A moment of silence

On December 6, 1989, 14 women were killed at the École Polytechnique in Montréal. They were killed for being women; the gunman singled out women, and claimed he "hated feminists".

It's been almost twenty years. Are women still being killed for being women?

Take a moment to remember these 14 women. Then take a moment to do something to stop this from happening again, to any woman.

Geneviè Bergeron
Hélène Colgan
Nathalie Croteau
Barbara Daigneault
Anne-Marie Edward
Maud Haviernick
Maryse Laganière
Maryse Leclair
Anne-Marie Lemay
Sonia Pelletier
Michèle Richard
Annie St-Arneault
Annie Turcotte
Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz

On heroism and feminism

I'm not completely sure what Dave Brown's point is in this recent column. I'm not sure he knows, either, except that the world's gone to hell in a handbasket and it's somehow all those awful feminists' fault. His profile proudly describes him as a 'contrarian,' which, at least in this case, can be defined as "curmudgeon who thinks the world really was exactly like Leave it to Beaver".

At the top of their list of things a man must do was the protection issue. It used to be an obligation of the strong to protect the weak.

This is the basic argument of the article. In "the good old days", men were strong and women were weak, and men were praised and rewarded and given "backpats" for protecting those weak and helpless women from other men.

Now, Mr. Brown is astonished to learn, the authorities encourage people to, er, call the authorities when they see something untoward happen. And to intervene only if they have the appropriate training to do so safely.

I'm having a hard time understanding why this is a bad idea. Does Mr. Brown really think that the world would be a better place if we all -- or rather, all men -- tried to be untrained vigilantes? How many more people would be hurt or killed than if we just let the experts handle the situation?

Now, what Israel Grant Carver did was a very courageous thing: he tried to help another person. I'm sure this is an entirely inadequate "backpat," but I wish more people -- both men and women -- had the courage to intervene when they see someone being attacked...even if their intervention is nothing more than a call to 911. I'd much rather see an assaulter put in prison or otherwise removed from his victim than beaten up -- so that he has one more reason to take out his anger on the victim.

In Mr. Brown's view, this attitude is just a pernicious outgrowth of feminism. "The fishes have come home to roost," he crows -- women, apparently, should just expect to be beaten up now that we're no longer encouraging white knights to rescue us. Or something. The women in the Carver case went on to marry her attacker, so clearly she didn't deserve to be the beneficiary of manly heroism.

And then it turns out that this isn't really about Israel Grant Carver and his lack of recognition at all:

Without fear of being branded cowards, they don't have to face bullies, hijackers or nutbars on buses.

That's what this was really all about. The Greyhound bus incident. Those wimpy, embarrassing men who kept the attacker inside the bus and prevented him from harming anyone else rather than launching heroic charges to try to save a man who was already dead.

Why thank you for liberating me from my repression

I'm late to the party on this one, which has already exploded all over the fannish 'net, but I can't let it go by without adding my own (albeit fairly redundant) $0.02.

The Open Source Boob Project, they called it.

Ostensibly, it was an experiment in sexual liberation.

The problem with sexual liberation is that, oddly enough, it so often seems to become men's liberation to objectify women. Theoretically, we're all supposed to be free to express our sexual desires without shame, without feeling dirty. But all too often it starts to feel like an excuse for men to tell women who don't want to take off their shirts or have their breasts groped or have sex with person x y or z that they're "repressed" and that their inhibitions are unreasonable. Women are the objects for the sexually liberated subjects (men) to admire and to use. And that's just unacceptable.

Look, I'm just as much in favour of a utopian orgy world as the next person. But I happen to live in this world. And in this world, we're not all starting from the same place when it comes to control of our bodies. Women live in an entirely justifiable state of fear that they're going to be attacked simply because they have women's bodies. And when we're not worrying about rape, we're worrying about how to make our bodies fit the desireable ideal. We struggle to be attractive without "asking for it". Every decision we make about our appearance and our bodies is made in this context.

If this all sounds rather fraught, well, it is. So you can see why someone asking to grope a woman's breasts isn't just a harmless question. Whether it's respectfully asked or not, whether it's all in good clean fun or not, it's going to make some women uncomfortable. Because they live in the real world where questions about a woman's body's availability are not, by default, good clean fun.

If you're with a group of friends, and you all want to feel each other up, have at it. But for crying out loud, don't do it in public, don't involve strangers, and don't make it a "project" to be expanded to the world at large. Because the world at large already has plenty of unpleasant ideas about what to do with women's bodies and their breasts.

