Author: Elisabeth

Throwing stones

I think I may have posted something to the wrong group. A mistake that will cause me great angst and now I feel sick in the pit of my stomach for my carelessness and I feel such shame and a need to skulk off and hide.

 It’s a familiar feeling. 

You’ve opened your mouth in the wrong place and people will be upset with you and they’ll tell you off and humiliate you and reckon that you’re the worst of the worst. 

Like farting in church as an old friend used to say. But his idea of farting in church was always as an act of defiance and yet he was one of the most bigoted people I remember, especially in relation to homosexuality.

I fear I may have sent an email about bigotry towards homosexuals to the wrong email group because I was careless when I sent the email out and did not check that there are two groups in my mailbox at present, one for whom this is relevant and the other one for whom it’s not.

And now I’m beginning to calm down because I may not have sent it to the wrong group after all.

So, my panic might well be unwarranted.

There’s a scene in the movie Notes on a Scandal where the central character played by Cate Blanchett, a young woman who after a sexual relationship with one of her young students is taken into custody and a crowd of people gather around her and yell at her for her obscenity. 

The look on her face, the angst in her eyes goes somewhere close to describing how I felt after I presented a paper on incest, among other things, to my colleagues and found some of them were enraged.

The same feeling in the pit of my stomach. 

‘Let they who are without sin, cast the first stone,’ but people are quick to cast stones, so fast to let it be known that the one who has transgressed is contemptible. 

It’s the worst feeling in the world and whenever it surges in me, I crumble. Blood thins, stomach drops, all those bodily changes that signify there’s adrenalin coursing through and I’m ready to flee. 

Not fight. Mostly I flee. I hide. I go underground until I can get my mind around the horror of what I’ve done. What badness I’ve brought on.

Ever since I was little and can remember drawing attention to myself by saying something I should not say, doing something I should not do, stealing lollies from the local milk bar when the man who served at the counter turned his back; looking at my father’s art books with their images of naked women and thick penises hidden under fig leaves but still visible in the testicles that curled underneath. The excitement I felt whenever I looked at the naked breasts of women on the front cover of The Truth newspaper, a tabloid my father brought home from work for reasons I never understood given he was an educated man, and someone told me The Truthwas just filth. The excitement I felt when I hid myself in the back of the house in the toilet at the top of the stairs near the laundry, the outside toilet in a house that already boasted an indoors toilet.

All these sins.

In this toilet I could read The Readers Digests my mother brought home from the old people’s home down the road, where she worked. And the Time magazines my father bought from the newsagency, a respectable international magazine that he folded over his Truth.

I went straight to the last two pages of Timewhere they reviewed films or other artistic ventures. 

The pieces on films I had not heard of and was unlikely ever to see, held the rudiments of stories, often salacious, stories of sexual innuendo, of men and women behaving badly, and I relished the frisson of excitement up and down my spine whenever anything sexual was mentioned even if I didn’t understand it. 

I was hunting for something.

In everything I read in those days I was hunting for more information about what happened between grown-ups behind closed doors.

I wanted to understand something that to me then seemed incomprehensible. This thing that men did with their penises and the way women responded. 

In my fourteenth year during the midday movie, I watched a man holding a woman in his arms, her back to the camera. The woman was wearing an evening gown, its back scooped down to the waist so the entire arc of her back was visible and the man who held her rubbed his hands up and down all over as she nestled in close to kiss. 

What if such a man were to stroke my back? 

Never. His hands would slide over the lumpy skin of a pimply adolescent back and he’d be repulsed. 

The actor of the low-cut dress had skin as smooth as the satin of her dress. Flawless. My skin was pockmarked and pitted. No man would ever want to comfort me in this way. 

And so began my foray into feeling bad inside both bodily for its imperfections and in my mind for other transgressions.  And the bad feelings stay. 

So much drama over the conviction of George Pell, the Cardinal who was found guilty of sexually abusing two men when they were altar boys and he the Archbishop of Melbourne.

Picture of disgraced Cardinal George Pell.
By Kerry Myers. CC BY 2.0.

The event has stirred up such a welter of feeling in our community, and throughout the world. Such rage at this man, this icon of the Catholic church this beacon of propriety now fallen from on high into the worst pit a person can imagine, inside with other paedophiles.

I watched a documentary last night wherein Louis Theroux visited an American penitentiary for convicted paedophiles who’d served their term but who would most likely never be able to go back into society because they’re still considered a threat. A place for paedophiles.

A disturbing film, not simply the witnessing of the troubled men who had sexually abused small children but also the treatment approach, which left me cold.

Among other things, they used a device, a type of lie detector to which the men attached their penis via a small elastic loop which was connected to the machine. The whole procedure was measured and filmed.

