#MeToo Read online

  As the months passed and the #MeToo movement showed no signs of slowing, the possibility of real change became clearer. Major theatre companies in Australia promised they would reform their sexual harassment policies. Saxon Mullins’s interview on the ABC about her rape in a nightclub alleyway prompted a review of New South Wales consent law. More recently, unions and labour law firms have joined up with Tracey Spicer’s organisation, Now Australia, to push for a complete overhaul of the legislation covering sexual harassment in the workplace (it is virtually non-existent and I’ll come back to this). But first, I want to think about what it means to speak out in the media. What are the limits to speaking out? Is it always an uncomplicatedly good thing? And what might the costs be to the women who do speak out?

  The civil rights campaigner Tarana Burke started the #MeToo movement back in 2006. It took the Harvey Weinstein story – a powerful and famous man groping, manipulating, raping, threatening and blackmailing beautiful, famous, yet younger and less powerful women – for it to become an international blockbuster. The Weinstein story arrived in Australia like an Urtext. It was the tale all the other stories needed to cleave to, at least at first (for this is the logic of the pattern-seeking media). But Weinstein’s crimes were so awful, his victims so many, and his recruitment of ex-Mossad agents to cover them up so extreme, the whole thing could have been a plot for one of his more twisted films (the title ‘Sicko’ was already taken, by the Michael Moore documentary Weinstein’s own company distributed). The bar was set sky high. The New York Times and the New Yorker (being the New York Times and the New Yorker) reported it all in excruciating and scrupulous detail. And as Chu astutely observed, ‘In one final act of gaslighting, Weinstein made all other abuse look not so bad and all other evidence look not so good.’8

  In Australia we searched for our own Weinsteins. Stars of TV and theatre were named, others were whispered. I’m not going to discuss specific stories here – they are not mine to tell. And I’m not judging the individual women, women bolder than I am, who made the difficult decision to speak out. While the personal is political, my comments here aren’t personal. I do, though, want to talk about what these kinds of interviews do, politically, as stories. And I want to think about the cost to women when we ask them (for this is also the logic of the media) to perform all their pain and emotion in front of the nation. I don’t mean their pain and emotion are not genuine, I mean that we viewers demand to witness them as the price of our attention.

  My admiration for the women who spoke out was mixed with disquiet about the way the reports framed their stories: the shots of women crying on TV, the interviews with women who talked painfully about their experiences of a man ‘who ruined my career’, or about the actor who was responsible for ‘the worst night’ of their lives. It worried me that the genre demanded by these interviews left these women – talented, intelligent women who’d lived big lives with many achievements and experiences – defined by this one man, or this one night. The images we were left with were of women irrevocably crushed. The interviews proved to us that being white, beautiful, privileged and talented (as many of the media’s first #MeToo victims were) does not protect you from damage. Yet I couldn’t help but feel that the media’s raw and unfiltered spotlight on them was like another kind of harm.

  Early in 2018, when the Australian arm of the #MeToo movement was still new, I was talking to a woman well known for speaking out about sexual harassment. I’ll call her Sam. We were discussing her upcoming media appearance and she revealed her own terrible story of sexual abuse. ‘But I don’t want to speak about it in public,’ she told me. ‘I don’t want to be “Sam the sexual abuse survivor”. I want to be known for my expertise, I’ve worked hard to be recognised for that.’ Sam has a pretty good understanding of how the media works. She would know, for example, that the last Global Media Monitoring Project in 2015, which maps representation of women and men in news media worldwide, found women made up less than a quarter (24 per cent) of subjects interviewed or reported on. And only 37 per cent of stories in newspapers, television and radio were reported by women. When they were in the news, women were more likely than men to be portrayed as victims or eyewitnesses, and much less likely than men to be sought out as expert commentators. In a news media which doesn’t often grapple well with complexity, which tends to flatten us to easily identifiable characters, speaking out as a victim makes it next to impossible to speak as an expert.

  We tell stories, of course, both because it is cathartic for us, and because we hope it is helpful for others who may have had similar experiences. We put enormous faith in our stories, faith that relies on the idea that not only can we be transparent to ourselves, but that our stories will peel away untruths and obfuscations to uncomplicatedly convey some bedrock layer of truth to others. But stories can also obscure or shut down meaning as much as they work to reveal truth.

