I just can’t think of a better way to celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day than with this:
“Help Us Lay This Burden Down”
Reply
Feminism and “The F-Word”
My response to CBC’s documentary “The F-Word: Who Wants to Be a Feminist?” is up at rabble.ca. Here’s a bit:
One of the framing questions asked by the film is “where did feminism go wrong?” In getting to the answer the film outlined some of the goals and objectives of “second wave” feminism. But if this means the status quo is represented as the answer to the question of where feminism went wrong, the answer will focus only on the shortcomings of the second wave.
There would be something to be grateful for here, too, if the documentary makers had focussed on those “failures” in their socio-economic and political context. The pressures of neoliberalism over the last two decades have led to the marginalization of many liberation movements, feminism is just one of them. The critical issue for contemporary movements is to understand how that happened and, of course, that means critical analysis of the goals and strategies of the movements themselves.
But the exclusion of this type of context in the documentary rendered it inaccurate, unhelpful and defeatist.
Did the doc at least get its history of the Canadian second wave right? Absolutely not.
Check it out here.
And Judy Rebick!
In 1911, the first International Women’s Day marches were held across Europe. A few days later on March 25, 146 immigrant women were killed in the Triangle Factory firebecause the bosses locked the doors from the outside. Russian socialist Alexander Kollentai proposed that the next year IWD would honour these women and the theme of IWD became bread and roses and the date March 8.
At the time, most women workers in Canada were domestic or textile workers. As soon as they got married or pregnant they were fired. They made up to 80% less than men for the same job. So the demand for bread was obvious.
As the song Bread and Roses, which has become an anthem of the women’s movement says, “Hearts starve as well as bodies, give us bread but give us roses.” The rose is a powerful symbol of the female and of love. That symbol comes not only from its beauty but also from its tenacity. The rose bushes in my garden still have leaves on them in early winter and they bloom almost until the frost.
The rest is here.
Give Yourself a Slap Upside the Head Canada
UPDATED Below
In these days of action for democracy in Egypt, Canada once again finds itself on the wrong side of humanity’s hope for freedom, thanks to His Harperness’ failure to condemn the brutal totalitarian regime of Hosni Mubarak. In that context, I hope everyone watches this:
UPDATE:
And just to clarify that the bone I’m picking is with the state of Israel and not all of Israel’s people, watch this too:
Grieve Christina with Care
Christina Taylor Greene, born at 12:50 p.m. on September 11, 2001; died at 10:10 a.m. on January 8, 2011.
Dear Christina,
I wanted to talk to you before you become a face on plastic amulets in our convenience stores, before the struggle over the meaning of your birth, life and death becomes a fight over political territory. I know I am appropriating your birth and death for myself. I do it with good intentions and in the hope that it would make you happy.
You were born in a moment of your nation’s despair, hatred, fear and rage. You knew none of that but you, as all of us, have lived in its grip for your whole life. It sounds as though your family didn’t let it hold you too hard. You were life for them when their country-people focussed on death. You were beauty and innocence and, little doubt, hope. Someone even put your face in a book called Faces of Hope, so you became a symbol for a larger circle of people than those who knew you and nurtured you.
That circle has failed you, Christina. Perhaps against our own wills we allowed your birth and the nourishment of your young life to be overtaken by our own selfish wishes for revenge, our desire to take back our own innocence by force, by our anger and rage and childishness. We moved from the terrible day of your birth too quickly, forgetting to mourn, forgetting what mourning means. We stayed in our rage and bitterness too long and polluted your environment so that it could no longer sustain you. We are famous for making this kind of mistake.
In the time since you were born we have killed many children like you. We thought we were doing that to protect you, so that you could grow up whole and strong and give us those gifts I see in your eyes. We forgot how easily and quickly we could destroy those gifts if we didn’t prepare ourselves to accept them.
We grew scabs over the pain caused us on the day of your birth. But they were scabs made of fear and a need for retribution and they allowed poisons to fester beneath them. We allowed our wounds to become fuel for violence. We have spent years spitting at each other. For all that I am against war and for peace, people have felt my spit on their faces too, I have been in such a rage about the killing. I know I am part of what killed you.
Yesterday, you went to hear and see Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords because you were interested in the workings of government and your curiosity caused a neighbour to invite you to meet her. Your interest, your neighbour’s interest in you, these are such good things. But we didn’t give you a good or safe place to explore your interests and curiosities. We gave you adults shouting inanities back and forth. We gave you insulting and hurtful and painful chatter. We made fun of people who called the rhetoric hurtful and insulting. We gave you words as weapons and vehicles to carry the poison of those festering injuries we sustained back on the day you were born. And long before that.
