One Year In Canada

Though there have certainly been many kinds of barriers to women in society, and many kinds of male insensitivity to female needs and feelings (and vice versa), the causes of women’s rights and inter-gender communication are ill served by twisting the facts to make them seem far worse than they really are. Yet that is exactly what has been happening, on a grand scale, in our society in recent years. The following piece, along with various others which will appear on this site, will expose that dishonesty in detail.
Ferrel Christensen

During the year from the fall of 1989 to the fall of 1990, highly publicized incidents occurred on several Canadian university campuses, events widely claimed to have resulted from hatred or at least gross callousness from male students toward women.  Official inquiries were held and various steps taken to combat the alleged bigotry.

The author of this article went to some lengths to research the four main incidents, at the University of Alberta, Wilfrid Laurier University, Queen’s University and the University of British Columbia. That research took the form of interviewing students and faculty directly involved in the first two incidents and interviewing others on campus, plus perusing campus and off-campus print media, regarding the other two. From all of that, a perfectly clear picture emerged: in every case, all the evidence was against the charge of anti-female sexism. Instead, the political motives for making that groundless charge seem fully evident.

This story began when prominent articles in The Edmonton Journal featured a female engineering student, saying she had been very hurt by false sexual stories about her in the engineering students’ newspaper The Bridge. The Journal labeled that treatment of her as anti-female sexism, calling it part of a pervasive pattern of sexism in the Faculty of Engineering.

Never made very clear in those articles was the general nature of The Bridge: largely satire and loaded with sexual and scatological jokes, it clearly did not intend its claims to be taken as factual. Much of its material was in the form of insulting jokes directed at and written by various prominent students--it was the sort of rough-and-tumble, give-and-take cajolery one often finds in close-knit groups, a kind of bonding ritual. Most of the targets of these sexual insults were males (a large majority of all engineering students being male); and in no other way was there the least evidence of either a specific hostility or a specific callousness toward females. The two sexes were being treated in just the same way. But by its selective reporting of facts, the city newspaper made it look as if there were a special attempt to degrade women.

Now, given that our society’s traditional double sexual standards have not fully disappeared, crude jokes might be claimed to have a more negative influence on females. On those grounds, treating women equally in this respect might still be considered more objectionable. That possibility is a very far cry, however, from the charge of misogyny that was being asserted. Moreover, what came out of group discussions I had with a dozen or so female engineering students was an adamant denial of even this latter claim. Unanimously and very forcefully, they told me that treating the females any differently in those respects would be the sexist thing to do. It was precisely such sheltered treatment in the past that convinced women they couldn’t do the tough things that men can do--and hence kept them out of fields like engineering. These young women were willing to grant that crude sexual insults may be objectionable (though they themselves felt no offense), when directed against members of either sex. But they categorically rejected the facile equation of 'sexual' with 'sexist' that so many automatically make these days.

That being so, there was a great deal of hostility, among the engineering students of both sexes, toward The Journal and toward that one female student. The engineers, I discovered, were a very close-knit group, and the females in particular felt totally accepted and respected by the males. Hence they were all very upset that their faculty had been maligned in public as a hothouse of bigotry against women. That one student’s personal affront they could make allowance for, but this claim about its source they considered a vicious lie. (It was not until much later that some of them noticed she herself had not been quoted as making the charge of sexism.) Meanwhile, the hostility toward her set the stage for what happened two months later at the engineers’ annual Skit Night.

That event too was seriously distorted, first by the press and then even more by others who sought to make ideological hay out of it. In the mouth of CTV’s Shirley Solomon, for example, the story was simply that the student was disliked for being a feminist, so that as soon as she stepped on stage, the men in the audience began to shout "Shoot the bitch!"  Except for that phrase itself, what happened that night and why is totally different from the way it has been portrayed.

