#MeToo Read online

  About #MeToo: Stories from the Australian movement

  In October 2017, the hashtag MeToo went viral.

  Since then we’ve watched controversy erupt around Geoffrey Rush, Germaine Greer and Junot Díaz. We’ve talked about tracking the movement back via Helen Garner, Rosie Batty and Hannah Gadsby. We’ve discussed #NotAllMen, toxic masculinity and trolls. We’ve seen the #MeToo movement evolve and start to accuse itself – has it gone too far? Is it enough? What does it mean in this country?

  And still, women are not safe from daily, casual sexual harassment and violence.

  In this collection thirty-five contributors share their own #MeToo stories, analysis and commentary to survey the movement in an Australian context.

  This collection resists victimhood. It resists silence. It insists on change.

  Timmah Ball # Arielle Cottingham # Alison Croggon # Carly Findlay # Sarah Firth # Eugenia Flynn # Ginger Gorman # Jenna Guillaume # Liz Hall-Downs # Nicole Hayes # Shakira Hussein # Eleanor Jackson # Kath Kenny # Natalie Kon-yu # Sylvie Leber # Rebecca Lim # Jenni Mazaraki # Fleur McDonald # Christie Nieman # Greta Parry # Rashmi Patel # Fiona Patten # Ruby Pivet # Natasha Rai # Candy Royalle # Kerri Sackville # Simone Sheridan and Ailsa Wild # Maggie Scott # Harriet Shing # Miriam Sved # Maria Takolander # Heather Taylor-Johnson # Helen Thurloe # Kaya Wilson

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  ‘#MeToo and Déjà Vu’ by Kath Kenny

  Australian sexual harassment activism from the 70s to today

  ‘This Place’ by Eugenia Flynn

  On Aboriginal women and gendered violence

  ‘How Come You’re So Sane?’ by Sylvie Leber

  A personal account of rape and rape crisis work in Victoria

  ‘You Know’ by Jenni Mazaraki

  Poetry

  ‘On Not Talking to Germaine Greer’ by Eleanor Jackson

  On motherhood and survivorship, with reference to Germaine Greer’s essay, ‘On Rape’

  ‘Difficult Men’ by Timmah Ball

  An auto-fiction exploring subtle manipulations and shame

  ‘Us, Too’ by Carly Findlay

  On sexual harassment in an activist space

  ‘We’re Not There Yet, But We Are on Our Way’ by Harriet Shing

  A politician’s perspective on the #MeToo movement

  ‘Brother’ by Candy Royalle

  Poetry

  ‘Exceeding Iniquities (Prayer no. 307)’ by Maggie Scott

  On the legacy of sexual assault in a family

  ‘#MeToo and Other Women’ by Greta Parry

  The impact of #MeToo on the partners of accused men

  ‘Where the Boys Are: The Problem with Accountability in Contemporary Australian Music’ by Ruby Pivet

  On marginalisation, misogyny, sexual harassment and abuse in the contemporary Australian music industry

  ‘Start Where You Are’ by Sarah Firth

  A graphic rendering of the #MeToo conversation

  ‘Maddeningly Predictable Messages from Men’ by Kerri Sackville

  A personal essay about social media harassment

  ‘“I Had Great Sex Last Night. #MeToo.”’ by Fiona Patten

  On sex work and the #MeToo movement

  ‘16’ by Arielle Cottingham

  Poetry

  ‘Little Briar Thorn’ by Christie Nieman

  A short fiction retelling of Sleeping Beauty in the age of #MeToo

  ‘#MeToo and the Uneven Distribution of Trauma’ by Shakira Hussein

  On intersectionality and #MeToo

  ‘Breaking the Silence’ by Fleur McDonald

  On domestic violence in rural areas

  ‘Something Borrowed’ by Miriam Sved

  A feminist fiction about gendered power and a sexual encounter in a university setting

  ‘Not Our Job: A Nurse’s Story of Sexual Harassment by Patients’ by Simone Sheridan and Ailsa Wild