  Let me tell, for example, two stories from my own life. In one, I am a 22-year-old student, in a relationship with a man a decade older than me, who has recently been my tutor at university. After some months together he starts asking me to move to another state to be with him. As I make plans to uproot my life for him he tells me he is leaving the country. In another story, I am an editor of a small yet prestigious newspaper casually seeing a man nine years older who encourages me to move to another state and enrol in a course to study a subject I love. By the time I make plans to move, he has been offered a job in another country and has left town. It is the same man, the same relationship, of course. But which story is more true? If I am being honest, both hold a partial truth. As the New Yorker’s Jia Tolentino wrote early in the wave of #MeToo stories, now that we are taking sexual harassment and assault as seriously as we ever have, we’ve put an awful lot of pressure on women’s stories: ‘We have undervalued women’s speech for so long that we run the risk of overburdening it,’ she warned.9 And when women spoke loudly, it was as if all the indignities that come with living as a woman were gathered up in one tidy bundle of rage and were dropped in one explosive hit on discrete incidents between individual men and women. By this, I don’t for a second mean to exonerate the men they named, particularly those accused of the worst crimes. But as Tolentino puts it: ‘Individual takedowns and #MeToo stories will likely affect the workings of circles that pay lip service to the cause of gender equality, but they do not yet threaten the structural impunity of powerful men as a group.’ She was, at the time, noting how #MeToo had failed to touch men such as Trump. She could also have been foreshadowing the swift return to public life of Louis CK or the Canadian radio host Jian Ghomeshi.

  The entirely rational feminist response to the awfulness of harassment, assault and worse has been to assert, again and again, that ‘no means no’. The difficulty of this line, as necessary as it has been to hold politically, is that it hasn’t easily allowed us to talk about the complexity of desire and power. The way desire, for instance, can go from no to yes and back again, from attraction to repulsion in an instant, as it did in the case of Grace and Aziz Ansari, for example. I realise the irony here is that I am starting to sound like Helen Garner when she spoke of the ‘Eros’ that can flicker between two people. And I do think she has a point – although I will always argue it wasn’t relevant to an interaction between a master and his students. Nor can we suggest there is some equivalence between the master’s real, institutional power and his students’ ersatz power, the kind that comes from youth and beauty. Garner wanted us to recognise the latter kind, but that kind of power was of no comfort to them when the man who could one day write job references for them was grabbing their breast. But Garner and others are right to gesture to an inherent (and necessary) tension within feminism. Feminism teaches women that we are oppressed because we are women. Yet it also instructs us to grab power, and not live, as Simone de Beauvoir suggested, inauthentic lives. Both lessons are true, yet if we emphasise the victim part we leave ourselves with no way out. And if we va
pidly repeat a girls-can-do-anything mantra without considering the forces holding us back, we can’t start to identify the structural things we need to collectively change.

  When thinking about sex, feminists have grappled with a similar paradox. While Brownmiller wanted to look at how men used sex to control and abuse women, other feminists such as Germaine Greer grasped that the pill and a counter culture–led freedom from restrictive sexual morality could be a pathway to personal liberation. Another second-wave feminist, Jane Gallop, wrote a fascinating (though often disingenuously self-serving) book when she was accused of sexual harassment by two of her female graduate students, in which she argued that when she was an undergraduate she felt powerful seducing her own advisors.10 In seducing and sleeping with these accomplished older men, she dragged these god figures (whom she in one sense wanted to be as well as have) down to earth and made them ordinary humans. The #MeToo movement is right to focus on the oppressive potential of sex, and the need to criminalise assault and rape. And yet we haven’t found a way to square this demand with the psychoanalytic approach of feminist thinkers such as Gallop, who would scoff at attempts to codify the otherwise ungovernable realm of sex and desire, who would be aghast at reports that Netflix has banned production crews from looking at anyone for longer than five seconds, and who would argue that such a policy is likely to be not only useless, but probably counterproductive in the way that all prohibitions entice transgression.

  As I’ve been researching a PhD over the past couple of years, I’ve been reading about a women’s liberation play that Helen Garner and other women performed in 1972. The play, Betty Can Jump, told stories of women being harassed and raped and treated as sexual objects throughout history. But Garner’s generation came to feminism as part of a movement that wanted to explore how sexual liberation could increase women’s power. They were anti-war protesters who were against police and authority figures of any kind. I understand much better now her instinctive response against relying on authorities to rectify personal harms.

  If we need to find a better language to think about women’s relationship to power within sex, we also need to find a better way of talking about sexual harassment as if it is always, for men, about power and never about sex (or their feelings of sexual inadequacy), as the writer and academic Laura Kipnis has suggested. Surveying the first crop of #MeToo villains, whom she described as ‘chopped-down potentates and lords’, Kipnis wrote in The New York Review of Books:

  many of them, one couldn’t help but notice, were not the most attractive specimens on the block: bulbous, jowly men; fat men who told women they needed to lose weight; ugly men drawn to industries organized around female appearance. Men with weird hair . . . We do, after all, move through the world as embodied creatures. I wondered what it felt like, if you’re such a guy, one who’s managed to accrue some significant portion of power in the world but you’re still you—coercing sex out of underlings . . . Sure you’ve won . . . but isn’t every win a tiny jab of confirmation about your a priori loathsomeness.

