Secondly, we have to start being okay with saying that. I know it’s difficult, but men aren’t children or dogs. They don’t get a cookie because they did the right thing. Not giving them a reward is not the same as swearing at them or throwing a bucket of shit at their head, even though some of them might act as if it is. We have to resist the urge to respond to basic decency by treating it as if it’s some kind of enormously magnanimous gesture. It isn’t. There shouldn’t be anything astonishing about a man who doesn’t degrade women, hurt them or treat them as somehow less than him. As Rita O’Grady says, that’s as it should be. You don’t get a fucking ribbon just for turning up to a morning tea, especially not when women’s reward for doing so much more than that is to gratefully scoop up the crumbs you leave behind.
Rights, not privileges, Eddie. It’s that easy. It really bloody is.
–
13 –
WHEN WILL YOU LEARN?
In the early hours of 22 September 2012, a young woman walking home from a night out with her friends stops to talk for a few moments with a man unknown to her. Perhaps made uncomfortable by his demeanour, she feigns needing to make a phone call. She places a call to her brother in Ireland and resumes her journey home. Moments later, as she turns down a side street, she is dragged into an alleyway by the same man. She is raped and strangled. Her body is left there while her assailant goes to pick up his car. She is wrestled into the boot, driven to a lonely patch of ground fifty kilometres north-west of where she died and buried in a shallow grave. She lies there for seven days before she is found.
The woman’s name was Jill Meagher. Two days after police recovered her body, 30,000 people marched down Sydney Road in Brunswick – the road where Jill Meagher had encountered her attacker – to protest men’s violence against women. It was a watershed moment, pricking the nation’s conscience and precipitating greater discussion of the trauma and abuse visited on women daily. It was also perhaps the first time I noticed widespread use of the phrase ‘rape culture’ in the Australian media; that term has subsequently been absorbed into the Australian vernacular.
It seemed to be the start of some kind of change.
I remember that week vividly. The public’s distress over the disappearance of this ‘beautiful, radiant’ Irish girl was palpable. Her husband’s grief, compounded by the fact that he was initially under suspicion (because it is almost always the husband or the boyfriend or the man known to the woman who is responsible for her destruction), trickled down on a city already made grey by a winter that had spilled over into spring. In a twist so cruel it would seem overwrought in a crime novel, it would later emerge that a worried Tom Meagher had tried to telephone his missing wife at the exact moment she was being killed just a few streets away.
That week exemplified some of the more potent elements of rape culture, particularly the propensity to place the onus of prevention and responsibility onto its potential victims. On a Facebook page set up to help find Jill, one man wrote the following:
She was obviously at a bar/club, left there in the early hours of the morning, obviously partially pissed/drunk, and she ‘lead someone on’ [sic] and the consequences followed her. If she is going to flirt with someone, make sure that you go through with it because someone is obviously pissed off with her . . . in my opinion, it’s now old news, she met with foul play as a result of her actions inside the pub/bar OR as I mentioned before . . . ask the husband.
As repugnant as these views are, I expect nothing less from the bottom-feeding troglodytes who belch their way up through the bile of humanity’s most pointless specimens to make sure their Very Important Opinions about how women should and shouldn’t behave are heard. Of course this man thinks women and our wily, flirty underpants areas are responsible for the violence enacted against us, because this man is made entirely out of garbage, and his skull is filled with the garbage water that ferments and drips out of the bag’s corners onto your bare toes and makes you gag. Leaving aside for a moment the dazzling lack of understanding about consent contained in the line, ‘If she is going to flirt with someone, make sure that you go through with it because someone is obviously pissed off with her’, this guy is not especially unique. He is a classic victim blamer, refusing to address how violence and entitlement manifest to expressly excuse perpetrators while further criminalising women who simply want to be treated like autonomous human beings. He is probably married and has daughters, and he uses this fact to establish himself as some kind of common sense expert and champion for women’s rights.
Garbage Man is a problem, but mainly insomuch as he’s reflective of a broader narrative that gets played out over and over again and reinforced by those in positions of relative authority. Only a couple of days after Jill went missing, Neil Mitchell – who, for reasons still unclear to me, is a well-known and seemingly respected talkback radio host on Melbourne’s 3AW – expressed on air the hope that she had been ‘off partying somewhere, [because] judging from her Facebook page she likes a good party’. That it’s become de rigueur for journalists to rummage around on private Facebook pages in order to pad out already distressing stories is problematic enough – that Mitchell found it necessary to comment on what kind of lifestyle Jill may or may not have enjoyed in what was at the time a speculative story about her probable abduction simply beggars belief.
Shortly afterwards, Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper ran a long, unnecessarily dramatised piece by their resident crime writer, Andrew Rule. Rule spent approximately a thousand words painting a picture of a beautiful, naive young woman who simply should have known better than to walk down the dark, forebidding corridor of Hope Street when she could have taken an alternative, longer route that Rule – who does not live in the area and does not regularly use its streets – determined to be safer and more sensible. Waggling his finger at the silly, thoughtless girl who’d gone and got herself missing, he wrote:
Police believe the stretch of Hope St from Sydney Rd west across the railway line is Jill’s usual route home to their apartment. We all have our favourite routes, from habit rather than logic. But for a stranger looking around in daylight, there seems no obvious reason why a young woman would choose to walk this way home late at night . . . There are better spots for a young woman to be walking alone after a night out drinking with workmates, ending in Sydney Rd after starting in the city.
