When did we get so sensitive?
There’s an ocean between words and actions
If ever you have wondered, as David Byrne and the Talking Heads once sang, “Well, how did I get here?” I may be able to help.
I refer to the era of extreme delicacy in which we all live, wherein, as a colleague described it, the CBC this week convened a “solemn panel” to discuss the traumatizing effect of rude words (the hideous FHRITP phenomenon) upon women and ask the big question, “What does that say about us as a society?” — and that was before we all learned that a veteran female comedian recently fled a stage in tears after a man in the audience heckled her with lewd suggestions.
It was on Sept. 13, 1993, that I first remember feeling the axis shift.
I was covering a commission of inquiry that was examining the conduct of a wonderful and well-regarded Ontario Court judge named Wally Hryciuk.
A woman, a complainant, named Kelly Smith was testifying.
At the time, she was a 30-year-old Assistant Crown attorney in the rough-andtumble Scarborough courts.
Weeping, Smith described how the year before at another court, Hryciuk allegedly had kissed her hard, sending her into a tailspin of uncontrollable crying, frantic teethbrushing and fears she might have caught a disease from him and would be unable to have children.
It was not the allegation that shocked me — the judge denied it in any case, and he was subsequently vindicated — but its characterization (a kiss being described by a lawyer as “tantamount” to sexual assault) and, even had it happened exactly as Smith said, her grotesque overreaction to it.
I wrote at the time, “If the purpose of this public inquiry is to answer the question, ‘Do we want as a judge a man who French kisses young female Crown attorneys?’, then I believe a secondary question is in order. It is, ‘Do we want as a Crown attorney a young woman who is reduced to irrational hysterics by such a kiss?’
“If the answer to the first question is ‘No’, so must the answer to the second one.”
Hryciuk’s vindication at the Ontario Court of Appeal was then three years away.
At the inquiry itself, in the final report that found he’d acted inappropriately, had engaged in “reckless” sexual humour and which recommended he be removed from office, and certainly in that hearing room that long-ago day, he was an object of contempt, his purported “victims” each and every one praised as brave little souls who had felt powerless.
In the 22 years since, things have only worsened, such that the latest shock-horror-outrage is what happened to the comedian Jen Grant at a printing industry awards dinner on May 13.
This was the Ontario Printing and Imaging Association (OPIA) awards dinner at Toronto’s St. George’s Golf and Country Club. As the story of Grant’s experience emerged this week — she was harassed by a man whose opening gambit was “There’s a 51 per cent chance that my buddy here will have sex with you and I take the other 49 per cent” and then said, according to Grant, in “a very ‘rapey’ tone, ‘Ohhh, the things I would do to you’ ” — it turns out the whole event was a snafu of misplaced expectations.
The OPIA president, Tracey Preston, said she didn’t hear the heckler from where she was standing at the door but had she, she said, “We would have ceased the show and we would have reacted immediately.”
And the heckler’s employer, a full-service, Quebec-based printing company, publisher and distributor called TC Transcontinental, immediately suspended the offender with pay, apologized and its spokesman Sylvain Morissette proclaimed, “This is not in our culture and values for sure.”
As for Grant, she felt like she’d brought a knife to a gunfight, she said, because she was under the impression that at corporate gigs like this one, she wasn’t to talk about sex, or be crude, or be able to unload on a heckler as she would have done at a comedy club.
After all, as she wrote on her blog, the gig was “a squeaky clean corporate event IN A COUNTRY CLUB. … I had to be clean at this show and not offend the people in the audience. I felt like I just had to take it.”
Hell, I didn’t know printing companies even had values, that anyone would be surprised that an after-golf tourney night is predictably a bit of a zoo, or that “corporate” or “COUNTRY CLUB” are synonyms for high-minded behaviour.
What I do know is that there’s an ocean between sexual assault and a kiss, however unwanted, between harmful actions and hurtful words, however mean, and between rape and a tone of voice, however leering.
And to answer the big question Peter Mansbridge posed with such heavy sorrow the other night, the society that can’t tell the difference anymore has lost its way.