I want my share

Years ago, Barbara Johns, a woman who taught my children public speaking, addressed an audience of parents and children about the art of speaking out loud to groups of people.

The words that stayed with me from that evening where we all sat together in the local scout hall, keen to hear more about how best we could help our children to become confident young people, and able to command an audience,

‘When you get up to speak in public, your audience is on your side.’

Your audience wants you to do well, Barbara Johns told us.

Your audience is keen to hear from you, and especially to hear that you have something meaningful or entertaining or compelling to tell them, something, whatever it might be.

Your audience suffers with you if you’re too anxious or if you lose your train of thought.

Your audience is your friend.

This idea appealed to me. It suited me to imagine then that if I was to get up to speak my audience would back me.

I’ve since discovered that’s not always the case and that audiences by and large might want the speaker to do well but audiences consist of individuals and people are not homogenous in their desires to see you do well.

There are those who might object to something you’re saying, those who might want to silence you – out of disgust, or rage, or even out of envy, or resentment that you’re the one out there in front and not them.

Your audience, or at least some members of your audience might dislike you for political or personal reasons and resist what you’re saying.

I wish I could hold more steadfastly to Barbara John’s notion that our audience is on our side because whenever I imagine my audience in my head, I’m aware of a much more hostile audience, one that’s ready to bring me down.

Why is this so?

Perhaps it has something to do with the position I hold in my family of origin. Something about being a middle-born child and a female to boot.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fierce competitiveness I’ve long detected among my siblings, each of us striving to outdo one another, even the youngest pitched in competition against the oldest.

The age differences and chronology don’t apply so much these days when we’re all over five decades old and my oldest brother is in his mid-seventies and my younger brother nearly sixty.

But still something of the flavour of those childhood years remain and for me in the middle, my memories of feeling inadequate when pitched against my older sister remains intact.

When I hear my older grandson rebuke my younger grandson for being stupid, I tell him to desist.

‘Don’t tell people they’re stupid.’

They‘re very likely to believe you.

Siblings have a way of competing that no others hold. It’s a competition for parental love most likely.

In my family, there was always this sense that my mother preferred the boys to begin with and most notably her first born son. And then she was also keen on the youngest, my baby brother, but by the time he had arrived there was not as much energy available and she left his upbringing largely in the care of my older sister.

And me, as I grew older.

My family was my first audience, my parents in the front row and they have not been the appreciative audience I’d have liked, though there have been moments when it seemed there was more to go around, when each of us might take turns to speak and when a sense of fairness prevailed. But not often. and not for long.

Too many children and not enough parents. Not enough interest to go around. And so I must create my own. 

Content Warning

It’s cropped up before.

I went to give a talk on autobiography at La Trobe university a few years ago and spent some time rehearsing with my daughter, who warned me I needed to offer trigger warnings to the students before speaking about my encounters with a paedophile in the park or about my experience of my father stalking the house at night in search of sexual comfort with his daughters.

It puzzled me then. It puzzles me less now, only I have trouble knowing when I need to introduce such warnings. Maybe it’s best to do so most of the time, if not simply as a warning to people who might be triggered, but more as a way of protecting myself from the criticisms that follow. Namely that I have added to someone’s load of trauma in speaking about my own experience.

It’s a troubling one. The place today where – over forty years ago I encountered a paedophile.

We’re urged to tell our stories and at the same time to find ways of talking about them that do not stream into the consciousness of another and stir up their memories of hideous experience. A visceral sensation that runs through their veins, as if it’s all happening again. Like a flash back.

At my other writing group last week, we workshopped a piece about my time as a university student when the then renowned Delys Sargeant took us for Social biology, a subject requirement of the social work course.

A few years later she ran a week-long workshop on sex. I was drawn to it like an animal to a water hole in drought, out of curiosity, not because I needed to know about the mechanics of sex – I was twenty-three years old by then and sexually active – but because I wanted to get a deeper understanding of the things behind sex, the stuff about desire.

