From The First Stone: Some Questions About Sex and Power, Helen Garner, Sydney, Australia, Picador Pan Macmillan Australia, 1995:
The two young women who accused the Master of Ormond College – a residential college affiliated with the University of Melbourne – of sexual assault in February, 1992, refused to speak to Garner, ever, at all. They offered no illumination of the situation apart from their accusations. Something about the story itself nagged at her. Garner decided to investigate.
Pp. 88-89:
“…Why would a young woman feel ‘worthless’ when a man makes an unwelcome sexual approach to her? She might not like it. She might very much want it to stop. But why does it make her feel ‘worthless’? Would she feel ‘worthless’ if the man were younger, better looking, more cool? Or is worthless sexual object just a rhetorical flourish, a bit of feminist sabre-rattling on behalf of a young woman who has not taken the responsibility for learning to handle the effects on men, of her beauty and her erotic style of presentation?
“Can a young woman really expect to go through life without ever having to take on this responsibility? Has a girl like Elizabeth Rosen even the faintest idea what a powerful anima figure she is to the men she encounters in her life? She told the court that Doctor Shepherd had got down on his knees before her. Which of them does the word humiliated apply to here?”
Garner is speaking here as though Elizabeth Rosen and Colin Shepherd are acting a bipolar field of power and sexuality. The people in the incident ad its long and complex aftermath actually act in a field at least a quadrilateral: power; gender; culture(s); religion.
This expanded view glimmers on the edges of other passages in the book:
“… I lacked the rudeness that’s required in order to go on reading something interesting to you while someone boring is trying to talk to you.” – On the daylight train to Geelong – p. 62
“… out of politeness, embarrassment, or passivity, or lack of a clear sense of what I wanted…” – On the daylight train, “give us a kiss” – p. 63
“Why would a young woman feel ‘worthless’ when a man makes an unwelcome sexual approach to her?” – p. 88
Garner intuits a wider view but doesn’t see it, focus on it, integrate it and so understand it.
The clue is the phrase, worthless sexual object.
From before I was born I was wrong, and the sin was mine, not God’s.
What Garner doesn’t put her finger on is this:
In a culture where the overt moral view of sexuality is that sexuality is a sin, in a profoundly puritanical culture that is barely masked by the image of Australia as a land of cheerful anarchists, where the sin of sexuality is venial for men, mortal for women – then being told you are being seen by someone in front of you as nothing but the vile thing you must never be, which you always profoundly are, though polite people don’t mention it; which you cannot help being, which is utterly beyond your control –
After spending your early, middle and late childhood, then your entire adolescence, with your nose and face shoved manure-deep into this bedrock condition of your permission to live. Having the matter of your inherently and essentially evil nature flung in your face, loudly and unexpectedly by anyone at all – is at the very least, humiliating.
It is a declaration that you can never be anything else, that all the other things you are or have achieved or have striven to be are nothing, can only be nothing, because you are a dark and endless locus of despicability: a womb, a mindless fleshy reproduction machine, a lure and a snare and a trap.
It is the very opposite of equality.
In that quadrilateral field of forces, a serious and unwanted sexual advance is experienced as a profound obliteration of self and soul.
The first step is shame – that despicable thing which you are is pointed out. The second step is the repeated insistence on that shameful fact. That is humiliation.
Repeated humiliation creates fragility.
The driver and enabler of the accusation, the skin-dissolving, gut-dissolving attack, is religion. It’s all-encompassing: skin-close, bone-destroying, mind-blinding, paralysing. Your body undoes itself in fear, your soul is undone in the desolation of inner and outer betrayal. Body, family, church, school. It is spiritual GBH, it is spiritual rape.
From her name it seems that Elizabeth Rosen would have been at least culturally Jewish, brought up well aware of community and service. She was also brought up in a and generally misogynist majority culture.
Even without the full Catholic Monty there were and are many different, though related, reasons why Elizabeth Rosen could have felt ashamed.
In a misogynistic culture, all points of female education are relentlessly criticized – dress, manner, hair, makeup, clothes, accessories, posture, deportment, speech, vocabulary, friends, sports, taste in television, movies, music… Every conceivable twist or dimension of female existence is subject to harsh and constant correction.
This is the polishing of an object. Objects do not act. They do not make a mess.
