{PDF EPUB} the First Stone Some Questions of Sex and Power by Helen Garner Helen Garner’S the First Stone Is Outdated
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Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The First Stone Some Questions of Sex and Power by Helen Garner Helen Garner’s The First Stone is outdated.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.