A theatre review from Darlene – it’s worth also having a look at these two posts on her blog for some background.
<img src="http://larvatusprodeo.net/wp-content/uploads/2007/08/criminology.jpg"
If chaos accurately reflects Anu Singhâ??s emotional state in the period leading up to the murder of Joe Cinque, the play Criminology by Lally Katz and Tom Wright at least succeeds in giving us some insight into that infamous woman.
Currently playing at the Malthouse Theatre in Melbourne, Criminology is an at times ugly and noisy look at a crime that shocked Australia, and later led Helen Garner to write her, also infamous, book, Joe Cinqueâ??s Consolation.
In contrast to Garnerâ??s possibly romanticised portrait of the deceased, thereâ??s scant attempt by the writers of the play to give audiences any idea of what Joe was like.
Katz and Wrightâ??s â??Joe Cinqueâ?? doesnâ??t have any dialogue, flirts with one of his girlfriendâ??s slutty companions at a dinner party and stuffs popcorn into his mouth while â??Anuâ?? sits on the floor in agony after once again imbibing Ipecac.
Itâ??s only when â??Joeâ?? is dying that he appears to have a life outside of â??Anuâ??sâ?? imaginings.
Although he looks trapped and afraid when his face is projected onto the bed/screen (with a ghoul lurking beside him), this could just be â??Anuâ?? indicating that she canâ??t get him out of her head.
For those who were critical of the way Garner dismissed claims that Singh was mentally ill when she killed Joe, Criminology takes seriously the idea that the real Anu was suffering from her desire to be skinny.
Played as a sex-obsessed, intelligent, manipulative, drug taking bulimic by the talented Bojana Novakovic, â??Anuâ?? is, if not a sympathetic and likeable individual, at least portrayed as a person whoâ??s not coping well with modern obsessions such as thinness.
In Criminology, the notion that the real Anu had planned to commit suicide and murder Joe is also accepted as true, as the theatrical Anu asserts that sheâ??s going to kill herself and her lover and leave â??beautiful corpsesâ??.
The weird puppet-like figures of Princess Diana and Michael Hutchence â?? those other â??beautiful corpsesâ?? of 1997 â?? were more ridiculous than poignant, while the excessive use of flashing lights and loud bangs grated a bit.
While some university students may live their lives like theyâ??re stuck in a porn flick, the sex scenes almost felt like watching a bad heavy metal music clip.
None of the other actors matched Novakovicâ??s presence, with Jing-Xuan Chan particularly amateurish as â??Anuâ??sâ?? besotted friend.
While Criminology is undoubtedly flawed, its biggest success is offering us a different perspective about Anu Singh than the depiction by Garner which has come to dominate discussions about the case.
I think this review does an injustice to Garner, whose portrait of Singh was more nuanced than this. Garner certainly portrays Singh as disturbed, but on Garner’s description (and also the court’s judgement) she clearly falls far short of the M’Naghten standard of being unable to distinguish between good and evil actions. In fact Garner’s book is a well written meditation on the extent and limits of personal agency and responsibility, as well as something of an epitaph for the victim (she seems to have written the book to try and console his mother).
Given this it’s disappointing that the play doesn’t manage to bring to life Singh’s follower, for one of the questions in the book is the role of discipleship in allowing people to dodge responsibility for their own actions.
One would have to question Garner’s right to appropriate the role of chief and ostentatious “consoler” for a stranger’s mother. It’s a leap that smacks of hubris.
Agree with dd.
Caz, maybe that’s a question for Joe’s mother? She is on the record as saying Garner’s book brought her the consolation that the trial conspicuously failed to do.
Darlene links at her blog to another review by Alison Croggon:
http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com/2007/08/review-criminology.html
Trials are not supposed to console. If they were, judges would mete out harsher punishments, there would be no rule against hearsay and the only evidence that mattered would be that of the victim and the victim’s family.
Also, too, the M’Naughten Rules (in Qld s 27, the insanity ‘defence’) results in a ruling that the accused is unfit to plead, typically followed by a referral to the mental health court. Singh was clearly fit to plead, but based on the available evidence, was found guilty of manslaughter on grounds of diminished responsibility. Yes, 4 years is probably a bit short (manslaughter usually means 6-10 years, depending on a few other factors), but with a few well known exceptions (Lindy Chamberlain, where the jury should have been discharged in response to media contempt), jurors usually get it right.
I can’t comment on Garner’s book, because The First Stone was the last of hers I ever read. In that instance, I had a friend at Uni who’d been a student at Ormond College at Melbourne and whose personal experience of the Master was that he was a total sleaze. I was much more prepared to trust her testimony than Garner’s – without even going to the tactic of multiplying characters in the book – because she appeared to be writing far more about her own disillusionment than about the actual events and to be twisting the lived experience of her subjects for essentially personal purposes. That’s a great pity, I think, as she is and was a very talented writer – I still love Monkey Grip.
Thanks for the review, Darlene. I applaud the production and the playwright for being prepared to tackle contemporary issues and not being afraid of disturbing fracture lines in our culture rather than the box office targetted crud that’s the fare of too much theatre these days.
I’d also suggest that people follow the link to Darlene’s earlier post:
http://thespinzine.squarespace.com/journal/2007/8/7/the-clatter-of-assumptions-women-and-crime.html
And when you get there, click on the link to Inga Clendinning’s speech where she refers to Garner’s “clatter of assumptions”.
I too enjoyed the book and Garner’s forensic capacity to set up the chessboard. I think it would make compelling theatre and wish it were within my reach. I agree with DD that mum gets the consolation but you have to remember that Garner was refused an interview of Singh even though from memory it was initially promised.
She’s dished out a fair bit of that in her time, she should be able to take it.
True, but Garner goes much further than merely report on the trial. She talks to the judge who reveals the painstaking process he went through to arrive at his determinations. This account left me with a deeper appreciation and respect for the judicial process and the deep humanity of that particular judge. I hope and expect that Mrs Cinque may have been thinking about that aspect of Garner’s book when she endorsed it.
In some ways there is no satisfying sentence for Anu Singh. However, it is remarkable that the sentence passed has allowed Anu Singh an opportunity to make something of her life.
And this is a good thing because what is the purpose of the ruination of two lives?
sl, one of the peculiarities of this case was that it was held before a judge without a jury. I think it’s a fault in the ACT judicial process that in such a serious case the judge should be the arbiter of the facts as well as the law. It is the community through a panel of jurors that should rule on the facts. Singh herself conceded in an interview with Philip Adams that a jury would have judged her more harshly.
Mmmm, I am not convinced about the nuanced nature of Ms Garner’s book. There were time when I was reading it that I wanted to throw the thing at the wall (more than once). Assume, assume, assume makes an ass out of you and me.
It’s a simple case of Anu bad and Joe good, Anu’s family bad (well, her father) and the Cinques good. The book makes me long for the old days of simple reportage without the endless presumptions. I stand by the claim that Garner thinks that if she has experienced or felt something all other women have to.
“One would have to question Garnerâ??s right to appropriate the role of chief and ostentatious â??consolerâ?? for a strangerâ??s mother. Itâ??s a leap that smacks of hubris.”
Caz, yes, yes, yes. There is a lot of hubris in that.
Such a good point from skeptic, as a lay person my take on it is that trials are supposed to determine whether someone is guilty or not beyond reasonable doubt. It’s difficult to know where consolation comes from (the people you love, God?).
Yes, the play was worthy for tackling an important subject and trying to do it in a non-traditional manner. It didn’t always work (e.g. the supporting cast came across as to inexperienced for that), but go see it nonetheless.
Oh yes, Bill Posters is right. Garner is not above criticism and she certainly hasn’t been above criticising others.
No one has that right.
A good writer gives herself the licence to write about it by making her account compelling.
Hubris exacts punishment. I fail to see how Garner has been punished for her involvement in this case.
I am not sure I fully grasp your point, Katz.
Hubris doesn’t always exact punishment, indeed sometimes the reverse is true.
From what I can tell, Garner appears to be above criticism from the literary luvvie set. Says more about them than Garner’s writing ability.
I loved Cosmo Cosmolino. Monkey Grip the book didn’t engage me that much (but any movie that features The Divinyls is okay by me).
Mmmm, my comment in response to Katz’s seems to have disappeared.
Well, the gist of my comment was that Garner hasn’t been punished, but I don’t think that indicates a lack of hubris. Plenty of people get awarded for being arrogant these days. Garner is particularly popular with literary luvvies, and that says more about them than it does about her.
If my other comment is found, just delete it.
later led Helen Garner to write her, also infamous, book, Joe Cinque’s Consolation.
It may attract criticism (see above), but I’d hardly describe it as infamous. From hearsay from others, I’d say it’s a very popular and well liked book.
I enjoyed it myself, although it’s not top of my Garner list (FWIW, I was one of those people who hated the First Stone too and thought it missed the mark entirely, but enjoy and admire other works of hers.)
Well, I think it’s infamous for all the reasons I’ve outlined.
Interesting discussion. I havn’t read anything of Garner’s.
Many people consented to talk to Garner in relation to the Joe Cinque case. They all knew she was a writer.
Several people refused to talk to Garner in relation to the Joe Cinque case. They all knew she was a writer.
Garner was quite candid about the sources of her information and her frustrations about not getting access to other information. She hypothesised or made some assumptions (whether they “clattered” or not) about matters that she could not resolve satisfactorily without access to certain information.
These are the difficulties facing anyone dealing with fraught emotions.
Perhaps, if Garner had got closer to Anu Singh then she would have explained that raised “girl hackles” were an unworthy emotion. Unfortunately, Garner could not get access to Anu Singh, despite repeated attempts.
So the reader is left to deal with “girl hackles”. They may be unprepossessing, but Garner would have been less than honest if she denied their existence.
Hubris that doesn’t attract punishment is called justifiable pride.
These l*vvies sound like perfectly dreadful people. I’d like a list of their names so that they can be justly punished.
BTW Darlene, your post was probably trapped by the l*vvies that dare ot speak their name.
You know who to blame for that.
Yes, but I think not talking to Ms Singh helped Garner in relation to the book she wanted to write. If Anu emerged as something more than a caricature it would have made the book better, but less about being “Joe Cinque’s Consolation”.
What the heck are “girl hackles”? Do we females have some special type of hackle? Does this mean that Garner was being sexist or that women have a unique ability to get annoyed with other women?
If you were Anu Singh would you have talked to Garner (going by her track record with The First Stone)?
I remember hearing Ms Singh being interviewed on LNL on ABC and I found her lacking in self-awareness and lacking a full appreciation of what she’d done, but other than that, I don’t really think we (those not in her closest circle) know what she’s like. Heavens, hopefully she’s not like she was a decade ago.
I’d go for hubris and not justifiable pride in this instance.
BTW, given that I live in the inner-city of Melbourne and go along to see plays like Criminology, I suspect I am a bit of a luvvie myself. Tee hee.
I’d be interested in hearing from others who have seen the play.
*Puts up hand*
Punish me! Punish me!
I think there are some reasonable questions here to be asked. Garner also found that some of the people in the Ormond College refused to talk to her. One reason why they refused to talk to her is that they feared that she would misrepresent their position and had already made up her mind as to what she was going to write. If a journalist were working on a story, then there are established protocols for reporting which encompass a source refusing to speak. Garner, by contrast, wants to tell a story regardless of whether she has access to sufficient information that would reasonably enable her to get to the truth of the events. Therefore she has to make a “clatter of assumptions” and I don’t think she deserves praise for it. Quite the opposite.
Crossed with Darlene but I’m in agreement.
Btw, Darlene, as Katz indicates, because of Mr Greenfield, comments containing the word “l*vvies” are prone to ending up in the spam filter or moderation.
Do l*vvies wear black turtlenecks to the theatre?
IIRC, her “track record with The First Stone” was that none of the many people who did talk to her (of whom I was one) had any complaints about being misrepresented.
Singh refused repeatedly to talk to Garner (as she had every right to do) and afterwards complained … that Garner had not talked to her.
