F-Bomb

by Lauren McKeon

Considering the many roadblocks that prevent young women from adopting or aligning with feminism, from lack of education to its negative representation in pop culture, Gaisenok saw the counting-out attitude as an especially critical error. She likened feminism to a cliff: women could fall off it after being treated badly at a meeting, after threats on social media, after university, after they entered the workforce, after children, life, and so many other things got in the way. Feminism was a hard, tiring slog, she reasoned, and it was easy to topple off. No wonder so many young women weren’t even bothering to find out about the f-word, she said. Feminists were too busy either building barriers or helping to throw them off proverbial cliffs.

  “It’s a very weird jam we’ve gotten ourselves into,” said Julie Lalonde. Like many of the younger feminists I interviewed, including Hodge and Gaisenok, Lalonde criticized the wider feminist movement for failing to encourage younger women to join. Technology amplified the movement’s reach and allowed it to talk outside the monolith, but it didn’t usually win women seats at media panels, committee tables, or at organizations that had politicians’ ears. It created pressure sometimes, sure, but it was still largely older, established, and often white feminists who were given the platform to discuss issues and guide change. The movement’s core feminist issues were predominately discussed in the context of younger women—reproductive rights, anti-violence in all its forms—but very seldom were young women allowed to speak for themselves.

  The divide was both cataclysmic and catastrophic. “There’s not just a gap between men and women,” Hodge told me, echoing the gospel of modern-era feminism. “There’s a gap between people of color, people of different immigrant statuses, people of different ages. We want equality that isn’t just equality for middle-class, middle-aged, straight white women.” I don’t doubt that feminists of every generation feel the same way, but the mainstream movement has so far failed to put this new vision forward, front and center. And the longer it refuses to wholly, enthusiastically adopt the new generation’s commitment to intersectionality, the more it creates all sorts of schisms. Whether they are pushed out or left out, the casualties of the breaks are becoming clearer to me: the young girls and women feminism so desperately wants and needs.

  With the exception of women whose mothers were feminists, the sweeping majority of young women I spoke to across Canada only discovered feminism in university. Some claimed to never have heard the term at all until then. “I didn’t know that word at all,” one twenty-five-year-old feminist named Emily Yakashiro told me. “It’s not because anybody prevented me from knowing it,” she added. The term just wasn’t used in her tiny, rural hometown. Once she started to volunteer at her university’s sexual assault support center, her activist life took off. After working in the anti-violence field for a few years, she entered the animation field, deciding she wanted to be at the forefront of crafting women’s portrayal in popular media. She also runs a website dedicated to dismantling sexism and racism in the fashion industry. None of it would have ever happened if she hadn’t wandered into the center one day on a break.

  Suggesting the route to all feminism must be through institutionalized academia is dangerous, however. While we should never fear to introduce feminism into our hallowed halls, we must also recognize that relying on our universities to teach women feminism falls into the very classist, elitist structures that intersectionality and fourth-wave feminism want to topple. Not all young women have the financial means or inclination to attend post-secondary school. Other women might only conquer their fear of the f-word after they have their first real-world encounter with sexism and misogyny (what a fun rite of passage!). It’s a case of meeting people where they’re at. For some newbie feminists, Twitter and Tumblr, or even Beyoncé and Emma Watson, can be as effective teachers as, well, professional teachers. If feminism truly wants to grow, it has to reach not only a younger but also a wider audience. How to do it is a harder question to answer.

  Consider one of the most successful youth recruiters of our time. Its followers and leaders tweet out more than ninety thousand snippets a day, extolling their lives and togetherness. It even has its own app. Pictures stream daily across Twitter, Facebook, and Tumblr showing teen and twenty-something members scarfing down pizza, peacefully browsing through farmers markets, enjoying movie nights, riding Ferris wheels, and playing video games. The images are meant to reflect the strong bonds at work. Wannabe members not only know they’re welcomed, wanted, and needed but they know it will be fun to be there. The name of that movement? ISIS. Sure, it’s an extreme example of single-minded recruitment, but it’s also a stark reminder that feminism doesn’t want new members that blindly follow. It wants thinking ones.

