Book Review

The Women's Freedom Network Newsletter Fall 1997, Vol. 4, No.4. The First Stone: Some Questions About Sex and Power by Helen Garner Reviewed by Daphne Patai

Halfway through her book The First Stone, Australian writer Helen Garner contemplates how institutions can inspire in men such deep feelings that they, as she writes in italicized wonder and admitted distaste, "fall in love with an institution for life." Such loyalty, she notes, "might unsettle [one's] broader ethical judgments." Her case in point is the dismissal of the Master of Ormond College, a residential college at the University of Melbourne, after he had been accused of groping two women students at a College celebration.

Yet Garner herself has experienced a comparable falling in love. This is never stated explicitly in the book, but it is implicit throughout in her deep sorrow at the loss of her faith in feminism's capacity to make the world a better place.

Perhaps it is this tone of loss, which provides a dark backdrop to the "quiet, thoughtful" book Garner had hoped to write, that has led Janet Malcolm to characterize Garner's book in The New Yorker as the "ravings of a rejected lover" (July 7, 1997). But Malcolm is wrong on both counts. There are no ravings here: there is sadness and bewilderment, and now and then a flash of deep anger (is only feminist anger at supposed male privilege legitimate?).

Nor is Garner the "rejected lover," despite her increasing frustration at being denied access to the two women who brought the charges. Hers is the voice of an older-and-wiser feminist who discovered suddenly that she could not tolerate the denial of fairness, justice, and common sense even when it is perpetrated in the name of feminism, and who now looks wistfully at the affection, trust, and hope of her earlier affair with feminism. And like men's passion for institutions, commitment to feminism, she now sees, can warp one's judgment of individual cases.

The course of events leading to Garner's critique is told in this very personal account of what happened in Melbourne starting in October 1991. It is a rather typical male female conflict, a conflict classified, as so often these days, by the label "sexual harassment." Such cases increasingly take on the dramatic form of a morality play, dividing their audiences, turning friendship to hostility, and ultimately raising questions about who and how we are in the world.

Garner pursues two main questions. First, why did two women students decide to press charges of indecent assault rather than attempt to settle the matter in less adversarial ways? She never quite reaches an answer, though it seems that it had much to do with both feminist rhetoric and the instant support given to the students by other women in the College, who resisted more informal solutions. It is this sequence of events--"He touched her breast and she went to the cops?"--that shook Garner's commitment to feminism to the point of sending a letter of sympathy to the accused, expressing her dismay at this "ghastly punitiveness." This letter, once circulated, made Garner the target of antipathy by feminists within and without the College, which explains the complaintants` persistent refusal to discuss the case with her when she subsequently tried to interview them.

The second main question Garner addresses is: Why did the Master--who repeatedly denied the allegations--lose his position even though on appeal he was found not guilty of the charges? While Garner sees this primarily in terms of the personalities, history, traditions, and ethos of the College, I suspect (given what I know of similar outcomes in very different places) that the force of feminist ideology played an important role.

But Garner's book is not a simple tale of feminist justice gone awry. As a long-term feminist, one who had her own experiences with unwanted and offensive sexual overtures, she is sensitive to the students' allegations and offers interesting reflections on the odd passivity which keeps women from handling such situations on their own. She is also aware of the real violence to which women are subjected, and episodes of it intrude into her narrative. In April 1993, while working on this book, Garner hears about a fourteen-year-old girl on her way to school, raped at knifepoint in a public toilet:

I thought ... that our helpless rage and grief at this eternally unpreventable violence against women and girls - our inability to protect our children from the sickness of the world - must get bottled up and then let loose on poor blunderers who get drunk at parties and make clumsy passes...

