By Vivienne Porzsolt
Why has Helen Garner's book, The First Stone, been so applauded by so many with so few feminist credentials? Why was the right-wing Sydney Institute so eager to give her a platform? Why has the debate been shifted from appropriate procedures to deal with and prevent institutional sexual harassment to the glories of Eros?
Garner in her reply to critics homed in on my point made in an article published in the Australian on June 29 that Eros, the passions in human experience, including current patterns of sexual interaction between men and women, are socially and historically formed and will vary in expression depending on the prevailing conditions. This position has sparked sharp disagreement by others in the debate who assert and extol supposedly uncontrollable sexual patterns.
Garner defends the primal nature of Eros which, she says, defies equality, legality and "society" in general. She rages at the women at Ormond for taking legal action (when all else had failed); these types of incidents, she says, are just part of "Life" and should be dealt with personally, individually. It amounts to "hubris" to say otherwise.
The consequences of such a position are to accept current patterns of gender relations — dominant, active male/subordinate, passive female — as unchangeable and leaves the status quo between men and women intact. Consistent with classic New Right dogma, it also denies the desirability of social intervention in a "private" matter.
Social progress in the forms of science, (whatever its distortions in both the former Soviet bloc and under capitalism, science must be said to have contributed to human progress), reason, democracy and equality have always been denounced by opponents, who would deny increasing human social control of our lives.
Those who dared to deny the eternal validity of the divine right of kings or God, or any other form of oppression, have regularly been labelled by their opponents as suffering from "hubris". (This is the Greek word for the pride which comes before the fall of the tragic hero in a Greek tragedy.) The message, that social change is both impossible and dangerous, is a classically conservative position. The attacks on feminist advances which have surfaced in the Garner debate seek to pull back from changes already taking place. These are worse than conservative — they are reactionary.
To labour the obvious, we are in a time where traditional relations between men and women are changing radically. Women no longer need to depend entirely on their sexual charms for economic support and sustenance and are now freer to reject traditional patterns of sexual encounter. The whole point of the experience of the women at Ormond is that it shows that women are not yet free to do so.
Throughout her book, Garner counterposes Eros ("richer and scarier and more fluid and many-fold than we dare to think"), against political action and analysis, the "constraints of dogma", "positions and lines". She reduces the concerns of the women to a "mingy, whining, cringing terror of sex."
In her book and later pronouncements in the media, Garner attacks the brand of feminism which exposes the political nature of sexual harassment as "a priggish, literal-minded vengeance squad" and the brand of "puritan" feminism which backed them up in resorting to the law to deal with what she calls "nerdish passes at a party". She dismisses the whole affair as "an absurd, hysterical tantrum, a privileged kids' paddy".
Garner confuses psychological, interpersonal power with structured political power. But the sexual allure and power which she attributes to the student she calls Elizabeth Rosen do not cancel out the structural power of the master and make him a victim. While Garner sings hymns to Eros, the fact is that men can shelter from any sexual awe which they may feel for women behind their social, economic, political and ideological dominance. They have the social power to punish women for any sexual/psychological power they may wield.
To say that passion and desire are historically formed does not deny their power. That is why I think that we cannot deal with these deep patterns of feeling by moralising and demanding "politically correct" behaviour between consenting adults. This is the useful aspect of the issues raised by Garner.
On the basis of new-found autonomy, based on advances won by earlier feminists, many women, including those who say, "I'm not a feminist but ... " are exploring new ways of relating sexually, to both men and women. The sexual confidence, the "anything goes" stance of many younger feminists is exhilarating. They reject "politically correct" restrictions on sexual behaviour but announce their confidence based on their sense of entitlement to sexual autonomy as women. Madonna and Tank Girl are icons of this new consciousness. This is different from the traditional confidence of some women based on their desirability to men.
An earlier generation, who had fewer options, perhaps could not take their entitlement to such autonomy for granted. If we want to move on from the "politically correct" rigidities of those days, let's do that. The anti-male stance of some feminist tendencies is ultimately as conservative as the anti-feminist kind. It presumes men (and women) are inherently as they are now, at this historical period, and this provides no avenue for change either.
But the retreat to earlier patterns of a more oppressive time signalled by Garner and other reactionaries is not the way to go. As women, we want to be free to run our own lives, including our sexual behaviour. This includes attracting sexual attention, if we wish, so we can decide if we want to take it further.
But women can't be held responsible for sexual intrusion and assaults against us. That responsibility belongs to the perpetrator.