I’m not a romantic or an idealist, Christina. It’s become very difficult to say the words “all you need is love” and be taken seriously. Perhaps because we have never really understood what we meant when we said those words. Maybe we thought those words just meant “don’t worry, be happy”. Though even that is hardly a bad thing.
We seem to have forgotten that wise women and men (and children) have pondered the meaning of those words for centuries and only understood them fleetingly and through a dark glass. We don’t think those words are “useful” in “real” life which is harsh and hard and technical and practical and scientific and rational and emotionless. Many people sneer at those words, Christina, and think they are nice enough in a song but of no useful significance. Others think they can use them in their churches and synagogues and mosques and decide what they mean in those limited places and forget what it means to bring them out into the world – the real world that often doesn’t look as though it was made for love but was.
I’ve had a bad year myself, Christina. I watched a livestream of some very vengeful men hurting some peace-loving, gift-bearing people on a ship bound for a place called Gaza and it affected me profoundly even though I wasn’t quite sure how. I watched a bunch of vengeful men, and probably some women, intimidate, corral, beat and imprison some friends of mine in Toronto and it affected me profoundly even though I wasn’t quite sure how. It has seemed in the past year that everything I’ve always worked for and towards was in tatters and that the world was going from bad to worse. I wondered if there was anything I could really hope for, or in, any more. I’ve been pretty angry and have often felt embittered. I use that word, “embittered”, because I felt someone made me bitter, I didn’t take responsibility for choosing bitterness. That was dumb of me. I take that back. I am not bitter, I was just being stupid for awhile. You have caused me to wake up a bit.
I want this bad death that has been inflicted upon you by all of us to lead to something better, if not something good. Like a world where kids can admire and respect and actually learn some wisdom from their elders because their elders have taken the trouble to be respectable and wise. A world where it’s actually sensible to participate in the ways we govern and nurture ourselves and look after others because we do our best at it and respect ourselves and others who try. Hey Christina – a world in which we’ve taken the trouble to know ourselves and understand what a good life might be and care enough to work for it. If we got that for ourselves, if we thought enough of ourselves to demand it, we wouldn’t be able to help being good to each other, because that’s what being good to each other requires.
We need to grieve you now, child. I admit, I’m trying to get on the grief bandwagon here quickly and take over. I know I’m going to be angered by the way your death gets exploited and people tread either too hard or too lightly on your life and its meaning. I know I’m going to get it wrong too. I just hope I can stay committed to a gentle path of grieving you, one on which I don’t cling too hard and fast to anything in particular and don’t respond too nastily to others who think they know what you meant and what you mean. I do think I know something though. I’ll try to hold onto it and share it, in your honour, without wearing my rage.
You are so beautiful. I’m glad to know you. And so sad you are gone.
What of our Stolen Sisters? A Post Mortem
I know everybody’s tired of it and of him. But questions linger and the post mortems are just as, or more important than, the explosion of media reporting that accompanies the events. We all know how bad that was. Except for this, and I’m not sure if it counts since it’s on the blogs and not in print – John Cruikshank prolly doesn’t even know it’s there.
The post mortems are threatening to be equally bad, even when of the more, er, “thoughtful” kind. Take this from The Globe and Mail:
In 1941, American psychiatrist Hervey Cleckley published a seminal book about psychopaths called The Mask of Sanity, in which he described an intelligent and cunning person skilled at manipulating others and indifferent to their pain. A man like this, Dr. Cleckley explained, finds no real meaning in love or horror or humour, as if “colour blind” to human feeling.
[...]
Dr. Cleckley used interviews, observation and medical records to learn about his patients, but today, brain imaging offers scientists a new way to peer behind the mask. A growing number of them now see psychopathy as a neurodevelopmental disorder, one in which a combination of genetic and environmental factors, such as neglect or poor bonding with parents, lead to deficits in the brain. And if biology is to blame, can society hold the psychopath responsible?
The brain deficits that neuroscientists have documented affect the ability of psychopaths to feel emotions and learn from their mistakes – as if they have a learning disability that impairs their emotional development, says Kent Kiehl, a neuroscientist at the University of New Mexico. The differences have been seen in the brain images of children as young as 5.
There is much that I find interesting and important in these theories and findings. Including that it might be quite beside the point to “blame” and punish psychopaths – though it’s still important to find humane ways to protect ourselves from them. But what they almost always leave out, as in this case, are questions about gender and race. Perhaps that comes later for scientists and most media types but I think the issues need to be addressed now.
Why are criminal “psychopaths” most often male? Why are their victims most often female (and children)? If we remain obsessed by the neurobiological, importantand intriguing as it is, we fail to properly address the fact that psychopathology results from a complex process involving not just the biological but also the social and environmental.
