'Almost two decades have passed since Helen Garner published The First Stone (1995), her controversial account of a sexual harassment case at Melbourne University’s Ormond College. Revisiting the book, even from this relatively safe distance, one can still appreciate why it caused such an uproar. It is spiked with incendiary and judgemental language. Garner writes of a generation of younger feminists ‘consumed by rage and fear’. They have an ‘unmodulated vision of the human things we’ – that is, Garner’s generation of feminists – ‘have learned to respect.’ She condemns the ‘cold-faced, punitive girls’ who adopt a ‘certain kind of modern feminism: priggish, disingenuous, unforgiving’. They are ‘puritan feminists’, ‘saboteurs’, ‘ideologues’, ‘thought police’. They display a ‘disproportionate ferocity’. When someone tells a story about the Prime Minister condescendingly touching a woman’s forearm during conversation and someone else exclaims ‘How sexist!’, Garner feels ‘a bomb of fury and disgust go off inside my head’.' (Introduction)
