#MeToo, page 22
‘And Radha, are you quiet because you still think Mike is too good to be held accountable for this?’
‘No! No . . . I am still trying to process it.’ I can hardly find the words. ‘I feel like quitting. I feel like putting down my papers, today.’
‘If you quit,’ says Sophia, ‘you lose everything. Your time. Your money. All that stock. Remember all that paper that is supposed to become money soon? Well, you walk away, you burn that paper.’
We consider our options. I don’t talk to Mike. I talk to Sameeksha. She says she doesn’t want to report Mike’s behaviour, not yet. I wish I could call him and ask him about it, but if I do, he might come clean with Human Resources and name Sameeksha, and it would all be downhill for her from there.
I don’t pick up Mike’s calls. Bahareh, Sophia and I exhaust ourselves thinking of the next course of action. Our disagreement sits between us like a wild beast ready to prey on our friendship. Our feminism is equally fierce but dyed in different hues. What is our leading light? Empathy? Justice? Larger good?
After a few days of mulling over the situation, we decide to talk to Sameeksha as a group. I invite her over to my home. She arrives an hour late, looking terrified and tired. Her arms are covered with scratches and she has a large rash on her face.
‘I get eczema when I am too stressed,’ she says when she notices me staring at her arms.
‘You don’t seem well at all,’ says Bahareh.
Sameeksha refuses to look at us and sits with her face down. ‘Everything happened just the way it was bound to,’ she says, her eyes fixed on the floor.
‘We are here to help you,’ says Sophia.
Sameeksha shakes her head. ‘Can’t you just forget that I shared this with you?’ she says, pleading, and Sophia’s face instantly reddens. ‘Please don’t report Mike,’ Sameeksha says. ‘I know what he did is wrong. Give me some time. I will figure out a way. Trust me, I will do the right thing.’
Would it be right to say to Sameeksha, ‘You are asking too much of us’? The statement dances on the very tip of my tongue. Other statements wait there too: You need help. You need to trust us. There might be other women. You have a responsibility towards other women. Think of your moral responsibility. Think of our moral responsibility. How can we relinquish it?
And another question: What do you mean, ‘the right thing’?
I swallow hard and wait for my friends to take over. I am sure that if I open my mouth, nothing helpful will come out. I feel numb from a sudden surge of anger. I sit there, zoned out, while Bahareh and Sophia continue to talk to Sameeksha.
Eventually she leaves, and then the three of us can’t stop talking about the complicated dynamics of helping someone. Can ‘helping’ be an act of aggression? Can it be an act of nullifying someone else’s agency? How to help with hands tied and eyes closed? Waiting to help. Waiting to be helped. The right kind and the right time to help.
When we meet Sameeksha at her cramped studio apartment after a few days, we are in agreement that there are to be no musts or shoulds, only a chance to understand her better.
I have already taken action for myself: I have resigned. Yesterday, after I sent my resignation, Bahareh, Sophia and I made origami cranes out of the papers I’d signed for my stock options and burned them by the beach. Then we drank ourselves silly and promised each other that we would take things slow and easy.
Sameeksha still seems distraught, and Bahareh takes her hand and tells her that we completely trust her decisions. And then Bahareh says something that surprises Sophia and me. She says, ‘But I think you need to realise that what we have heard cannot be unheard.’ She says it in the most gentle tone. ‘You must acknowledge that.’ Bahareh using must – I almost want to smile. ‘You are strong,’ Bahareh says, ‘but you are also vulnerable. You must let us help you in any one way. It’s your choice. You don’t have to tell us what it is right away, but just have a little bit of trust that we have your best interests at heart.’
We wait in silence for Sameeksha to speak.
‘I need a therapist and I need a new job,’ she says.
And I think, Thank you, Bahareh, for not throwing away all the ‘musts’.
