by Helen Garner
Yes, yes, it’s only a movie, from a benighted era, and one is supposed to deplore her occupation and the fact that she is subjected to these advances – but how refreshing her bluntness was, her irritable wit, her stable sense of her self, of the precise whereabouts of her boundaries.
The senior lecturer in humanities, Dr Q—, who had thought his post-graduate tutor might be willing to give me the complainants’-eye view of Ormond, reported in a puzzled tone, ‘When I asked her if she’d talk to you, she told me a little story about Colin Shepherd. She said that one evening, while the students were standing behind their chairs in the dining room waiting for the High Table to take their places, he went past her on his way in, and he tickled her.’ Dr Q— made a two-handed gesture of grabbing someone round the waist from behind, affectionately, as one would to tease a child. ‘And she said to me, “I’d never been so humiliated in my life – I felt like bursting into tears.” I found this an odd reaction. And about you she said, “Yes, I’ve heard she’s been sniffing around Ormond. You either believe those women or you don’t. I do, and I’m not having anything to do with her.” She said that as far as she’s concerned, it’s “a closed issue”.’
Blocked again. Oh, they were so wretched.
Dr Q— had his own small story to tell. The year before, he had been warned by a female colleague that, according to graffiti in the women’s toilets and carved into a desk in the Baillieu Library, he had ‘abused his power’. The graffitist also urged students to ‘provoke and report’. Since Dr Q—, a decent, open man, had always felt strongly about the issue of professional relations on campus, he was very exercised as to the meaning of this attack on his reputation.
‘I racked my brains,’ he said, ‘for students I’d horribly antagonised. Finally I thought that maybe blokes like me, who make all the right noises – who claim to be capable of redemption – are the worst of the lot. At least with rednecks women know where they are, whereas blokes like me just sweeten the pill of the patriarchy. I was frightened, though. Frightened the rumour would get around that I was a sleaze-bag. For months, whenever I approached my office, I looked to see if there was any graffiti on the door.
‘Humanities is where the action is, in terms of feminist theory. I had a very animated discussion with one of our tutors here about Colin Shepherd. She would have hung, drawn and quartered him on the spot because some women had made complaints. But in the same discussion she spoke admiringly about Madonna – said she was “carving out a sexual space for women”. But if anyone touched her – look out!
‘We ran an induction program for the post-graduate students who were going to do some tutoring. One session was on professional dealings with students. Several of the new tutors told me that I must never, ever talk to a student with my door closed; that if a student came to see me, I must insist on the door being open.’
‘And do you?’
‘I leave it up to the student,’ he said. ‘If I shut the door, it’s a statement of my power. It may seem intimidating. Some of them come rocking in here and sit down with the door open behind them. But if the student shut the door and I opened it, it would be saying, “This is a fraught situation, a fraught relationship.”
‘These are very smart, bright, confident young women we’re talking about here. But some of them said they didn’t like the way blokes in their tutes looked at them. One of them told us that at the end of her class a male student came up to her and asked, “Is it all right for a student to ask a tutor out?” She was flummoxed by this. She said to us furiously, “This sort of thing must not be allowed to happen!” I said, “For God’s sake, just make it plain that you don’t want to!” I told her that eighty per cent of people in marriages and relationships meet in the workplace. How are people supposed to meet? I told them they would get infatuated with people they work with, people they teach – after all, they’re only a few years older than some of their students. I said, “These things happen, and there are professional ways of dealing with it.” They’re so fragile! They have to learn to deal with it, instead of going’– he threw back his head and covered his face with his hands – ‘Oh my Gahd!
‘There’s a woman connected to our department who’s in her eighties. She’s got no time for this stuff. She rounded on the young tutors. She said, “People like you think we’re brains on stilts. You must realise that every tutorial is a dynamic event. Nothing will stop people from becoming infatuated.”’
‘What is this about?’ I said. ‘They arm themselves against wolves – that’s right, it’s good – but then some harmless bunny blunders into the headlights and they give him both barrels. It’s inappropriately aimed. Is it referred anger, do you think? From the real outrages that you see in the paper every day?’