Cops miss this too, even when they acknowledge the interconnections. For instance, The FBI produced a monograph on serial murder after a “multi-disciplinary” symposium on the topic held in San Antonio in 2005. Here’s something the monograph says about causality and serial killing:
Serial murderers, like all human beings, are the product of their heredity, their upbringing, and the choices they make throughout development.
Though the monograph does discuss this in somewhat more complex terms like “environment” it never really gets beyond the issue of “upbringing” within the family. It never gets to the “social” at all, beyond pointing out that serial murders are present across racial and socioeconomic divides. When it addresses the myth that serial killers are (mostly) white males, it explains how that is not so in terms of race but never deals with the issue of gender.
I’m thinking there weren’t any feminists at the symposium. A feminist might ask why male psychopathy more often leads to serial death than female psychopathy. Might also ask why the victims are more often women, especially when murder is combined with sexual assault. A feminist might think certain social divisions need to be investigated. Like women’s inequality. Like the objectification and sexification of women. Like the violent images of women’s victimhood so beloved in the Western world that they comprise a multi-billion dollar industry – and not just in porn. Like the vulnerability often imposed on women by race and poverty. Like the masculinization of power.
But while we’re on race and poverty. One thing that I do like about the FBI monograph is that it points out how rare serial murdering is.
Serial murder is a relatively rare event, estimated to comprise less than one percent of all murders committed in any given year. However, there is a macabre interest in the topic that far exceeds its scope and has generated countless articles, books, and movies.
We’ve certainly experienced that in Canada this past week. There isn’t a way to diminish the suffering of the Lloyd and Comeau families or the tragedy of the deaths of these sisters and daughters. But their deaths and the prurient and sensational interest in Colonel Williams and others like him does diminish our aptitude for further examination of the lives and suffering of others. For instance, apart from a few brief mentions, does anyone seem to care much for the women who survived attacks by Williams? That is, apart from Antonia Zerbisias. And why isn’t the media all over the stories of missing and murdered Aboriginal women. If Williams had chosen from among them, would anybody have noticed? From Amnesty International Canada:
According to a Canadian government statistic, young Indigenous women are five times more likely than other women of the same age to die as the result of violence.
Indigenous women have long struggled to draw attention to violence within their own families and communities. Canadian police and public officials have also long been aware of a pattern of racist violence against Indigenous women in Canadian cities – but have done little to prevent it.
The pattern looks like this:
- Racist and sexist stereotypes deny the dignity and worth of Indigenous women, encouraging some men to feel they can get away with acts of hatred against them.
- Decades of government policy have impoverished and broken apart Indigenous families and communities, leaving many Indigenous women and girls extremely vulnerable to exploitation and attack.
- Many police forces have failed to institute necessary measures – such as training, protocols and accountability mechanisms – to ensure that officers understand and respect the Indigenous communities they serve. Without such measures, police too often fail to do all they can to ensure the safety of Indigenous women and girls whose lives are in danger.
What about our stolen sisters? A new report has added 62 more names to a growing list of missing or slain aboriginal women and girls across Canada.
The report by the Native Women’s Association of Canada pegs the total as at least 582. The data is drawn from the last three decades, with 153 of the cases occurring between 2000 and 2008. Most of the women in the database were killed, while 115 are still missing.
I challenge the mainstream media to make a big event of these numbers and the lost lives of these women.
Stephen Harper certainly won’t.
Coverage of the “Colonel” Case Puts Us In a Coma
Read this and substitute the words “Paul Bernardo” for “Russell Williams”:
The [Paul] Bernardo case, like every similar investigation, had its share of human error. But this is not a story of human error or lack of dedication or investigative skill. It is a story of systemic failure.Virtually every interjurisdictional serial killer case including Sutcliffe (the Yorkshire Ripper) and Black (the cross-border child killer) in England, Ted Bundy and the Green River Killer in the United States and Clifford Olsen in Canada, demonstrate the same problems and raise the same questions. And always the answer turns out to be the same – systemic failure. Always the problems turn out to be the same, the mistakes the same, and the systemic failures the same.
That was Mr. Justice Archie Campbell in 1996 in his Report on the investigation into the crimes committed by Paul Bernardo. If we need a detailed examination of the similarities between the case of Colonel Russell Williams (and no, I won’t stop calling him “Colonel”) and those of Bernardo, it wasn’t the one that Christie Blatchford provided on Wednesday (Go there if you really want to read about how these two serial rapist/murderers are the same and how they’re different – and which one is best – but this just is not what matters).
