Women facing a firestorm of vicious hate
“Can I speak with Catherine?” The man asking that question then began shouting obscenities at the office of Infrastructure and Communities Minister Catherine McKenna. It was a blizzard of violent and foul language. At one point, the man, filming himself, called her a “c—t.”
One of the eeriest things? He called her by her first name, part of a social media campaign to demean her. He felt he had that right. She is not a minister of the Crown, she is his.
McKenna once had that word sprayed in red across her Ottawa constituency office. She has had to ask Rebel Media to not refer to her as “climate Barbie.” And Laura Dudas, an Ottawa city councillor who has faced constant sexualized insults, last week had rocks thrown through the window of her home.
Attacks on politicians, particularly females, are “accelerating,” McKenna told the CBC, “and I think that a lot of what we’ve seen happen south of the border comes up here, and it is exacerbated by social media.” The police are launching a hate crime investigation and that sounds about right.
Good men are supporting women when foul attacks like this take place in an increasingly toxic and violent atmosphere poisoned by the Trump era. Other men don’t. NDP MP Charlie Angus recently said Margaret Trudeau is nothing more than a famous surname. The virulent Maxime Bernier said she has accomplished nothing in life beyond marriage and childbirth.
Misogynists are targeting women more during the pandemic than they did earlier. Why? We women are in a muchweakened position. The pandemic has killed more women’s jobs than men’s, and has made working from home much more difficult because of lack of child care and doing most of the domestic workload.
One despairs. Good men back feminism; without them, women can’t win. We team up. Feminism helped bring more women into the workforce but when will they win power in the workplace? If we measure power by money, men have more. I suspect they will always have more until more men come to support equal rights.
As dusk arrives earlier and earlier, I am less free to walk around my neighbourhood after work (in a home office) where there have been several violent attacks on women outdoors. Domestic violence — attacks on women and children in the home — is increasing and shelters are becoming full.
We women can’t do it alone. Look at how hard it is to be a woman in politics, fearing physical violence and crude insults just for having been born female.
And then there is another more sinister question. Do women still exist? The word “women” is vanishing. This week, a male New York Times reporter wrote about gay men having children. This was his first sentence: “While plenty of New Yorkers have formed families by gestational surrogacy, they almost certainly worked with carriers living elsewhere.”
Pregnancy is now “gestational surrogacy.” A pregnant woman is not human; she is a “carrier.” The word “woman” is not used until near the end when feminist Gloria Steinem, 86, is mentioned.
Normally I would not write about a dull American paper’s use of language. It’s not of interest to Canadians; there are more elegant papers to quote. But it’s a huge mainstream paper and its sexist prose gradually smokes into general conversation, in the same way that Trumpish attitudes to women headed north.
In the liberal Guardian this week, a female reporter wrote about a rape survivor, Georgina Fallows, being unable to wear a face mask because it immediately brought back the terror of being raped by a man whose hand was over her mouth. Traumatized, she finds herself abused in public for going unmasked.
The story does not mention “women” even once. If the intent is not to exclude male rape victims who can’t wear face masks, it is not clear there are any because victims’ sex or gender go unmentioned. Yet rape is a current and present danger for all women, smaller and weaker than their rapists. Rape is so rarely prosecuted that Britain has almost decriminalized it.
And now this. With women enduring every disadvantage already, we “women” and “girls” are vanishing from English speech. It bodes ill for women’s rights.