  On sexual harassment of nurses by patients

  ‘telling (on) you’ by Helen Thurloe

  Poetry

  ‘My Place’ by Nicole Hayes

  A personal essay on harassment and carving out space in the blokey world of AFL

  ‘Danger: Trolls Ahead’ by Ginger Gorman

  On online misogyny and the #MeToo movement

  ‘Who’s Afraid of Hindi?’ by Rashmi Patel

  A fictional story of sexual harassment in the business world

  ‘#MeToo and the Marginalised’ by Rebecca Lim

  On the impact of the #MeToo movement in the legal profession and on marginalised and intersectional women

  ‘Lullaby’ by Maria Takolander

  Poetry

  ‘The Rush Trial: A Backgrounder’ by Alison Croggon

  On #MeToo and the Geoffrey Rush defamation trial

  ‘The Gatekeepers’ by Natasha Rai

  A fictional story on the culture of silence in an Indian family

  ‘safe’ by Liz Hall-Downs

  Poetry

  ‘Among Men’ by Kaya Wilson

  On gendered perspectives of sexual violence and stranger harassment from a transgender author

  ‘The Beheld’ by Natalie Kon-yu

  On beauty and societal sexualisation of children

  ‘The Lucky Ones’ by Jenna Guillaume

  On rape culture and young women

  ‘A Useful Body’ by Heather Taylor-Johnson

  Poetry

  Acknowledgements

  This anthology was conceived of and worked into being largely on the lands of the Kulin Nation, and in particular on the country of the Dja Dja Wurrung and the Woiwurrung language groups. We acknowledge those Jaara and Wurundjeri people, past and present, on whose country we live and work and write and we would like to pay our respects to their Elders, past and present, and Aboriginal Elders and Traditional Owners of all the other communities whose lands have supported the production of writing published in this anthology.

  ‘We have to come together and speak honestly about what the barriers are . . . and then tear them down. It’s really that simple.’

  Tarana Burke

  For legal reasons, some names in these pieces have been changed.

  INTRODUCTION

  When the #MeToo hashtag went viral, the four of us started having the conversation.

  By then we’d been meeting for many years as a writers group, a feminist editorial collective and, first and foremost, a group of friends, so we knew most of what there was to know about each other. But we didn’t know each other’s experiences of sexual harassment, assault and coercion. We’d never spoken about these things, because – like so many women around the world – we had all internalised ideas about what was normal: just part of growing up, of relationships and workplaces, of moving through the world as women.1

  The conversation we started to have, that so many other women also started to have, is partly about stocktaking. Removing each experience from its dusty shelf, considering it afresh: what we labelled it at the time, what it meant, how we might start to think of it now.

  The conversation is about lines. Hannah Gadsby talks about the line between the Good Men and the Bad Men: about how men have taken it upon themselves to draw and defend the placement of that line, and how women have to be able to claim this defining role. And now, finally, it seems that lines around sexual assault and abuse are being reassessed through the prism of women’s experiences. The line between ‘a bit of fun’ and harassment. Between banter and lechery; assumed consent and abuse of power. Sometimes between an awkward encounter and an ongoing trauma.

&n
bsp; One of the many issues presented by the #MeToo hashtag is that it is asked to represent both the contested space around the lines and, once all lines have been crossed, the scarred landscape of clear-cut sexual abuse, assault and exploitation.

  We have encountered many challenges in pulling together this book. There were challenges of representation, in a movement started by a woman of colour to empower women in underprivileged communities and brought to notoriety by rich white celebrities. And there were the challenges presented by those lines, which beg questions about where the movement begins and ends, who it is for and where it might go. Is it for victims of domestic violence, and violence that is gendered but not clearly sexual? Is it for those who have been catcalled as well as those who have been raped? Is it for Aboriginal women who, in a culture of ongoing racial persecution, might feel the need to defend their men before their gender? Is it for children?

  The stories that came in presented a range of nuanced responses to these questions. And they came in fast; so many stories. They came from industries as diverse as nursing and acting; from encounters in pubs and parties and the halls of parliament and, in overwhelming numbers, from women abused in their own homes (definitively answering the question of whether we should include domestic violence within the scope of the project). They came from women of different backgrounds, ethnicities, abilities and sexualities. They came in personal essays, fiction and sometimes poetry, and we decided that if we were committed to listening to women’s stories we should listen to them in whatever form they took.

