Volume in numbers, volume in tone
Confronting misogyny is ‘about life and death’
It is an exhausting, confusing and utterly necessary conversation.
It is women talking as they sort and understand and confront misogyny that is launched at an alarming rate lately.
Yes. This is a column about feminism. If that offends you, stop reading and move on. If you are interested in what women leaders in our community are thinking about these days — I invited a few to sit around a table with me recently — you’ll want to pour a cup of coffee and carry on. The chat touched on Bill Cosby, #MeToo, Incel and a lot of points in between.
“It feels like a pretty confusing and exhausting time,” began Lenore Lukasik-Foss, director of the Sexual Assault Centre of Hamilton and Area (SACHA).
On the positive side, she says, there is the “hopeful moment of #MeToo,” but there is also the targeting of women. That ranges from being targeted in “the Twitterverse” — “getting hate and trolling that happens constantly” — to being run down by a van driver who follows the Incel (“involuntary celibacy”) movement, as appears to be the case in the Toronto attack that left 10 people dead.
These issues “go beyond just our feelings,” says Jyssika Russell (who identifies as “they”), program coordinator for Speqtrum Hamilton, a community building group for queer and trans young people. “They go to our safety and to our well-being, and to our participation in our collective society, including online.”
“This is about life and death,” agrees Lukasik-Foss. “This is about women continuously being killed in our community and being raped.”
After the Toronto van attack, observers were quick to guess — wrongly — that the driver was a terrorist of Middle Eastern descent, says Medora Uppal, who works at the YWCA Hamilton and is with the Woman Abuse Working Group. Yet, “male violence against women is happening often and frequently by white men.”
The women bristle at the notion, raised by some in the van attack aftermath, that feminists have some-
how glommed on to use it as a platform to further their own goals. Though the driver’s motives have not been definitively identified, many believe his actions are linked to his Incel ties and they see that as terrorism targeting women.
Laura Kooji, a youth support worker who identifies as Indigenous and queer, puts it this way: “It’s absolutely absurd to say we’re taking some sort of platform.”
Incels believe they are entitled to sex with women. It’s a short segue from there to the guilty verdict in the Bill Cosby sexual assault trial.
Lukasik-Foss and Uppal were among the women who stood outside First Ontario Concert Hall in 2015 protesting, while Cosby “was inside, trying to make people laugh,” recalls Uppal. She was shocked and elated a few weeks ago when a jury found the comedian guilty.
“He’s still seen and revered as a hero and innocent by many people,” she says. But the verdict “tells us we are moving forward.”
For Russell, the youngest at the table, Cosby doesn’t resonate as much as Hedley, the Canadian band accused of sexual misconduct. But when Hedley played Hamilton in March, there was no mass protest by women the way there was for Cosby.
Lukasik-Foss laments that she didn’t organize a Hedley protest. “But we were just so burned out — that’s the honest truth …This feeling of exhaustion … I think that every day there is some story, some issue or some #MeToo thing or other injustice that we should be doing something about …The level of dialogue has never been so vigorous.”
It is not lost on the group that they protested a black man from America, but not a group of white men from Canada. They realize the optics of that may not be the best, but it wasn’t intentional.
Especially when “white men are being radicalized online … specifically around their misogyny,” says Russell, citing Gamer Gate, Pick-Up Artists and Incel as examples from the “manosphere.” While Uppal and Lukasik Foss have had the experience of men shouting in their faces in real life, for Russell it happens more often online.
They all agree men are emboldened to be more provocative, more misogynist lately and some blame that on the example set by United States President Donald Trump. Despite all that, this group is big on hope. They believe that slow, steady progress is being made.
“That’s how I know stuff ’s working,” says Lukasik-Foss “because it’s turning up the backlash metre.”
One way or another, these women will be heard. As Kooji puts it: “You have to find either volume in numbers or volume in tone.”