garner is a controversial non-fiction book about a 1992 sexual harassment scandal at Ormond College, one of the residential colleges of the University of Melbourne. It was first published in Australia in 1995 and later published in the United States in 1997. The book revolves around Garner's attempts to interview the two young women at the centre of a sexual assault scandal but who declined to meet her, along the way exploring the politics, sexual and otherwise, of the college as well as Garner's personal feelings about the original events and the people she meets in the course of her research. The book was condemned by some Australian feminists for a variety of reasons. The journalist Virginia Trioli published Generation F: Sex, Power & the Young Feminist in 1996 and a collection of essays critical of The First Stone was published under the title bodyjamming (1997). Garner gave her first detailed response to the critics in a speech at The Sydney Institute entitled "The fate of The First Stone " (1995). Contents. Controversy. The First Stone was controversial for a number of reasons. As the students involved refused to be interviewed by Helen Garner, instead the point of view of the accused master of the college was used in isolation and the narrator was therefore criticised as being biased towards his point of view. [ citation needed ] Elements of the story became fictionalised - for example, the tutor who advised the students was split into nine separate characters giving the appearance of a "feminist conspiracy" at work. Additionally, the book was also criticised for its view that feminism had become weakened and claim that the appropriate response to being groped was "a slap in the face" rather than a police complaint. [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] First Stone by Helen Garner. The first stone: Some questions about sex and power. Garner, Helen. Published by Pan Macmillan Australia, 1995. Used - Softcover Condition: Good. Paperback. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. More buying choices from other sellers on AbeBooks. First Stone : Some Questions about Sex and Power. Helen Garner. Published by Free Press, 1997. Used - Hardcover Condition: Good. Hardcover. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. More buying choices from other sellers on AbeBooks. The First Stone: Some Questions of Sex and Power. Garner, Helen. Published by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, 1997. Used - Softcover Condition: Used; Good. Paperback. Condition: Used; Good. Fast Dispatch. Expedited UK Delivery Available. Excellent Customer Service. More buying choices from other sellers on AbeBooks. The First Stone: Some Questions about Sex and Power. GARNER, HELEN. Published by Picador / Pan Macmillan 1995, 1995. Used - Softcover. Octavo softcover (VG); all our pecials have minimal description to keep listing them viable. They are at least reading copies, complete and in reasonable condition, but usually secondhand; frequently they are superior examples. Ordering more than one book will reduce your overall postage cost. The First Stone. GARNER, HELEN. Published by Bloomsbury 1997, 1997. Used - Softcover. Octavo softcover (VG+); all our specials have minimal description to keep listing them viable. They are at least reading copies, complete and in reasonable condition, but usually secondhand; frequently they are superior examples. Ordering more than one book will reduce your overall postage cost. The First Stone. GARNER, HELEN. Published by Picador 1995, 1995. Used - Softcover. octavo softcover (VG); all our specials have minimal description to keep listing them viable. They are at least reading copies, complete and in reasonable condition, but usually secondhand; frequently they are superior examples. Ordering more than one book will reduce your overall postage costs. The First Stone (Paperback) Helen Garner. Published by Pan Macmillan Australia, Sydney, 2020. New - Softcover Condition: new. Paperback. Condition: new. Paperback. In the autumn of 1992, two young women students at Melbourne University went to the police claiming that they had been indecently assaulted at a party. The man they accused was the head of their co-ed residential college. The controversial book that Helen Garner wrote about the resulting Ormond College sexual harassment case caused a social media storm. Prominent feminists were outraged at Garner's perceived support for the man involved, but many saw her approach a necessary and much welcome nuance towards the power dynamic between men and women. Either way, The First Stone sparked a raging debate about sexual harassment in Australia, making it easy to see why even now, twenty-five years on, the book is no less sharp. no less relevant, and no less divisive. This new edition coinciding with the twenty-fifth anniversary of release, contains a foreword by Leigh Sales and an afterword by Garner's biographer, Bernadette Brennan. It also reprints David Leser's original 1995 Good Weekend interview with Helen Garner, and her own 1995 address 'The Fate of The First Stone'. 'This was never going to be an easy book to write, its pages are bathed in anguish and self-doubt, but suffused also with a white-hot anger.' Good Weekend 'Garner has ensured one thing: the debate about sexual harassment . . . will now have a very public airing. And it will have it in the language of experience to which all women and men have access.' The Age 'This is writing of great boldness. . . an intense, eloquent and enthralling work.' The Australian 'Travelling with Garner along the complex paths of this sad story is, strangely enough, enjoyable. The First Stone [is] a book worth reading for its writing.' Sydney Morning Herald The book that split a nation: Helen Garner's The First Stone, reissued in an updated edition twenty-five years after first publication. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. More buying choices from other sellers on AbeBooks. THE FIRST STONE: SOME QUESTIONS ABOUT SEX AND POWER. Garner, Helen. Published by Picador, Sydney, Australia. Used Condition: Very good. Condition: Very good. 1995, reprint. Unmarked pages. Sound binding, clean cover with a crease on front. 222 pages. The First Stone (Compact Disc) Helen Garner. Published by Bolinda Publishing, 2020. New Condition: new. Compact Disc. Condition: new. Compact Disc. In the autumn of 1992, two young women students at Melbourne University went to the police claiming that they had been indecently assaulted at a party. The man they accused was the head of their co-ed residential college. The controversial book that Helen Garner wrote about the resulting Ormond College sexual harassment case caused a media storm. Prominent feminists were outraged at Garner's perceived support for the man involved, but many saw in her approach a necessary and much welcome nuance towards the power dynamic between men and women. Either way, The First Stone sparked a raging debate about sexual harassment in Australia, making it easy to see why even now, 25 years on, the book is no less sharp, no less relevant and no less divisive. This new edition, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of release, contains a foreword by Leigh Sales and an afterword by Garner's biographer, Bernadette Brennan. It also reprints David Leser's original 1995 Good Weekend interview with Helen Garner and her own 1995 address, 'The Fate of The First Stone'. Shipping may be from multiple locations in the US or from the UK, depending on stock availability. writereaderly. MM has recommended this so often and so strongly that I finally picked it up. I knew it had been controversial, and that HG had had a literary brawl with a spiteful ex-lecturer of mine (Jenna Mead), and I couldn’t be bothered to be involved in the controversy. This book is Garner’s exploration of a sexual harassment case at Ormond College in Melbourne Uni in the early ’90s, and her premise was “Has feminism come to this?” – that is, women taking male academics to the court for squeezing an undergrad’s breast at a party. After a distasteful 70pp attempt, I could no longer be bothered humouring Garner’s retrograde opinions. Once she’d said that men are expected to read women’s minds to know they don’t want sexual advances in trains, etc – bullshit! How many times have men been told explicitly that their hand- and eye-contact is unwanted?! – and that she couldn’t understand why the young women were so angry that they’d taken this perfectly nice man to court – because, simply put, women are never not afraid of sexual violence by men, in case Garner hadn’t noticed that – she’d worn out my patience and her credibility. Pathetic. Abandoned. Be off with you. (I have, however, remained irritated at those 70pp since I dumped the book, and hope this review gets its unwelcome presence out of my head. Bah.) Helen Garner Biography. Nationality: Australian. Born: Helen Ford in Geelong, Victoria, 1942. Education: Manifold Heights State School; Ocean Grove State School; The Hermitage, Geelong; Melbourne University, 1961-65, B.A. (honors) 1965. Career: Writer-in-residence, Griffith University, Nathan, Queensland, 1983, and University of Western Australia, Nedlands, 1984. Melbourne theater critic, National Times , Sydney, 1982-83. Since 1981 feature writer, Age , Melbourne. Since 1985 member of the Australia Council Literature Board. Awards: Australia Council fellowship, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1983; National Book Council award, 1978; New South Wales Premier's award, 1986. P UBLICATIONS. Novels. . Melbourne, McPhee Gribble, 1977; London, Penguin, 1978; New York, Seaview, 1981. Moving Out (novelization of screenplay), with Jennifer Giles. Melbourne, Nelson, 1983. The Children's Bach. Melbourne, McPhee Gribble, 1984. Cosmo Cosmolino. Ringwood, Victoria, McPhee Gribble, 1992;London, Bloomsbury, 1993. Short Stories. Honour, and Other People's Children: Two Stories. Melbourne, McPhee Gribble, 1980; New York, Seaview, 1982. . Melbourne, McPhee Gribble, 1985; NewYork, Penguin, 1986; London, Bloomsbury, 1989. My Hard Heart: Selected Fiction. Ringwood, Victoria, Viking, 1998. Plays. The Stranger in the House , adaptation of a play by RaymondDemarcy (produced Melbourne, 1982; London, 1986). Other. La Mama: The Story of a Theatre. Melbourne, McPhee Gribble, 1988. The First Stone: Some Questions About Sex and Power. Sydney, PanMacmillan Australia, 1995; New York, Free Press, 1997. True Stories: Selected Non-Fiction. Melbourne, Australia, Text Publishing, 1996. Critical Study: "On War and Needlework: The Fiction of Helen Garner" by Peter Craven, in Meanjin (Melbourne), no. 2, 1985; Helen Garner by Kerryn Goldsworthy. New York, Oxford University Press, 1996. Helen Garner's novels deal with the fractured relationships of "alternative" living in Melbourne. Against a background of communes and shared houses, the drug scene, rock bands, cooperative movies, suburb, and beach, her characters try to form relationships and cope with their inevitable failure. Her fiction explores the point at which freedom stops and irresponsibility begins. It is a world in which women with love to spare try to deal with men who have "the attention span of a stick insect" who monopolize them one minute and ignore them