‘I hope it’s about real outrages,’ said Dr Q—, without conviction. ‘Rape, and silly bloody judges, and blokes that bash women.’
A woman in my French class, a Labor Party activist for all her adult life, told us in her careful, formal French that she had met the Prime Minister at a party in the electorate of Melbourne Ports. She said she had approached him, after he had spoken on various current issues including the Mabo decision, and asked him whether the government was seriously committed to resolving the terrible problem of white relations with Aboriginals. He replied with apparent sincerity that it was – and while saying this he put his hand on her forearm. She added that when she had described this small incident to people she knew, they had reacted variously. Several had gasped about the Prime Minister’s hand on her arm: ‘How condescending!’ But more had said, ‘How sexist!’ When she told us this I felt a bomb of fury and disgust go off inside my head. Sexist! This has become insane.
Every day now I waited for the professor’s daughter to answer my call and my letter. But from her direction streamed the silence that was becoming so familiar on the complainants’ side of the story. In my heart I knew that the professor’s daughter was someone whose voice I was fated never to hear.
By now I was becoming an obsessive listener on the topic of sexual harassment. As soon as I mentioned in casual conversation what I was trying to write, the woman I was with would give me a sharp look, pause, then pour out a story. One day, for example, I went to have lunch at the house of Nina D—, a friend who lectures in English, a clever, handsome young woman with a husband and two small children.
‘When I was in my early twenties,’ she told me, ‘I went overseas to do post-graduate study. The university I went to was full of interesting radicals, and one particular lecturer was magnetic. I was reading stuff that put me through a fundamental re-appraisal of everything I’d been taught. My semi-Leavisite views were being torn asunder. It was terribly compelling. Every square inch of me wanted to be in this man’s classes, and yet at the same time I didn’t want to seem over-enthusiastic – I didn’t want him to think I was uncool. I couldn’t find a way to get the whole situation under control.
‘He was very territorial with me, intellectually. When I’d talk enthusiastically about some lecture I’d heard by one of the other people I admired in the department, he’d say, “I don’t want you to go to those lectures.” He’d ridicule other people’s opinions.
‘I was impressed – but he was a wolf. He had a rapacious physicality. There was an incident in the car park – he was sexually insistent. I was always trying to keep him away and yet at the same time to keep him charmed.
‘Halfway through the year, when I still thought he was magnificent, he said to me, “My wife and I are going away on holiday. We’ve got a house in the country and a dog that needs to be fed.” I stayed in their house for ten days – it was lovely. But the night before they were supposed to return, he arrived back alone. That night he made me dinner, and at the end of the meal he attempted a seduction, which I fumbled. I said, “No! I don’t want this!” I could feel him getting hard, I got panicky, it was all out of control. I ran out and got into my car and drove back to my share house near the university.
‘When I got home, he rang. He was cold. He said, “You’re right. What I did was unforgivable.”
‘And then he spent the rest of the year punishing me.
‘He accused me of being a cock-teaser. He became very chilly towards me. I found it hard to arrange supervision sessions for my thesis. He seemed to care less and less about my work. Then the time came to give a seminar on the work I’d done, to the tutors and all the other graduate students – a roomful of twenty or thirty people. I started to read my paper. After the first sentence he broke in with a derisive comment. After every sentence he said something derisive. It was an orchestrated campaign to disallow me from finishing a thought.’
Her voice trembled and she stopped talking. I asked her what the feeling in the room had been.
‘It was electric,’ she said. ‘No one said a word. No one said “What the fuck is going on here?” I had an almighty struggle not to burst into tears. I was thinking, “This is irreparable – this is gone.”