There's been a lot written about this, much of substantially more eloquent than my own semi-incoherent sputtering:

• A link roundup at journalfen
• Kate Nepevu's very eloquent response
• Tamora Pierce's also very eloquent response
• Your cousin Vito proposes some actual action: the Open Source Women Back Each Other Up Program
• Karen Healy at Girl Wonder weighs in

Hostile Environment

It's an ongoing struggle to get more young women to enter traditionally male fields. Engineering is certainly one of those fields that is heavily male-dominated. Sometimes people argue that it's just that women aren't as interested in these areas of study. But when stories like this hit the news, I find it more remarkable that any women are brave enough to puruse an engineering degree in the first place.

It's kind of a textbook example of a hostile environment. The engineering students' society's newspaper, the Oral Otis, published a mock sex-advice column* which included some pretty nasty language. (Full disclosure: I haven't actually read the column in question, and it seems to have been pulled from their web site.) People complain. The vice-president of social affairs for the Engineering Students Society, Rob Arntfield, admits that it's sexual harrassment, but says that's okay, because sometimes people say engineers can't get dates.

No, seriously. That's what he said. To the media:

"For myself, personally, I think some of the content in the paper is meant to be humorous," he said. He added that engineers "have taken a lot of flak for being engineers," and are often the subject of jokes about engineers rarely touching women or getting laid.

"I believe that when we take this sort of thing in stride and that sexual harassment, if we dish out a little bit of our own, who's to say who's more right?"

That little quote was on the news yesterday morning.

I have to give some (mild) props to the paper's editor, Zacharie Brunet, who did give a radio interview this morning accepting responsibility and acknowledging that the column was inappropriate. His excuse was that he was really busy so he only edited the article enough to take out the really bad bits (so what was left in was presumably only moderately bad). But at least he took some responsiblity. And indicated that steps were being taken to prevent it from happening again.

The VP-Social hasn't corrected himself, as far as I know. It would appear his position is still that sexual harrassment is okay, and that it's just like getting teased for datelesness.

When young men think sexual harrassment is perfectly okay as long as you claim you were trying to be funny, is it any wonder that women would rather study something else?

This is what we're up against.

It's also why we need to encourage women to get into these fields. Not just because women should be able to do whatever they want (although, obviously, they should), but because we need a critical mass of women to prevent the boys'-club mentality that allows this kind of behaviour to flourish.


* incidentally, why do student newspapers insist on publishing these? They're pretty much never funny or clever; and yet they're forever getting written and published.

Violence against women isn't cultural

One of the things that's so distressing about the death of Aqsa Parvez (and there's plenty to be distressed about) is the way it's being interpreted in the media. Reading the stories, listening to the radio, you'd think this was all about culture -- speficially, Muslim/immigrant/'other' culture.

It's not. This is about violence and control.

Muhammed Parvez didn't kill his daughter because she wouldn't wear a hijab; he killed her because, for whatever reason, he felt he could. That's not a characteristic of Muslim culture. That's a characteristic of all patriarchies. There are plenty of white, 'western' men who've killed or hurt women because they felt they could.

It would be nice to talk about the fact that Aqsa felt threatened by her family, that she said she was being beaten, that she had to flee her home more than once. It would be nice to talk about the background and how we can stop this from happening again.

Instead, all the stories lead with this idea of a cultural clash.

This isn't about a hijab. This is about patriarchy and violence.

Children raping children

I can imagine few things as horrifying and disturbing as this story, in which an 11-year-old girl accuses three boys, aged eight and nine, of rape.

It's disturbing on so many levels. They're so young, all of them. It's hard to conceive of children that age being the perpetrators of a rape. At that age, how can they even imagine it? Who's sexualized those boys to the extent that they would even think to link sex and violence like this? How can we possibly consider charging eight and nine-year-olds as adults for something like this? Why can't we find whoever hurt them or whoever taught them that this was a thing to do, and charge them instead?

But I think what disturbs me most is to read that the boys' defense -- at least as portrayed in this story -- is that the sexual activity was consensual. How is it possible that an 11-year-old girl could consent to sex? How have we gotten to this state, as a society, that we take a case like this, and think "well, she just didn't want to get in trouble with her parents, so she made up the part about the rock"?

Some days, I just want to give up on our society altogether.

Murder is murder

We tend, as a society (maybe as a species), to view crimes as particularly terrible when committed against certain kinds of people -- usually those we perceive as vulnerable* or (perhaps more to the point) 'innocent'.