As I said before, someone I knew had been at the college and I have much more trust in her assessment of the dynamic there (very far from pastoral care by a kindly scholarly old gent) than Garner’s.
It seems to me that she also uses unethical tactics in holding out to those she wishes to interview that they’d be better portrayed if she does talk to them.
Whether or not Singh subsequently complained is hardly to the point, I think.
My view is that Garner exploits people in situations of extreme distress and vulnerability in order to tell a story she wants to anyway, and usually to make some sort of worthless polemical point.
I’d invite anyone who hasn’t read it to read the chapter from “XX” – the two women who were sexually harrassed at Ormond College – in Jenna Mead’s book.
Mark, do you mean ‘better’ as in ‘more accurately’ or ‘more sympathetically’? Either way, where did she say that?
“More sympathetically”.
As I said, PC, I’d suggest a look at the chapter by “XX” in Jenna Mead’s book.
â??Girl Hacklesâ?? – handy-dandy expression to instantly diminish and dismiss any women who offers any opinion about another woman. Should be repeated often if women keep insisting that they are entitled to express legitimate opinions about women.
No corresponding expression exists in relation to men, as none is necessary.
My experience would indicate that women get irritated by other women in ways that are more or less incomprehensible to males.
Me too. and I’m glad that Anu Singh had the opportunity to grow out of gaol.
That is also my impression, based on the comments made to me by some persons directly involved in the case.
Garner certainly seeks out persons in extreme distress. I’d disagree about how worthless her points are.
In the case of The First Stone, Garner shows brilliantly how the Melbourne Establishment operates. They are clever and ruthless.
In Joe Cinque Garner shows how the judge arrived at his verdict. He was quietly admirable, in my opinion. And I didn’t feel unduly manipulated by Garner in reaching that view.
From the point of view of public culture, both of these insights are more important than the small tragedies that threw such an intense light upon them.
How so? I didn’t particularly get that from my reading of the book.
Nonsense, I’m afraid. If the insights have validity, they could be expressed without doing further damage to those she chooses to write about.
At every stage of the judicial process, look carefully at who was driving it.
This isn’t logical. Insights are insights regardless of how many people are destroyed. They have an existence independent of the conditions of their creation.
But an author has an obligation not to “destroy” people.
Woodward and Bernstein destroyed Nixon.
How many persons has Garner destroyed?
Read it the week it came out, Mark, in 1997, so may have forgotten some details in the intervening ten years. Mead’s bodyjamming was pretty much required reading for a Melb U feminist literary academic who had known both Mead and Garner since 1980 and who had published a book on Garner the previous year, after all, and I was devoutly grateful not to be attacked by any of the contributors on the grounds that although I had expressed disagreement with TFS‘s major premises, I had fallen short of calling for Garner to be hanged, drawn and quartered in the public square.
Which was then — and, alas, still does seem to be — the orthodox position.
I was using your words, Katz. I suspected they were hyperbolic. She hasn’t destroyed anyone – but she’s certainly done some damage to vulnerable people along the way. I’m not particularly interested in arguing the toss about her ethics ad infinitum, because for me to do so ethically would require re-reading The First Stone and also Bodyjamming. Incidentally, I thought TFS was much more about her intervention in certain pseudo-debates about feminism than any deconstruction of the power of the Melbourne establishment. Her take on those issues certainly prompted more discussion at the time. I’ll repeat what I said before – anyone who wants to understand both Garner’s style in seeking to elicit information and also the actual effects of her writing on those she wrote about ought to read the chapter by “XX” in Bodyjamming. Particularly if they’re prepared to venture an opinion on her ethics and the impact of her work on those affected.
What I objected to in your comment was the seemingly casual dismissal of those effects.
I think it’s of far more importance to have an ethical, truth oriented and other regarding orientation to reportage than to reveal some sort of insight into the operations of the Melbourne establishment, about which, I for one, couldn’t give a stuff.
Katz, on the Melbourne Establishment point: I think it might have been Mead herself, in a long piece in the Age (?), who had most to say about the way the Ormond Old Boys’ network and friends, particularly in the legal profession, lined up in opposition to her own and the students’ attempts to make the college and the Master take some responsibility.
I disagree, PC. She had an enormous amount of support at the time, and still does, as this thread demonstrates. I don’t see that your disagreement with the “orthodox” opinion disables any critical examination of her ethics.
Anyway, it’s a public holiday here in Brisbane, and I’m not interested in spending any more of it in talking about Helen Garner. As I said, it was also a long time ago that I read her and Bodyjamming, and I don’t feel confident that we can discuss it appropriately without refreshing our memories.
“BTW, Darlene, as Katz indicates, because of Mr Greenfield, comments containing the word â??l*vviesâ?? are prone to ending up in the spam filter or moderation.”
: ) I was unaware of the “l**vie” situation. I will desist from saying “l**vie”. John Greenfield, keep your l**vies to yourself, love.
Yes, Sacha, they do.
Yes, men don’t get “hackles”, Caz. Ms Garner should have kept her “girl hackles” to herself if she wanted to at least attempt to write objectively.
Thanks, Pavlov’s Cat, for that insight. I meant more on a general level. The portrait Garner painted of the young women in The First Stone was hardly charitable, especially given that they were the ones who’d been harassed. Given that, Singh, a person who committed manslaughter, was always going to fare badly.
“My view is that Garner exploits people in situations of extreme distress and vulnerability in order to tell a story she wants to anyway, and usually to make some sort of worthless polemical point.”
Agree, agree, agree. It’s that young women and feminism thing and that young women’s feminism thing.
It’s the Ekka holiday. I want a Bertie Beetle bag (that’s about as non-Helen Garner as you can get).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bertie_Beetle
The Ekka is cursed, Darlene! Not only are attendances 30% down because no one wants to catch the flu from hell, Brisvegas has decided to turn on one of its now very rare rainy days for the public holiday. So I’m going down to Vue for the all day brekkie – eggs and mushrooms and toast!
Perhaps your lack of understanding, failure of imagination, lack of empathy etc. may be your problem, Katz, rather than being proof that women’s interactions are in some way less important than the way real humans interact.
Or perhaps I just misread the intent behind the words “girl hackles” and you did not mean it to be a way of belittling an entire gender because you can’t be arsed putting any more thought into it than: “Oh how silly, they aren’t exactly like me.”
1. Reasonable, though, for you, unprovable assertion.
2. You seem to assume that “different” = “inferior”. You’re welcome to that assumption. It isn’t one that I hold.
How often is it asserted that organised violence is a characteristically male pattern of response? If that is true (which I believe without any formal proof of the case it is) then the possibility surely exists that there are other gender-based differences of response between men and women.
Ethics committees thrive in universities. No doubt they do good work. If Woodward and Bernstein had worked in such a university, Deep Throat’s revelations would have ended up on the cutting room floor. W and B had a rather more robust attitude to the acquisition and publication of administration secrets. And it would appear that Garner too was prepared to cut some corners to amplify the impact of her story. Ultimately it was about the identity of sources.
Everyone is welcome to her opinon about the Melbourne Establishment. This happens to be a major theme of The First Stone. Those persons not interested in this subject are not compelled to read the book.
The book is a very Melbourne book.
Darlene that link is rubbish – Bertie Beetle bags were traditionally $1 and there was uproar when it went up to $2. I loved Bertie Beetle bags. Don’t remember if I ever bought one.
The analogy between Woodward and Bernstein and Garner fails. They were bound by journalistic ethics. Her practice of “faction” or whatever it was called at the time involved her exemption of herself from any ethical norms prevalent in writing about real lives and people – of course she invented her own, but again your reluctance to engage with the point that she had a duty and an obligation to take care not to do further harm to people who were at that time in a very vulnerable position is telling.
In addition, I’d repeat my point that the extensive contemporaneous public discussion of Garner’s book didn’t revolve around the Melbourne establishment but as Darlene pointed out, her views on “eros” and young women and feminism.
I didn’t attempt an analogy between W and B and Garner.
I merely pointed out that each adhered to different ethical standards to those you appear to be promoting, without necessarily adhereing to the same standards themselves.
It indicates only that up till now I haven’t been particualrly interested in defining the precise line of acceptability.
What, precisely, are Garner’s obligations?
Legally, she is obliged not to defame. As far as I konw no one has taken an action against Garner.
Often, writers show their subjects drafts of their work for comment and consent. I don’t know whether or not that happened in this case.
Persons convicted of a crime (like Anu Singh) lose any protection from the frankest factual discussion of their crime.
In the case of The First Stone Garner never identified the women most directly concerned. Only if those women identify themselves is it possible for what Garner wrote about them to damage them in the eyes of any except for a narrow circle of persons. If those women rejected the truth of what Garner said about them, then they can hardly be said to have been damaged by the statements alone.
Yes, Garner was amazed and saddened by that fact. But she can hardly be held responsible for how others read her book.
Sorry, Sacha. It’s the first thing I could find. : )
I am perplexed by the Melbourne Establishment (ME) angle. Was the ME looking after the Master or Garner?
Disingenous crap from Garner.
And very po/mo.
Even Derrida argues that authors have a responsibility for how their text is read. Had she really been “amazed and saddened” she could have refrained from constantly talking about those aspects of the book.
That’s extremely legalistic, and quite lacking in empathy. The way their case was written about by her doesn’t effect how they feel about themselves, how they deal with the response to the events?
The irony is that the issues in the Master’s case revolved around “duty of care”. Something Garner denied to the subjects of her text, and quite self indulgently I belive.
I don’t know if anyone has read this article (alas, it’s not available online for free):
Link
The article is titled:
Feminists ‘Misreading’/'Misreading’ Feminists
Helen Garner, Literary Celebrity and Epitextuality
“While Criminology is undoubtedly flawed, its biggest success is offering us a different perspective about Anu Singh than the depiction by Garner which has come to dominate discussions about the case.”
Well, I think it probably is impossible to talk about either the Ormond College thing or the Singh case without Garner getting the way.
Getting in the way, that is.
Oh no Darlene – my “girl hackles” definition was in relation to the way it was being used to insult commenters on this thread, not to defend Garner’s right to her never-bloody-ending-voice.
Goodness, Garner continues to be an indulged and indulgent literary darling, and anyone suggesting that she should be silenced would be tarred and feathered by the literati and the culture-vultures. She’s like some protected species.
No, I assume that phrases like “girl hackles” imply inferior, Katz. Disappointment at your use of the phrase has nothing to do with anyone rejecting gender differences and how they apply, and everything to do with your attempt to trivialise the way women interact with each other as if it is in some way less important than how “other” people interact with each other.
Trying to pretend as though “girl hackles” was a neutral thing to say does you no credit at all.
Thanks for that clarification, Caz.
“Goodness, Garner continues to be an indulged and indulgent literary darling, and anyone suggesting that she should be silenced would be tarred and feathered by the literati and the culture-vultures. She’s like some protected species.”
The point I was making with my l*vvies comment. Mind you, I was most surprised to get some less than positive feedback about Garner from some women I talked to at the play.
“Girl hackles” is louded with essentialist notions of what it means to be a woman. Ewww.
â??Girl hacklesâ?? is louded with essentialist notions of what it means to be a woman. Ewww.
I suspect it’s “louded” and “loaded”.
It’s Garner’s term, not mine.
I don’t know what girl hackles are. Do you?
I merely defend the right of Garner to use the phrase (it’s her phrase, not mine). When I read the book I was struck by the phrase, but moved on. Oddly, my appreciation of the book didn’t seriously diminish despite the fact that I didn’t know what “girl hackles” are.
I’d prefer to state it as:
It’s well nigh impossible to satisfy Dilthey’s conditions for empathy (verstehen), i.e., “re-experience” the thoughts of others. But Garner makes a reasonable fist of it.
Or do you mean sympathy?
A bit of context here. Garner used the term to describe her reactions to a series of photographs of the principal actors, before she even got involved in the project of writing the book.
Garner, as is her wont, was simply being honest. Sometimes she is uncomfortably so. She is quite open about her own doubts, uncertainties and self-questionings. It’s one of the things that makes her such a great writer and essayist.