The Skit-Night Incident

Two points must be made. First, the oft-repeated charge that the shouting occurred because of sexist attitudes is flatly contradicted by the facts the country's newspapers did not report --just as in the case of the earlier claims regarding jokes about the student. Second, what was done was not nearly so malicious as it was made to appear by the way it was told. The information below was gathered from interviews with students and one professor who were present that night, some of whom had reviewed a videotape of the evening’s events.

In regard to the first point, females were treated on the whole better than males in the skits. In one of them, for instance, women pointed guns at men in a bar; in another act, men were shot. As for sexuality, there were lots of allusions and visual gags of an erotic nature involving both genders. The newspaper report in The Edmonton Journal, however, made no mention of the violence to men or of the sexual treatment of men. In the latter connection, it mentioned the wearing of plastic breasts and chants to women on stage to bare their breasts, claiming them as grounds for charging the male students with “the urge to reduce women to their body parts and mock them”. But The Journal suppressed all mention of such things as the sexual chants at men, a huge artificial penis, a naked male dummy with an erection, and a male student wearing only a G-string. Revealing any of these other things would have gotten in the way of the charges of hatred toward women. Later, the newspaper went so far as to expunge specific mention of such things from a letter to the editor that attempted to tell the other half of the story.

As for the treatment of that one student herself, a parallel event is instructive: within a few days of Skit Night, a hockey player seen as having been disloyal to the Edmonton Oilers was hanged in effigy. It is simply a fact of human nature that people regarding someone as a traitor to their group are apt to send the person hostile messages. They may be totally in the wrong for doing so, but their actions constitute no evidence for the claim that they are hostile to a whole class of people to whom their target belongs. The treatment of the hockey player, for example, was hardly the result of animosity toward men in general. (And if that treatment had been translated into words, they would have been something like “Hang the bastard!”--the employment of a gender-specific term of opprobrium indicates an attitude of sexism toward women no more than it does one of sexism toward men.) Quite the contrary is true, in fact; as one engineer later put it, with the immediate emphatic agreement of all the other engineering students present, a male student seen as a traitor would have been treated much worse than the female had been.

Does it make a difference that men were chanting those words to a woman? This question brings up another of the serious distortions in the incident: many students of both sexes joined in the chant (including some of the female engineers I interviewed who had been present). But that fact was never reported in the media. In fact, though the Journal reporter's original article didn’t do so, many of the articles and editorials drawn from it around the country stated explicitly that males did the chanting. In truth, not only was there no hint of sexism in how she was treated; there was none in regard to who dished the treatment out.

Turning to the matter of the degree of seriousness of the confrontation, the facts never told in the original news report, and the distortions added later, again make a huge difference. The chant of “shoot the bitch” did not begin when the student stepped onto the stage, but several minutes into the skit. And the reason it began then was that guns were introduced to the scene, and the question raised of whom they should be used to shoot. The rest of the wording was seemingly suggested by the role the student was playing: in a “Gilligan’s Island” take-off, she was representing that “rich bitch” Mrs. Howell, who was always putting other people down. To a degree, then, the chant from the audience was “part of the act”. This crucial fact becomes even more clear when one considers the general context.

An important part of the tradition of Skit Night was the intense rivalry among the various clubs putting on the acts. One result of that rivalry was a standard practice of all the other clubs yelling insults at the members of whatever group was on stage, as an accepted tactic for winning the prize: if you can rattle the other team so that they don’t perform as well, your own team may get more points. None of this is veiy genteel, but the students themselves saw it as only a spirited contest, not a hostile one.

The foregoing points are not meant to hide the fact that genuine hostility was also behind the chant at the student. It was the hostility involved in telling someone off, not the gender-based hate that ideologues pretended it to be, but it was there. In fact, all the students I spoke with agreed that student had always been unpopular because of personality clashes with others; the down-side of a tightly-knit group is that dislike as well as supportiveness and warmth can be much magnified. Hence it is not surprising that following the Skit Night incident she dropped out of the program.