It is a revealing passage. First, many feminists would denounce Garner's "sickness of the world" as a weak euphemism for "the sickness of men," a condition demanding correction and control. Secondly, the pronouns hint that Garner does not see herself as one of the potentially raped, as one of the victims. On the other hand, many feminists who clamor for drastic measures against sexual harassers do identify with the offended parties, do see themselves as sufferers, indeed see all women as men's victims. As much feminist discourse has been devoted to eliding the distinctions between types of offenses and degrees of suffering, this identification should come as no surprise.

Therefore, when Garner concludes: "But the ability to discriminate [between attacks and clumsy overtures] must be maintained. Otherwise all we are doing is increasing the injustice of the world" (italics in the original), she asserts a proposition which not only has never won general agreement in feminist circles, but is expressly denied and actively contested by some of the most vocal feminist writers.

For my part, I concur with Garner. Distinctions are of the utmost importance. Unfortunately, we live in a climate (and evidently so does Garner) in which many women are doing their best to prevent nuance from dissolving their caricature of the undifferentiated male menace, so that the smallest offense can be represented as "as bad as" or "not fundamentally different from" the most heinous. Is it any surprise that feminism strikes Garner increasingly as "priggish, disingenuous, unforgiving"?

Garner rejects the view that sees male power at work in all heterosexual exchanges. She worries that "Eros, 'the spark that ignites and connects,"' will be extinguished by the new dispensation with its insistence on conflating "harassment" and "violence." But even Garner occasionally genuflects to feminist discourse, as when she describes sexual harassment as "bullying"-- forgetting her own arguments elsewhere that a provocative word or gesture may be a positive expression of desire, even awe, when encountering female beauty and vitality. Why, she asks more reasonably, must flirting be harmful? Why must it mean something beyond itself? "It's play. It's the little god Eros, flickering and flashing through the plod of our ordinary working lives." She concludes: "Feminism is meant to free us, not to take the joy out of everything."

But the problem is that what she calls "joy" and "play" has been reconceptualized by many feminist theorists as patriarchy's perpetuation of its oppression of women. So, unless a great many women step forward to support Garner's call for common sense--to declare that an unwanted sexual overture is a small price to pay for freedom of expression and association, and to reject a world from which sexuality is banished from school and workplace in the name of avoiding any possible offense--the theoretical battle will continue to be won by those who talk the most and the loudest.

The battle is between two fundamentally opposing worldviews. One sees sex (especially male sexuality) as a perpetual danger; the other, as primarily a source of pleasure for both women and men. Garner's version of the world is an irritant and a threat to the sex police who would leave nothing to chance, risk no unpleasantness, opt always for safety and certainty over improvisation and possible accusations of abuses of power.

Garner suspects that much of the conflict between herself and the younger women who supported the complainants may be due to differing generational perceptions. In light of what I have seen of sexual harassment cases in academe, I doubt it. Older women who have absorbed and sustained the "punitive feminist" (Garner's term) line on sexual harassment are as ferocious as the students to whom they teach that line.

What is most significant about The First Stone is its commentary on the implications--for women, for feminism, for men--of the new dispensation that pits women against male sexuality.

After The First Stone was published in Australia, Garner's dismay was compounded, as is made clear in an Afterward to the North American edition, by the reaction. Like other women who have written critically of feminism, she found herself vilified and turned into an official enemy, her words and views distorted, her motives presumed mercenary. But there were also hundreds of letters (about two-thirds of them from women, she says) expressing relief that someone was at last saying that daily life is not as horrible and destructive to women as feminist orthodoxy insists it is.

One of the most illuminating lines in the book comes from the Ormond Master's wife, who is the subject of a sympathetic chapter. "Deep down," she says, "under this extraordinary pain I feel, there's a sense of the triviality of this destruction."

Garner's is a brave and mellow book. It recognizes the legitimate grievances of women, but also the power of youth and beauty and the unpredictability of Eros. It insists on a sensible approach to complex, problematic human interactions, rather than vigilantism and retribution. That this posture makes its author in many eyes an enemy of feminism is a sorry reflection on the state of feminism in the English-speaking world.