  As the #MeToo movement has developed it has begun to move away from the initial exemplar story of the powerful but not particularly attractive man and the less powerful but attractive woman. Complexities have been introduced. Junot Díaz claimed the #MeToo movement for men and young boys, and almost as soon as he did a young woman accused him of assault, prompting us to think about whether victims and abusers could be one and the same person. More recently accusations against Asia Argento and the philosopher Avital Ronell suggested that women, and even leaders of the #MeToo movement, might be culpable. These stories all seemed like a sidetrack and at the same time the whole point. While these stories talked about sex – as if that was the only way to get our attention – they kept, insistently, pointing us back to questions of power. Who had it and when. How power can keep shifting.

  On a Friday night about once a month I head to a house in a suburb somewhere in Sydney that belongs to a member of my book group. I am the one writer in the group (though most of the group’s members are much better at finishing novels) and I’ve felt embarrassed on occasions when the rest of the group has suddenly gone quiet when I speak, as if my opinions deserve special attention. Because I often think about how it is the women in my book group who have real jobs, who do the real work. One of the group’s members leads an organisation that campaigns every day to end homelessness. Another is working to power the country by solar energy, home by home. Yet another, until recently a Legal Aid lawyer, worked for years helping women, many from migrant and low-income backgrounds, navigate the legal system as they deal with family violence and divorce.

  One member, Alex, runs a team of labour lawyers in one of the country’s top law firms. Emma, meanwhile, is the first woman to become assistant secretary of Unions NSW. Spurred by #MeToo, Alex and Emma are the ones who bring me, along with fifty lawyers, barristers and unionists, to discuss workplace sexual harassment at the Preston Stanley Room at New South Wales Parliament House. Millicent Preston Stanley was the president of the Feminist Club of New South Wales in the 1920s and the 1930s, and she would have approved. As Alex and Emma lead a day-long conversation, they explain that while more than two-thirds of sexual harassment complaints relate to the workplace, neither the Fair Work Act nor the OHS laws governing workplaces talk about sexual harassment. The room of women speak about what we need to do to change an industrial relations system that not only doesn’t require employers to take steps to prevent sexual harassment, but doesn’t even name it. We discuss how women’s complaints are dismissed, how harassed women are moved out of jobs and workplaces as solutions, how they are blamed and targeted as the problem. Women aren’t sacked en masse in one dramatic afternoon like the scene in The Handmaid’s Tale, but perhaps even more insidiously they are pushed out of jobs, one by one, day after day. Many of the worst cases I hear about involve migrants and young women. Not the powerful or famous. ‘Why don’t people understand what sexual harassment is?’ speaker after speaker asks. ‘It’s really simple.’

  Not so long ago, after years of hardly entering my mind, my former tutor/lover/boyfriend (what do you call these people in your life?) sent me a friend request and message on Facebook. ‘Hi. Long time. Water/bridges etc. How come you don’t seem to have grown old?’ his message began. It was confronting in some ways, not so much because of our own ambiguous history, but because of a recent echo of it. I replied simply and briefly – ‘Sunscreen’ – before making reference to recent reports I’d heard that he had left his university following sexual harassment allegations against him. Someone, or some people, had scrawled his name in copies of his books in a library, accusing him of harassment. For and against camps had set up warring blogs. There were powerfully worded essays. And yet the allegations were hard to get a handle on and lacked detail. In the pictures I saw of his now partner, she looked like no one’s fool. Other women claimed they’d been pushed to narrate their experiences of him as harassment when they said they had experienced no such thing. What to make of this story? Which women – and the women seemed to contradict each other – to believe? Likewise, how should I tell my own story of our relationship? Interesting mutual love affair, or cynical exploitation of a naive student? I wondered which of my competing stories to hold on to.

  Stories can only get us so far. This is not to say that women who tell their stories loudly and fearlessly don’t feel what they feel. I, for example, will say that I feel more traumatised that someone I believed to be a dear friend ended a sexual relationship the moment I asked for our sexual encounters to lead to my orgasm, not just his, than I feel traumatised by the memory of someone I didn’t know at all grabbing me in a car late at night near a park in Melbourne. I can say I feel nothing when, most mornings, at the place I work, I see a man who groped me twenty years ago at a Christmas party. That’s how I feel, but I don’t know if it is right. The trauma from one event is surely mixed up in all the other ones. And another woman would respo
nd to the same events differently. There is no right or wrong response, right or wrong feeling.

  The #MeToo movement is an important feminist reawakening. But it is hard. In talking about the personal and the professional, sex and power, victims and abusers all in one breath, it can be exasperatingly hard to separate the issues and identify the problems, let alone find easy answers. Our hurt and our feelings leak everywhere. Pain can float untethered and settle on something different from where it began. That doesn’t mean our anger is wrong. But I know too that damage goes all ways. And I keep thinking about a phrase that Garner used recently – ‘the wreckage we leave behind us’ – to describe the life she led in the 1970s.