And boys have bristles too — about other boys. “Get real, you bloody little poser. Stop showing off for the girls [but why can't they see through it?]” is the way we internally articulate it.
I don’t see what is sexist about the term “girl hackles”, though it is not one I have ever heard used before. If it means female intuition, in this case about another woman based on first impressions and subjective feelings that would quite likely not be ones typically experienced by men, then I know generally what Garner means and agree that such impressions and feelings can come about as a result of my gender socialisation and may not be ones experienced by most men for the same reason.
But that is not at all the same thing as being sexist.
Speak for yourself, boyo.
And often externally as well.
Me and most other blokes I know, Mark.
Darlene, would you like to nominate the ‘worthless rhetorical point’ that Garner was making in Joe Cinque’s Consolation?
Is that your male intuition speaking, Rob? Or your well known habit of generalisation from the personal to the universal supported by anecdote? I can see why Garner appeals to you.
So THAT’s what you blokes are saying.
Ah, I see!
I was entirely unaware of the context of “girl hackles”, and only read it in the context in which it was used in this thread, which seemed very much to be a mechanism for criticizing the women (and men) daring to exercise their right to express an opinion about the vaunted Garner that isn’t sycophantic.
The context in which the expression was used by Garner is specific and narrow, while in this thread it was used in a generalized and negative manner.
without generalisation philosophy would be impossible.
Rob’s musings about masculinity hardly constitute philosophy. And there’s a reason why there’s something in philosophy called the “problem of universals and particulars”. I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming he’s operating more in a sociological than a philosophical sense, but I’d also like to point out that there are many of us men who don’t think or act like that. Perhaps we’re just not the “blokes [Rob] knows”.
Dialectical Materialism (A. Spirkin)
So? None of that means that Rob has any warrant for making his claim, as interesting as it might be in other respects. I could find you quotations from people like Benjamin who were astute philosophical observers of the aesthetic or from a more orthodox dialectical materialist or two which would refute that, but none of this would be on topic now, would it?
well, Mark, heaven forbid anyone to be off topic. If human beings had religiously stayed “on topic” we would never have left the bloody Garden of Eden, now would we? And how boring would that have been?
I could explain what girl hackles means. But I won’t. You don’t deserve it.
I don’t know, jinmaro, but I have this quaint view that it demonstrates respect to the author of the thread to discuss their views and not ones quite extraneous to the topic, and also makes it easier for others to do that should they wish rather than having to wade through a lot of generalisations, or debate about Rob and his secret masculinity or whatever.
I thought you believed in democracy? Many threads evolve into all sorts of segues and diversions and non sequiturs. Human beings are like that.
I happen to agree with Katz and Rob and probably Pavlov’s Cat. I don’t know why you insist on personalising this point vis a vis Rob.
We have a different understanding of human psychology in its various manifestations. That you don’t understand or agree doesn’t negate the truth of many other people’s experience. And I would have thought it was on topic anyway, but then that’s me.
Rob wants to make a claim about men. I’m a man. I am not like that. Therefore his claim does not extend to “men”.
I hope that’s syllogistic enough.
Look, I’m in a grumpy mood today, and I apologise if that’s showing. But I really do mean the point about showing some respect for the author of the thread and others who may want to participate in discussing the topic.
formal logic does have its limitations.
Not to make stuff up.
Mark, you keep attacking me for relying on anecdotes, but your whole case against Garner in the case of The First Stone is purely anecdotal. You know someone involved who thought blah blah, and so, blah blah.
Katz, what do you mean by the differentiation between empathy and sympathy?
And Mark, you are extrapolating from anecdote to a critique of a book which (forgive me if I’m wrong) you have not even read.
Bill Posters gets it in one.
Rob, not good enough.
First, you are trying to prove some universally true statement about men on the basis of a certain gendered experience men of a certain age may share. I’m pointing out to you that there are many men whose values and behaviours have been shaped by growing up with feminist mums, sisters and friends.
I am trying to establish the truth of a particular instance – viz. the behaviour of the Master of Ormond College. Garner never spoke to the students who impugned his behaviour and relied on reports from others. I have spoken to one of those students. It’s a more direct level of experience, and the person in question had nothing in particular to gain from making the statement.
Think about how the relative testimonies would stand up in a court of law.
In any case, my recollection is that the gentleman in question was held to account for his behaviour in a court – the behaviour that Garner refused to believe him capable of, and on which she hung an enormous superstructure demeaning the young women involved with a whole lot of rot about how they didn’t understand “eros” and how she was disturbed by graffiti she saw in a university loo or something.
Bottom line: he had a duty of care which he breached. Garner took insufficient care about the way in which her words would impact on those about whom they were written.
Probably a boy hackles thing?
Mark, we seem to inhabit different planets. I wasn’t to prove anything, let alone anything universal. I was trying to establish that ‘girl hackles’ as used by Garner has to be contexted and read proportionate to her narrative. I don’t think you are doing her justice. On the basis of your anecdotally-derived reading of The First Stone, you have been imputing to Garner morally dishonest motivations for writing Joe Cinque’s Consolation — a book which on your own admission you have never read.
You’re not on firm ground here.
No, I think you’re fundamentally wrong, and I’m disagreeing with you. That’s all.
The only interest I have to declare is that the woman I knew from Melbourne was a very nice person, and didn’t need to have her experience effaced by a defence of a sleazy old man who shouldn’t have been in the role he was in from the hands of an author who turned around and blamed the victims in order to popularise her own preferred narrative about how young women had let down feminists of her generation and failed to understand “eros”. I’m well aware you and the rest of the Quadrant crew then decided she was some sort of unquestionable figure.
The “elite” litterati we have to have, I suppose. Or perhaps Christopher Pearson could use a few analogies about Jansenism and Paddy McGuinness could malign a few research topics to somehow twist Garner’s abuse of power and ethics into a people vs. elites narrative?
Mark, I think you are getting preposterously defensive about this.
Think what you wish, Rob.
I’m flattered.
I’d admired Garner’s earlier writing, very much, but not much more than that. I thought she was an astute and honest observer, but I refused to read, and still haven’t, The First Stone. This was totally for ideological reasons. At the time I was working in the area of sex discrimination law. None of us read the book. On principle.
But some years later I changed my mind about the nature of women’s power that Garner explicated. Camille Paglia was a major influence in this change of heart. As was reflection on mine own experience and observation. Which is not to say that I don’t believe sexual harassment can be a major issue for women. Rather, that women often do have more power than some might admit to counter or repudiate it.
Rob, I was referring to Ms Garner!
jinmaro, that was Garner’s argument. It seems to me to be deaf to the fact that we are talking here about a man in his fifties who is in a position of power over young women in their late teens and early twenties, and who has a duty of care towards them.
Thats interesting because I never read her ‘honesty’ as anything more than a novelistic device. The narratorial ‘I’ was very constructed to me, fictive even. I read these doubting moments as permormative and saw them as working to capture the authority of the reader. Rather than a transparent honesty, I saw her self questionings as strategic methods used to coopt the reader’s own doubts, which then made it easier for Garner to take the reader to her conclusions. I always felt irritated, and manipulated by these hand wringing passages. I though these strategic posturings also operated to obscure through its performed honesties, what she was really on about. and what she was on about related very much to, what Mark said: “her intervention in certain pseudo-debates about feminism” rather than any exposure of the old boys of Melbourne.
I can understand your point, casey, although I don’t agree with it. Garner’s honesty is uncomfortable, not least, one feels, to herself. If you don’t want to take the writer at her word, don’t read her, I’d suggest. You certainly won’t get anything out of her except the point of view you project onto her.
So, why should anyone write anything?
well, Casey and Mark are not women. And one must wonder at the antagonism expressed here by these men-folk towards a superlative woman writer, in the full meaning of the term.
And this is definitely not PC, but I don’t see anything inherently exploitative, or something that should be outlawed, in an older man making a sexual play for a younger woman. And, let me tell you, many younger woman desire older men, or younger men, older women, who are their teachers. I know people say consummation of this desire is a terrible thing for the mid to late teenager, but I don’t buy it. Most of us would be happy if they were a good f*ck and treated us nice, which is more than most of our uni lecturers were capable of on either count.
I think you’re talking about Garner’s much maligned Eros there, jinmaro. Good on you.
Jinmarro you are assuming much and know nothing at all when it comes to me. I am a woman.
Unless I am to read it as truth, taking her at her word, then you are telling me not to read AND critique her? I am not to explore how a writer constructs her text and draws her argument together as is MY wont to do in my daily life? If I cant do this, then I shouldnt read at all….. Now Im feeling like Im in Howard’s Australia….hang on I AM in Howard’s Australia…
Well, it’s a personal thing, isn’t it? My suggestion would be not to critique a writer of Garter’s calibre, but rather maybe yourself?
“Question not the word but thine own understanding”.
Sot of thing.
sorry Casey, I could have sworn you said previously you moniker was that of your opposite sex cat or dog. Doesn’t change my argument, one iota.
Rob, respectfully if I did that I couldnt do my PhD on Australian writing – could I? – what an utterly bizarre thing to say. The pontifications, assumptions, generalisations, gender stereotyping and kindly advice on how to read are no longer sustaining my interest here. I will withdraw from further commenting on this post thank you very much.
Ow, casey, I’m sorry. Look, I generally say exactly what I think and that’s a curse, in life, but more particularly on blogs. I’m sorry if I offended you.
You appear to be writing as if you’re a woman, jinmaro, or at least that’s what I take from your use of the word “us” in this paragraph:
It might be helpful if you’d clarify whether you’re engaging in some sort of cross-gender l’ecriture feminine or not.
Rob then says:
So, in short, young women derive benefit from having their teachers come on to them and have sex with them? To suggest otherwise, and to suggest it’s an abuse of power, is to be “PC” and to have forgotten “eros”?
That is an ethically untenable position, I’d suggest.
And the notion that no one can criticise Garner because of her stature or the quality of her writing is just risible beyond belief.
the only thing that is bizarre Casey is your self-confessed Phd student negation of the truth of the perfectly reasonable intellectually sound notion that self-reflection should, at the very least, accompany attempts at comprehension, let alone meaningful critique.
And you’re demonstrating that yourself? I can see where casey’s coming from – any questioning of you guys and the sainted Garner and you get condescension and belittlement. And you are signally failing to reflect, both you and Rob, on the extraordinary ethical implications of your claims about the acceptability of older males in positions where they have a duty of care over young women seeking to seduce them – something you claim the women should be grateful for.
ok. Without googling. What was the name of Anne of Green Gables’s best friend?
Only a woman would know that. I do. It was Diana. And what did Anne ask Diana to give her as a keepsake of their friendship? Only a girl or woman would know that.
I dont know that you can weigh any sexual relationship in that way Mark. Costs and benefits. There are always both.
No, I think you’re wrong there, Mark, on all kinds of counts.
I can’t begin to unscramble your conceptual egg.
Metaphysics are not your forte.
No, not always.
That was in answer to jinmaro.
Rob, I fail to see what metaphysics has to do with anything unless it’s a euphemism to rename the sexual exploitation of younger women by their teachers as “eros” and blame them for it if they don’t thank them for it. That appears to be the position you and jinmaro are advocating. Which goes beyond even the sainted Garner’s incoherent discourse on eros.
Mark, I can’t find it at the moment but there’s a marvellous quote from Garner that I’d like to have thrown into the pot: something about people with a metaphysical bent confronting those with a political bent in mutual incomprehension, with their mouths hanging open in disbelief.
It was from her essay The Fate of the First Stone.
I think that’s what we’ve got here.
I’ll happily leave you to your metaphysics, then, Rob, and continue to believe that distorting the truth and misusing power for sexual ends is not “great writing” and “eros” respectively but just wrong.
Don’t be silly. She has talents you and I could not even dream of.