The sore points remain in the soul as emotional trapdoors. Training in being an object becomes the learned helplessness of designated prey.
Elizabeth Rosen stood in the office of her landlord and the controller of student bursaries, the Master of the College she lived in. The Master was at her feet.
Just by being, she’d made a mess; profoundly upset the natural order of things; sinned socially, mortally: she’d brought authority to its knees. The castle was at her feet, looking up at her, begging to be let in. She had rendered Authority helpless as a helpless child asking for help.
The Master was at her feet – giving her power she did not want and had not sought, locking her into it, making her responsible for this utter wreck of order as though she had acted; and she had not.
And he was still the Master. She was bound to obey him while he was ordering her to disobey his rules. Society at large would blame her. Above all it would blame her.
“Why should you have been ashamed?” I said. We looked at each other in silence. I can’t count the number of times the discussion I had with women reached this point, and got jammed.” – p. 90
What is the utterance, “You should be ashamed of yourself” for?
Could an injunction be any clearer? Could a social instruction be any clearer?
How much shame does it take to make you feel worthless? Not much, if you’ve been told to do it all your life.
Elizabeth Rosen was female, an object, and objects don’t act, and she would be condemned for acting. For breathing while beautiful, for being unable to restore the natural order while being unequipped with either confidence and lack of shame, or with the social position, to restore it.
She was ashamed of being seen as nothing but her flesh. Only the feminine is seen that way: women, gays, LGBTQ+ communities, all now again marginalized and openly hated: designated prey.
She was ashamed of being seen as The Unbridled Feminine, provoking the Master’s physical and emotional state by standing in his office, though she hadn’t done more than stand in his office. Elizabeth Rosen was ashamed of making a mess, failing herself and family and society profoundly, of not knowing how to end or reverse the situation. She was terrified that this moment would become her identity, her life and lifelong shame.
Until sometime in the early ’60s, in South Australia, Catholics were forbidden jobs in many industries; they were excluded for lack of property from voting for the Upper House of Parliament. Irish/Catholics formed 8% of the population in a racist, misogynist, self-righteous mercantile Protestant culture. Catholics often shared the attitudes of the larger culture; they got their dourness from it. Every three years the parish church hosted a Passionist Fathers Mission against sin and Communism. I knew Joyce’s sermon almost as well as I knew the catechism.
Garner was born and lived most of her life in Melbourne. After the mid 19th century Victoria was 25% Irish/Catholic. Post-Gold Rush, some of those Catholics were very wealthy indeed; they were in a position to shape attitudes. Melbourne also had a large population, industries apart from agriculture, a major port, and a complex mix of immigrants, attitudes, philosophies and contemplatable behaviours. Much closer to Sydney than Adelaide, Melbourne remains part of the largest current of trade and culture in modern Australia.
From How To End A Story: Collected Diaries 1978-1998 (New York, Pantheon Books, 2025) Garner’s religion seems to have originally been some sort of Protestant, with Anglican adumbrations later in life. It does not seem to have been virulent. She doesn’t seem to have been held in the tombs of Atuan.
The two young women who accused the Master of Ormond College of sexual assault, refused to speak to Garner, ever, at all. They offered no illumination of the situation apart from their accusations.
Though Garner remembers her long-forgotten encounter on the daylight train to Geelong, she doesn’t see the clues it offers.
And so she remained unequipped to answer the question, Why would a young woman feel ‘worthless’ when a man makes an unwelcome sexual approach to her?
So the question Garner asks at the end of the book: What happened between the ’60s and the ’90s, that such a conviction of personal powerlessness overtook so many young feminist women? misses what happened.
From 1965 to 1973 came The Commonwealth Scholarship; in 1973 the Whitlam Government abolished tertiary education fees. This lasted until the mid ’80s. Thousands upon thousands of lower middle- and working-class, and particularly Catholic, girls – a fair percentage of them 17 in First Year – who would otherwise never have set foot on university grounds, came to study. They came with their religious and class-based strengths and impediments.
Boy did they come with their impediments.
Garner Helen, How To End A Story: Collected Diaries 1978-1998, New York, Pantheon Books, 2025
Garner Helen, The First Stone: Some Questions About Sex and Power, Sydney, Australia, Picador Pan Macmillan Australia, 1995
Le Guin, Ursula K., The Tombs of Atuan, Middlesex, England, Puffin Books, 1974
The two young women who accused the Master of Ormond College – a residential college affiliated with the University of Melbourne – of sexual assault in February, 1992, refused to speak to Garner, ever, at all. They offered no illumination of the situation apart from their accusations. Something about the story itself nagged at her. Garner decided to investigate.