  We don’t need feminism as monolith, but we could all use a multipronged approach: more social media, more pop culture, more books, more Dr. Porters, and less fear, less stigma, less apathy. I worry that without all those things, those faced with an institution that isn’t doing very much to welcome them, speak to them, listen to them, or take them seriously at all will either leave the movement, stop caring, or never join to begin with. They’ll be the women and young girls who never had a chance to knock on feminism’s door. They won’t even know the door is there. Of course these women will believe feminism isn’t for them: that’s the message the movement itself is broadcasting.

  3

  F-bomb generation: Empowerment, millennial women, and the “I’m not a feminist, but…” choir

  Janice Fiamengo, an anti-feminist University of Ottawa English professor, stepped onto the stage at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. She wore a smart wraparound dress with a delicate geometric pattern, and her voluminous hair covered her face every time she looked down to check her notes, which was frequently. It was the evening of Thursday, March 27, 2014, and the room was packed. “My goal for the evening is to encourage students to join the Men’s Issues Awareness Society, or to give men’s issues some serious consideration,” she opened. “My feeling right now is that I really hope more women will decide to join with men in pursuing equality. I hope that women will consider rejecting the feminist idea that the only suffering that really matters is the suffering of women and the best men can hope for is the right to apologize for their so-called privilege.”

  Fiamengo would go on to hit, in under three minutes, all the major pillars of the men’s rights and anti-feminist movements: that men have lost their status and their jobs, that nobody cares about the rape of men in prisons, that there are no shelters for battered men, that men have to accept discrimination in government and public sector hiring competitions, that they’re denied the right to father their children, that they’re treated unfairly in divorce. Fiamengo assured the crowd that men suffered many more other injustices she did not have time to name. It went by so quickly that audience members didn’t have time to unpack the contradictions and implications of her statements. If feminism is presumably built on outrage, as critics claim, the men’s rights movement has perfected its use. Fiamengo stressed to the crowd that she used to be a wrongheaded feminist, too—laughing “Cry me a river, white boy” with her smug feminist friends—but that she was now reformed. They could be, too.

  Queen’s University is widely considered one of the best universities in the country, one of our very own Ivy League, and it boasts one of Canada’s richest student populations. At less than 30 percent, the proportion of Queen’s students receiving financial aid is the lowest of any of the province’s twenty-two universities. The 175-year-old campus looks like a more austere, capitalist version of Hogwarts: buildings are turreted, roads are made of cobblestones, and old-growth trees hang romantically over scurrying young intellectuals. Just replace J. K. Rowling’s whimsy with Gordon Gekko’s greed.

  Queen’s students themselves have mocked the exclusive prestige of the university in the viral YouTube video “I go to Queen’s!” which jokes about the school’s whiteness, its frat-styled party culture, and its rich kid–infused attitudes.
There’s truth to the satire. Queen’s is one of the few universities in Canada that embraces generational legacy, and alumni include some of Canada’s most elite businesspeople, scientists, and political leaders. It is, in other words, a perfect petri dish of white, wealthy privilege and modern university party culture. Considering its influential alumni, it’s also the exact type of place you’d hope a “But, men!” narrative wouldn’t thrive. Sigh. Sorry. Because here’s Queen’s other tradition: greeting frosh week young women with so-called “move-in” signs, scrawled on bed sheets and poster boards, that say things such as “Queen’s fathers, say goodbye to your daughters’ virginity!” and “Don’t forget your knee pads!”

  In early March 2014, Queen’s became a violent anti-feminist battleground after a second-year student named Mohammed Albaghdadi formed the school’s Men’s Issues Awareness Society (MIAS). He told the student newspaper that he was stunned by the vitriolic reaction from feminists: “I was surprised. I genuinely thought I was in the majority point of view.” He later added that he’d founded the society, in large part, to focus on false accusations of sexual assault. (It’s worth noting here that the frequency of false rape reports is statistically thorny ground, with numbers ranging from the feminist-friendly 2 percent to the MRA-friendly 40 percent. Neither has been deemed satisfactorily true. Many people settle on the 8 percent statistic favored by the FBI, but the accuracy of that is debatable, largely because women who either don’t report or withdraw their complaint under fear or pressure skew the numbers. Suffice it to say, however, false reports are not the epidemic of injustice MRAs pretend.)