For example, murder is pretty universally agreed to be a Bad Thing. Murdering a man is bad, but murdering a 'helpless' woman is worse. Murdering the elderly is worse yet, and murdering a child is beyond the pale.

These are emotional evaluations, of course. There's no cold, logical reason why some kinds of murder should seem worse than others** -- but then, the human species is not, typically, cold and logical.

So it's not really surprising that the murder of a pregnant woman should cause some strong emotional reactions. And one of the ways this emotion seems to express itself is through the call for charging the perpetrator with two murders -- the woman's and the "unborn baby's".

I understand the impulse, especially when it's late in the pregnancy, especially when it was a wanted pregnancy, especially on the part of the family (who are, after all, mourning not only the woman they love, but also the potential future family they'd been expecting and preparing to welcome). But this is an impulse that must absolutely not be codified into law.

The problem is, as soon as you create a crime called 'fetal murder', you open the door to all kinds of issues. As outlined in this National Post article:

"If we take the position that the fetus is a separate person at viability, then we open up all sorts of issues. All of a sudden, the woman is two separate persons," said Martha Shaffer, an associate law professor at the University of Toronto who specializes in family and criminal law. "Her liberty and autonomy can be greatly curtailed in the interests of the fetus within her.

"If she's doing something that somebody decides to be contrary to the fetus's interests -- which could be eating too much sugar, exercising too hard, smoking or drinking -- it's very dangerous to go down that route to say a woman is no longer a separate, independent person at a certain stage of pregnancy.

In other words, a woman who miscarries after doing something her in-laws don't approve of could find herself in serious trouble.

That's not even touching the abortion issue, which is, of course, very much a part of the debate. It may not be what Aysun Sesen's parents are thinking when they say they want double murder charges, but you can bet it's what the political activists who have picked up this cause are thinking about.

Ultimately, I don't think the problem is that we attach insufficient value to fetuses.

IMNSHO, I think the problem is that we attach insufficient value to living, breathing, human beings. We need to value women for themselves, and acknowledge that the murder of a woman is terrible because it ends a woman's life, not only because it happens to end a pregnancy as well.

On that note, it was nice to see the Globe and Mail taking a slightly different tack on the case and at least touching on the issue of violence against women instead of so-called fetal rights.


*Although certainly not always -- crimes against the socially marginalized being Counter-Example A.
** I suppose you could construct an argument about the loss of a child's potential, but it's hard to claim logically that murder is a crime against future potential weighted by life expentancy, rather than a crime against the actual person in question.

Hope for the human race yet

An update to my previous post:

Discharge refused in soldier's sex-assault conviction

Judge Carol St.-Cyr of Quebec Court yesterday refused to grant Private Pier-Olivier Boulet an absolute discharge. The judge said the soldier may have had a promising career in uniform, but giving him a court discharge would have rendered his crime "banal."

Thank you, Judge St.-Cyr.

A Very Good Soldier

From the annals of "news articles that really tick me off".

"Should convict serve time or country?"

That the Globe and Mail thinks this is even a question is repulsive. If someone's convicted of a crime, we generally assume they ought to go to jail (or whatever other legal remedies are deemed appropriate, of course).

Why is this case any different?

Because it's a rape case. And, apparently, rape is something we might consider excusing if the perpetrator is a 'nice boy'.

The whole article makes me really angry. It clearly works from the assumption that the victim is "crying rape" and that the perpetrator -- the convicted perpetrator, let me add -- has just been caught up in this case through no fault of his own.

She was so drunk she couldn't stand on her own.

She let him into her room because she thought of him as a friend.

They didn't "have sexual relations". He raped her. He raped a drunk 18-year-old who trusted him.

And yet the article pretends there's any question about whether he should serve time.

The whole thing makes me want to scream.

Can't live without me

I was greeted this morning by the news of two murder-suicides: one involving a pro wrestler, and one in Toronto. Not really how I prefer to wake up in the morning.

In both cases, although all the facts are not in, it seems the men involved killed their female partners, and other members of the family (a child in one case; the woman's mother in the other). Steroids are being mentionned as a possible contributing factor in the wrestler's case; in the other, the only explanation so far proferred is that the man recently lost his job.

There's something particularly horrifying about this kind of murder-suicide. Of course every case is unique, and we really don't know what happened yet, but it reads to me like the logical outcome of a viewpoint that makes women appendages to the men in their lives. So depressed or crazy you want to kill yourself? Better kill her, too. After all, she's a part of you. She shouldn't be able to live without you. You'll be together forever...