This kind of tongue-clucking, finger-wagging attitude isn’t uncommon, particularly when it comes to women who wander too far from the path of ‘common sense’ and ‘get themselves in trouble’. As a society, we need catch little more than a whiff of the Harmed Woman before people fall over themselves to declare what it is she and her short skirt did wrong and how future women can take sensible precautions to avoid falling into the same arbitrary, in-no-way-shape-or-form-connected-to-actual-perpetrators-or-social-attitudes kind of stinky mess. You know, just in case we were in any danger of forgetting that sexual assault and violence is something women just stumble into because our silly lady-brains weren’t paying an appropriate amount of attention.
You know the drill. Don’t walk alone at night. Don’t wear revealing clothes. Don’t drink too much. In fact, don’t drink at all. Don’t talk to strange men, but don’t ignore men who are probably just trying to have a conversation with you – can’t a man even have a conversation with a woman these days without being accused of being a rapist, how dare you unfairly malign ALL MEN with your paranoia and man-hating, don’t you know that 99 percent of men are good and decent and would never harm a woman? What do you mean, you let him walk you home? What were you thinking? Don’t you know how dangerous that is? You girls have to learn how to take better care of yourselves, you can’t just go walking around with strange men, it’s not safe, you never know what might happen, you’ll give them the wrong idea. What do you mean, you won’t let me walk you home? But I’m just trying to get you home safely, I’m not a threat to you, how dare you make me feel like I might be a threat to you! You know, yo
u’re the reason why men are giving up on even trying to be polite to women anymore, because look what happens when we try to do the decent and right thing: we just get treated like there’s something wrong with us. That’s the problem with feminism, it makes all men out to be rapists. What do you mean, you invited him in for a drink? Don’t you know what kind of message that sends? Ladies, when will you learn? If you don’t want any trouble, don’t invite it into your house! Of course something happened – what did you expect?
Later, people would argue that the unrelenting, horrified public attention Jill received was a classic example of Missing White Woman syndrome. There’s truth to this; pretty white girls from nice middle-class backgrounds are absolutely valued more highly than those other women more likely to be targeted by violence. Women of colour, sex workers, trans women, poor women, drug-addicted women, old women, fat women, ugly women – these women don’t play so well on the cover of a newspaper or as headlining stories on the nightly news. I would never begrudge anyone, particularly a woman from any of those demographics, feeling angry over how disappearances like Jill’s reinforce the hierarchy of value that women occupy in the eyes of society.
But there were other things that contributed to the force with which Jill was thrust into people’s minds. She worked for the ABC, which made her one of the media’s own. She lived in the inner city, alongside numerous other young women who were accustomed to walking home by themselves at night after drinking on nearby Sydney Road. And, perhaps most significantly, her disappearance and subsequent discovery took place over a single, neat week that was punctuated by intermittent developments. The planting of her handbag in a laneway off Hope Street. The release of CCTV footage showing a ‘person of interest’ talking to Jill outside a bridal store near her turn-off. The news that a man fitting the same description had tried to rape a Dutch backpacker months before. Cafes and bars buzzed with theories about what it could all mean, while enjoying the sense of narrative power that came from being armchair detectives. Amid all of this, a basic and gross human contradiction revealed itself. There was the visceral hope that Jill would be found alive. There was the horrible frisson of depraved excitement that she might not.
It was grey and rainy the morning news broke that the man from the CCTV footage had led police to where he’d taken Jill’s body. I cried when my boyfriend told me, but it wasn’t just for the way she had been killed. It was also for the way she’d been discarded, as if she were a fast food wrapper tossed out a car window onto the highway, the occupants suddenly considering themselves too good to have to deal with the detritus of treats they’d excitedly demolished only moments before. He had raped her, brutalised her and strangled her to death because her unwillingness to speak with him and ‘be nice’ had made him mad. He had done all of those things to her, and then that fucking bastard had driven her far away from where she belonged and just dumped her in a hole on the side of the road.
The rape and murder of Jill Meagher mobilised a new wave of discussions in Everyday Australia about the impact of men’s violence against women, particularly when rape was a factor. It wasn’t dissimilar to the grief and outrage felt over the 1986 murder of Anita Cobby, a young nurse abducted on her way home from work by five young men who then spent a number of hours gang-raping, torturing and mutilating her before finally leaving her to die in a paddock.
In 1986, phrases like ‘rape culture’ had no traction in suburban Australia, but the concept of the Lurking Monster certainly did. Girls were taught (as they always have been) to fear strange men – the things they could do to us were worse than anything our fevered minds could conjure up. Modern history is full of the terrifying stories of young girls and women like Jill and Anita, snatched from the streets by depraved men intent on inflicting punishment and violence on them. Ebony Simpson, Janine Balding, Sophie Collombet, Stephanie Scott – they all linger as the ghostly evidence of what can happen if we fail to take proper care.