To determine his progress in treatment, each man sat alone and pulled the loop onto his penis then sat, with penis attached, under a desk onto which they rested both hands. Their hands needed to be visible because men could cheat at this test simply by attacking the loop to a finger.

Then they were required to watch a series of images, some ordinary, some sexually suggestive, some subtle, some not so, some with children, some without. And the degree to which their penis swelled in size was used as a measure of whether or not they had overcome their desires to interfere sexually with children.

It seems such a basic and primitive measure as if the men are merely a function of their brain and penis.

The whole time I watched I wanted to cry. But could not.

These men, most of whom had been sexually abused themselves as children in one way or another, and who then found themselves unable to resist the temptation to perform sexual acts on children.

They emerge out of our society. They are of our society and yet when we hear of them, we want nothing more than to expel them forevermore.

As if we can be rid of paedophilia forever, if only we can be rid of such monsters.

But are they monsters or do they represent something gone wrong in our society?

This is not for one minute to condone any of this behaviour.

But to lock them away forevermore is harsh punishment indeed.

Which brings me back to the beginning, the harsh punishments we mete out to those who’ve done wrong.

How tempting it is to throw stones and at the same time duck for cover.

For the question always follows, which one of us is without sin?

On women: ready, willing and able

When I think of the word woman, I think of bosoms. A word I found difficult to say out loud because of its salacious quality, as if the very word bosom was as unspeakable as any idea I might have had of sex. 

And then I think of the word cunt, a word I also find difficult to say out loud. A word I might find less disturbing when it’s said by a woman but when I hear a man use this word, and men tend to use it in anger or as a form of denigration, I feel troubled but in a different way from when I was a child. 

When I was a child the word bosom had an exciting quality. As much as it set my heart racing, it also felt pleasurable. I practised saying it whenever I sang out loud the words to ‘The Lonely Ashgrove’. 

A song about a man who has lost his beloved and wanders down by the ash grove in search of solace.

‘in sorrow deep sorrow, my bosom is laden, all day I go searching in search of my love. 

Ye echoes oh tell me where lies the sweet maiden? 

She sleeps ‘neath the green turf down by the ash grove.’

The word cunt, on the other hand, speaks to me of sexual violence, which is the other association I make to the word woman. I heard it first when I was at university, and someone told me it was the worst word in the English language, far worse than fuck. 

So why is the slang for vagina such a powerful and unacceptable word?

Sure, the collection of letters offer the satisfaction that comes out of uttering certain letters together, the emphasis on the ..unt, beginning with that hard ‘c’, and then something else, the hidden and secret nature of vaginas, the part of women’s body that cops such bad press these days. 

I didn’t consciously realise I had one until I hit my early teens when talk of periods first entered my life experience. It was all tied up with the making of babies, the vagina as that tunnel, or so my older sister told me when I was fourteen, the route up which the man put his thing, the thing I could not even name when I was still more a child than an adolescent because it felt so dangerous. 

‘Yuk’, I said when my older sister told me the facts of life, just as my father had told her when she sat on his lap on a Saturday morning when our mother was away at work. 

I walked up the hall way from the kitchen to my bedroom and there was my father in his usual chair and my sister curled up on his lap. He is whispering things into her ear. 

If this was the lot of women I thought then, I did not want a bar of it and more so when my sister decided she needed to tell me the facts so that my father did not get to me with them first. 

Our father told my sister he said, because he wanted to prepare her body for a man. Our mother he told my sister was too much of an innocent. She knew nothing about sex when they married twenty years earlier and he had to teach her everything. 

They did not teach us about vaginas at school. The only thing they taught us about being a woman at school was to do with the need to maintain our purity and help the man control his impulses over which he had no control. 

You’ve no doubt heard all of this before. Stock standard for the education of young Catholic women in the nineteen fifties and sixties. Hold onto your passion and your desire. 

And so, I learned to hold onto my passion and desires for many a year. 

Made worse by the fact that my father used to visit our bedroom at night when all the lights were out. His visits were so regular I learned to wait for them, to anticipate them and to brace myself for his arrival. 

In those days I shared a room with my older sister and our beds ran side by side with a narrow corridor in between. My father padded along this corridor and turned to face my sister, this then was my cue to turn and face the wall. To face the wall and hold every fibre of my body tight so that he might not notice me, he’d think I was asleep and therefore leave me alone. 

Which he did, night after night. I heard the rustle of blankets the slip slide of hands on bodies the muted muffles of my father’s breathing and the occasional sigh from my sister. 

I never imagined it to be a sigh of pleasure. Instead I heard it as a sigh of duty. 

In the mornings she climbed out our bedroom window early to go off to mass and from this I imagined she was escaping any further visits that night.  

This then was the lot of women, I decided as I anticipated my own future. To be ready willing and able and if not to escape into the dark.

She who once thought these thoughts.