A film reel of the future unfurls in my mind, a sequence of events leading to Mike facing the consequences of his actions and Sameeksha leading a successful, confident and independent life here in Melbourne. In this whirlwind of film-making, all in my head, I rush to add scenes where Bahareh and Sophia have also quit this startup and have found more satisfying work elsewhere. And Sam, oh, Sam . . . Maybe we exact our revenge on him through social media.
Here, in the present, things move slower as all of us sit in wordless solidarity, trying to grasp the small headway we have made. To reach this moment has taken effort. I am not sure where this moment will lead us. All I know is that we are poised in a place of hope and mutual compassion.
A sudden hunger grips me, a hunger to celebrate, to pause for a moment, to soak in this breakthrough. I want doughnuts.
Bahareh and I step out while Sophia sits, talking to Sameeksha about a psychotherapist she knows. I pull my coat around me tighter, despite the sunshine, as we step right into Melbourne’s chilly winds.
‘Well, at least there’s a little bit of sun!’ Bahareh says. ‘Today is the kind of day when we must keep counting our blessings.’
I thread my arm through hers and pull her closer. ‘You found your musts, after all.’
‘Oh, those weren’t mine,’ she says, ‘those were Sophia’s. I am going to keep them for a while. They are quite helpful. For example,’ she adds with a smile, ‘we must pay for Sameeksha’s therapy and we must find her a new job.’
‘And then we must –’ I am eager to share the film I have in my mind.
‘One step at a time,’ says Bahareh. And she throws her head back to soak up more sun.
Rebecca Lim is a Melbourne writer, illustrator, editor and commercial lawyer. The author of nineteen books, her work has been shortlisted for the Prime Minister’s Literary Award, Aurealis Award and Davitt Award, among others. She is a co-founder of the Voices from the Intersection initiative to support emerging young adult and children’s authors, illustrators and publishing professionals who are Indigenous, people of colour, LGBTIQ+ or living with disability, and a co-editor of Meet Me at the Intersection, an anthology of YA #OwnVoice memoir, poetry and fiction.
#MeToo and the Marginalised
The marginalised woman – whether Indigenous, refugee, migrant, low-wage, undocumented, trafficked, LGBTIQ+ and/or living with disability – is largely missing from the conversation surrounding the Washington/Hollywood incarnation of the #MeToo movement, for the same reasons she’s largely been missing from mainstream feminist theory: both have been constructed along a ‘single axis’ framework (namely, all women, en bloc, suffer gender oppression in the same way). Because gender oppression does not affect all women in identical ways (on the basis that all women are clearly not identical, and some are more vulnerable than others), #MeToo will have no lasting impact, and will not act to raise up or support all women unless it squarely recognises, and addresses, the issues of privilege and intersectionality.
If you’re already well on the page, pardon me for briefly restating what those concepts are before I proceed further. I only do this because, recently, in response to my co-founding Voices from the Intersection, a voluntary initiative to support Own Voices32 writers, illustrators and publishing professionals, with my good friend, Ambelin Kwaymullina, an acclaimed Indigenous author and legal academic, a Caucasian female academic publicly responded by saying she’d never heard of intersectional theory, and noted that it would have very little meaning for most people. I was astounded, and saw it as yet another instance of blind privilege in action.
Privilege manifests in many ways, ranging from supermarkets only stocking beauty products that cater to a narrow range of visibly pale ‘skin’ tones (the skin of the mythical ‘everywoman’) to entrenched legal and systemic biases (e.g. the ability to escape racial profiling, or the ability to see yourself reflected in politics, the media, sport, the arts, the so-called ‘norm’) that provide hidden advantages to a large, ‘mainstream’ segment of the population – a system of privilege that is both ‘unconsciously enjoyed and consciously perpetuated’.33
Intersectionality, a concept first actively coined in 1989 by African-American civil rights advocate and legal and critical race theory scholar Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw34, but foreshadowed in the groundbreaking work of the National Black Feminist Organization (founded in 1973) and later the Combahee River Collective (a black feminist lesbian organisation active from 1974 to 198035), is only just now entering the consciousness of white feminism.36 To be an intersectional woman is to be a woman who is disadvantaged by multiple or simultaneously converging sources or systems of oppression or discrimination due to one or more identity markers such as race, class, sexuality, faith, culture or physical, physiological or neurological difference. The violence different women are subjected to, and their vulnerability to it, is often compounded by these identity markers. To be able to march in the street, or rail in writing, against gender oppression presupposes that you can leave your home, demonstrate a reasonable facility with the dominant language, walk. What happens when you are a woman who is marginalised for more reasons than merely being a woman, whose home or workspace, whose conditions of life are unsafe?