The problem with this account is that it only tells a tiny fraction of the story. In the grand, sweeping narrative of women’s experience of violence, our ‘worst nightmare’ forms but a footnote. A convenient ghost story, sure – but, like most ghost stories, predicated on our own creeping sense of fear and the unknown. The truth is that men’s sexual violence against women is found far less frequently in the dark and shadowy alleyways of popular nightmare than in the quiet, mundane streets of suburbia. It suits the cultural narrative (dominated as it is by masculine ideology) to imagine something so brutal as rape occupying a form of Hollywood cinematography, but the reality is quite different. Friends, acquaintances, boyfriends, family members: these are the men who statistically pose the biggest threat to girls and women, and it is the stories of these men that are whispered between us, confessed over bottles of wine and shared around as proof of membership to a club nobody ever wanted to join.
But here’s the thing about rape culture. Like the devil, the greatest trick it ever pulled was in convincing the world it doesn’t exist. It doesn’t matter how many rooms and houses and buildings and cathedrals can be filled to bursting with the hauntings of abused women, how many names can be thrown into the fire around which all women are invited to chant their truths, how many scars (both physical and emotional) can be brandished to show the depth of all of these wounds – none of that matters in a world in which all that is required to discredit a woman’s entire being is to point at her and yell: LIAR.
‘Yeah, where’s your proof?’
‘That doesn’t sound right to me.’
‘I don’t find that very believable.’
‘It probably didn’t happen like that.’
‘Regretting it after the fact doesn’t make it rape.’
One of the most heartbreaking things I’ve learned as a woman is how little people (even other women, conditioned as we’ve all been to bend towards patriarchy and prop up the rape culture it cultivates) are prepared to believe women when we offer testimony about our lives. Stand up and tell a story about your own lived experience and then wait for the inevitable dissenting interruption from someone who wasn’t there and who knows absolutely nothing about you beyond the fact you’re challenging their comfortable notion of the world. Despite the overwhelming evidence (both statistical and anecdotal) that’s available on the prevalence of sexual violence, it is still far easier for people to believe that women are lying or exaggerating or misinterpreting a situation than it is for them to believe that Ordinary Men could be capable of such things. In the consciousness of broader society, people are far more horrified by the idea men could be impugned with such mystifying accusations than they are the fact that women are subjected to such abuse every day.
Of course, this is also vehemently denied. Most people will swear black and blue that they condemn rape, that all rapists should be locked up, given a taste of their own medicine, hounded until the end of time, executed, beaten to a bloody pulp and so on and so forth until all possible variations of revenge fantasy have been exhausted. But this is a fate only suitable for the concept of the rapist they’ve constructed in their minds – the rapist who acts like Adrian Bayley, who snatches poor, innocent white girls off the street, stealing them from their husbands and families and robbing the world of their gentle smiles. What happens when he looks more like their favourite sports star, or the local football hero? Their son? Their brother? Their friend?
Suddenly, things get a little murky. These men who look like our brothers, friends, sons, colleagues, and teammates – men like that don’t rape women, for crying out loud. We know them! We josh about with them, we drink with them, talk with them on the internet. Sure, they make the odd ribald joke, but who hasn’t done that? No, they couldn’t possibly be responsible for something as heinous and horrifying as sexual assault. She must be lying.
No matter how much evidence is offered to the contrary about the profiles of generic rapists and their wholly generic lives, this narrative keeps reiterating itself time and time again. And the vi
olated bodies of girls and women keep piling up, just another set of notches scratched into the bedposts of a world that doesn’t give a shit.
I used to think I wanted to be a lawyer when I left school, until I realised I actually just wanted to play one on TV. Discovering this somewhat lessened the sting of missing out on the necessary marks to study law at university, a relief that was starkly magnified once I met some of the people who’d actually got in and heard about torts (not a fancy cake, as I had hoped).
Since becoming a feminist writer, the distance between me and the law (or those who practise it at least) seems only to have widened further. I now find myself fielding angry emails or subtweets from defence lawyers in particular who cannot abide how ignorant I am when it comes to How The Law Actually Works.
‘Clementine,’ they’ll write to me witheringly, ‘there is no conspiracy taking place here. What you are witnessing is merely the proper and full execution of the law. White Male Magistrate #7,098,283 is simply interpreting the law as it has been written, and you cannot blame him for doing so. A suspended sentence of [insert paltry number of months or years] for this sex crime is not the equivalent of a slap on the wrist, because the threat of jail is actually very scary. Stop writing about things you don’t understand. Sincerely, Annoyed Male Defence Lawyer #5097.’
I find this hyper-defensive argument interesting, because it implies that what is essentially little more than a social doctrine has been written by a power higher than ourselves – that it is infallible and constant and not at all influenced by cultural ideas or practices. I mean, it’s almost as if the law hasn’t been crafted and passed down throughout the years by a group made up predominantly of white men from privileged backgrounds and for whom violence against women is largely a theoretical quandary.
Fight Like A Girl Page 22