The fetid basement of the Internet
“Go into the nearest Sociology or Womens (sic) Studies classroom next week, and fire a bullet into the Professor’s head and spray bullets all over the room until all the feminists are dead.” It reads like a Marc Lépine-École Polytechnique flashback, but it’s the least unpublishable of the threats against University of Toronto staff and students made Sept. 5 on blogTO, a perfectly pleasant website featuring city events.
Someone spotted it — in a foodrelated thread of all places — and U of T was alerted. The commenter, who called himself Kill Feminists, mentioned “feminists who are rude,” who act “lewd in the classroom” and show him “disrespect.” He advised renting a gun “at Jarvis” for $40 and shooting women for being, you guessed it, “slutty.” He also had a plan for throat-cutting.
What can we conclude about him? To start with, he’s not clued in. Aside from the grammatical errors, there are no women’s studies courses at U of T as such, at least not of the kind Jian Ghomeshi boasted of attending decades ago at York University. They are now known as Women and Gender Studies, and are more investigative in nature — Gender, Body and Sexuality in Islam, or Sociology of Women and International Migration — than stance-taking.
I’d happily take these courses, theoretically. But not right now. I wouldn’t attend a class without an armed guard at the door.
I spent five years in perfect peace getting two degrees in English literature at U of T’s downtown St. George campus. But in 2008, after I wrote a CBC column pointing out Sarah Palin’s drawbacks, the uni- versity had to provide an undercover security guard for a writing class I was teaching. I didn’t ask. They instantly offered.
The class was in the same building where I had once been a student. It happens all the time, they told me. The university is used to personal threats. But with 85,000 students and 20,000 staff, how can it cope with mass threats?
I’m not sure how much has changed since Lépine ordered the men out of that Montreal classroom in 1989, and shot (and also stabbed) 14 women to death. The national long-gun registry set up to make life more difficult for Lépines was finished off by Stephen Harper in 2012. Gun regulations were loosened in Bill C-42 this year and the gun lobby is becoming a Canadian NRA, working inch by inch to bring more guns and gun tolerance to Canada.
Up in Arms, a documentary by Nadine Pequeneza on this subject, will chill your bones. (It will appear on TVO on Sept. 23 at 9 p.m. and online at tvo.org.) You’ll understand Kill Feminists’ reference to how easy it is to get a gun in this city. Guns flow north across the U.S. border. And then there are the words he used.
How strange it is that I refer to this person planning a mass murder as a commenter. The comments section is the fetid basement of the online world. It’s where the bones sit in the dark, waiting for burial or deletion. Open sites like Reddit are freefloating stink tanks, so full of hate, so foul in intention and invention. Comment sections are magnets for libel and expensive to police. Embarrassingly, they also announce the kind of reader a newspaper attracts.
The Toronto Sun offered screenshots of the threats, I think correctly. But wisely, it didn’t allow comments.
It did allow them on an adjacent story concerning a man, blue-eyed and pale as paste, who had decap- itated his mother. He had gone missing from his mental health unit. The anonymous comments began on the subject of Muslims and headed for “trannys,” “wop gangsters,” cyclists, 3-year-olds being taught anal sex, ISIS plants among refugees from “Siria,” the beheading of the leaders of the NDP and Liberals, “McWynnty” murdering Ontario, and then I gave up.
I don’t mean to single out the Sun. Online comments at CBC.ca, the Toronto Star, name a place, they’re all appalling.
What is to be done? The great Guardian columnist Jessica Valenti thinks they should vanish, while speaking sadly of the idealism that birthed them.
She’s right. Anonymous online comments gave a man the opportunity to terrorize three campuses at Canada’s best university. If this is free speech, whose is it? We don’t know who Kill Feminists is. He could be anyone.