Why do we need to think about the Bernardo and Williams crimes together? Not because of the details of the crimes themselves but because of the law enforcement (and media) response. The ineffective (and misleading) response.
Perhaps the most important thing that Campbell pointed out in his report was this:
What is needed is a system of case management for major and interjurisdictional serial predator investigations, a system that corrects the defects demonstrated by this and so many similar cases. A case management system is needed that is based on cooperation, rather than rivalry, among law enforcement agencies. A case management system is needed that depends on specialized training, early recognition of linked offences, co-ordination of interdisciplinary and forensic resources, and some simple mechanisms to ensure unified management, accountability and co-ordination when serial predators cross police borders.
As Antonia Zerbisias pointed out in a column at The Star as long ago as February, various detachments of the Ontario Provincial Police along with Belleville police did no such communicating and coordinated case response. Why not?
At the time that Paul Bernardo was operating, there was no ViCLAS automated crime linkage system in place. As Campbell pointed out in his report, such a system would likely have alerted police to the fact that rapes being committed in Scarborough, Ontario were related to rapes in St. Catharines. There was no system that would recognize the wider public interest in catching a serial rapist, interest that went beyond that of one particular community.
It’s my understanding that there are such systems in place now. But the police have to use them. Did anyone in Tweed or Belleville or Brighton enter information into the system that should have linked the sexual assaults of Laurie Massicotte and “Jane Doe” with the rape and murder of Corporal Marie-France Comeau? What about the series of break and enters in these communities that involved the theft of “lingerie” and other personal items of the women who lived there? Given that police take such crimes to be so unimportant and trivial, that has to be unlikely.
I want to know. Given the slow speed at which the police and our justice system incorporate the knowledge that could lead to saving the lives and bodily and personal integrity of women, we can’t get the answers to these questions soon enough. Four days of courtroom time this week did not give these answers, or even ask the questions. Much as it troubles and tires me to say this, we need a public inquiry conducted by someone with the integrity of an Archie Campbell. Are we going to get one? Or have we been so mesmerized by visions of the Colonel wearing stolen underwear that we have lapsed into our own private comas? As Campbell said, so many years ago:
There must be a public recognition that these problems are not just problems for the police and law enforcement communities. They are problems for the community as a whole. A commitment to correct them is necessary in order to guard against another case like this.
Is anybody listening? These cases make for a whole lot of noise and no action. That’s femicide for ya.
h/t to Anna Willats for reminding me of the Campbell Report
UPDATE: For the sake of all that’s sacred, read this blog post by Antonia Zerbisias, the only member of the journalistic tribe that knows how to report this case. If that sounds biased, you’re damned right!
UPDATE II: From Laurie Massicotte, one of the women who survived an assault by Russell Williams, via Antonia:
I feel liked chopped liver & I can’t even comprehend how the little one is feeling. Now if I could get a message out to the masses it would be-if you survive a violent act of sex don’t report it, just run for cover & find your own protection minus the police & the system they represent.
I’m afraid I have to second that emotion. After the decision of the Supreme Court of Canada in R. v. Seaboyer, which I heard argued at the Court, I told a few of my feminist friends that I thought the only way women who had been sexually assaulted were ever going to get justice would be to organize a boycott of the system. Set up feminist centres for women survivors and never take another cent of government money. Focus on empowering survivors and healing and on activism. I thought that judges and lawyers and cops and politicians other powerful people might well start getting interested if their mothers and wives and sisters and daughters had no place to go if they are assaulted. Because that’s the reality right now. I’ve been through an experience similar to that of Laurie Massicotte. Women have to make their own choices. But I could never advise a woman to choose our justice system.
Col. Williams Can’t Be Explained?
So. How’s this for a military culture that’s respectul to women? How can we even say that in the same sentence? I thought this would be a huge story. It wasn’t. We like Russ Williams better because we think we can’t explain him. The MSM wouldn’t even publish the more egregious cartoon because they found it too offensive. Ha! What about this week?
The military has launched a purge of its classroom materials after several offensive cartoons, including some featuring women in degrading sexual situations, were used in courses for soldiers headed to Afghanistan.The drawings were part of presentations provided to instructors at the Canadian Defence Academy in Kingston, Ont.
One cartoon, intended as an example of reading body language, shows a woman at a bar piled with empty glasses engaged in a sexual act with a man on a barstool. The caption reads: “How to tell when you don’t have to buy her any more drinks. . . . ”
How to tell when you don’t have to buy her more drinks? Prelude to rape.
The officer in charge of “Conduct After Capture” training acknowledged the cartoons are offensive.