I won’t repeat the story here other than to say my writing friends in the group were struck by the absence of specificity and detail about what it was like to live through those days of so-called sexual liberation, during the fading glory of the hippy era.

One woman suggested I do a poll within my online writing circles to help ‘jog my memory’.  So, I put up a post within a closed group telling people that I was writing memoir and had been thinking of some of the misogynistic expressions used in my day, the 1970s and 1980s, and how much we then took them for granted.

I asked if others had thoughts about such aphorisms and included two, one an expression used in relation to a woman who had not yet formed a relationship with a man: ‘She needs a good hosing out’.  And the other:‘Turn women upside down, and they all look the same.’

Comments and quotes from other women writers came in thick and fast with other examples. Some protested at the very post itself. That it was distressing to read these words. In the end the moderator, in her wisdom, took the post down because it had been triggering to some who had already been traumatised.

I can understand this, though a pattern emerges for me. One in which I find myself speaking about my experience and many people resonate, while a few others are distressed to the point, they ask me to stop, and then I become unsettled.

Like I’m back at school and have been caught out doing something bad, stealing from someone’s locker. Not that I ever did anything like this though in my primary years I shop lifted lollies from the milk bar and maybe that’s a better analogy.

I begin to feel as though I’ve been caught doing something bad even as I’m talking about the things that people said, not did, thirty, forty years ago, most typically men when I took such comments as givens.

There is a notion in psychoanalysis called après coup, or in German Nachtraglichkeit, meaning ‘afterwardness’, the notion that something can happen to you in childhood or adolescence, at a time when you have not fully grasped the significance of sexuality. For instance, your father can look at your body as you begin to develop breasts and a fuller body, with a particular expression and it means little to you though you register it and you feel uncomfortable. It’s only later in adulthood when something else happens, when someone approaches you in a sexual way and the memory flashes back to you, the leer on your father’s face. In childhood you could not receive or understand the message but in adulthood it makes more sense because by now you know about sex, and you’ve been on the receiving end of men’s sexual desire. Now it can seem all wrong, the thing that happened to you years ago, which you then slid into the box of forgettable events only to have it rear up again triggered by another event or words. Your body feels the effects even when at the time your mind could not comprehend.

So, it has been for me in recent years when my memories of the many aphorisms that men, even good friends, trotted out regularly throughout my teens and early adulthood, even into my thirties, expressions which I now recognise as objectifying and misogynistic.

‘She’s as dry as a nun’s nasty’. Dated now but still in my mind an expression that insults women who, for whatever reason, elect to keep themselves chaste.  And that is somehow seen to be depriving of the men who might lust after such women.

Writing this, the same shudder sweeps over me. Is it okay to be saying these things? These expressions from the past that were once commonplace, and these days are recognised as ‘rape talk’ and part of a culture that feeds the idea that sexual violence and predation is okay.

Perhaps that’s the essence of my struggle.

In raising the spectre of these memories. In writing the words that rattle around in my consciousness and memory like so many loose marbles, I stir up disturbance for people from more recent generations, including my own daughter, who sees things differently. Who recognise misogyny when they see it and call it out.

I’m too late to call it out now after thirty years even as it only now dawns on me, weighed down with the burden of decades of experience in which what was once considered normal is now recognised as anything but.

These things are commonplace and apply in lots of instances. People no longer talk about belting their children for misbehaviour like they might once have done, but men are still killing their women, at least one a week in Australia and still certain attitudes prevail that a man’s wounded pride or hurt feelings are enough to warrant the brutal murder of the woman who has offended him.

To imagine that I’m tarred with the same brush for speaking about the way it was in those days when we did not keep records of how many men killed their women because it was considered an unfortunate incident of domestic violence that couldn’t be stopped, is distressing.

These things can be stopped but only if we talk about them. But how do we talk about them without people feeling we’re doing the very thing they rail against?

Give a content warning, my daughter advises.

In future, I’ll try to remember.