Jinmarro, Ive always appreciated your posts. I have been challenged by your nuanced arguments and have loved the slices of poetry you have strategically placed to make a point. So here, I would appreciate it if you didnt make generalisations, assuming I am a man and attacking on that basis. Some women, a lot of women, just dont agree with what Helen said in the First Stone. In regards to talking about my PhD, there was no conceit intended. I rarely mention it (heh, i think it would work against me here! – as evidenced by your response) but I was pointing out that what Rob was asking me not to do, (which was to not read critically and to read unproblematically), was what I do every day in my work and I could not do my work if I did that. In fact I would fail my degree. You mention your work all the time Jinmarro and implicitly offer that as evidence that you have some experience in the area you are talking about.
Rob, I didnt actually make any generalisations about loving or hating Garner, but rather went to the specific writer’s technique which you brought up. What you regard as self evident and transparent, I dont. If you read my post, that is all I said. Now im sure Dr Cat would offer a textual counterpoint to all this and I would welcome that by the way. I would in no way stand at the gate of exclusion here and would welcome all of the multiplicity of reading and response that Helen Garner generates. Thats the point of blogging no? I am surprised by what has been said here in response to my post. I am surprised by the vehemence I guess. But thanks for the apology. I appreciate it.
Is this a private fight or can anyone join in? I’ll go with the latter, mostly for reasons of my own perversity. Here’s what ya said two years ago, Robbo, again quoting Garner’s essay:
The bolding is mine, and the redheaded stepchild’s rejoinder remains eternally beautiful and true. It’d be a copout, Rob, to try and climb up on a pedestal above politics to bolster your argument, especially when you’ve refused to do it in the past.
PS. According to my sources, the essay you’re looking for is in Saluzinsky, Imre (ed). The Oxford Book of Australian Essays. Oxford Uni Press, Melbourne, 1997. 218-225.
Well, no doubt that’s so, Rob, but it doesn’t exempt her work from criticism, nor her ethics. Talent and ethical sense aren’t necessarily correlates.
Rob probably meant that metaphysically, Liam!
Oh no! I clicked through to the link, and saw the name of “Sophie Masson” taken in vain!
Much better stoush than this one, though.
sorry Casey, there are men on this site passing themselves off as women. I generally appreciate your posts but got a bit carried away in my response to yours here on this thread. My apologies.
I have no vested interest here. I don’t know HG or even revere her very much as a writer.
One thing I would say, from what I have garnered, and that is her personal history, surprise, surprise, has influenced her writings on gender and is no less legitimate for that. It is very representative, though not every woman’s experience.
Ah, Liam, we could talk. Despite our differences, we could talk. We should. You were always the sanest of the LP crowd.
The rest of us are insane, Rob?
Nostalgic tripe. If you can’t be in the stoush you love, love the stoush you’re in.
Who you trying to get crazy with, ese? Don’t you know I’m loco?
[ahem, cough, away, noise of snare drums, cheesy bass and turntable, away]
Can I have a go at Casey now?
I rest my case, m’lud.
</rumpole>
Fair cop, guv.
Though I wonder whether Darlene knew what she was getting in for when she suggested a bit of posting on kulcha…
Geez, that was a good stoush two years ago. I’m not up to it anymore.
Ou sont les stoushes etc…?
Just for the record: I’m female, and Mark has gone to the trouble of articulating an opinion that I fully support. I can’t image why that would be surprising.
As for Garner’s “stature” or the “quality of her writing”, oh, sheesh! Spare me.
I still can’t figure out why she’s a protected species, it’s certainly not because of her writing stature, which is diminishing the longer I read this thread.
It is true that often the words are used interchangeably.
However, in historiography, word “empathy” (verstehen) carries a strong and quite specific meaning, stemming from Wilhelm Dilthey, who developed a methodology which he asserted enabled historians to re-create the thoughts of their subjects.
(I have strong reservations about the validity of his methodology, so anything I may say about it should not be interpreted as an endorsement.)
“Sympathy” on the other hand, does not necessarily connote understanding, but merely condolence.
To make a practical point, I discovered in another life that security service interrogators were often very empathetic in the way they dealt with their interviewees. They got inside the lives of their interviewees with the object of exposing them and the lies they told.
They were often frighteningly good at it.
If there’s a prize for wangling a conditional apology into self-serving wankery on being a straight talker with the extra bonus of self-pity and passive aggressiveness in the context of recommending self-reflection in under 30 words,
this get it.
While I can’t figure out why Garner’s the literary equivalent of Saddam Hussein in certain circles! She wrote some books. Lots of people liked the books. Later, a lot of the same people didn’t like one particular book because it touched impolitely on certain subjects.
It’s no mystery – and it’s no biggie.
Helps to read the thread, wbb.
I did. And it didn’t.
“And boys have bristles too â?? about other boys. â??Get real, you bloody little poser. Stop showing off for the girls [but why canâ??t they see through it?]â?? is the way we internally articulate it.”
And then some also externalise it – like Robwängler in passive-aggressive snark mode here and bitchy little asides on other sites there. A tea cup troll, all watercress and no mustard.
Back OT. It was the marketing director that what that did it, in the conference room, with a quarterly sales and returns report and a fluoro green highlighter.
Actually, what the (fluoro) yellow rubbery fuck was the original premise of this thread anyway?
Indeed, Nabs, on past performance, Rob will be away at the moment because he’ll be busy posting snarky metacommentary about this thread at Catallaxy, Tim Blair’s and no doubt on his own blog.
â??Actually, what the (fluoro) yellow rubbery fuck was the original premise of this thread anyway?â??
Umm, donâ??t know. Perhaps my post about the play, if thatâ??s what you mean, Nabs.
To suggest that Garner is the literary equivalent of Saddam is a bit silly. Her â??factionâ?? books deserve to be critiqued. Nothing wrong with that. I consider myself a liberal feminist, so I donâ??t go into bat for the rads (unless they’re cute).
â??Darlene, would you like to nominate the â??worthless rhetorical pointâ?? that Garner was making in Joe Cinqueâ??s Consolation?â??
Rob, I donâ??t remember using those words.
â??I donâ??t know, jinmaro, but I have this quaint view that it demonstrates respect to the author of the thread to discuss their views and not ones quite extraneous to the topic, and also makes it easier for others to do that should they wish rather than having to wade through a lot of generalisations, or debate about Rob and his secret masculinity or whatever.â??
Itâ??d be interesting to read about this â??secret masculinityâ?? thing, although perhaps you boys should put your â??secret blokinessâ?? away for the moment.
Casey makes some wonderful points. Thanks so much for your comment. The word â??peformativeâ?? is very apt.
Yes, Katz, there is more than a degree of verbal confusion in the English language in the use of these terms. Pity, sympathy and empathy are commonly used interchangeably without clear distinction from one another, or from compassion.
As you say, empathy is most accurately used to designate an imaginative reconstruction of another’s experience, without any particular evaluation of that experience. But it is quite different and insufficient for compassion and may not even be necessary for it. Sympathy is more closely related to compassion with the latter indicating a stronger emotion. Pity today has connotations of superiority and condescension that it didn’t always contain.
A source of this complexity is the fact that in the philosophical tradition all these words have been translated and retranslated in many different ways. The German word ‘Mitleid’ is that most commonly used to translate the Greek ‘eleos’ and ‘oiktos’, the classical Latin ‘misericordia’, the Italian ‘pieta’, the French ‘pitie’, the English ‘pity’. Hobbes in the ‘Leviathan’ equates pity with compassion. Aristotle went deeper. He said compassion has three necessary cognitive elements: a belief that the suffering is serious rather than trivial, that it not the sufferer’s fault, and must contain the judgement of ‘similar possibilities’ befalling oneself.
OK, my twenty cents’ worth, having read and re-read The First Stone four times, Generation F by Virginia Trioli twice, Bodyjamming one and a half times, and having been involved, in the year The First Stone was published, as a witness to an extensive sex discrimination/sexual harassment complaint at Bjelke-Petersen Memorial University of Suburban South-East Queensland.
1. Some of the worst commentary on the Ormond College affair and TFS came from out-and-out anti-feminist commentators who managed to read TFS as exonerating the Master and as proving that the accusations against him were totally fabricated as part of a feminist conspiracy. Garner did not say anything of the sort, and most of her key questions and polemical points in the book (e.g. “why did they go to the cops?”) asked the reader to assume, at least for the sake of the argument, that the Master had done something blameworthy.
2. On reading Garner’s account the first time, without then having had the benefit of reading the Trioli and Mead et al works, but with the benefit of seeing the amateurishness with which the BPMU affair was dealt with by various protagonists, my own impression was that the most likely scenario was that something blameworthy had been done, and that the subsequent responses of the University, the complainants, witnesses, supporters on both sides, etc., was in large measure due to a lack of skill and expertise in dealing with cases of this sort, combined with the human emotional responses which such cases elicit.
3. Garner’s grasp of anti-discrimination law and practice is shaky (e.g. her discussion of “conciliation”, why she thinks it’s a good thing and what she thinks are the requirements for it to work, bears little resemblance to what conciliation actually is and how it is applied by anti-discrimination agencies and in alternative dispute resolution processes).
4. Some of Garner’s points, such as about the possibilities of the exercise of “personal power” and the limits of dealing with inter-personal conflict via administrative regulation of “eros”, are not a million miles removed from the concerns of Foucault, Habermas and many other intellectual luminaries. However TFS lacks the intellectual rigour and equanimity to deal adequately with these issues.
5. At one point in TFS it seems to be strongly suggested that the Master had made enemies within the relevant in-groups in the University and the College who wanted to do him in for reasons unrelated to the Smoko incidents, and that the incidents were picked up on by these Establishment enemies as a Trojan Horse for this agenda. However Garner does not pursue this line of inquiry to its conclusion, reverting to restating the case against young feminists and contemporary feminism.
6. I thought Generation F was, on balance, the better of the two responses, and that Bodyjamming – perhaps because of its very nature as an anthology – was uneven in quality.
7. I haven’t read Joe Cinque.
Top comment, Paul. All true, especially this bit:
I’d add that a great deal of what Garner is assumed — to this day — to have said, especially by people who have never read the book, was in fact implicitly (and incorrectly) attributed to her by a highly and deliberately polemical article by Anne Summers in the Good Weekend on the Saturday before The First Stone was released.
This article was read by huge numbers of people before they had had a chance to read — or to refuse to read — what Garner had actually said. Most of which, as you rightly point out, was posed as questions rather than assertions.
“Bjelke-Petersen Memorial University of Suburban South-East Queensland.”
One day they’ll change the name to “University of Pete”.
I would have thought that Ms Garner and Ms Summers both have concerns about the young women feminists.
Frankly, I think Ms Garner was hoping to annoy feminists back in 1995. It was Backlash time, so she must’ve been aware of the sort of hype that’d be generated. Can’t diss for that; every writer wants their work to be read. I read Garner’s work when it came out, and it seemed to suit my pre-university prejudices about university folk.
It’s been a long time since I’ve looked at it, but frankly the thought of going back to it is not that appealing.
Seconded, PC, though I’d take issue with Paul on some points.
As for bodyjamming, it’s the most vicious and spiteful book I’ve ever read. Robert Manne described it as ‘genuinely cruel’, and I think he was right.
Why?
Sorry, Darlene, but frankly, I know she wasn’t.
I’m not even sure what you mean by ‘feminists’ here. Garner was herself, had been since about 1970 and to the best of my knowledge still is a feminist, unless you’re of the view that feminism is not both a pluralism and a broad church, as you may be; certainly plenty of others were and are. But she did more to raise awareness of women’s rights and lives at one stroke with the writing and publication of Monkey Grip than any other single Australian woman I can think of, a fact that no amount of rage will change.
I can’t quite work out what you mean by this, since Garner herself was so much (and always had been) a bit at loggerheads with ‘university folk’ herself. Do you mean Ormond College, or the harassed students, or Jenna Mead, or whom?
I’ve always been very struck by Bronwen Levy’s point that Garner’s critique of the Ormond events was as much broadly marxist/libertarian as anything else, and proceeded from an automatic mistrust of the institutions of the state — namely the police and the law.
