True Stories

by Helen Garner

  The question of money in this context is fascinating. The accusation of ‘profiteering’ is the last refuge of one’s enemy—a reproach, densely packed with psychic content. If The First Stone had been a jargon-clogged pamphlet bristling with footnotes, if it had sold a comfortably obscure, say, three thousand copies over a couple of years, the response to it from feminism’s grimmer tribes would have been much less poisonous. But among those who maintain a victim posture vis à vis the big world, where one can earn an honourable living by writing in a language that the person in the street can understand, nothing is more suspicious than a book which appears to have succeeded.

  Crudely, there are two possible attitudes that a hostile feminist might take towards the annoying fact that a lot of people, including feminists of broader sympathy, have defied the girlcott and responded favourably to The First Stone. The first one is easy: Garner is a sell-out, a traitor to her sex. She’s caved in to the patriarchy and joined the other side. This leaves the grim tribes feeling and looking—to each other, at least— squeaky clean. The other alternative is to wonder whether something might have happened to feminism.

  Maybe something’s gone wrong.

  Maybe something good and important has been hijacked.

  Maybe the public debate about women and men has been commandeered by a bullying orthodoxy.

  My intention has never been to bash feminism. How could I do that, after what it’s meant to me? After what its force and truth make possible? But I hate this disingenuousness, this determination to cling to victimhood at any cost.

  Why do the members of this orthodoxy insist that young women are victims? Why do they insist on focusing the debate on only one sort of power—the institutional?

  Why do they refuse to acknowledge what experience teaches every girl and woman: that men’s unacceptable behaviour towards us extends over a very broad spectrum—that to telescope this and label it all ‘violence against women’ is to distort both language and experience?

  The hysteria that this book has provoked in some quarters reveals clearly and sadly that feminism, once so fresh and full of sparkle, is no different in its habits from any other political theory. Like all belief systems and religions and art forms—like any idea that has the misfortune to have an -ism tacked on to it—feminism has a tendency to calcify, to narrow and harden into fundamentalism. The life spark slips out of it and whisks away, leaving behind it an empty concrete bunker.

  To disagree with a fundamentalist feminist, it seems, to question acts carried out in the name of women’s rights, is not to challenge her, but to ‘betray’ her, to turn her into more of a victim than she was already.

  One feminist critic in Melbourne put forward the proposition that in telling the Ormond story against the will of the young women involved, I had committed a treachery in the same league as the betrayal of the tribal secrets of the Hindmarsh Island Aboriginal women. The Ormond women, she wrote in the Australian Book Review, ‘did not want their story told by Helen Garner, writer of fiction making a guest appearance as a journalist. She told their story anyway, has stolen the story that they did not want her to have.’

  I find this a piece of the most breathtaking intellectual dishonesty.

  In what sense is it ‘their’ story? It is distorting and deeply wrong to bestow on the Ormond complainants the ownership of this story. It could be truthfully called their story only if they had decided to keep it to themselves, to hold it to themselves as a private trauma. I don’t suggest for a single second that they should have done this. And they didn’t. They took their complaints to the police. And the police took them to the courts.

  Now the law covering sexual assault may still be seriously skewed against women’s interests: it plainly is, and I strongly support the correction of this; but a court in a democratic country like Australia is an open forum. Painful as this might be, a court is open. It is open to the scrutiny of the citizens in whose names justice is being aimed at. So, once the complaints reached the courts, the story ceased of necessity to belong to the young women, or to the college, or to the man against whom the allegations were made. It stopped being ‘their’ story, and it became ‘our’ story—a new chapter in the endless saga of how we, as a community, try to regulate the power struggle between women and men.

  I want now to speak briefly about something called eros.

  I used the word rather loosely, perhaps, in the book. You could define eros—if it would stay still long enough for you to get a grip on it—as something lofty and mythological, like ‘the gods’ messenger’, or ‘the life spirit’. You could call it the need of things to keep changing and moving on. The Jungians call it ‘the spark that ignites and connects’. Eros, most famously, comes bounding into the room when two people fall in love at first sight. But it’s also in the excitement that flashes through you when a teacher explains an intellectual proposition and you grasp it—or when someone tells a joke and you get it.

  Eros is the quick spirit that moves between people—quick as in the distinction between ‘the quick and the dead’. It’s the moving force that won’t be subdued by habit or law. Its function is to keep cracking open what is becoming rigid and closed-off. Eros explodes the forbidden. Great stand-up comics thrill us by trying to ride its surge. It’s at the heart of every heresy—and remember that feminism itself is a heresy against a monolith. Eros mocks our fantasy that we can nail life down and control it. It’s as far beyond our attempts to regulate it as sunshine is—or a cyclone.

  But one feminist, criticising The First Stone in the Australian, wants us to accept that ‘the dynamics of eros’, as she puts it, ‘are historically produced’. ‘We need,’ she says, ‘to reconstruct eros between men and women on an equal basis.’

  There will always be these moments, I know, when people who think politically and types like me with a metaphysical bent end up staring at each other in helpless silence, with our mouths hanging open.

