Traumata

by Meera Atkinson

  Even if Paglia is right to acknowledge the once-productive foundation of patriarchy and a biologically influenced ‘natural division of labour’ that enabled the survival of the human species in ancient civilisations, she glosses over the fact that the productive–destructive balance tipped towards the latter as modernity ramped up, and that, for all of patriarchy’s achievements, women and the lower classes, the workers and slaves, have paid an unspeakably high price for those gains. Patriarchy was profoundly traumatising from the start, with its inequities and focus on war, devastating for men as well as for women, children and non-human animals. Paglia also protests that patriarchy didn’t start out motivated by significant numbers of men hating, enslaving, exploiting, oppressing, or otherwise victimising women and girls, but according to Foreman it took almost no time before laws came into being that amounted to, or paved the way for, just that. And despite many of those laws having been rewritten in light of challenges to the patriarchal worldview, it’s hard to conceive of the kind of treatment received by the likes of Valenti as anything less than downright hateful.

  It’s difficult to reconcile statistics on violence towards women with Paglia’s selective thinking on the glories of patriarchy and the shortcomings of modern-day feminists. Her logic comes across as one-eyed. For example, when she observes that ‘it was labor-saving appliances, invented by men and spread by capitalism, that liberated women from daily drudgery’, she disregards the pesky detail that men dominated the field because humankind evolved over aeons in which women were not generally permitted into public life and disciplines such as science and engineering. She also fails to acknowledge the many damaging inventions by men, and the threat of catastrophic climate change that many scientists link directly to the Industrial Revolution and the rise of consumerism and capitalist mass production dating from the mid-twentieth century.

  There’s another irony inherent to Paglia’s argument: if patriarchy was a reasonable arrangement for much of human history, the very same advances she celebrates men for having made have also rendered it largely redundant, or have at least transformed the cultural landscape to such a degree that a process of re-negotiation has long been in order and in play. In her positive spin on patriarchy, Paglia makes no mention of the high price men themselves pay for the stubborn remains of patriarchy: according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ 2016 Causes of Death report, the number of deaths by suicide is three times higher for men than women, and the ABC’s Siobhan Fogarty reported that the suicide rate of young Indigenous men in Australia is the highest in the world.

  Fast-forward to October 2017. The Harvey Weinstein shitstorm hit the internet after New York Times investigative reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey broke the ‘open secret’ of his decades-long systematic and serial sexual harassment of women (reports estimate at least fifty women have come forth to accuse him). While Weinstein, one of the most powerful film producers in Hollywood and co-founder of Miramax, denied allegations, played with semantics, and faffed about with a joke one-week stint of sex addiction outpatient treatment for show, the #MeToo movement went viral. Tarana Burke, an African-American activist, had initiated the grassroots Me Too movement in 2007 to help underprivileged, unrepresented or otherwise marginalised survivors of sexual violence feel less alone. The hashtag was introduced on 16 October when actor Alyssa Milano tweeted encouragement for women who had experienced sexual harassment or assault to follow suit.

  Millions of #MeToos flooded feeds in the days and weeks that followed. And then the responses rolled in: #MenToo (men joining in), #ItWasMe (men owning up), #IWill (people vowing to take specific actions to combat sexualised abuse), but there were boycotters too. Amy Gray sent public love to those participating but declared to the world at large, ‘You don’t get to read my #metoo.’ Jacking up against disclosing her trauma ‘on social media platforms that continually silence women and protect their attackers’ for the passive consumption of many who ‘won’t read the articles, won’t look at the statistics, won’t physically campaign for reform’, Gray pulled no punches. ‘We’ve given you the evidence whether it’s through the courts, police, articles, or research papers. Either no one listened or we were censured for saying it. Some of the people who weren’t heard aren’t here any more.’