I had the interesting experience of reading TFS firstly as an exemplary ‘creative nonfiction’ text in a writing class, and then later framed as something of a ‘backlash’ text – or rather as part of a media event. Arguably, as a media event, the content of the text became less significant than the context in which it appeared and all of the accompanying commentary, justification etc.
“As for bodyjamming, it’s the most vicious and spiteful book I’ve ever read. Robert Manne described it as ‘genuinely cruel’, and I think he was right.”
Nah, it wasn’t that bad. A bit uneven perhaps. I think some very important points are raised in some of those pieces.
I think I agree with Levy’s point about the significance of a certain kind of libertarianism informing Garner’s perspective in TLS, PC. While that kind of libertarianism is justifiably wary of certain institutional power structures, but appears ignorant of others, or elides power differences where they infuse other contexts.
Monkey Grip is a great, great book. IMHO far superior to TLS. I haven’t read Joe Cinque’s Consolation, so I can’t compare it to that.
‘it appears’ even
Yes, I too thought that Garner framed the issue at least partly on the basis of a 60s “no cops on campus” discourse. There were some interesting alliances formed around this debate. Some of Garner’s (and the Master’s) critics included old-style Christian conservatives with old-style Christian conservative views on respectful relations between men and women and on the responsibilities of someone in the Master’s position (a view also put in more nuanced terms by Robert Manne in a Quadrant editorial). Per contra, some of the anti-feminist commentators who claimed Garner as one of their own seemed to be arguing from a moral position of the 60s “free love” antinomianism which was rife amongst the male student radicals of that period and which Second Wave feminism arose, in part, in reaction to.
This is a fair call based on the public positions taken by both of them in that period. TFS and other pieces by Garner at the time included a critique of what she regarded as a certain kind of punitive and illiberal feminism which had usurped the libertarian and compassionate feminism she learned in the 1960s and 1970s. Summers, in one piece in that period, complained about young women in the 1990s being “strangely inarticulate” and not exhibiting the feminist consciousness of an earlier generation. In short Garner and Summers were both complaining about the perversity of the rising generation of young women, even though they disagreed totally about what this perversity consisted of.
Come to think of it, Adam, it may be that Manne was talking about Rosa Braidotti’s contribution, not the book as a whole. I can’t find the relevant article at the moment.
Rob, Manne was discussing Rosi Braidotti’s contribution as well as two or three others which were particularly ad hominem. He also replied to Jenna Mead’s account of a meeting at La Trobe University at which he and Mead both spoke, and which Mead had characterised as a hatchet job on her set up by Manne and his students. A version of the article appeared in Manne’s book The Way We Live Now.
Thanks, Paul.
Adam, re the Levy, I’ve found it — and the word she actually uses here is ‘anarchist’, which further goes to show one should never ascribe remarks or ideas to others from memory. Sorry about the ellipses here but I’m quoting out of my own book (sorry about the book-whoring, too, not that it’s findable as OUP only did print runs of about a dozen each of its Australian Authors series after the bean-counters seized power. Ahem.)
‘Levy’s article* places the Garner/Ormond affair in the wider context of international feminist debates, mildly concedes Ann Curthoys’ forcefully put point that Garner doesn’t know what trying to negotiate “liberal masculinism” inside a university is like, and adds (also mildly) that ‘[Garner] seems insufficiently informed … on the procedures that are part of sexual harassment policies’. Having said this, Levy then puts a positive case:
*’Third Time Lucky, or, After the Wash-Up’, Imago 7, 3 (1995), 108-117.
Aha, thanks. I didn’t remember that, and may not have seen it. It explains a lot, actually.
FWIW, most of the ‘young feminists’ of that generation that I taught in the late 80s and early 90s were in fact articulate, well-organised young women who read voraciously and spoke their minds, and I was extremely fond of them as a group. It was the ‘I’m not a feminist but …’ brigade that drove me up the wall screaming.
I’ll have to look up the Levy piece – she taught me at Uni and she’s great value.
By the way, a general apology for my descent into snark in some comments on this thread last night. I was tired and in a grumpy mood and shouldn’t have been stoushing.
I do wish to point out that the comment jinmaro made above where she said that it was great for young women to have sexual relationships with older male lecturers which Rob then applauded as an example of “eros” in Garner’s terms has gone unremarked in subsequent comments. I, for one, find this ethically very troubling.
I’ll leave the rest of the issues alone because as I said last night, it’s been a long time since I read TFS and Bodyjamming and it would be interesting to return to them when time permits and re-read in light of some aspects of this discussion. I will say, in passing, that I’m generally an admirer of Rosi Braidotti’s work.
And the political substance of Braidotti’s critique of Garner is basically that she is, was and always will be a naive hippy anarchist who still clings to the modernist project of universal human emancipation and needs a crash course in the academic postmodernisms to which Braidotti subscribes.
If I recall correctly, Garner described herself as a libertarian feminist during the course of the TFS/Ormond debate
If there’s one thing that’s clear about the politics of the debate at the time, Paul, it’s that an awful lot of the people doing the debating took the political very personally.
I’m going to have to read your book, PC! I’ve been meaning to since I enjoyed Monkey Grip so much and wanted to get some critical perspective on it. I’m sure Fisher will have a copy.
Rob, I am generally much more likely to agree with something Braidotti has written than something Manne has, but I was initially struck by that piece because of the ad hominem argument. In retrospect, I do think there is a point in there somewhere about Garner’s track record on picking battles, and about being aware of the political complexities of a situation and the potential effects of her intervention. I think Braidotti was attempting to use earlier events in which they were both involved as a way of interrogating the way that Garner’s subject-position inflected the political dimensions of her work. As to whether that ended up being effectively argued, I don’t know. Manne’s response suggests that the point was missed, and perhaps Braidotti needs to take responsibility for that.
But Paul, Braidotti’s article was ridiculous as well as being spiteful. As I recall it, at the end of it she listed all her postmodernist credentials along the lines of ‘As a [insert dopey pomo thingy here] I oppose you’. Well, give me a hippy anarchist any day.
And I’m a postmodernist, FFS.
I think the key ethical issue here is that the male lecturer in such a situation would (or at least could) be: (a) breaching his professional ethical responsibilities towards the individual young woman concerned, in terms of his responsilbities for her learning, assessment and academic progress; (b) breaching his professional ethical responsibilities to deal fairly and equitably with all his students and not enter into relationships which could compromise that; (c) in a position, because of the power imbalance in the lecturer/student relationship, to exploit the student.
Similar concerns arise in the case of a head of college and her/his duties towards the college residents.
I think it is also important to distinguish these context-specific ethical concerns from a more generalised prudishness about relationships across the generation gap. There is nothing wrong with these provided the younger person is old enough to be a consenting adult (and the older person still has enough of their marbles to be a genuinely consenting adult).
Rob, I will admit to a residual soft spot for modernist projects of universal human liberation.
Good points, Paul, and an important distinction.
I’ve got such a soft spot, too, Paul, though Rob – in his capacity as a postmodern conservative – thinks they’re all metanarratives on the road to serfdom.
I agree with what you say about the distinction between the ethics binding someone in a professional relationship with a student and cross-generational relationships where that isn’t an issue. Though, the latter do raise issues which are worth foregrounding and reflection – they’re not unproblematic as I’m sure others than just me are in a position to state from experience.
With regard to Paul’s point (a), which I accept, and probably (b) and (c) also, I’d only say — that’s going to happen. Nobody can stop it. Sometimes it’ll work, sometimes it’ll be a disaster. That’s (yeah) Eros. Deal.
Please be clear about what you mean, Rob. Are you arguing against penalties for lecturers or teachers forming sexual relationships with students, or propositioning them? You appear to be. Since it does harm to the student, which you accept, it appears inconsistent that you should argue that there should be no professional consequences for the teacher.
Yes, I’m saying I have no problems with sexual relationships and/or propositions across authority boundaries, as long as they are not coercive. The consequences are for the individuals concerned to work out for themselves, even taking into account power or hierarchic disparities.
Katz
Well let’s enjoy it while it lasts, but I read The First Stone the way you did!
I was living overseas when the whole Ormond thing happened. I found the Australia represented in TFF so alien. It was so absolutely about the Melbourne Establishment: the elite world of Melbourne Uni sandstone colleges, private schools, tony law firms, barristers chamber’s, judges, media and other luvvie types…
There was not one warm or agreeable character in the whole book. The picture she painted of Melbourne bourgeois feminism was so sterile, so pinched, so, so Presbyterian. Born and bred in Sydney I recoiled, “who on earth are these hideous women?”
Garner’s contrasting the libertarian feminism of her generation with the po-faced bluestockings of the next generation was quite chilling. It painted a very ugly picture of Melbourne IMHO.
But Rob, they are coercive by definition, the moment they become overt. Here in 2007 they are totally out of bounds for any genuinely ethical person. Or even just any person smart enough to come in out of the rain.
I too, like many others here, speak from extensive experience, first as a (straight) female student of almost exclusively male teachers and then as a female teacher of (some) male students — and as a female staff member of a department that has still never had a female Head of Department (and that only recently acquired its first-ever female full professor, my lovely and talented mate Stephanie from humanities researcher).
A word on ‘eros’: Garner was using it in a specifically Jungian sense, in a way that goes beyond the merely overtly sexual. In ‘The Fate of The First Stone‘ (True Stories), she defines it as ‘the quick spirit that moves between two people’.
And here jinmaro’s quite right. I know what Garner’s talking about. We all know what she’s talking about. I have even felt it blogging, for God’s sake, and more than once. And Rob is right to the extent that it’s a wild thing that does not respect boundaries, of authority or anything else. But feeling it and acting on it are two very, very different things.
â??I think it is also important to distinguish these context-specific ethical concerns from a more generalised prudishness about relationships across the generation gap. There is nothing wrong with these provided the younger person is old enough to be a consenting adult (and the older person still has enough of their marbles to be a genuinely consenting adult).â??
Hmmm, I just read that Kirsty Hinze is dating a 63-year-old rich dude. I donâ??t think thereâ??s a prudishness about that. Surely people just assume that Ms Hinze is getting something out of the relationship (a rich dude) and he is getting something out of the relationship (a young very beautiful model). Who cares? Itâ??s when women date younger blokes that people get â??prudishâ??.
If there are â??authority boundariesâ??, Rob, surely thereâ??s coercion? Sure, â??authorityâ?? and the lack of authority can be attractive (and the dynamics can be complex), but what a minefield. Don’t go there. It’s not appropriate at all.
Date an academic from the Gender Studies Department instead, or just someone else you don’t have authority over.
I absolutely think feminism is a broad church, PC, (and a church of broads â?? sorry, couldnâ??t help myself).
Generally speaking, I would regard myself as a liberal feminist, but I think all the feminisms have bits and pieces that are worthy. Garnerâ??s a good writer (as I mentioned before Iâ??m a huge fan of Cosmo Cosmolino), but the â??Consolationâ?? book annoyed the living daylights out of me.
â??â?¦or the harassed students, or Jenna Mead, or whom?â??
The harassed students/Jenna Mead etc.
Just the idea of university feminists as â??punitiveâ?? (i.e. spoilt brats).
â??FWIW, most of the â??young feministsâ?? of that generation that I taught in the late 80s and early 90s were in fact articulate, well-organised young women who read voraciously and spoke their minds, and I was extremely fond of them as a group. It was the â??Iâ??m not a feminist but â?¦â?? brigade that drove me up the wall screaming.â??
True, there are some very articulate young women around. The whole â??not a feministâ?? thing is weird. Even more prevalent these days.
My next review is going to be about â??I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larryâ??, an, gag gag, hilarious movie in which Adam Sandler and Kevin James (the bloke from â??The King of Queensâ??) pretend to be, gasp, gays. Apparently, the film has ample jokes about mincing and other allegedly gay stuff, before finishing with a message about tolerance. I will try to look for a Garner angle.
“Date an academic from the Gender Studies Department instead, or just someone else you don’t have authority over.”