Pp. 88-89:
“…Why would a young woman feel ‘worthless’ when a man makes an unwelcome sexual approach to her? She might not like it. She might very much want it to stop. But why does it make her feel ‘worthless’? Would she feel ‘worthless’ if the man were younger, better looking, more cool? Or is worthless sexual object just a rhetorical flourish, a bit of feminist sabre-rattling on behalf of a young woman who has not taken the responsibility for learning to handle the effects on men, of her beauty and her erotic style of presentation?
“Can a young woman really expect to go through life without ever having to take on this responsibility? Has a girl like Elizabeth Rosen even the faintest idea what a powerful anima figure she is to the men she encounters in her life? She told the court that Doctor Shepherd had got down on his knees before her. Which of them does the word humiliated apply to here?”
*
Garner is speaking here as though Elizabeth Rosen and Colin Shepherd are acting a bipolar field of power and sexuality. The people in the incident ad its long and complex aftermath actually act in a field at least a quadrilateral: power; gender; culture(s); religion.
This expanded view glimmers on the edges of other passages in the book:
“… I lacked the rudeness that’s required in order to go on reading something interesting to you while someone boring is trying to talk to you.” – On the daylight train to Geelong – p. 62
“… out of politeness, embarrassment, or passivity, or lack of a clear sense of what I wanted…” – On the daylight train, “give us a kiss” – p. 63
“Why would a young woman feel ‘worthless’ when a man makes an unwelcome sexual approach to her?” – p. 88
Garner intuits a wider view but doesn’t see it, focus on it, integrate it and so understand it.
*
The clue is the phrase, worthless sexual object.
From before I was born I was wrong, and the sin was mine, not God’s.
What Garner doesn’t put her finger on is this:
In a culture where the overt moral view of sexuality is that sexuality is a sin, in a profoundly puritanical culture that is barely masked by the image of Australia as a land of cheerful anarchists, where the sin of sexuality is venial for men, mortal for women – then being told you are being seen by someone in front of you as nothing but the vile thing you must never be, which you always profoundly are, though polite people don’t mention it; which you cannot help being, which is utterly beyond your control –
After spending your early, middle and late childhood, then your entire adolescence, with your nose and face shoved manure-deep into this bedrock condition of your permission to live. Having the matter of your inherently and essentially evil nature flung in your face, loudly and unexpectedly by anyone at all – is at the very least, humiliating.
It is a declaration that you can never be anything else, that all the other things you are or have achieved or have striven to be are nothing, can only be nothing, because you are a dark and endless locus of despicability: a womb, a mindless fleshy reproduction machine, a lure and a snare and a trap.
It is the very opposite of equality.
In that quadrilateral field of forces, a serious and unwanted sexual advance is experienced as a profound obliteration of self and soul.
The first step is shame – that despicable thing which you are is pointed out. The second step is the repeated insistence on that shameful fact. That is humiliation.
Repeated humiliation creates fragility.
The driver and enabler of the accusation, the skin-dissolving, gut-dissolving attack, is religion. It’s all-encompassing: skin-close, bone-destroying, mind-blinding, paralysing. Your body undoes itself in fear, your soul is undone in the desolation of inner and outer betrayal. Body, family, church, school. It is spiritual GBH, it is spiritual rape.
*
From her name it seems that Elizabeth Rosen would have been at least culturally Jewish, brought up well aware of community and service. She was also brought up in a and generally misogynist majority culture.
Even without the full Catholic Monty there were and are many different, though related, reasons why Elizabeth Rosen could have felt ashamed.
In a misogynistic culture, all points of female education are relentlessly criticized – dress, manner, hair, makeup, clothes, accessories, posture, deportment, speech, vocabulary, friends, sports, taste in television, movies, music… Every conceivable twist or dimension of female existence is subject to harsh and constant correction.
This is the polishing of an object. Objects do not act. They do not make a mess.
The sore points remain in the soul as emotional trapdoors. Training in being an object becomes the learned helplessness of designated prey.