  I found myself strangely conflicted. I was moved as woman after woman posted #MeToo; I felt obliged to stand with the womenfolk (and others who joined in), but I was torn between wanting to be counted and a complex configuration of sympathy with Gray’s unyielding, uncompromising stance and several perplexing reservations. It was not a question of eligibility. My inner cynic was wary of tokenism, suspecting this would be yet another temporary viral solidarity that failed to dismantle the hierarchical structures set in place by patriarchy. And there was also some other, harder-to-pin-down cause for pause, in which my innumerable lived experiences of sexual abuse, coercion and harassment resisted being contained to a six-character badge. In the end I identified as someone who qualified for #MeToo in the context of airing my reservations, which was either the honest thing to do or the coward’s way out, depending on your view.

  As the days and weeks wore on, I witnessed the value in terms of collective solace and it became clear that, far from being the flash-in-the-pan trend I feared it might be, #MeToo opened a floodgate, though to what ultimate effects and ends remains unclear. Beyond its social media moment, the testimonies kept coming from within industry after industry. Abusers were named, and stories were told that often included aftermaths featuring bribery and intimidation. Some of those named faced real-world consequences. A handful issued tricksy image-control statements. Yet more hid under rocks. And the odd fellow fessed up with an actual apology. Penning the foreword for my academic book, The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma, in October 2016, days before the US election, American affect theorist Gregory J. Seigworth wrote about the women ‘taking to social media to share the details of their personal encounters with male sexual aggressors’ in light of Trump’s ‘sexually predatory behavior’. It turns out that was just a warm-up for the post-Weinstein explosion of what Seigworth described as women’s voices reverberating ‘across an already charged public atmosphere, forcefully speaking back against sexual intimidation, assault, and patriarchal power’ (and yes, I know it’s not just women, but women have been, and continue to be, the drivers of this phenomenon). The eruption of #MeToo demonstrated that people abused by those who benefit most from patriarchy aren’t just angry when they speak out: it takes courage to express that anger in a culture that protects your perpetrator/s.

  But if we’re talking courage we also need to talk class. In ‘The People #MeToo Leaves Behind’, published in Reveal some weeks after peak #MeToo, Bernice Yeung pointed out that the ability to participate is somewhat predicated upon privilege. Many of those who did so faced possible negative consequences, but those consequences didn’t likely come down to not being able to feed the children. Working-class women, Yeung reminds us, such as those who clean hotel rooms or pick crops in relative isolation, are especially vulnerable to sexual assault, and usually aren’t in a position to take action or publicly out perpetrators, either due to financial dependence on the employment with precious few alternatives, or because they don’t realise they have a right to complain. Recognising that not everyone is ‘empowered’ enough to be a ‘silence breaker’, Tarana Burke and Alyssa Milano joined forces with Unicef USA to launch #HerToo. In a Guardian article dated 21 December 2017, Burke and Milano described #HerToo as a commitment to supporting Unicef’s efforts to ‘end discrimination and violence against girls and women – and against all children suffering violence and harassment – worldwide, through education, protection and policy reform’, though there were no details proffered as to what that might mean in practical terms.

  Some wrestled with confusion, while others took their place on one side or another of starkly illuminated social schisms. The women of Hollywood turned out in black in symbol
ic protest, bringing to mind the wonderful line in Chekhov’s The Seagull, in which Masha declares that she wears black because she is in mourning for her life. Several non-English-speaking countries started their own versions of #MeToo. I wasn’t a fan of the French phrasing, #BalanceTonPorc (‘Expose Your Pig’), disliking its shift in focus and speciesist conflating of pigs – known for being highly intelligent and sensitive, and not given to inappropriate displays of sexual acting out – with abusive men. In January 2018, a hundred Frenchwomen, including Catherine Millet and Catherine Deneuve, signed off on an open letter published in Le Monde, which managed to make a couple of fair points amid a series of extremely problematic statements. Announcing that #MeToo had gone too far, and decrying a lack of distinction between rape and persistent or clumsy ‘flirting’, the women expressed concerns about trial-by-social-media public prosecutions and mob-justice mentality, according to the New York Times translation. The letter focused on #MeToo almost entirely in terms of sex (rather than relations of power or structural and historical gender politics), casting #MeToo as a puritanical relapse harking back to the Victorian era and accusing participants of enacting a ‘witch-hunt’, an unsavoury and horribly ironic metaphor given the literal meaning and history of the term. Reprisal columns were dashed off and promptly published, and the media reported ‘counterblasts’ charging the signatories with being apologists for rape and rape culture.