While I can’t, and wouldn’t presume to, speak for people outside my culture, I can give you some idea of the complexities that the #MeToo movement throws up for someone who is a migrant Chinese-Australian woman raised along ‘traditional’ cultural lines (read: Confucian, patriarchal), whose first language was not English.
I have written before that intersectional women rarely think about themselves in terms of privilege. Using my own life as an example, I was both expressly and implicitly told, from the moment I could speak, that boy-children were superior to girl-children; that female children were a burden and would cause the death of the family name; that there were men’s jobs and women’s jobs and that women’s jobs (including child rearing, cooking and cleaning) should only ever be done by women; that the male head of the household alone had the power to make all financial and other significant decisions relating to conduct and daily life; that wives had no voice whatsoever; that commercial assets should be left only to the men in the family; that daughters were never to speak up and express their opinion (or risk a rolled-up newspaper across the head, or a bamboo cane across the hands); that marrying strictly within culture was expected (and that parents could force you to break things off with a suitor outside the culture); that small acts of rebellion (such as complaining to an aunt about the overbearing strictness of one’s parents) were punishable by having a kitchen chair broken in front of your face, or by every pop star poster and piece of artwork on your walls being torn down in a rage, and incinerated to ash.
I was taught, through words and actions, that mental illness was not to be spoken of outside the family, that a child born out of wedlock was an abomination to be shunned by family members, that authority figures were to be obeyed without question, and that racism was to be expected and feared from white Australians, at all times. I was never told about menstruation as a child (or about other ‘women’s issues’, as these possibly run counter to cultural ideas of innocence and purity), so when it occurred, out of the blue, I thought I was going to die. As a teen, I was generally not allowed to leave the house, except for school, outside the company of my family, let alone date. As a child of 1970s and 1980s Australia, gendered violence and masculine toxicity were not only things you absorbed through the media in relation to tall, tanned, white women with bouncy hair who seemed to have all the power in the world to resist them, they were also entirely different beasts in the home; so that there were actually, for me, multiple beasts and multiple battlefronts.
While I was outwardly encouraged to get the highest marks possible at school (be as good as, or better than, the boys in your studies), what I actually saw in my future, based on the publicly voiceless, homemaking women of my mother’s generation, and those preceding it, was the fate of an outworker. A person our Fair Work Commission currently defines as a contractor or employee who performs their work at home; or at a place not normally thought of as a business premises. I had been raised to hold an outworker’s mentality in a country, and an environment, where outworking women were invisible and powerless. The absolute incongruity of these two competing aims is apparent to me now, but back then, when my father insisted, ‘One day, you should get into politics to help Chinese people in this country,’ my only despairing thought was How? How would I ever be able to do that? It seemed impossible to me that I would ever have any agency and not be voiceless and powerless. Growing up, I was simply never equipped, in the home environment, to be anything other than an outworker.
A thorough education in the ways of ‘peak caucasity’37 (in the fields of law, commerce, arts) has bestowed on me a level of privilege (a relative fluency, if you like, in the dominant narrative of this country) that enables me, from time to time, to ‘transcend’ my intersectionality through my work. I could be any (‘Aussie’) woman over the telephone. But when you see me? I will always look like a bespectacled, hideously shy, overly apologetic and anxious Chinese woman to you, and I have been told many times before, and will likely be told many times again, by well-meaning fellow citizens, words to the effect of:
Fuck off back to your own country!
You speak English good, for a foreigner.
No, but where are you from, really?