At work, that is. Don’t date students or people in a lesser position from you at work.
Thanks for the Jungian point, Dr Cat, and I apologise to jinmaro if my not seeing it before caused me to misread her comments.
I do think Rob, however, has been very clear indeed, and while I thank him for his clarifying answer, I’d endorse the point that feeling something and acting on it are two very different things. Indeed, to be Freudian for a second, the ability not to act on impulse and to distinguish between desire and ethics is surely what makes people adult humans. One would hope that teachers were adult humans, and I’m sure the vast majority are.
Which puts the whole “it happens, deal” thing in perspective, I think.
I absolutely think feminism is a broad church, PC, (and a church of broads – sorry, couldn’t help myself).
Heh heh heh … vivid mental picture … heh heh heh heh heh.
“Sure, â??authorityâ??… can be attractive… but what a minefield. Donâ??t go there. Date an academic from the Gender Studies Department instead, or just someone else you donâ??t have authority over.”
Date someone I don’t have authority over? Well, seeing as how I have total authority over ALL you miserable, puny little skraelings, I guess that’s going to make things rather lonely for me, isn’t it. And I’m sorry, but, ‘date an ACADEMIC’? From the GENDER STUDIES Department’?!
Sigh. Well, I guess it’s another tedious night of “Command the Grand Vizier to send forth my thousands of concubines” for me. And I bet meanwhile, some unethical professor-type and his giddy student are sneaking around in a charming little backstreet cafe, slurping one long piece of spaghetti off a plate until it turns out they both have the two ends in their mouths. Sob.
Vizier! Skip the concubines tonight, and summon forth the Imperial Cold Shower!
I see what you mean about the politicos versus the poetic Rob. It amazes me that people can endlessly discuss electoral politics quite happily and shy away from or show little interest in philosophical questions or the poetic sensibility. I am interested in both but perhaps more so the latter.
I don’t want to comment further on the advisability or ethics of university student-teacher sexual relations except to say if I was a teacher then I would probably try to abide by the prohibition, but if I were a student again, not necessarily. I wonder too if the introduction of such formal codes coincide with the Dawkins counter-revolution and subsequent introduction of university fees.
I can see the reasons for blanket prohibitions as outlined by Paul, but in reality breaches of this do not necessarily result in the projected negative outcomes. I do also see them, to a degree, as an unhealthy and objectionable intrusion into private matters and a continuing infantilisation of people who are, in my view, responsible adults. I am talking about students here.
And then once again there is the Eros question which philosohically is of most interest to me here. Yes Pavlov’s Cat, the classical definition of Eros is the one for me too. Broadly, it is the creative force, sexual in origin, but it manifests itself in all creative, loving activity, behaviour, thought and work. It is life-seeking and good.
I did discuss this in a similar manner on the recent Anal Sex thread when I raised philosophical arguments and theories about the nature of erotic sex-love, the question of our ability so easily to transcend Eros, from which it derives, or if that was even desirable.
Sappho
I’m not so sure, PC. Acting on it might require courage, recklessness, danger, risk. There may be a cost, perhaps a heavy one. But then again there might be gains and rewards otherwise impossible of accomplishment.
Surely that’s the essence of Eros.
I don’t know about that, so much. I think the essence of Eros is delight.
(Or de dark, depending.)
Or it might require self-indulgence, carelessness, irresponsibility, narcissism, cruelty. Depends where you’re coming from. I’m sorry, I would have liked to have put that another way.
I think that’s true as well, PC. But that’s us (humans), isn’t it? The good doesn’t come without the bad.
Delight. Yes, that’s the essence. But the essence of deight is danger. And we all find our own ways to it.
We are coming from both places, or so the theory goes. Eros and Thanatos. Thanatos is expressed in many ways. Globally, by wars, in the viciousness with which human beings can treat each other. In the wreckage we are making of the most beautiful and irreplaceable parts of this planet on which we and all species rely. It is expressed in all forms of sectarianism, racism, the abuse of power. It is expressed in jealousy, envy, hatred, but also self-destructive behaviour of all types, addictions, repeated behaviour patterns that result in destroyed relationships, killing the thing you love.
But Eros and Thanatos exist together in every human organism. Both are largely, or at least partly (is it possible to measure this?) sublimated as part of our socialisation. How and which predominates or manifests itself from day to day, or moment to moment, depends on a lot of factors, not least of which is the social context and environment in which we live.
The two are inextricably interlinked too. Eros probably is the primary element-impulse in sex, but Thanatos does often ram his ugly head in there too and paints his pain. Oh, yes.
I’m sorry to be a party pooper to your metaphysical delight, Rob, but the reality is that we’re talking about older males exploiting young women. Maybe there’s frisson, risk, etc. but none of that means that it should go on. People get frisson and experience delight from all sorts of acts that harm others – it doesn’t mean that such things ought either to be encouraged or condoned.
Well, I’d say it would be entirely up to them, provided they stayed within the limits of the law.
Yes, indeed, Rob, you’ve already said that.
When I was in High School one physics teacher was notorious for sleeping with selected female students – they were over the age of consent as 16 or 17 year olds. It’s only been very recently that the law has reflected concerns that such relationships are exploitative and dangerous. The law and ethics are not self-identical as you must know.
Anyway, you and I never get anywhere arguing, and I’m tired anyway. So I’ll leave you to your poetic flights of phantasy and wish you a delightful evening.
Trouble is that the Law is society’s minimum standard. Far safer to set a higher standard than that. Once a person is where the law is, it is thin ice territory but I’m sure no one need explain that to you. If you really want to test out the law go ahead but be prepared to pay dearly if the law is not where you think it is.
Mark
Why shouldn’t “it go on?” And your view is pretty sexist and patronising towards women. As though sex is something that only older more cunning sleazy men initiate.
Thanks, Mark.
Re those high school students — it was entirely up to them whether they wished to acquiesce to whatever relationship was proposed to them — provided there was no coercion.
Good point, John.
The law is an ass – is another good point, never depend on it.
jinmnaro — I totally agree with you. You’re more eloquent than I.
The whole point of feminism was to get men out of making decsisions for their “precious little princesses.” Also this thread reveals a bizarre 1950s puritanism towards sex. Guess what!? Danger and risk are part and parcel of the whole sex thing. You cannot excise the bits you think “are about power, not about sex.” Hullo? Part of the wonder of sex is its elemental psychological manipulations, risks, and intrigue. Trying to turn sex into some corporatised mission statement is appalling.
Reading it again I think jinmaro’s comment at 8:38 pm absolutely hits it on the nail. It’s in the category of ‘I wish I’d said that’ things.
Funny, Rob, while I’m working this morning I’m listening along to a web-streaming classical music station, and whilst I was reading yours and jinmaro’s thoughts on Eros and Thanatos, what should come on the station but the “Magic Fire Music” from the finale of “Die Walkure”. A more extraordinary co-mingling of Eros and Thanatos, you’d have to travel long to hear.
I wouldn’t go quite that far JG.
Let’s try a little nuance. (It may be a Melbourne thing.)
Garner certainly did comment upon generational differences between her feminism and the feminism of the advisors of the plaintiffs in TFS.
Now, unless you can demonstrate that there was considerably less libertarianism in Melbourne feminism in the 1990s than elsewhere, then your rather sweeping statement falls to the ground. My reading of feminism at that time would suggest to me that this generatonal split was happening in many places, perhaps even Sydney, during the 1990s.
It was mentioned upthread by someone that Garner imbibed the libertarian ethos of the 1960s. Indeed, anyone who knows Garner’s life story will be able to tell you that Garner herself became a cause celebre over that precise issue in the late 1960s. These were extaordinary times. By the 1990s many of the cultural resources supporting and driving Garner’s libertarianism had dissipated and/or disappeared. The young women of TFS faced different challenges. And it is perhaps a critique of TFS to observe that Garner did not apply a sufficiently historical perspective to her sense of alienation from those young women.
Just like Garner and the rest of us, these young women were creatures of circumstance. It was not possible and not appropriate for them to behave as if it were 1969.
One of the resources these women did have was a legal system newly sensitised to the offence of sexual harassment. Such a thing did not exist in 1969.
Garner ruminated throughout TFS why the women and their advisors finally went to law for satisfaction. Garner implies that she wouldn’t have, owing to her distrust of constituted authority. And Garner shows in TFS how powerful figures in the Ormond OB network manoeuvred the women into taking their complaints to law. If these Establishment figures had been unsuccessful in these plans, Garner would not have had a story.
Contrary to a widely believed misreading of TFS, Garner never asserts that The Master did nothing wrong. Indeed, she suspects that he did breach protocols and his in loco parentis role.
Garner’s disappointment is that The Master’s punishment was disproportionate to his offence. In her view, in this case, constituted judicial authority got it wrong. This is a metter of judgement, and therefore contestible.
The interesting counterpoint is Joe Cinque where Garner finally accepts the trial judge’s methods and decision in punishing Anu Singh.
So, stony-hearted Melbourne. The difference between Melbourne and (let us say) Sydney in the 1990s wasn’t the brand of feminism. Rather, it was the nature of its social elites. In my humble opinion, neither city can be particularly proud of its top people, though, perhaps, for very different reasons.
Yo, j_p_z.
Paul wrote:
I was at this meeting (it was actually a public forum) and I remember it very clearly. There was no hatcheting and most of the few students there were English and Philosophy dept people – not Robert Manne’s.
I’ve avoided this thread so far because I’m not familiar with Garner’s work: the closest I have come is watching the movie of Monkey Grip, which was great.
With that out of the way, I am pretty disgusted about the various defences presented on this thread of older males seducing adolescent students, and this is from a woman with a husband 14 years her senior. However, I met my husband when I was 26, not 16 or 18/19. My sexual initiation had already occurred with men much closer to my own age before I met my future spouse.
I do understand the attraction between people in a mentor/protege situation – it can be astonishingly intimate and certainly have its frissons of eros: but as Mark said above – thinking and acting are two seperate things.
Oh, and PS.
[The above asterisk is mine, owing to lamentable, and too well-known reasons.]
I was already having considerable difficulty getting a handle on what, exactly, constitutes a “l*vvie”.
The above list makes any sensible categorisation utterly impossible.
TT — the younger woman / older man thingy wasn’t the only, or even the main, issue in the Ormond case.
What was at issue (and it’s amazing how many people seemed quite unable at the time to grasp the distinction) was the fact that two students at a university college had allegedly had their breasts groped, and in one case been directly propositioned, by the man who gloried in the title Master of Ormond College. He was in loco parentis, and he was in a position of direct authority over them. Their reactions to his behaviour could, and I’m sure did, have a direct bearing on their scholarly (and by extension their professional) futures, particularly in the Devil’s Snare networks of Melbourne’s old-boy and professional classes.
The age difference is a separate issue from what was happening in the Ormond case. In that scenario it would not have mattered if he had been the same age as the students, or even if he had been younger. There was still a power differential, ripe for exploitation.
That said, and without wanting to be needlessly unkind, I might add that I believe the “Master” was at the time in his fifties, which I now am myself. And I would howl and sob with laughter at the notion that there might be any of the two-way spark of Eros present if I were to go groping a pretty boy in his early 20s.
Dr Cat, I think what tigtog is referring to is Rob and JG’s later segue where Rob said, after a discussion of Paul Norton’s comments about the distinction between unethical relationships and age different relationships in response to a comment I made about a high school teacher at my school who was in the habit of sleeping with 16 and 17 year old girls that that was perfectly fine providing it was legal. JG also said:
This was after they’d both gone on a joint enconium about frisson, eros, delight, risk, danger, etc.
PC – quite, and as you also say:
No matter how delightful, there is a power differential that should not be exploited and a responsibility to live up to. The capacity to persuade young and attractive people to acquiesce to seduction is not an adequate defence to the charge of immorally exploiting a position of mentorship overy young and attractive people.