the next. There is a sympathetic, fatalistic cast to her writing. Most of her characters could be summed up by the line: "Their mother was dead and they were making a mess of things." Monkey Grip is Nora's account of her obsessive love for Javo, a junkie. They belong to a subculture where drugs define the real and the tolerable, where there is no tomorrow only today, and therefore where commitments to another person are infinitely redefinable. "I'm not all that worried about futures. I don't want to love anyone forever." Nora's love, her habit of "giving it all away," is as addictive as Javo's heroin habit, and makes her as vulnerable. She supports and is supported by other women, sometimes finding herself consoling or being consoled by a sexual rival. The pain and the jealousy are intense but in the curiously reticent unreticence of this culture, protest about exploitation is limited to declarations as inadequate as, "That makes me feel bad." By the end of the novel Nora has achieved some degree of detachment from Javo, but there is no guarantee that the cycle will not be repeated with another exploitingly helpless male. Honour, and Other People's Children is a pair of novellas which show characters similar to those in Monkey Grip at a later stage in their lives. Each involves separation. In "Honour" a woman who has been separated for five years from her husband is shocked by his asking for a divorce in order to remarry. Instead of the commune life he now wants "a real place to live, with a back yard where I can plant vegies, and a couple of walls to paint, and a dog—not a bloody room in a sort of railway station." Despite their five-year separation Elizabeth still feels a residual bonding which is now threatened. Relationships in this book are much more richly delineated than in the first novel. Here they are products of shared experience, shared jokes and personal rituals, family connections and mutual awareness. When Frank's father is about to die, it is Elizabeth who accompanies him on the visit. Their child stands in the middle of an awkward triangle wanting all to live together and not comprehending the nuances and difficulties of the situation. However her instinct is right, and ex-wife and future wife tentatively feel towards some sort of acquaintance, even friendship, symbolized by the balanced seesaw of the story's conclusion. "Other People's Children" moves the focus away from heterosexual relationships to the declining friendship between two women who have been the nucleus of a shared house, and have gradually become abrasive towards each other. Over years in the same household Scotty has come to love Ruth's daughter, Laurel, and hers is the greatest loss when the house breaks up. Loving other people's children gives no rights, not even the limited access granted to the non-custodian parent by the divorce court. Ruth's relationship with the self-protective Dennis shows the same sort of male manipulation used by Javo in Monkey Grip , while Madigan, to whom Scotty turns for companionship, is so torn between misogyny and the need for acceptance that he ranks as the most destructive of Garner's male characters. The Children's Bach extends Garner's range of characters, and puts them in a new arrangement. Whereas previous novels concentrated on the isolation of characters and on the failures of bonding, this novel offers at least one couple in a successful relationship: "She loved him. They loved each other. They were friends." Dexter and Athena embody an innocence which characters in the earlier novels seem never to have had. Their marriage is stable and caring despite the strains put on it by their retarded second son who has a musical sense but not speech. Set against them are Dexter's old friend from university days, Elizabeth, her lover Philip, and her younger sister, Vicky. There is a clash of values in this novel, and a sense that characters are redefining their perspectives instead of being depicted at a stage when they are already locked into a fixed way of seeing, and surviving in, the world. Music has always been an important motif in Garner's books, and here it becomes dominant. In earlier works it offered, like sex or drugs, a way of immersion or escape. It is associated with most of the characters in this novel, and it generally suggests sanity and harmony. While Philip uses music to exploit people, it is a mark of Athena's unglamorous dedication to making life work, and of Dexter's uncomplicated gusto. Postcards from Surfers is a collection of stories which offers vignettes on the ways people relate and report themselves to others. In the title story a woman holidaying with her parents who have retired to the seaside writes a series of postcards to a former lover which she does not post because it's "too late to change it now." Other stories tell of chance meetings, visits, trips in Europe and Australia. Males in this collection continue to be selfish, manipulative, and arrogant but Garner ends some of the stories more hopefully in the manner of The Children's Bach. Women trying to make something of their lives ("The Life of Art") are always going to find males unsatisfactory, but they can support each other. Women are always going to be racked by passion for men who want them less continuously and exclusively, but it is possible to "hang on until the spasm passes." Cosmo Cosmolino , with its eponymous novella and two short stories—all three of which are interrelated—explores themes familiar to Garner's readers, but uses new motifs such as magic realism. Such developments may be an outgrowth of the author's deepened interest in spiritual matters.