  The deafening noise of the perpetual opinion wars can make it hard to hear yourself think, but the one thing that does not appear to be debatable is that almost all women (and many others) encounter the predatory behaviour and (often sexualised) aggressions of those men who most manifest the ugly underbelly of patriarchy’s teachings, and many do so routinely. Sometimes even the strongest and healthiest among us find it’s seeped in and done damage. Those chronically traumatised as children, by whatever means, become extra absorbent and vulnerable to deforming adaptations. Some become teenagers and adults who unwittingly soak up everyday abuses like sexual harassment and coercion, internalising pain and confusion that then seeps out in an array of paradoxical behaviours. Others shut up shop, building a wall of defence such that none can get through, not to sex, not to heart, not to help. I turned it all inwards, became self-destructive and self-defeating, keeping company with people many years older and men with few scruples.

  The winds calm to a hard whisper then pick back up to a tree roar. There are rumours of coming snow. Upon waking I open the curtains with anticipation, but the rumours disappoint and I go on with my day. During the afternoon a freak snowstorm hits. White flakes fall from all directions. I’m in the shaken winter fairyland of a snow globe, the kind I loved as a little girl.

  The worst thing about getting a new therapist is having to tell your story all over again.

  I followed Jake to London, aged sixteen, leaving the Sydney summer for the northern winter, arriving with an overcoat that was pitifully unequal to the cold. When I landed at Heathrow I was scrutinised at customs, where officials deliberated about whether to let a visa-less Australian teenager enter the country on her own. Men. Uniforms. Fast talk. I was accustomed to talking my way through hairy situations on the spot, working the system. I’d already crossed the Nullarbor and back alone, and hitched rides in semitrailers on the desolate stretch between Darwin and Cairns, scamming charities and collecting social security ‘counter cheques’ from town to town. I knew how to handle a couple of confused guys at a border.

  Waved through, I caught a bus to the city and made my way to the YMCA. I slept the jet-lag off for the better part of two days before pulling out the scrap of paper with Jake’s phone number and dialling it from a phone booth in the YMCA lobby. He was living in Chelsea, it was 1980, and London was at the tail end of punk and swinging into New Romance. I did a lot of smoking and drinking at the kitchen table, depressed and overweight, and no competition for Giselle, the lithe and lovely dancer Jake held a torch for (they had been sweethearts back in Australia). That didn’t stop Jake and me having an affair, and though I remember very little of it (I don’t recall most of the sex I had as a teenager), I do remember a certain tenderness, and how painful it was for a girl already despondent and exhausted, wracked by acute feelings of inadequacy, and bewildered in a new land.

  I pause to look up the definition of memory: the process in which information is encoded, stored and retrieved (where did all those fucks go?). The behavioural neuroscientist Jee Hyun Kim defines memory as ‘a past that has become part of me’. Attention, she says, is critical for initiating memory formation. Short-term memories are made by neurons connecting, chemically and electrically charged, while for a long-term memory to develop the neurons need to talk enough to forge a protein pathway that makes a physical change in the brain (non-present, neuron-mute fucks).