Ok, I’m kinda on a semi-hiatus from blogging, and don’t live in Melbourne and thus won’t be seeing the play and am not interested in adjudicating on either the veracity or ethics or literary merits of Helen Garner’s work (except to agree with tigtog that Monkey Grip is an ace film and that the swimming scene with Noni Hazelhurst is one of the sexiest bits of fillum evah). But I have been browsing this thread, and I can’t resist bringing you:
The review of the stoush!
[Boom boom!]
1. Darlene – keep writin reviews! Love your work on kulcha!
2. Dr Cat, other literary discussants – interesting stuff though I wonder whether those who know/knew people involved in the Melb Uni affaire don’t have their views a bit coloured by literary/personal/political affiliations. That includes Mark because I think knowing someone involved has also coloured his views. Just sayin…
3. Liam gets the award for killer comment -
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2007/08/14/guest-post-by-darlene-taylor-criminology-review/#comment-393188
Completely destroys the basis of Rob’s argument, which Rob doesn’t acknowledge or respond to in any way.
4. Rob, Greenfield, etc. – piffle, waffle, prattle. Get off your “metaphysical” high horses and stop prattling about poesy, eros, risk, danger, delight and all this high minded stuff and admit that you just feel a deep need to (a) identify with the bloke in this scenario, (b) obscure and mystify any ethical aspect of sexual relationships with some sort of pseudo-romantic piffle which covers up for the fact that there are deeply unequal positions as between the two alleged partners in such relationships.
All relationships contain inequality – relationships with large differences in age are going to bring problems in their wake, but it is never acceptable – never – for someone in a position of power or care to sleep with, seduce, go out with, grope, whatever, someone subordinated to them or in their care.
Never.
And JG’s hypocrisy in claiming that to oppose this is to be “sexist” is stunning.
Sorry, son, yes sometimes girls or women might initiate something but as tigtog said, adult men should be able to exercise some basic self control.
So put a sock in it, boys, and grow the feck up.
6. Katz, jinmaro – some interesting points and interesting philosophical discussion but you have been badly let down by some of your “metaphysical” supporters who are really just playing adolescent games and invoking all sorts of high falutin nonsense to avoid or undermine ethical judgement.
7. Kimberella out. As you were.
Cheers Kim. Though I think you’re being unfair to Rob, against whom I think I had a bit of a cheap shot assisted by Google and an unhealthy memory for unpleasant bunfights.
As you might say, whatevs.
Whatevs back atcha, Liam!
It’s all about the institutional power. The age thing raises more complex questions, but if it takes place out of an institutional context or a more or less formalised system of power relations, then the age of consent is as far as we can go in assessing something. I guess it’s different if a girl or a boy asks for help, or alleges that a crime has been committed.
In a purely legal sense but there is more to life than being a slave to petty legality. Surely ethics are important in some corner of a brain.
Yes, but I mean in terms of judging something from the outside. It’s not like you can go around trying to intervene in relationships when there is no institutional power differential, and no criminal activity. At the very least it becomes more complex when differences are not explicitly attached to systems of power. The Ormond Case is clearly within a readily identifiable institutional context. Plenty of unethical behaviour simply isn’t attached to such a context, and our responses must be context specific.
“can” is a very capacious concept in this clause.
High school students remain at school two years after attaining the age of consent (16). Yet the law says that a teacher is a criminal if he/she has sexual relations with any student. So the law does go further than the age of consent.
Whether the law ought to frown upon such consensual relationships is entirely another question. The law says that it is impossible for the young person in such a relationship to form informed consent, owing to the power relationships deemed to persist between adult and teenager.
And sexual harassment laws are based on power relationships. It is deemed by many sexual harassment laws to be impossible for a subordinate to sexually harass a superior.
Of course I’m talking about the ethical limits of speech and judgement rather than about the operation of the law in itself. I think in institutional contexts with clearly defined power relationships, there are more straightforward ethical problems than in the extra-institutional. A point of contention between my own and, say, an anarchist or libertarian ethics like Garners, might be in terms of the recognition of institutional power, or structural power relations. I do think there are degrees of ethical complexity attendant to different kinds of power relations.
“The whole point of feminism was to get men out of making decsisions for their â??precious little princesses.â?? Also this thread reveals a bizarre 1950s puritanism towards sex. Guess what!? Danger and risk are part and parcel of the whole sex thing. You cannot excise the bits you think â??are about power, not about sex.â?? Hullo? Part of the wonder of sex is its elemental psychological manipulations, risks, and intrigue. Trying to turn sex into some corporatised mission statement is appalling.”
Yes, yes, John, but it’s actually good old-fashioned common sense that you don’t get involved with someone you have authority over. Not 1950s puritarism.
If it was a woman teacher that was involved with a boy student, I suspect the discussion of the delights of eros would be missing, and certain blokes would be just talking about how women are not treated as harshly as blokes.
I think Darlene’s and Adam’s sweeping definitions of institutional power and authority where sex between unequal partners is commonsensically rejected or prohibited are silly, wrong and unworkable.
Their definitions would encompass all work places. They would encompass the commonplace, like it or not, consensual sexual relations that occur between men and women of different levels of power, workplace status, organisational authority everywhere. In fact the common workplace liaison I’d wager is as it always has been: between an older male supervisor and younger subordinate woman. Surgeons and nurses, executives and lower level administrative staff.
The legal definition of sexual harassment in Australia is repeated unwanted actions, comments, etc. Making a pass at someone in the workplace, on campus, etc., which is clearly rejected is not sexual harassment. In many cases it is welcome and reciprocated. Most women start to deal with these sorts of offers from a very young age without recourse to the law or tribunals. It is part of being an adult human being.
The debates that occurred at the time of the Ormond case as PC says did feed into and conicide with feminist debates that were happening internationally around the moral panics particularly on campuses, around sex harassment and date rape issues and, in the legal arena, the focus on the limitations of the law. Camille Paglia for one has written extensively on all this.
It was at the same time too that David Mamet’s play “Oleanna” ran at the Sydney Theatre Company with the two leads played by the pre-Hollywood famous Geoffrey Rush and Cate Blanchett.I refused to go and see this too at the time because of the Garner-like slant of the author’s intent. It was, reportedly, a tour de force production.
Okay, not sure how I am making sweeping definitions in suggesting that ethics has different levels of complexity re: institutional and extra-institutional contexts. Actually, I don’t think there is anything ‘unworkable’ about that idea. It’s not even an argument about what ought to be the case. Also, I was very clear that I’m not talking about the law, but about judgement in an extra-legal ethical sense. If you are suggesting that any discussion of sexual ethics is ‘unworkable’, jinmaro, I for one am not going to be taking that position seriously because it is a manifest commonplace that people do constantly negotiate in their everyday lives around these questions.
Lots to agree with, from all sides.
good to remember just how quickly the workplace has changed over the last 30 years. iâ??ve posted about this before, but when i started work as a 15 y.o. â?? sexual harassment & discrimination were everyday events â?? across class lines from board rooms to factories â?? young women in particular, were fair game for physical harassment and assault – the cheap feel up in the storeroom to discussing looks/rating in the lunch room and of course â?? promotion opportunities where women with 10 years experience would be routinely overlooked for a bloke who just started – and who could forget the old â?? â??pregnancy announcement/farewell partyâ??!! Ah, happy days!
The First Stone is an artefact from when this country was halfway thru adopting processes, which functionally ended endemic & historical behaviours, and within a decade and a half.
jinmaro, the backlash and international feminist debates may have coincided with tfs, but ALL were as a result of actual mass legislative changes in relation to sexual discrimination, and more women entering the workplace in the 70â??s and 80â??s etc etc.
garner in the TFS – is a bit like my friendâ??s polish father (occupied, polish free army, russian gulag blah) carrying on about anzac day â?? â??what war they hadâ????
garner historically, is on the wrong side, but that doesnâ??t mean TFS doesnâ??t have valid questions about personal responsibility, or compelling accounts of the personalities & intrigues of that particular case.
most of our debates are centred around the balance between institutional power and personal responsibility���
Okay, here are a couple of only semi-hypothetical examples from, say, university life.
1) Young female academic on an 11-month contract (= no sick leave, no annual leave, no study leave, etc etc) gets propositioned by the male head of department. She finds him icky and therefore turns him down. The following week she is put in charge of co-ordinating the compulsory First Year Very Basic Writing for Engineering Students subject (enrolment: 450), with a heavy teaching component.
She does this for 11 nightmarish months, during which she endures engies en masse yelling ‘Show us yer tits’ while she’s trying to explain quotation marks, and at the end of which her contract is not renewed.
2) The two top Honours students, one male and one female, are competing for the one available scholarship. The boy is having a secret fling with the hawt young female academic in charge of the Honours year, and, astonishingly, the boy gets the scholarship. The girl gets a boring job in a bank, gets married to the bank manager, has three babies, then discovers that hubby is shagging the new (junior) girl at the bank. Hubby/ manager, desirous of placating wife, finds excuse (under the new workplace dismissal laws) to fire new girl.
Meanwhile, boy with scholarship is discovered to have been shagging hawt young female academic and a huge public stink ensues. (Not unlike the Ormond affair, say.) The stink is still clinging to his clothes 20 years later when teaching TS Eliot to young farmers at a small, remote regional university, where he has been repeatedly passed over for promotion — much for less half-decent jobs at half-decent universities. Etc.
Etc, etc, etc.
I have yet to read every comment on this thread, though I’ve read most of them and I’ve been reading a fair bit of stuff around the issue. I will probably make another comment later. But for now, I was really taken by Kim’s comment and would like to comment on this bit:
I agree, but my comment is that in marriage or long-term relationships the two people concerned need to resolve this issue. I don’t think it’s at all easy and is complicated by all sorts of factors along the way. So it may be something that needs to be worked on forever, as it were.
I became aware of it as an issue as a young man before my first marriage after reading D H Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love. I realised that the romantic notion of fusion was impossible, undesirable and dangerous. It seems to me that you have to be yourself and be secure in yourself before you can enter and sustain a long-term intimate relationship.
Inequality breeds exploitation and dependency. Respect and mutuality are words that seem to make some people spew, but they are part of my value system.
In terms of short term, too much is entered into on the grounds of mutual exploitation. You might think it’s fine to have a friendly fuck, or a no-regrets one-night stand, but beware that the chemicals released in your body mess with your mind and emotions and have an agenda of their own.
BTW I haven’t revisited Lawrence and am not sure I’d have the same reaction now.
I fail to see how this is like the Ormond affair.
Shagger and shaggee were in a consensual relationship, so the issue of harassment never arose.
Moreover, in the Ormond affair, the Master (male) suffered all the public scrutiny and appropbrium. Meanwhile the hawt female (the person in a position of authority) appears to have escaped unscathed from her tryst.
Is it possible that men and women are judged in different ways in these relationships? Is it possible that gender trumps position in the formal authority structure of the institution?
This is a good example of the limitations of sex discrimination law and policies.
There is no way of proving there is a causal link between the rejection of sex and the appointment. And, in reality, there might be none. There could be multiple other valid reasons why the appointment was made which could have had nothing to do with the rebuff. In any case, it would be handled as a case of sex-based discrimination not sexual harassment as it was a single incident not repeated. It is not illegal to proposition a work colleague.
If the woman had made a complaint of sex-based discrimination it would mostly likely fail after investigation even by an independent external tribunal.
Jo, I doubt the SD laws have wiped out sexual harassment in the workplace. It has been 10 years since I worked in this area, at a government agency level handling all sex discrimination complaints. Certainly, employers and employees alike are much more conscious of and circumspect about each other’s behaviour in this regard. I think the law has empowered women mainly in the entrenched cultural understanding of the stick that the law represents and also terrible suffering and assault on dignity that sexual harassment imposes on a woman.
However, in practice, many women in the workforce continue to do what they have always done in the face of sex-based discrimination of all kind, including sexual harassment, shut up or leave. There are many reasons why women feel it is better to do so. No law or policies or codes of conduct can successfully or comprehensively regulate human behaviour.
