Image: Boys State (2020) A24 Films.
Our opponents studied at places with one-word names. Hale, a synonym for strength. Scotch, like the drink. Wesley, for a colonial preacher who believed in ‘Christian perfection’. Their shoulders were yet to grow into the hopeful scaffolding of their blazers. But their vocabularies aped the promise of their school’s Latin crests. On Wednesday nights in 90s Perth, high-school debates unfolded in classrooms made unlovely by fluoro lighting, nubbly carpet, the regulation-beige desks that I’ll forever associate with adolescence. It didn’t matter. These boys commanded these spaces like they were auditoriums. Government chambers. Courtrooms. In their minds, they probably were.
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When I was on my high-school debating team, my favourite role was second speaker. If you spoke first, you were lumbered with tasks like introducing your teammates and defining the topic. If you went third, your job was simply rebuttal. If you were third on the negative side, you were even banned from introducing new matter. But if you were second, you could poke holes in the opposition’s logic before mounting an argument of your own.
Back in 1998, I stood across from the boys in blazers and argued that voluntary euthanasia should be legalised, that we shouldn’t reintroduce the death penalty, that public figures had a right to privacy with the earnest zeal of a suburban fifteen-year-old.
These boys commanded these spaces like they were auditoriums. Government chambers. Courtrooms. In their minds, they probably were.
The boys in blazers would snicker or jostle each other under their desks. They would drop their palm cards, an elaborate ruse designed to intimidate. The back of my neck would grow hot as their eyes bore into me.
But I was second speaker! I could argue that the sick deserved basic dignity, that you couldn’t separate capital punishment from racial prejudice, that surveillance infringed basic liberties.
I could make points of escalating importance. I could smile calmly at the audience and pitch my voice towards the adjudicator. I could prove that I belonged there as much as them.
*
‘Man is the measure of all things’ and ‘There are two sides to every question’; two of the best-known statements conceived by the ‘father of debate’, a Greek rhetorical theorist called Protagoras of Abdera. Protagoras worked as a sophist, teaching upper-class youth how to speak well in public, how to bend language to their will to win court cases. It is from here we get the word sophisticated.
The Ancient Greeks considered the act of debating, the ability to voice your position publicly, central to democracy. But the origin of debating is inseparable from the evolution of public space. In Athens, the agora, or town square, was designed expressly for men to gather together, exchange ideas, persuade other people of their point of view.
‘So, to engage in civil discourse is to be part of a “speaking city”’, writes the Greek academic Panayiotis Kanelos in a 2019 essay. The model for the speaking city, he writes, is Athens, ‘the origin point of democratic governance.’ He doesn’t mention that women in ancient Athens, noticeably absent from the agora, weren’t considered citizens then.
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In her 2011 essay ‘Aftermath’, Rachel Cusk attributes the breakdown of her marriage to the role reversal that characterised her relationship.
‘Call yourself a feminist, my husband would say to me, disgustedly, in the raw bitter weeks after we separated,’ she writes. ‘He believed he had taken the part of the woman in our marriage and seemed to expect him to defend me against myself, the male oppressor. He felt it was womanly to shop and cook, to collect the children from school.’
Cusk’s feminist trajectory meant becoming the family breadwinner. But she fears that by commanding spaces her mother had never occupied, she inherited male values along with a revulsion of her husband’s femininity.
I read Cusk and think about the pride I used to take in my rebuttals, about the times I’ve tried to emulate the combativeness of men I’ve worked for to prove that I could be trusted. That I could push my feelings to the side to be a worthy leader.
All the times as a young woman, that I’ve tried to shrug on male power, a blazer too wide in the shoulders, on the off chance that I’d grow into it one day.
All the times as a young woman, that I’ve tried to shrug on male power, a blazer too wide in the shoulders, on the off chance that I’d grow into it one day.
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Bookish teenagers with poor ball skills love high-school debating. I was no exception—convinced, for a hot minute, that I may one day become a lawyer. The art of debate ‘involves mastering skills of obvious intrinsic value: the confidence to speak in public and make sense; the construction of a logical argument; the ability to read an audience’s reactions,’ writes Alex Clark, in an August 2016 article for The Guardian, ‘Why debating still matters.’ Put another way, it can also teach you how to prioritise reason over empathy, present your perspective as objective reality, treat language as a storehouse of weapons, aimed to deter, discredit and devalue other positions. Rhetoric, I discovered wasn’t always about believing what you argued. As hollow as this left me, winning a debate, I learnt from our opponents, was less about voicing your own reality than it was about convincing the people who were listening that the reality you were describing was true.