  It’s hubristic to speak of ‘reconstructing eros’. The whole point of eros, its very usefulness as a concept, is that it’s not reconstructable. Eros doesn’t give a damn about morals or equality. Though eros moves through the intellect, eros is not intellectual. It moves through politics, but it’s not political. It moves between men and women, but it’s not in itself sexual. When I talk in the book about eros, I’m trying to talk about that very thing—the thing that’s beyond us—the dancing force that we can’t control or legislate or make fair.

  It’s an article of faith among some young feminists that a woman ‘has the right’ to go about the world dressed in any way she pleases. They think that for a man to respond to—and note, please, that I don’t mean to threaten or touch or attack—for a man to respond to what he sees as a statement of her sexuality and of her own attitude to it, is some sort of outrage—and an outrage that the law should deal with. I find the talk of rights in this context quite peculiar. What right are you invoking here? You can only talk about rights, in this context, by pretending that it means nothing at all to wear, say, a low-necked dress in a bar at two o’clock in the morning, or a pair of shorts that your bum’s hanging out of on a public beach. To invoke rights, here, you have to fly in the face of the evidence of the senses—as if they believed that each person moved round the world enclosed in a transparent bubble of rights.

  And who’s going to protect these notional rights? Which regime will provide a line of armed police to make sure that no bloke looks at a woman’s breasts with the wrong expression on his face? I’m inviting these young idealists to get real—to grow up—better still, to get conscious. Know what you’re doing, what its likely effect is, and decide whether that’s what you want. Sexy clothes are part of the wonderful game of life. But to dress to display your body, and then to project all the sexuality of the situation on to men and blame them for it, just so you can continue to feel innocent and put-upon, is dishonest and irresponsible. Worse, it’s a relinquishing of power. If a woman dresses to captivate, she’d better lear
n to keep her wits about her, for when the wrong fish swims into her net.

  A woman of my age knows—and it’s her responsibility to point this out to younger women—that the world is full of different sorts of men. Many are decent. Some are decent until they start drinking. Many have grown up enough to have learnt manners. Some have taken seriously their responsibility to get conscious. Many men like women, and want to be around them. Some men hate women, and want to be around them. Many have been taught by imagination, or by reason, or by painful or happy experience, that a woman is a person and not just a clump of sexual characteristics put there for them to plunder.

  Some men have learnt to recognise and respect the boundary between their fantasy and what is real. Others, trapped in instinct, have not, and never will—and it’s a sad fact that we can’t depend on the law to make them. Nor will laws alone save us from their depredations, whether trivial or serious. Society makes laws. I am strongly in favour of tough legislation that will give women redress against assault—but around and above and below the laws, for good or ill, there is this fluid element, life. What I’m proposing is that there’s a large area for manoeuvre, for the practical exercise of women’s individual power, before it’s necessary or appropriate to call in the law. And I believe that one of the tasks of feminists should be to expand and develop this area of power.

  In the book I describe a photograph. It’s a black and white shot of a young woman dressed in an elegant and revealing gown. I wrote, ‘It is impossible not be moved by her daring beauty. She is a woman in the full glory of her youth, as joyful as a goddess, elated by her own careless authority and power.’ In response to this page of the book there emerged a grotesque distortion of my intent. One feminist critic, for whom perhaps all gods are vengeful, wrote that my admiring description of this lovely, rather wild young woman was in actual fact an invocation, in modern dress, of that monstrous, punitive, man-hating figure of myth—‘vagina dentata in her full glory’.

  Other feminists have told me severely that by ‘sexualising’ young women, I had ‘disempowered’ them. Leaving aside the hideousness of the language, you don’t have to be Camille Paglia to see that this is sick, and mad.

  There’s been a lot of talk, triggered by the book, about symbolic mothers and daughters. Some feminists have a doom-laden approach to giving maternal advice. The young woman in the beautiful dress is not, they insist, in possession of any power whatsoever, potential or actual, and it is wicked of me to suggest that she might be. For them, only one sort of power is admissible to a discussion of events like these, and that is institutional power. This splendid young woman, then, so clever and lovely and full of life, is nothing but a sad victim. These traumatic events, they solemnly assure her, ‘will blight her life’.

  What sort of a mother, literal or symbolic, would insist to her daughter that an early experience in the rough adult world, no matter how painful or public, would blight the rest of her life? That is not good mothering. That is pathetic mothering. That is the kind of mothering that doubles the damage. A decent mother, when the dust has settled, would say to her daughter, ‘Right. It’s over. Now we can look at what’s happened. Let’s try to analyse what’s happened. See how much of what happened was other people’s responsibility, and then try to see how much of it, if any, was yours. Take responsibility for your contribution, be it small or large. You are not responsible for men’s behaviour towards you, but you are responsible for your own. Pick yourself up now. Wipe your tears. Spit out the bitterness and the blame before they poison you. You’re young and clever and strong. Shake the dust of this off your feet. Learn from it, and then move on.’