  What all the different stories shared was a sense of revelatory negotiation with the self and the world. An ongoing demarcation; women drawing their own lines. We found that even women who have experienced the worst traumas of violent sexual assault have needed to defend their line, to proclaim to a hostile world and sometimes even to themselves: this happened; this was not my fault. And this was not right.

  This, we have come to see, is the challenge and also the strength of the movement. Whether we are talking about catcalling or rape, the internalisation of ideas about what is normal, what is unavoidable, is the same. We have been moving the lines for so long, according to what the world has conditioned us to accept. We have adjusted our expectations.

  This book, we hope, will be part of a mass readjustment.

  As the backlash begins in earnest from men who’ve been ‘MeTooed’ – men like Louis CK, who might accept a slap on the wrist with some semblance of humility but have no intention of relinquishing any of the gendered power that allowed them to abuse women with impunity for so long – it becomes clear that we can’t rely on men to change the world. But we’re optimistic: because women, increasingly, are on the inside – rebuilding the power structures, helping each other up; telling their stories.

  We’re proud of every one of the pieces in this collection, and every one of the writers who had the strength and bravery to come forward and tell a story. We hope that each story, in its own way, will make clear once and for all the lines that have been crossed and should not be crossed again. In this book we offer a map of the world with the grid laid down carefully, thoughtfully, by women.

  We mean to include trans and non-binary folk here. We realise that cis men can also be victims of sexual assault, violence and toxic masculinity, but the kind of threat that women, girls, trans and non-binary folk face is pervasive and facilitated by a misogynistic and transphobic culture.

  Kath Kenny is a journalist, reviewer and essayist. In 1992 she was one of the editors of the student newspaper Farrago when the paper broke the story of the Ormond College sexual harassment case. A board member of the Sydney Writers’ Room and associate member of the Centre for Media History, she is currently writing a PhD on Australian women’s liberationists who made film and theatre in the 1970s.

  #MeToo and Déjà Vu

  Like all winters now the winter of 2017 blew warmer than usual. For women like me, sitting comfortably warm in our comfortable homes, a cold undercurrent arrived only as we streamed The Handmaid’s Tale. One scene, set at the publishing company where a pre-Offred June works as an editor, chilled more than most because it played as almost possible. June’s boss calls the female employees to a meeting where he sacks them all in one job lot. Commandos wielding automatic guns lead them out the door (as if their female pheromones are so many chemical weapons) and into a new world where women who work, who have affairs, who have children or sex outside of marriage are sinners all. The scene seemed to leave us even more primed than we might have been when, just a few months later, the #MeToo movement turned the tables. By October, when the jasmine had started to perfume Sydney’s air and the sun was staying out long after work days ended in cities further south, a real-life drama started filling our news feeds like the revenge tale we’d all been wishing for. Now the men were being shown the door. The irony was both electrifying and barely acknowledged.

  It started at the top with Weinstein. The news then went guerrilla with the Shitty Media Men list. Then it seemed to work like a virus, as television and radio hosts and film stars started appearing in the discredited lists. Movie scenes were cut, shows were cancelled, contracts torn up. While The Handmaid’s Tale warned of the precariousness of hard-won liberties, it was as if we’d decided we would have none of that. Women were finally speaking the truth! Justice was, at last, being served. But was it? And were they? Like any good story there were vicarious pleasures to be had as the guilty were named and punishments dispensed. I didn’t offer my #MeToos (although I easily could have – who couldn’t?). But the whole righting of wrongs this moment seemed to offer was more than a little intoxicating. What I found harder to believe were the taglines saying this movement was unprecedented, that this moment would change the game.