No wonder debating is perceived as a training ground for a career in law or media or politics. Malcolm Turnbull was a high-school debating champion in the early 70s. He beat the ACT in a national competition, according to his opponent Steve Kilbey who wrote about it for The Sydney Morning Herald, in a ‘bullying whirlwind of Latinate adjectives and melodramatic gestures.’ On the debating team at Queensland’s Nambour High, Kevin Rudd was especially eloquent on matters of social justice. There has been much reporting in recent months around the school debating career of Australia’s former attorney-general, who made the WA state team in 1986 and 1987.
Winning a debate was less about voicing your own reality than it was about convincing the people who were listening that the reality you were describing was true.
In the acclaimed 2020 documentary Boys State, a group of 16 and 17-year-old boys from Texas high schools assemble a mock government, part of a week-long annual program organised by the American Legion. One of the documentary’s subjects is Ben Feinstein, a Reagan-obsessed conservative who says that when society focuses on factors like ‘race or gender or disability’ rather than ‘individual failings’ it’s a ‘bad thing for this nation.’ His rival is Steve Garza, the son of an undocumented Mexican immigrant whose dream of a more inclusive America shines through in the warmth of his public-speaking style. The gun-loving candidate Robert MacDougall lies about his stance on abortion, which is more progressive than the conservative voters he’s attempting to persuade, a rhetorical trick I remember. “I’m playing this like a game,” he deadpans, his chilly masculinity recalling my debating opponents, who had already internalised, as 15-year-olds, that the appearance of sincerity is more politically valuable than actual sincerity. It’s not hard to guess who wins.
‘[The] idea of prejudice within debate is key throughout history: for arguments to be properly heard, one has first to accept that all have the right to make them, and to believe in a commonality of capability, capacity and sensibility,’ Clark writes.
Since my days as a high-school debater, I’ve been trailed by men in cars. I’ve been trolled by a millionaire entrepreneur who didn’t like something I’d written. Once, a man in the audience at a panel advised everyone present they should dismiss what I was arguing and read another man older and whiter than me. To speak and to be heard—the promise of the Greek agora! But again and again, I realise that public space doesn’t belong to me, not really. It was designed to corroborate the authority of those who built it first.
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Lately I find myself thinking about Judith Beheading Holofernes, a 1620 painting by the great Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi. The daughter of Orazio Gentileschi, a famous artist who was friends with Caravaggio, Artemisia honed her talent in private. The streets of Rome were closed to her, as they were to middle-class women of her era. But in an irony many women still recognise today, she was raped by her mentor, the middling painter Agostino Tassi, in her family home. Gentileschi was questioned under physical torture during the trial, in order to prove the truthfulness of her testimony. Semi-illiterate, she couldn’t write down what she experienced.
Again and again, I realise that public space doesn’t belong to me, not really. It was designed to corroborate the authority of those who built it first.
She speaks instead through Judith Beheading Holofernes. In the painting Judith, a Jewish widow from the Old Testament, puts a dagger through the neck of Holofernes, an Assyrian general who had been sent to invade her city.
Judith’s brows are ever-so-slightly furrowed, her lips pursed in concentration. Chiaroscuro, a painterly interplay of light and shadow, has left half her face in the dark, a swathe of herself inaccessible to the attacker and to us, the hungry viewers, desperate for grisly details. Over the last few months, the news cycle has become a beast that grows bigger the more stories it swallows. All we know is that Gentileschi’s rage—familiar to so many survivors, newly fuelled by determination and fury —has been galvanised into something a lot closer to pure intent.
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Often, our desire to speak and be heard is intertwined in our relationship to physical spaces. When we want more power, we ask for a ‘seat at the table.’ The women we tend to listen to are those lucky enough to have ‘a platform.’ We know the story of Gentileschi, that her work was overlooked, that she was a survivor of serious injustice, because from last October to January, her paintings hung together for the first time in London’s National Gallery. When I was second speaker, back in high school, I understood that to speak and be heard by the boys in blazers was training ground for the likelihood that I could speak and be heard in the world.
‘There are endless options for creating alternative spaces,’ writes the geographer Leslie Kern in her 2020 book Feminist City: Claiming Space in a Man-Made World. ‘There are little feminist cities sprouting up in neighbourhoods all over the place, if we can only learn to recognize and nurture them. The feminist city is an aspirational project, one without a “master” plan that in fact resists the lure of mastery. The feminist city is an ongoing experiment in living differently, living better, and living more justly.’
What could an agora be if we’d always belonged to it? How can we raze it to the ground and build it again?
Boys State is available on Apple TV+.