  When I left the Chelsea flat, having been outshone by Gigi, I moved into a shared bedsit in a boarding house in Islington I’d circled in the paper. My roommate was a Canadian punk called Bernie who spent most of her time working on her look in preparation for weekends at the Hope & Anchor. I got a job cleaning tables at the National Gallery, drank cups of Earl Grey tea, and established a network of doner kebab takeaways where I could get credit in exchange for flirtation when needed. There was an American boyfriend called Randy, who must have been in his thirties, but mostly I nursed a series of unrequited infatuations that dissipated upon the first sign of reciprocation. My paternal grandmother was born in Bishopbriggs, just outside Glasgow, and in those days an Australian could claim permanent residence if they had a British grandparent, so I stayed in London for close to two years, being one of the more forgettable students in an Alexander Technique class, working shit jobs and drinking hard.

  ‘I’ve broken myself,’ Jake told me decades later, swinging between his brokenness and what was left of his boozy bravado during the time I spent with him as he lay dying of alcoholism at the age of forty-nine in a cottage on the Macarthur-Onslow estate. He gave me one of his rings and told me I’d helped him become a man (I’ve never understood what he meant, unless he was suggesting that he wasn’t as experienced back then as I had assumed). He knew I understood the compulsion that drives a person to drink destructively, and that I didn’t judge him. He knew I’d long stopped, but he didn’t want sobriety. Few alcoholics readily do: giving up drinking is generally a dreaded prospect to a problem drinker, and without some desire for freedom from enslavement there’s no hope of achieving it. Jake never got there. Even then, at the end, perspicuous and poignant integrity swung into defensive arcing up: he had received a letter from my father and objected to my father’s casting of him as an alcoholic. I left with a heavy heart. Jake had said during the visit that he was sorry, he should have protected me in London, but there was no protecting me from myself, just as there was no protecting him, or my other cousin Damien, who died from an overdose of sleeping pills in his twenties.

  I wake up to find the sun melting the carpet of snow on the lawn. The moon is high in the finally blue sky and four wild cockatoos screech to a halt in the foliage of the now-sedate eucalypts.

  I left London deflated, my delusions of international grandeur in ruins. I stayed with my mother in a flat in Kirribilli where I ate too much and moped around and felt like I’d failed and I didn’t know why. On the morning of the Saturday when I ended up at the quaint ye olde pub on George Street, my brother had mentioned his band were rehearsing in the city. Bored, I had set out to go watch them when I got lost and found myself in one bar and then another.

  I was lost and I didn’t know why.

  The twenty-one-year-old party girl in the apartment next door had her techno playing at top volume again. My then-husband and I had tried politely requesting she bear us in mind. We remembered being young and tried to be patient. We didn’t want to be those people, people who call the cops on someone outside an emergency, but, exasperated and impatient for respite from her late-night good times, we resorted to drastic measures
. We made the call and waited, hoping a verbal warning would give her cause to reflect.

  As the officers appeared in the hallway we took turns watching through the peephole and listened from behind our door, exchanging triumphant smiles. This, we hoped, would sort it out once and for all. But when the cop who arrived that fateful night, and who had heard the doof-doof blast from downstairs, skipped the warning and took it upon himself to issue a twenty-eight-day summons to cease and desist, our smiles quickly sank. It had gone further than we intended already. He pulled out his pad and all hell broke loose. We opened the door as our neighbour, dressed up for a night on the town, tried frantically to shut the door on the cop with the pad. He stood firm, one leg holding the door ajar, demanding the information he needed for the summons. When she realised she had no retreat, she grew wild, kicked at his shins and threw a live cigarette at him, her eyes wide in confusion, rage and terror. He warned her to cooperate or he’d arrest her for assaulting a police officer. I appealed to her to calm down. Suddenly his back-ups burst forth from the blinking lift; six or seven officers surrounded her in the narrow hallway. She flailed like a trapped animal. Her breast fell out of her dress. She cried out: she couldn’t breathe; she was having a panic attack, a heart attack; she wanted her doctor, her mother; she couldn’t believe this was happening; she had a party to go to. As the cops descended to make their arrest, her heels made skid marks on the cream hallway walls. It was clear they thought her a random loose cannon or, worse, a cop-hater. But for the first time since she’d moved in, I felt an empathic connection with her.