But Lt.-Col. Lloyd Gillam said he believes the illustrations appeared only in draft versions of the training materials and never made it into the classroom, where there are male and female students.
Ah, so they were only in the draft versions. So they are indicative only of what the military represents but won’t acknowledge they represent. Lest someone take issue. Appearances you know, appearances. And they weren’t used in co-ed company. Why is that important? Ah, so women can be deluded into thinking they are respected while the porno joking goes on among the jocks in their offices and locker rooms. Well, that’s alright then.
Colonel Williams can’t be explained? Oh yes he can. And we’d better explain him and the men like him and the systemic sexism that aids in his development and recreation. Because we’re spawning guys like him by the barrel every day. Of course, not just in the military.
WTH is Up With Mallick?
If there’s one thing I really don’t want right now from a feminist, it’s a paean to the great, “MALE”, police work of a balding OPP officer. Was she feeling guilty for feeling negatively toward “men”? Because I don’t feel guilty. I don’t feel negatively toward men you see. I feel negatively toward sexism and the cult of masculinity. This saves me from having to tell fine and decent men that they are fine and decent when I’d rather be thinking about my dead sisters, how they got that way and how we’re ever going to stop it. Sorry Heather. I. Do. Not. Get. It.
“It is true that the Belleville and Ottawa police should have alerted women earlier that there was something evil on the loose, something Jessica Lloyd herself referred to as the “Tweed creeper.” Women were left helpless by their lack of knowledge. But the work of the police once they found a tire track and footprints in the snow outside Lloyd’s home was stellar.”
What. The. Fuck? So the police did great once it was absolutely clear who the killer was? After his SUV was identified by three fine citizens who bothered to watch out for their neighbours? After the police harassed and detained Larry Jones? After countless women had their homes invaded and personal items stolen and were ignored? After two sexual assaults weren’t linked? After a murder wasn’t linked to the sexual assaults? After Jessica Lloyd was dead?
If competent police work was done after all that, thank the fucking goddess! Are we not to expect competent police work? Do we have to extend tenderness to cops who do their jobs?
It’s been really hard sitting in that courtroom. I know that. But doesn’t Mallick have an editor to censor bathetic drivel? Or a feminist friend?
Heather on how the “good guys” nailed Williams
This post was originally published as a Note on my Facebook page. Go there for the discussion. Be my friend. As long as you’re not a fucking stalker. In which case, there will be blood. Metaphorically speaking.
Why We Should Pay Attention to the Colonel You-Know Story
1. Because we need to see and understand how impossible it is for the mainstream media in general to report these kinds of cases fairly, accurately and KNOWLEDGEABLY. For instance, I keep hearing that his fetish for underwear escalated into break-ins, photo sessions whilst modelling the undies and masturbation on camera, leaving the evidence of such behind. Now that is not a women’s underwear fetish. Such fetishes are perfectly harmless. This is the escalation of PREDATORY behaviour! The point is not the underwear. The point is that it belonged to a girl or woman who wore it and kept it in her dresser drawer. To break into the house, the bedroom, the dresser drawer of a girl or woman, try on her underwear and spend hours taking pictures of yourself wearing it while masturbating isn’t a fetish, it’s a VIOLATION of the personal space and the sexualized belongings of the girl or woman. To masturbate all over her bedroom is a VIOLATION. To tie her up and take pictures of her while masturbating and taking pictures is a VIOLATION. To do the same and then kill her is a VIOLATION. This is escalating predatory behaviour, not fetishism.
2. Because we need to know that if the cops were educated about such behaviour and able to categorize it properly and make predictions on the basis of that information, THEY MIGHT BE ABLE TO STOP PEOPLE LIKE COL. WHAT’S IT. And ought to have caught him before he sexually assaulted four women or, at the very least, before he killed two of them.
3. Because we need to know how easily predatory men get along in our misogynist culture and particularly in the most macho aspects of that culture which would certainly be THE MILITARY! If I wanted to be a raping serial killer I would be in the military or I’d be a cop.
I’ll probably be back to add more as the coverage causes a whole body rash.
Read this at Broadsides
Watch this: Above Suspicion at the fifth estate
Antonia picked up on this and added more at Broadsides and this too.
This post was originally published as a Note on my Facebook page on October 20, 2010. Go there if you want to see the comments and you are my “friend”. If you’re not my friend, how come?
UPDATE: An expanded version of this post appears at rabble: The horrific Williams murders were about power not personal fetishes
Dobbin’s Hit List
rabble.ca columnist Murray Dobbin details the harm Prime Minister Stephen Harper is doing to the political and social fabric of Canada in a new essay commissioned by The Council of Canadians. The complete series will constitute 10 parts published between March and April 2010.