  That same year, feminist groups on campuses across Canada faced an MRA-led backlash for mobilizing against sexual assault on campus. The anti-rape campaign plastered posters bearing should-be-obvious-but-somehow-aren’t slogans such as “It’s not sex…when she’s passed out” and “Just because she isn’t saying no…doesn’t mean she’s saying yes.” In response, anti-feminists created their own campaign, dubbed “Don’t Be That Girl.” Posters unhelpfully told women that lying about sexual assault is a crime and claimed women benefit from double standards (presumably some get-out-of-jail-free card activated with cleavage and eyelash batting). They played deeply on the stereotypes against women who report rape. One admonished women: “Just because you regret a one-night stand, it doesn’t mean it wasn’t consensual.” Another, addressed to men, asserted: “Just because she’s easy, it doesn’t mean you should fear false criminal accusation.” These twin finger-wagging narratives affirmed both that women lie and, also, that they should want to lie after engaging in casual sex—the shame! What a soothing balm for young men, some of whom, of course, welcomed messages like: “None of this is your fault,” or “It’s all her fault (because she’s a slut)!” As Janice Fiamengo put it in an article commending the countercampaign, it’s not fair that “no matter what a woman does—no matter how careless and irresponsible—she is always innocent.”

  Well, of her own rape, yes. The deeper problem here, though, is that for someone like Fiamengo these cases of sexual assault aren’t rapes. They’re lies. According to Fiamengo (and others), narratives against sexual assault punish men. They tell men—alone—not to engage in party culture. They tell men not to celebrate their sexuality. They shame and stigmatize men. Fiamengo and her cohort worry that men are failing, at the hands of women and feminism no less, and if we, as a society, really cared about men, we’d shunt aside conversations of women’s rights and focus on saving our men. I’d find such arguments easier to stomach if they focused on the very real struggles facing men—especially low-income, queer, and racialized men—and less on attacking feminism and calling women lying, slutty criminals. But, hey, that’s just me. Many others, particularly young men who feel they shouldn’t have to navigate the pesky issue of consent while blitzed at a rad party, have gobbled up these arguments like a five-star meal.

  It was no coincidence that Queen’s MIAS students launched their men’s rights group in the midst of this brewing anti-feminist storm or that the group invited Fiamengo, who had become a sought-after campus speaker, to talk at its first event. (Today, she is a bona fide men’s rights star: when a student launched a human rights complaint against her in late 2016, Fiamengo’s supporters raised more than $12,000 for her legal fees within days.) Queen’s, while a remarkably fertile ground for such narratives, was not unique. Earlier that year, men’s rights student groups at the University of Ottawa and the University of Toronto asked Fiamengo, whom the ultra-conservative Toronto Sun pointedly characterized as a “soft-spoken academic,” to lecture against women’s studies, feminism, and the work both did on campus. The response was furious: feminist activists pulled the fire alarm to interrupt her presentations (it didn’t stop either presentation but did stall both) and protested loudly outside the venues. But, similar to their swift response to an anti-rape postering campaign, Fiamengo and her ilk were ready with counter-messaging. Predictably, it centered on pernicious stereotypes of women and feminism, and like many messages built on half-truths, prejudices, and fear, it worked.

  By the time the Queen’s event was underway, the men’s rights movement had neatly snuggled into its underdog onesie. Feminist action was rebranded as not an effort to halt damaging and longstanding myths about women, rape, and sexual assault (I’ll explore this in a later chapter) but an insidious effort to curb free speech. Fiamengo, exploiting the hairy-legged, bra-burning stereotype, called the feminist movement a totalitarian ideology that had no interest in equality, only supremacy. A Maclean’s reporter who wrote about her University of Toronto talk called the protestors’ actions “dramatic” and “childish”; its headline writer crowed that “free speech had prevailed.” The reporter agreed that Fiamengo’s critique of feminism—namely, that that the movement is empty, dishonest, and incoherent—is a fairly common one.

