Let’s put the word ‘misogyny’ into everyday understanding

Gun ban is long-delayed start, but will make Canada safer

What a relief it was to hear Public Safety Minister Bill Blair use the word “misogyny” at the all-important news conference on Parliament Hill on May 1.

It was part of what one observer called “the best news conference” he had ever seen, with completeness, moral passion and good sense: the announcement of an immediate Order in Council by the federal government to ban the sale, importation and use of 1,500 types of assault weapons in Canada.

“Today,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, “the market closes.”

The three leaders who laid out the case, and implemented the actions so long hoped-for, actually since the Montreal massacre of 1989, were the prime minister, Blair, former chief of police of Toronto, and Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.

Freeland gave the 10-minute speech of her political career, laying out the history of mass killings in Canada carried out by these weapons and their particularly deadly effects on women and girls.

“The weapons aren’t for hunting” she said, “they are designed to kill people and to look like they can kill people. Gender continues to be a determining factor in whether you feel safe in your home or on your street. From 2010 to 2015, there were 476 victims of domestic homicide, and 79 per cent were women: on average one every three days. Let that sink in.”

I looked up the meaning of the word “misogyny.” It is hatred of women, contempt for women, or ingrained prejudice. We aren’t, as a society, coming to terms with it.

Often, says the magazine Psychology Today, men don’t even know they have a misogynistic personality until some crisis. The attitude is probably related to some trauma in childhood, and is fostered by a “macho” culture.

This COVID-19 pandemic, not surprisingly, is worsening the situation. In the past 36 days in Canada, there have been nine cases of men killing women: In Brockville, Winnipeg, Portapique, Calgary, Osoyoos B.C., Hammonds Place, N.S., rural Alberta and Hillsborough, N.B.

Feminist analysts have written perceptively about it. We cannot ignore any longer the link between mass killings and hatred of women, says Elizabeth Renzetti in The Globe and Mail.

Why are officials “scratching their heads again wondering how such horrible event could occur?” Behind many acts which we deem “senseless” is misogyny.

They are not “senseless and isolated acts,” continues Renzetti. “That releases us from responsibility for the hard fixes needed to ensure the chain of violence is broken.”

On April 24, Robyn Bourgeois, a professor at Brock University, wrote that the most prominent link connecting Canadians and killings has been that all the accused perpetrators were men and mostly white. Male violence begins in domestic abuse, she writes, and many males are socialized into violent masculinity.

Finally, Johannah Black wrote in a Halifax paper, The Coast: “Call it what it is: misogynist violence.” Black also points out that it is mistaken to paint rural communities as “quaint” and free of violence against women.

Blair, with his craggy, all-man persona, was just the person to draw it all home. He is an older white man, a police chief at one time. I often expect such people to spout vaguely anti-woman perspectives, such as one hears in bars and hockey dressing rooms.

But no, Blair showed his deep understanding of the gendered dimension of violence, using the word “misogyny.”

For many years, we feminists have been trying to get decisionmakers of all kinds to grasp the deep-rooted, often unrecognized aspects of crimes that show a deep hatred and fear of women.

The prime minister, with his credentials as a feminist who made the cabinet gender equal, only has to be there to underline the importance of this move.

Of course, the new law is partial, and just a start. It tackles the weapons, not the attitudes, the socialization, the business of weapons and so on. But it is a long-delayed start, and will make Canada safer.

Blair showed his deep understanding of the gendered dimension of violence, using the word ‘misogyny’