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.”
So, when a Teen Vogue writer says that she is “not at all concerned about innocent men losing their jobs over false sexual assault/harassment allegations ... if some innocent men’s reputations have to take a hit in the process of undoing the patriarchy, that is a price I am absolutely willing to pay”, she is dead wrong.
The Daily Telegraph’s over-the-top front-page coverage of an anonymous complaint against actor Geoffrey Rush, with no detail of what the complaint was, was dead wrong.
A common reaction to actor Matt Damon’s unremarkable statements that “there’s a difference between patting someone on the butt and rape or child molestation” and that “both of those behaviours need to be confronted and eradicated without question, but they shouldn’t be conflated” was that he should shut up because he’s a man.
There’s even a petition to have his scenes in an upcoming movie snipped out.
That’s dead wrong, too, and risks a backlash of our own making. One of the best things to come out of this is that men are grappling with these issues, seriously, many for the first time.
We are beyond Garner’s The First Stone. There is clarity about the pervasiveness of sexual harassment, the damage it causes, and what lies beneath it. Yet as an article in the New Yorker noted in 2016, it still “seems a brilliantly prescient book – in its complexity, in the tense torque of its self-argument, and in its very vulnerability and stunned intolerance”.
Garner’s book had a subtitle, “some questions about sex and power”. Whether you agreed with her answers to those questions, they were good questions, then and now.
- Gay Alcorn is a Guardian Australia columnist