  The idea that feminism is lying about its equal rights mission? Not outrageous. Not bizarre. Totally normal. We all know feminism is really about man hating, right? Increasingly, though, as the 2016 Washington Post/Kaiser survey showed, that is what we believe. Caught in this roundabout logic, feminists can’t win. Any protest action is seen as proof of their secret agendas. That’s not to mention the unintentional side effect of shining an even bigger spotlight on men’s rights events.

  Organizers of the Fiamengo talk had booked an auditorium that could seat almost four hundred. How do you attract that many people? Brea Hutchinson, coordinator of the left-leaning Ontario Public Interest Research Group (OPIRG) in Kingston, knew the answer: conflict. From the beginning, Hutchinson tried to dampen the conflict. With about fifteen others, she’d created a “Not That Space” group that met in Grey House (one of the few shabby buildings on the Queen’s campus and then home to both the Levana Gender Advocacy Centre and OPIRG) to not talk about the MIAS. Hutchinson urged fellow activists to remain silent, to not create the controversy the events had thrived on at other universities. In a mass email she wrote, “Give no reaction.”

  But that’s not what happened. First, feminists tried to get the Alma Mater Society at Queen’s to revoke the MIAS’s official club status. Then they publicly urged administration to cancel the talk. “That’s when things got intense,” said Hutchinson. “We had drawn a line collectively that we were not going to let this happen. And it meant the Men’s Issues Awareness Society had a reason to fight us.”

  On the night of Fiamengo’s talk, campus feminists decided to host an alternative-spaces event at Grey House. More than one hundred people packed into the ramshackle building, where cupcakes, tea, and counselors were on hand. Organizers wanted it to be a friendly space, where women (and men) could talk about feminism, or not. It was an act of solidarity and resistance. It said: Here we are, together, in a place that still makes sense to us. Fiamengo’s speech was being streamed in one room, but the idea was to make Grey House a place where feminism, not anti-feminism, got to define itself, a place where Fiamengo was not given credibility. But I wondered:
Was it too late for that? Didn’t this event show the two movements had become entwined? “We tried to create spaces where they weren’t a thing,” Hutchinson said, “which was a nice thought, but in practice it became, unfortunately, really untenable.”

  Online, those who spoke out against the MIAS were targeted and harassed. Grey House suddenly drew an alarming number of male visitors and passersby, all dressed in black. One woman involved in the center (she is still studying on campus and asked me not to use her name because of what followed), started to tally the phone calls and emails the center received from men (and some women). More than a dozen callers used fake names, assuring Levana volunteers that they wanted to get involved to help “save” women. None ever answered the center’s follow-up invitations. Soon, Levana volunteers reported being followed. The woman I spoke to woke up to panicked phone calls from women at two am, who feared that strange men were tailing them. Eventually, she was followed, too. Men drove by Grey House and yelled from cars. The woman, who had immigrated to Canada from a war-torn country, was shocked. “Coming here to Canada,” she said, “it was the kind of thing that I never thought would ever happen…that normalization of violence against women.”

  And then it escalated. Danielle d’Entremont, a feminist on campus who’d vocally opposed Fiamengo’s talk and had helped lead efforts to de-ratify the MIAS, left her house late one Wednesday night that March. When a strange man called her name, she turned, and the assailant punched her in the face multiple times, so hard that she lost half a tooth. In a Facebook photo posted after the attack, the left side of her face is puffed out, the trauma squinting shut her eye and enlarging her lip, making her cheek alarmingly red and swollen. “How’s this for a no makeup selfie?” she asked. Police investigated but no charges were ever filed and, although anti-feminists had threatened her online, no formal connection could be made between the two events. Police felt obligated to make the public statement: “Regardless of a person’s opinion on feminism, or equality for all, is the fact that no one deserves to be assaulted”—something we now, absurdly, need to be reminded about.