  If all I had to go on, as responses to The First Stone, were the critiques of these prominent feminists, I’d be feeling pretty sick by now. But I’ve had letters, hundreds and hundreds of long, frank letters from strangers. The Melbourne critic (male) who chastised me for writing the book ‘to please men’ may be interested to know that I estimate the male/female ratio of the letters at about 35/65. I was surprised at how few of them were from cranks or nutcases. By no means did all of these letters—and they’re still coming—express blanket approval of the book. But almost all of them were from people who had been prepared to respond to the book in the way I’d hoped—with the defences down—with an answering spark. They’re prepared to lay out and re-examine examples, from their own lives, of encounters big and small with the opposite sex, which at the time had bewildered them, or hurt them, or made them angry. I lost count of the people who said, ‘I’d like to tell you something that happened to me—or something that I did—many years ago; something that until I read the book I had forgotten—that I’d buried.’

  Some of the letters were hilarious. I relate in the book an incident about a masseur at a particular Fitzroy gym who kissed me when I was naked on the table. One woman wrote to me, ‘I shrieked when I read about that masseur.’ She said the same bloke had kissed her, and that furthermore she’d paid him too, so I wasn’t to feel I was the only mug. A man wrote and suggested to me very disapprovingly that I must have led the masseur on. ‘Why did you take your clothes off in the massage room,’ he sternly asked, ‘instead of in the change rooms? What you did was tantamount to striptease.’ A masseur who could see as striptease a middle-aged woman scrambling hastily out of a sweaty old tracksuit in a corner gets my prize for sexualising against overwhelming odds.

  Some letters, from both men and women, are full of pain, and anger, and shame. Others tell stories of the patient unravelling of interpersonal and institutional knots, and of happy resolutions.

  But the word that crops up most frequently is relief. Again and again people speak of the relief they feel that it might be possible to acknowledge that the world of daily work and social life isn’t as horrible and destructive and ghastly as punitive feminists insist. People are relieved that it might be possible to admit sympathy in human terms with people on the opposite side of a power divide. They’re relieved that ambiguity might be re-admitted to the analysis of thought and action. And specially they’re relieved that to admit gradations of offence is not to let the side down or to let chaos come flooding in.

  A lot of people have asked me if I regret having written this book—and more particularly, if I regret the letter of ignorant sympathy that I wrote to the Master when I first became aware of the case—the letter that got me into so much trouble, and caused so many doors to be slammed in my face. The answer is no, and no.

  One thing I do regret, however, is that my publisher’s defamation lawyers obliged me to blur the identity of a certain woman who was the young complainants’ chief supporter in the college. I did this in quite a simple way: I didn’t invent anything, but each time that the words or actions of this woman appeared in the text, I called her by a different name, thus splitting her into half a dozen people. Months after the book came out, the woman identified herself publicly, to my relief, since I had divided her with the greatest reluctance. This is the only ruse I engaged in, but it has given some people the idea that the book is ‘fictionalised’—that it’s a novel. It is not a novel. Except for this one tactic to avoid defamation action, it is reportage.

  I accept that The First Stone has caused pain. I know it’s no comfort—that it’s almost a cheek—for me to say how sad I am about this. But sometimes a set of events erupts that seems to encapsulate, in complex and important ways, the spirit of its time. These are the stories that need to be told, not swept away like so much debris, or hidden from sight. My attempt to understand this story was frustrated. My version of it is full of holes. But I hope that these holes might, after all, have a use; that through them might pass air and light; that they might even provide a path for the passage of eros; and that they might leave, for women and men who want to think generously about these things, room to move.

  1995

  PART FOUR

  Cruising

  Cruising

  AT LUNCHTIME ON the Friday, I buy an anti-seasick patch an
d stick it behind my ear. By two o’clock my saliva has totally dried up. By half past four, when I present myself at Darling Harbour wharf ten, dressed for a cruise in flowery dress and straw hat, I am so stunned by whatever drug the patch is leaking into me that I can barely stagger along.

  The ship is Russian, painted glossy white, and named the Mikhail Sholokhov, after the first Russian writer to win the Nobel Prize. At the top of the gangplank, Russia begins: a line of women and men with poor skin and sullen expressions, their hands clasped behind their backs. My solo status and age are noted with a sly, pitying smile by the official ticking off names on a list, and someone whose badge identifies her as Tat’yana guides me in silence down several flights of stairs to my cabin. It’s cell-like, narrow, very cold; more Marx Brothers than Fred Astaire. Tat’yana throws open a chipped metal closet and, with a formal flourish, draws the back of her hand along a clump of old, bent wire coat-hangers. She opens a drawer under the bottom bunk, points dramatically to its contents, and utters one word: ‘Blenkit.’ Handing me a key, she backs out of the cabin, smiling. Little do I know that this is the last smile I will see on Russian lips for quite some time.

  I unpack and rush up on deck, my cheeks stinging from the frames of my sunglasses which the ferocious air-conditioning has chilled to below zero. My dream of a restful weekend— wooden deckchairs, gin and tonic tinkling in a glass—shrivels and dies. All the furniture in sight is made of white plastic; and this is not a glass culture. Everywhere I look I see gangs of grinning, tattooed men shambling about in shorts and bare feet, clutching cans of beer. ‘Oi don’t think y’ noid any sloip on this boat!’ yells a cheerful youth, raising his can for another slurp.