Sexual harassment complaints that go through formal channels are gruelling in the extreme for the complainant. Extreme and prolonged harassment experiences are more likely to be successful and typically (10 years ago)involved a woman aged 18-24 working in an unskilled job in a nnumerically small workplace. Since it was most often that these cases came to the attention of the government because of the role of the union, or working women’s centres, I would think that today the numbers of sexual harassment complaints from this predominant demographic would have fallen.
might be consensual, but the academic should have been fired or reprimanded etc. as kim and brian and others have stated -
transfer jobs, wait, change to a new university etc. i can never understand if the ‘lurve’ is so powerful, why are participants unwilling to do anything practical to accommodate their lurve, anything which involves sacrifice or even minor inconvenience that is. it says a lot about the nature of these type of affairs.
Are the quotations in the above post the wrong way around, jo?
Anyway, the second quote is spot on in my experience, where the sleazebags who expolit their position of power, authority (not to mention duty of care) are precisely the kind of people unwilling to sacrifice anything, being more self obsessed than the norm.
And if anyone objects to the term ‘sleazebag’, tought – this is exactly what these people are, particularly in the school context, where I have been unfortunate enough to witness some of them.
The attempts of some commentators here to couch this in terms of sexual freedom is particularly odious, because it is usually about exploitation pure and simple.
I fixed them, jo!
doh! thanks kim – can you delete the double post, trying to do the housework, and some other stuff before school p/up at 3, and post here, all not very successfully…..
thanks adrian!
as to the issue of adults with a duty of care pursuing a relationship with young adults in their care, (unlike in the hypothetical above)…
there is just too much evidence that the young people (we are talking about 16-19yos) involved in these type of relationships mature, and subsequently view themselves as having been victims rather than consenting adults.
the type of protections we are discussing, weren’t created by some imagined prudish feminists with nothing better to do – they came about due to many, many cases where teachers, ministers, scout leaders, sports coaches, music instructors etc pursued relationships with older teenagers, and it all ended in tears, and terrible recriminations and poor outcomes for the teenagers involved.
QED she is breaching her professional ethical responsibilities to deal fairly and equitably with all her students and not enter into relationships which could compromise that.
It should be noted that many universities have codes of ethics and assessment/supervision policies which would require the academic in this instance to transfer her responsibilities for the Honours students to somebody without a conflict of interests.
I agree, jinmaro. You can’t regulate desire — you may as well try to regulate the weather. And it can be very surprising. One of the strongest relationships I know of is between a woman and a man roughly twice her age. She was his PA, they formed a relationship, his marriage broke up as a result, he (and also she) attracted the most brutal condemnation from their workplace peers, but to the astonishment of all they remain happily together. For them it was worth it.
I’ve also heard you can’t stop the music because nobody can stop the music.
People, people – you fuck the student, you fuck the faculty.
Thanks Paul, that was my point. The unfairness to third parties is what mainly concerns me in this one.
I think a couple of people have taken my cautionary tales either too literally or not literally enough. Jinmaro, I meant to imply that there was a causal relationship between affair and schoalrship, but (a) obviously didn’t make that clear enough, and anyway (b) think there would already be an obvious problem whether it was causal or not, for the reasons Paul explains so clearly here.
Katz, the ‘huge public stink’ was the part of the Ormond affair I was making the comprison with, not the individual behaviours. And I did try my best in a relatively lighthearted way to give at least one example of everybody (of both sexes) suffering for their intra-workplace jollies one way or the other. Believe me, the hawt young female academic in that particular scenario would experience all kinds of lasting professional complications.
If you want a true story, how’s this: beautiful young male undergraduate of oscillating sexuality goes on university-run weekend retreat being run by middle-aged male university counsellor. Undergraduate confides problems with sexual identity to counsellor. Response of counsellor, who is married with children, is to seduce him. If anyone thinks there is nothing problematic about this story, then I have probably reached my threshhold for the possibilites of further discussion.
The earlier stories were just little fables about cause and effect, really, based on some of my own observations. I didn’t realise I’d need to spell so much out.
rob,
have you considered that the condemnation was probably due to having them having an affair while he was still married….. not about the younger/older thang? No-one is suggesting that people shouldn’t be able to divorce and move on, but if you do the dirty on your wife/husband – you should expect some blowback, irrespective of the new relationship’s validity or endurance after the fact.
i meant to post this earlier jinmaro, but got sidetracked:
when i wrote ‘functionally ended’, earlier, i meant the most blatant forms of discrimination and harassment, but you are quite right that SD and harassment are still alive and kicking….but things did change quite dramatically – it was open slather way back when, and in the main thankfully, this is just not the case, as you wrote:
as to other types of work relationships that you referred to earlier – to some degree you are still correct, re: the ‘male doctor/female nurse’ thing, but this gender imbalance is fast breaking down with so many women moving into middle & upper management generally. (incl. so many female doctors. )
‘marrying down’ occupationally has been turned on it’s head somewhat, with the rapid rise of women thru the ranks – articles in cosmo/cleo etc. about “executive women marrying tradies” – “he’s so good around the house, i never thought i’d marry a plumber!” becoming quite frequent.
I suspect that students have to bear an inordinate amount of representation here for cultural anxieties. So, if the above is true, “the student” is the idealised and secondary object here.
Well then.’fess up tertiary level teachers. This is about securing conflict-free career progression. Of course, career is the most important thing right and if you should fall in love with someone what should come first? Career, right? Well done. You are obedient subjects. Point is: this is not about respect for students primarily. It is about ownership and sexual repression and and delineating relationships of hierarchy and subordination vis a vis students.
Loco parentis has no place in universities. We would have laughed at such a notion, and too right. University teachers are not parental surrogates, just as the 17year old and over students are no longer children, nor completely inept at social interaction and control.
Rob, I think universities, not surprisingly became at a point, the foci of sexual anxiety in our warped culture: a culture which on the one hand is sex saturated and on the other is crazy to impose legal, moral and other strictures and rules on sexual activity.
Still, I imagine today that sexual activity between faculty and students is relatively less that it was in the past. Classes too big, contact too infrequent, time less unstructured, libido less engaged.
jo, no, the condemnation was over the feeling that she had in fact seduced him for her own purposes and that he’d been stupid enough to fall for it. As it happens I think both responses were wrong — as evidenced by a relationship that, however traumatic had been its birth, has endured for almost two decades.
Just as a tiny nitpick on the doctor/nurse relationship, doctors are not the work superiors of nurses. While there certainly is a status/income hierarchical imbalance, in very few cases, at least in hospitals, is a doctor actually a nurses’ superior in terms of the organisational hierarchy. Doctors have no influence on the promotions or rosters of nurses, that’s the purview of the nursing administration. There are two parallel command structures as it were, with the doctors’ hierarchy and the nurses’ hierarchy working side by side, and where it is only in the operating theatre that one doctor is the absolute boss (for the duration of an operation only).
The origins of in loco parentis on US campuses was in the political-corporate objective of prohibiting students’ right of freedom of speech, Today S courts primarily apply the doctrine of in loco parentis to educational institutions.
Sorry, Jinmaro, but that’s a wilfully perverse interpretation of what’s been said here, and more than a little bit insulting. Most importantly, it’s just wrong. It is about the spoiling of lives, and not only the lives of the two people in question. (I notice you have consistently ignored the question of unfairness and pain to third parties.)
It’s very interesting that you have somehow slid from a discussion of sex to using the phrase ‘fall in love’. What I think is that if your career is more important to you than the object of your desire, then you are probably not ‘in love’ — in fact I’d go so far as to say it’s a pretty foolproof diagnostic tool.
‘If you should fall in love with someone’, you make your decision about what is most important to you, and then act on it honourably. Whatever it is.
Glad someone mentioned falling in love, jinmaro.
Here’s a hypothetical to match PC’s. Suppose a bloke with a senior position is assigned a deputy whom he finds very attractive, but does the usual thing and puts her attractiveness in a separate mental bucket. (It’s what we do these days as a matter of course.) They discover they have a strong professional affinity. They talk. They discover they have other affinities. They talk some more. She sends signals, or he does. Suddenly the attractiveness comes out of the bucket and into the foreground. Maybe he shows it, or she does. She doesn’t push back. So what should he do? Get her re-assigned, or him?
I don’t think so.
Tigtog, doctrors are not nurses substantive superiors in the organisational, reporting hierarchy in the hospital system but there is not doubt doctors conduct themselves and are regarded and treated by everyone in the health workforce as superiors. This is true not only to nurses, who are still predominantly female, but in relation to all other healthl practitioners and ancilliary support staff: psychologists, counsellors, physiotherapists, etc.
Within the medical specialities there is a hierarchy too. And don’t for a moment think it not gender biased still. Most medical specialists, the highest paid doctors, are male.
My aim was not to be insulting PC but to be probing.
Rob, my short answer to that is that working together in the same company/institution/office/whatever is death to relationships, especially where one partner is senior to the other, and that getting together sexually (or, if you prefer, ‘falling in love’) and both remaining in the same workplace is the quickest route to having the problem solve itself.
My long answer would involve the story of what the well-known-as-homosexual pacifist Lytton Strachey said when hauled up before some military authority or other for refusing to enlist at the outbreak of WW1. ‘A pacifist, eh?’ said the ruddy-faced general, or words to that effect. ‘And what would you do if a German tried to rape your sister?’ Strachey replied ‘I should interpose my body between them.’ I think this discussion may have moved into sister-raping territory, though I must say I can’t imagine what the Stracheyan reply to your hypothetical might be.
jinmaro,
i would think that ‘in loco parentis’ is exactly what parents instinctively understand and desire the relationship to be re: schools & minors…….and why “broke our trust” is so often used by parents when something goes terribly wrong.
as to universities, i thought there was clear guidelines as to how to arrange affairs if lecturers/blah want to form a relationship with older (?) students?? (is this correct?)
if ya can’t be stuffed changing classes or/positions, or waiting or anything – as I said above , and PC just now – it really says alot. And i’m sure most us think the same, when some doctor/psychologist/shrink/lawyer gets into trouble for having a relationship with their client(s)…..like, you couldn’t refer them on???
you’re right tigs, about the parallel command structures of nurses/doctors within hospitals etc but this isn’t much appreciated outside the health sector…..and nurses aren’t gods….. only doctors are gods…ask my mum.
Do you really think the two things are the same, PC?
About seven hours difference, if you ask me, Rob, which I know you didn’t. Take it away, rhythm section:
You’ll just have to imagine the brushes on the drums, the slide guitar and the muted, oh-so lovely sax.
Oh for God’s sake of course I bloody don’t. I was responding to your comment
which suggested to me that you think they’re the same thing.
I’m surprised people are bothering to spend any time or energy on responding to Rob.
It’s clear as can be.
Teachers or lecturers can have an influence on their students’ grades, self-esteem, knowledge, education, growth. Therefore they should not seek to enter a sexual relationship with them, and should resist any attempts to do so from their students.
End of *fucking* story.
If I didn’t know better, I’d say that there’s a bunch of middle aged blokes here on this thread indulging their pathetic fantasies under some ludicrous cover of “metaphysics”, “Jung”, “eros”. Blah blah blah.
If you want to enter into a relationship, I assure you that you will actually find that it is more satisfying for both parties if it’s on a basis of near equality.
That’s the last friendly advice you’ll get from me. Next time you try to justify 35 year old teachers sleeping with 16 year old students, I’m just going to haunt you on this thread and call you a pathetic old perve.
Just giving fair warning…
Alternatively, I might intervene at any moment using admin privileges to shut the whole thread down. And maybe shut you down as well. I am the one with power in this situation and you speak at my pleasure. Like that? Find it sexy? Enjoying the frisson? Risky? Dangerous?
Ok, bored now.
I’m going to use my power. If you don’t like it, you have to suck my toes. All five of them.
You’re both in moderation by the way. When I believe – for good pedagogical reasons – you’ve learnt your respective lessons, I might let you out. Or if some erotic spark passes between us.
Like being infantilised? Like unequal power relationships? You’ve spent the whole thread lauding them. Always with the presumption that you’re the one doing the subordination.
Delighted now?