Elizabeth Rosen stood in the office of her landlord and the controller of student bursaries, the Master of the College she lived in. The Master was at her feet.
Just by being, she’d made a mess; profoundly upset the natural order of things; sinned socially, mortally: she’d brought authority to its knees. The castle was at her feet, looking up at her, begging to be let in. She had rendered Authority helpless as a helpless child asking for help.
The Master was at her feet – giving her power she did not want and had not sought, locking her into it, making her responsible for this utter wreck of order as though she had acted; and she had not.
And he was still the Master. She was bound to obey him while he was ordering her to disobey his rules. Society at large would blame her. Above all it would blame her.
*
“Why should you have been ashamed?” I said. We looked at each other in silence. I can’t count the number of times the discussion I had with women reached this point, and got jammed.” – p. 90
What is the utterance, “You should be ashamed of yourself” for?
Could an injunction be any clearer? Could a social instruction be any clearer?
YOU SHOULD BE ASHAMED OF YOUR SELF
How much shame does it take to make you feel worthless? Not much, if you’ve been told to do it all your life.
*
Elizabeth Rosen was female, an object, and objects don’t act, and she would be condemned for acting. For breathing while beautiful, for being unable to restore the natural order while being unequipped with either confidence and lack of shame, or with the social position, to restore it.
She was ashamed of being seen as nothing but her flesh. Only the feminine is seen that way: women, gays, LGBTQ+ communities, all now again marginalized and openly hated: designated prey.
She was ashamed of being seen as The Unbridled Feminine, provoking the Master’s physical and emotional state by standing in his office, though she hadn’t done more than stand in his office. Elizabeth Rosen was ashamed of making a mess, failing herself and family and society profoundly, of not knowing how to end or reverse the situation. She was terrified that this moment would become her identity, her life and lifelong shame.
*
Until sometime in the early ’60s, in South Australia, Catholics were forbidden jobs in many industries; they were excluded for lack of property from voting for the Upper House of Parliament. Irish/Catholics formed 8% of the population in a racist, misogynist, self-righteous mercantile Protestant culture. Catholics often shared the attitudes of the larger culture; they got their dourness from it. Every three years the parish church hosted a Passionist Fathers Mission against sin and Communism. I knew Joyce’s sermon almost as well as I knew the catechism.
Garner was born and lived most of her life in Melbourne. After the mid 19th century Victoria was 25% Irish/Catholic. Post-Gold Rush, some of those Catholics were very wealthy indeed; they were in a position to shape attitudes. Melbourne also had a large population, industries apart from agriculture, a major port, and a complex mix of immigrants, attitudes, philosophies and contemplatable behaviours. Much closer to Sydney than Adelaide, Melbourne remains part of the largest current of trade and culture in modern Australia.
*
From How To End A Story: Collected Diaries 1978-1998 (New York, Pantheon Books, 2025) Garner’s religion seems to have originally been some sort of Protestant, with Anglican adumbrations later in life. It does not seem to have been virulent. She doesn’t seem to have been held in the tombs of Atuan.
The two young women who accused the Master of Ormond College of sexual assault, refused to speak to Garner, ever, at all. They offered no illumination of the situation apart from their accusations.
Though Garner remembers her long-forgotten encounter on the daylight train to Geelong, she doesn’t see the clues it offers.
And so she remained unequipped to answer the question, Why would a young woman feel ‘worthless’ when a man makes an unwelcome sexual approach to her?
So the question Garner asks at the end of the book: What happened between the ’60s and the ’90s, that such a conviction of personal powerlessness overtook so many young feminist women? misses what happened.
From 1965 to 1973 came The Commonwealth Scholarship; in 1973 the Whitlam Government abolished tertiary education fees. This lasted until the mid ’80s. Thousands upon thousands of lower middle- and working-class, and particularly Catholic, girls – a fair percentage of them 17 in First Year – who would otherwise never have set foot on university grounds, came to study. They came with their religious and class-based strengths and impediments.
Boy did they come with their impediments.
Garner Helen, How To End A Story: Collected Diaries 1978-1998, New York, Pantheon Books, 2025
Garner Helen, The First Stone: Some Questions About Sex and Power, Sydney, Australia, Picador Pan Macmillan Australia, 1995
Le Guin, Ursula K., The Tombs of Atuan, Middlesex, England, Puffin Books, 1974
