Bodyjamming: Sexual Harassment, Feminism, and Public Life.

bodyjamming: sexual harassment, feminism and public life, Jenna Mead (ed.), Vintage, 1997.

In recent times the issue of sexual harassment has become inextricably associated with the media hoo-ha over the most powerful man in the world's apparently insatiable urges. Yet the publication in 1997 of bodyjamming was a reminder that it was not so long ago that a sexual harassment case sparked a media furore closer to home. This collection proposes a wide-ranging discussion of sexual harassment, feminism and public life; but is still most interesing read as a response to the Ormond College case, and as a critique of Helen Garner's account of the case in The First Stone.

This critique discusses Garner's growing reputation as a `premier journalist'. Matthew Ricketson focuses on the way The First Stone relies for its impact on being read as a `true' story, yet fails basic tests of non-fiction/journalism. From the outset, knowledge of Garner's deeply sympathetic, and widely circulated, letter to the Master of Ormond, Alan Gregory, undermined the credibility of her account. As various contributors note, lack of balance is evident throughout The First Stone--notably in the author's failure to take account of the lengths to which the Ormond complainants went to get their allegations heard within the college, and her striking failure to address the particular institutional relationship between Master and complainants involved in this case. Ricketson and Mark Davis also explore The First Stone's grossest and most infamous misrepresentation of the facts--Garner's `splitting' of the real Jenna Mead into six or seven different characters. This is the most obvious in a range of strategies that work to suggest, as Mead long ago pointed out, that Garner is reporting the existence of a real feminist conspiracy.

This is a strong, rigorous critique. Yet I was left somehow dissatisfied. The First Stone is haunted by frustration and uncertainty. This makes Garner's book a hostile, inaccurate and confused report and analysis of the events that took place at Ormond College. Yet Garner's frustration and uncertainty clearly also speak of a more deep-rooted concern, a concern that we live in a society where there is a growing propensity to look to the law to define and deal with social problems. Bodyjamming's discussion of sexual harassment does not deal with this concern. In a sense it is the apparent unwillingness of contributors to take Garner's anxiety seriously that is the most disappointing aspect.

The modern conflation of the public and the private, championed by feminism in the call that `the personal is political', has had some unintended consequences. The politicising of the private has tended in some instances--notably anti-porn, child sexual abuse campaigns and some domestic violence initiatives--to widen state powers of surveillance and intervention. The tendency to seek legal solutions for social problems--the slide from a political to a legal definition of experience--is clearly not just a feminist concern. Its pervasive presence is highlighted in censorship debates (I am thinking of the draconian implications of the current censorship legislation--highlighted by the Rabelais case--and the calls to toughen this legislation in the name of cracking down on violence) and by the introduction of the Racial Vilification Act in NSW.

Meaghan Morris, interviewed by Jenna Mead in bodyjamming, suggests the `terrifying... implications' of a society with an unchecked and paranoid reliance on surveillance. She speaks of some of the outcomes of efforts to combat the fact and fear of child abuse--the `witch-hunting of teachers in NSW' in the name of counteracting paedophilia, and the physically invasive examinations children were subjected to in the United Kingdom in the wake of panics over incest. She posits a future where, as a result, we have a generation of children no one is game to touch. Attempting to explain this phenomenon she suggests:

You know it's a panic when you pass from a right and proper investigation of actual crimes into a phase where suddenly the crime is proliferating everywhere, incest in every other family and a paedophile in every school.

The frustration and uncertainty that infuse The First Stone struck me as a product of Garner's fear that we are entering precisely the sort of panic Morris speaks of. Garner runs the Ormond case up against her musings on sex and power and senses a panic. It seems to her that people perceive crime proliferating everywhere--sexual harassment in the most mundane human interactions; criminals in rather pathetic middle-aged men. But she unconvincingly attributes her frustration to the puritanism and vindictivness of young feminists and academic feminism. In her own panic, she figuratively and literally conjures up a feminist conspiracy to explain events. As Matthew Ricketson and Mark Davis here relay, Garner's anxiety makes The First Stone a seriously flawed, bordering on hysterical, documentation of the events that took place at Ormond College. However, it does not seem to further a discussion of sexual harassment to dismiss this anxiety, as Davis does, as the paranoia of a neo-conservative has-been.