‘I had quite a few friends in the department – tutors – who were feminists. I’d been trying to tell them what was going on. No one believes me when I tell them this: they thought it was funny. They laughed it off. They said, “Isn’t that just like him. He’s so sexual” – as if it was part of his cutting edge. Deal with him, deal with his dick.’ Here she sounded puzzled, and uncertain. ‘Maybe I told it to them ambivalently – or as a joke? I might have invited this response – anyway, they couldn’t read my panic. I was so out of my depth. I didn’t know what I was doing. I wanted my mother.’ She laughed, but painfully. ‘Anyway – this bloke subsequently fell from grace. It became clear that there had been case after case, before me and after me – a chain. I guess that sort of intellectual charisma always runs out. People started to say, “I always thought he was an arsehole.” His colleagues began to loathe him.
‘My question is, how does a girl like me, an extrovert, capable of handling herself in the world – how could I have failed myself in this instance? I was trying to be cool, but I was unable to get the right tone. I didn’t want to lose him as my teacher. I didn’t want to be cold-shouldered, rejected, intellectually put to one side.
‘If I spoke to him about it now, he’d say “You were a coquette” – but the thing I remember most about myself was that I felt like an old-fashioned prig. In a way I did play at being flirtatious – I did play the passive, gasping girl – but now with distance I’m able to say, “Fuck that! I wasn’t asking for it.” I wanted to be in a sparring, healthy intellectual relationship without its being seen as flirtatious.’
After lunch I had to go to a press screening of an Australian movie, The Heartbreak Kid, which was soon to be released; Nina decided to come with me. We took a cab downtown, bought some lipstick at DJs, and went to the cinema. The central relationship of the movie turned out, ironically, to be a love affair between a female high school teacher and one of her sixteen-year-old students. In the toilets afterwards we called out our opinions of the film to each other from our cubicles. She asked me whether I had liked the sex scenes. I said I had, a lot.
‘Well,’ she said, as we emerged and approached the basins and mirrors side by side, ‘that touches on something I maybe should tell you. Which bears on what I’d told you about the problem with my supervisor, and maybe undermines my position.’
‘What?’
‘When I was first tutoring, up in Queensland, I slept with one of my students. Twice.’
I stared at her. We both laughed wildly. There was no one else in the toilets. We got out our new lipsticks and began to apply them.
‘He wasn’t cut out to be at university,’ she said. ‘He hated my subject. There was a kind of joke around the place that he was so beautiful and sexy. I’d just broken up with a bloke who was very important in my life. There was a party at the end of term. And after the party we went home to my place together.’
Watching her in the mirror, I could not imagine their encounter being anything but joyful. ‘I think you’re both lucky,’ I said.
‘But don’t you think it’s immoral?’ she burst out. ‘I think the student’s father in Heartbreak Kid was right when he accused the teacher of having betrayed his trust. You are in loco parentis, with students. Don’t you think so?’
‘In high schools, yes – there’s a point there,’ I said. ‘But not in universities. And there are major differences – it’s not as if you manipulated him, or attacked him, or distorted his intellectual life or tried to humiliate him publicly, like your supervisor did to you. It was a mutual attraction, wasn’t it?’
‘Yes – but how can I still complain about what my supervisor did, when I’ve done something like that?’
A whole novel lies shadowed in her story. The erotic will always dance between people who teach and learn, and our attempts to manage its shocking charge are often flat-footed, literal, destructive, rigid with fear and the need to control. For good or ill, Eros is always two steps ahead of us, exploding the constraints of dogma, turning back on us our carefully worked out positions and lines, showing us that the world is richer and scarier and more fluid and many-fold than we dare to think.
In May the Sunday Age ran two big front-page stories with sexual themes. The first was a piece about a serial rapist who was terrorising the Ascot Vale area, where, as it happened, my daughter lived. This man’s latest victim was a woman in her eighties. The second piece, illustrated by a large colour photo, concerned women police who dressed as prostitutes and enticed motorists in St Kilda to pull over to the kerb and make sexual propositions; at a given signal, the policewoman’s backups emerged from hiding and arrested the driver.