  Women have been telling their stories of harassment, rape and assault, their #MeToo moments, for years. Maya Angelou wrote of her sexual abuse in her 1969 memoir I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (abuse that occurred alongside the racism she experienced growing up in the US). In early 1970s editions of the women’s liberation movement newspaper MeJane, women spoke out about rape, sexual coercion, the assault of women in girls’ homes and the need for women’s refuges. Similar stories appeared on the pages of The Age’s Accent section in the seventies and eighties. In 1975 Susan Brownmiller published the classic feminist rage against rape and assault Against Our Will, and by the mid-1970s, thousands of women across the world were speaking out at Reclaim the Night and Take Back the Night marches. Women, in other words, have been ‘speaking out’ for decades now. Yet the statistics about rates of rape and sexual assault appear to have barely changed. Some recent figures suggest the proportion of women who say they have experienced sexual violence increased from 1.2 per cent in 2012 to 1.8 per cent in 2016.2 In 2018, almost a year since the #MeToo movement made headlines worldwide, Australia’s Sex Discrimination Commissioner, Kate Jenkins, released survey figures finding ‘one in three workers in Australia said that they had been sexually harassed at work over the last five years’. This was up from one in five in the Commission’s 2012 survey and one in ten in 2003.3

  When #MeToo first began trending on Twitter, I felt a strange sense of déjà vu. In 1992 I was one of three women editing Farrago, the University of Melbourne’s student newspaper. In our first issue one of my co-editors, Felicity Lewis, wrote a report about two female students at Ormond residential college who said they had been harassed by their college master. One said that during a college dance the master had grabbed her breast. The other said he had locked her in his office and tried to kiss her. Felicity followed the story throughout the year, later writing, ‘we watched the two women’s complaints being shunted around the college and university, then through the courts’.4 The women went to the police only after trying for months to get the college board, then the university, to listen to them. But the university and college closed ranks around the master. At one stage the university tried to shut do
wn our reporting too.

  The writer Helen Garner, reading about the court case in the paper, was perplexed about why the students had involved the police in what she saw as a trivial matter – ‘He touched her breast and she went to the cops?’ She began researching a book about the case but the students, who had read a sympathetic letter Garner had penned to the master, would never speak to her. Three years later The First Stone painted a picture of a feminist conspiracy launching an Exocet missile on a man when a swift stiletto kick to the shin would have sufficed. Garner’s book was beautifully and seductively written, but in its pages, and in the media storm that followed, a man’s career was, again and again, judged more important than the women’s right to freedom from harassment. When The First Stone was released, young feminists found themselves in the firing line. A year-long media event began with Anne Summers describing a generation of young women as strangely inarticulate. Newspaper columnists, talkback radio and television hosts variously called young feminists ‘feral’, ‘priggish’, ‘passive’, ‘punitive’ and ‘bitches’ (this last was from John Laws). Commentators were bipolar in their dismissal of a whole generation of young women, on the one hand painting them as both all-powerful (they could destroy careers!) and simultaneously thin-skinned and obsessed with victimhood.

  The case divided the country and it divided women. I remember, in the middle of it all, lying on a massage table waiting for an acupuncture treatment and reading The Australian when my face turned bright red. A leading conservative columnist had written an article titled ‘Stalinism Has No Place in Journalism’. It was illustrated with a cartoon of a woman’s symbol decorated with deadly-looking spikes. My heart started racing as I read my name. She was responding to an article I had written for the newspaper a week earlier, defending the Ormond women’s right not to speak to the media. The columnist called me a terrible journalist.

  Then, it was mainly conservative voices demanding that the Ormond women be held to account. In 1996 Garner cast herself as the defender of Eros, ‘the quick spirit that moves between people’.5 Now critics are still worried that feminists are trying to regulate sex and ban flirting. Both moments prompted cries of ‘witch hunts’ which could destroy innocent men. While the Ormond case was about sexual harassment in the elite world of a university college, now it is stars of film, theatre and television who are at the centre of most #MeToo stories. But all these parallels aside, the biggest difference between now and then is that women’s stories of sexual abuse and assault are now received with much more sympathy. Now we say #BelieveAllWomen (although as Andrea Long Chu, one of the most interesting writers on #MeToo, notes, ‘Could all women really be believed? That was a lot of women’).6 And at first, with so much speaking out, so many millions of #MeToos, it was hard to see if we would get beyond one deafening collective wail of sorrow and rage, of talking about an issue. A handful of large heads rolled, but little real structural change was on offer. In her one public statement about the case, one of the Ormond women had said that many people had told her that her story would change things for women in university colleges.7 But two decades later university colleges are back in the headlines. Now it is boys at elite University of Sydney colleges posting charts of the supposed sexual history of female students, orientation-week drinking games putting women in hospital, and other women leaving college altogether following sexual abuse.