If I appear to have returned to the issues of feminism and sexual harassment in a rather roundabout way, my excuse is that sexual harassment is not simply part of a feminist history--or a history of feminism. It is also part of a history of the modern state's control over the private lives of its citizens, and the desire of its citizens to extend that control through the law. It is the ambivalence of this history that demands that caution and uncertainty are part of contemporary debates about sexual harassment. The First Stone deals in uncertainty but obscures the relationship between sexual harassment and the law because it assumes sexual harassment is ultimately a feminist problem. Various essays in bodyjamming are certain and rigorous in their critique of Garner, but here too the issue of sexual harassment's relationship to the law is obscured--you are left with the impression that it is a relationship that does not warrant concern or analysis. Davis, for example, notes Garner's concern over `running to the law and excessive social legislation', but his critique implies that this isn't an issue. Ultimately he doesn't take her anxiety seriously--dismissing it as paranoia and as the inability of Garner's seventies `equity' feminism to come to grips with the `masculinism of the status quo'.

To consider the connection between sexual harassment and the law seriously one might begin with questions about the value and consequences of advocating legal remedies for social problems, and the value of defining and judging social/sexual interaction through legalese. These are questions liable to provoke uncertainty because they don't throw up a clear enemy. Garner's myth of the vengeful, wimpy, puritanical feminist will clearly not suffice--nor will Mark Davis's of Garner as yet another privileged neoconservative.

In her introduction, Mead writes that one of the tasks of bodyjamming:

... is to speak of women and their concerns by coming up with languages that are meaningful... Men and women, like the people in this collection, all have a stake in what language in the public domain will allow us to say and think.

Later, in her contribution, Foong Ling Kong, teasing out the complexity race and class add to the issue of sexual harassment suggests, `the language to deal with sexual harassment and with difference is still inadequate'. Taking Garner's anxiety seriously might prompt us to ask to what extent the law is an adequate language. In what ways does it encourage us to speak and think? The law has, and is, inextricably tied up with our definition of what constitutes sexual harassment and how to deal with it--and it is not the subtlest of discourses. The language of the law is a blunt and ultimately combative way of cognising social interaction and conflict. Sexual harassment is not just about defining offensive or sexist behaviour; it's about defining an offence and its perpetrators. Where to draw the legal line should be a matter of debate. When I read feminist legal theorist Margaret Thornton on the possibilities for extending sexual harassment legislation beyond the workplace, and her contention that `all working women are subjected to some degree of harassment by virtue of their sex', I wonder which of my interactions I would wish, or think it productive, to have rendered legally cognisable.

Towards the end of The First Stone Garner writes:

I know that between `being made to feel uncomfortable' and `violence against women' lies a vast range of male and female behaviours. If we deny this, we enfeeble language and drain it of meaning.

Garner fears that a growing propensity to look to the law, the oppressive spectre of `the cops', begins to erode this distinction. It does not seem an unreasonable fear. In the only bodyjamming contribution devoted to sexual harassment legislation, legal theorist Jenny Morgan quotes the same passage from Garner's book before replying:

Obviously there's a scale from discomfort to violence, a scale that focuses on the extent of physical invasion, but we might also want to think about the links between the harm of rape and sexual harassment.

Morgan goes on to propose a legal way of defining, and dealing with, this link. These are not the words to reassure an anxious Gamer, indeed a concerned anyone, that the law knows its place. Morgan's article reminds that the task of translating the complexity and subtlety of relationships between men and women into legal discourse is a difficult one. But she acknowledges this difficulty simply as an obstacle to be overcome, rather than as presenting an occasion to ask questions about the validity of the task. It is one thing to offer theories of women's subordination to explain the connection between `being made to feel uncomfortable' and `violence against women'. It is another to assume that the legal process and the language of the law are the best tools to define and deal with the vast range of male and female behaviours that lies in between.