I didn’t know how to read the juxtaposition of these stories. It could have been a simple desire to sell papers, though the Sunday Age probably thinks of itself as a quality paper. Perhaps it was an attempt at balance: we can’t catch the rapist, but we can come down hard on these gutter-crawling pervs in St Kilda: we can be seen to be doing something. Fear blurs the skid in reasoning here, from rapist to would-be customer: and it is a skid, whatever your position on prostitution. The spectacle of policewomen offering themselves as decoys in a campaign against prostitution is cold comfort to women who have excellent reason to fear random sexual attack.
Next day an Age journalist reported that the frightened women of Flemington and Ascot Vale ‘want better street lighting. They want more police car patrols of the area. They want posters and notices about the attacks and the suspected man in shop windows and on billboards. They want community outrage to have an effect. The worrying fallout of these attacks,’ the journalist went on, ‘is that women then feel it is their responsibility to defend themselves against rape.’ She quoted a spokeswoman for the Centre Against Sexual Assault: ‘But it’s not a woman’s responsibility to defend herself from rape; the responsibility for the prevention of sexual assault belongs to men and the community.’
I thought for a long time about this statement. How can it be argued? I believe that rape is an outrageous crime, that it should be taken much more seriously by police and courts than it often is, that it should be very severely punished. When in 1994 the Ascot Vale rapist got thirty-four years I was glad, glad, glad. Ethically, yes, it is men’s responsibility not to rape women; but I don’t understand how ‘the community’ can prevent sexual assault while yet allowing women the freedoms we demand: the right to live alone, to go about the streets as we wish, to drive cars, to drink in bars and dance in clubs, to work for our living alongside men, to travel on public transport, to walk or run on beaches and in forests. How can there be such a thing as safety? Even totalitarianism can’t make women safe. There can’t be freedom without responsibility. It is a woman’s responsibility to protect herself against sexual assault. A free woman must accept that in the world there is risk – that risk is part of her freedom.
I read Cassandra Pybus’s re-examination of the Sydney Sparkes Orr scandal, a story which was still being whispered about in 1961 when I got to Melbourne Uni
versity. In those days Suzanne Kemp, the student who claimed to have been sexually involved with Professor Orr, was almost universally reviled; the misogynist assumptions and behaviour of men of every stripe in the Australian academic world of the fifties, as laid bare by Pybus, are breathtaking. I instinctively understand a woman like Suzanne Kemp. I am closer to her in age, background and experience than to an Elizabeth Rosen or a Nicole Stewart. These days young women are assumed to have more sexual knowledge and experience than we did as students. I remembered, as I read Pybus’s retelling, going to my first party in Trinity College in 1961, herded over from Janet Clarke Hall in a batch of trembling freshers. The party was held in the room of a second-year student who is now a successful barrister. He offered me a beer. I primly replied, ‘I don’t drink anything alcoholic’ The high, nervous voice in which I made this statement still rings in my ears, making me blush. Is there still such a thing as ‘innocence’? As Nina D—, the woman whose post-graduate supervisor preyed on her, said to me, ‘I wanted to be sophisticated.’ Frank Moorhouse says somewhere in one of his books, ‘Why are the innocent ashamed of their innocence?’ It’s as if there were a way of becoming experienced other thanan through experience itself.
One of the people I interviewed for this book lived in Trinity; for the first time in almost thirty years I walked into that college’s Clarke building. Naturally it seemed much smaller and less imposing than I had remembered. Its brutal hollowness had been muffled by carpets. The landing windows were of stained glass: this I had forgotten, or were they new? As I passed them, I glanced out on the northerly side and saw that the building where I first slept with a man – a boy, for God’s sake – was no longer there. It was absolutely gone, and its site was now occupied by a car park. I also recalled, as I climbed the stairs, a night a year or so later when I slept, against all rules and customs, in the narrow bed of my second boyfriend, who was also my tutor. We had been drinking at the football and after; he had passed out. When I needed to go to the lavatory in the middle of the night, I put on his dressing gown and scampered along the hall to the bleak, freezing bathroom.