And my personal favourite on the weekday train home from work at 10.44 pm:
I fucking hate the Chinese because they take all our jobs.
What I am trying to tell you, in rehashing my origin story, is that there are many, many levels of privilege. And so many intersectional women are so far from the centre of that privilege that they have no privilege at all. And that whole #MeToo thing? That thing with the shouty judge guy and the lady doctor in America? The thing with those movie directors and all the young and/or famous female actresses? For marginalised women, probably does actually amount to white noise happening on a distant planet of mostly white people, far, far away.
To further demonstrate how removed marginalised women are from the debate, let’s take a closer look at our laws regarding sex discrimination and sexual violence cases that go to trial. Clearly our laws haven’t been hugely successful in the Australian context, or #MeToo would not have had early successes in exposing hidden instances of gender violence and discrimination in the media and entertainment industries, and in federal and state politics.
The Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) renders it unlawful to discriminate against a person because of their sex, gender identity, intersex status, sexual orientation, marital or relationship status, family responsibilities, because they are pregnant (or might become so) or are breastfeeding. It also makes sexual harassment (unwelcome sexual behaviour which a reasonable person would anticipate would make someone feel offended, humiliated or intimidated in the contexts of employment, education, and in the provision of goods and services) unlawful. This includes: staring, leering or unwelcome touching; suggestive comments or jokes; unwanted requests for sex; intrusive questions regarding a person’s private life or body; displaying posters or screen savers of a sexual nature; and the sending of sexually explicit text messages. The concept of ‘person’, however, does not take into account, as Angela Onwuachi-Willig has noted in the American context in a recent Yale Law Journal article, ‘a reasonable person standard that accounts for . . . different intersectional and multidimensional identities’. She goes on to recommend that ‘courts should employ a standard based on a reasonable person in the complainant’s intersectional and multidimensional shoes, rather than the ostensibly objective reasonable person standard’.38
Yet despite sex discrimination and sexual harassment being unlawful for more than thirty years in this country, the most recent Australian Human Rights Commission national survey of 10,272 individuals (the fourth workplace sexual harassment survey of its kind, released on 12 September 2018) found that in the last five years, one in three people has been sexually harassed in a work environment, with more than one in three women (39 per cent) having experienced sexual harassment, with the percentage of perpetrators being male remaining steady at 79 per cent.39 Not only has the Australian Human Rights Commission not received a spike in complaints since the 2017 advent of #MeToo, despite the number of people who’ve experienced sexual harassment increasing overall, but the percentage of people reporting harassment has decreased from 32 per cent in 2003 to 17 per cent in the current survey.40 The time limit for unlawful discrimination claims is also remarkably short: while there is no specific time frame in which a complaint must be lodged with the Australian Human Rights Commission, the President can now terminate a complaint if it was lodged more than six months after the alleged act or practice took place (for those taking place after 13 April 2017). For acts or practices arising before that date, the President has the power to terminate a complaint lodged more than twelve months after the alleged events.41 For many sexual discrimination or harassment claims, these are highly prohibitive and problematic time frames for potential complainants who are already traumatised. If you reframe that complainant as a female working-visa holder or female undocumented or disabled worker in a low-wage job, the chances of a complaint being made within the requisite time frame are probably practically nil.
In Australia, broadly, the sexual offence of rape (one of the key adult sexual offences) for every state and territory (whose laws vary considerably, to make matters more complex) possesses three main elements, each of which must be proved beyond reasonable doubt by the prosecution to result in a conviction. Each offence requires physical acts that meet the definition of ‘sexual intercourse’ or ‘sexual penetration’ for the relevant Australian state or territory, the non-consent of the complainant and a specific mental state on the part of the perpetrator (often requiring proof beyond reasonable doubt that the perpetrator knew that the victim did not consent, opening the victim’s behaviour and character up to potential undue scrutiny). It’s a system already incredibly difficult for a ‘mainstream’ woman to navigate – how, then, would an intersectional woman fare if her complaint was, in fact, believed and then escalated?