What is not at all clear, however, is whether she would have been so hurt if The Edmonton Journal had not greatly magnified and politicized the whole affair--especially with its manufactured charges of sexist bigotry. The students themselves were remorseful for what they had done. But they blamed The Journal as well: if not for the pain they had been caused by that malicious falsehood, they would not have struck back in anger and the Skit Night event would never have occurred. Let the readers of this piece reflect on what their own reactions might be if falsely accused of something very serious. You might well lash out and do something very unwise--something that might just play right into the hands of your accusers.

The Montreal Massacre

Having heard the unreported parts of the story puts one in a position to assess that special aspect of the “shoot the bitch” incident that so aroused editorial anger: the fact that it occurred a mere six weeks after Marc Lepine gunned down fourteen female engineering students. Most of the commentary saw the chant as plainly revealing callousness toward women and their fears; some even charged that it was a deliberate allusion to the Montreal massacre, meant as a threat to that student if not to women, or at least women in engineering, in general.

Lepine’s horrible act has to be discussed in its own right. One thing must be said here, however. much of the reaction to it shared and reinforced the very attitude he himself exemplified: that of separatism and hostility between the sexes. If one has a view of men and women that includes massive group-based callousness or hatred to begin with, one will certainly see the UofA Engineering incident in those terms. But the only sane interpretation is very different. Repeatedly and unanimously, the engineering students I talked to told me none of them had had any thoughts of the Montreal massacre at the time of the chant. The females among them were particularly emphatic on the point: to them, Lepine’s rampage was the isolated act of a madman, in a society where there is a lot of shooting violence, much more often toward men; hence they did not see that act as threatening to all women or even to themselves as women engineers. They may, for present purposes of discussion, have been right or wrong about that. But it would be absurd to charge those female engineers (remember, they were among the chanters) with hatred of or even callousness toward women or women engineers. Hence there are certainly no grounds for believing that the male students’ attitudes were any different.

Many people, and especially young people, and more especially young males (as will be discussed later) often act in a callous way toward suffering. So it can be reasonably argued that the engineering students of both sexes should have thought enough about the horror in Montreal to have realized what effect a callous reference to shooting a female would have on many at that time.

Hence it can be argued that they should have caught themselves before stumbling into any such verbal behavior as they exhibited that night. But the fact remains that this kind of insensitivity is not directed more toward females than toward males--the very opposite is true. And the claim that the U of A events revealed outright hostility directed specifically at the female gender is a gross fabrication. Both charges, once again, were made plausible to the public only by the suppression of important information and the outright invention of facts by the news media and others.

While we’re on the subject of sensitivity, however, it is revealing that there wasn’t much shown, by those making the charges of anti-female sexism, for the feelings of all the other women engineers. A dozen or so of those young women organized into a group to oppose the claims of sexism in engineering, and hundreds of engineering student of both sexes signed a petition with the same goal. These facts were publicized by the campus newspaper but not by The Journal. All it did was print a couple of letters to the editor from engineering students, and respond to direct complaints from the engineers by interviewing a couple of women engineers denying the claim of sexism. In response to their attempts to set the record straight, these women were met by a barrage of charges--always from individuals outside the Faculty of Engineering - that they were merely brainwashed dupes. (For whatever it means to the reader, the ones I met were all very strong-minded and independent in their thinking; they certainly never hesitated to disagree with me.)

The women engineers boiled at these further charges. But they received no public support from the University, or even from professors in their Faculty. They were particularly disheartened by what they saw as the University President’s indifferent response, in the meeting they requested with him, to their adamant denials of the allegations of sexism in Engineering. Eventually, their fighting spirit waned, sapped by the pressures of classwork (always exceptionally heavy in Engineering), by fear of the massive power of the news media, and by growing concern for their individual careers--public threats to refuse jobs to UofA engineering students had arisen from the Skit Night incident. Political correctness silenced them. And their Faculty knuckled under to the charges of sexism toward women, banning Skit Night and promising to reform its evil ways.

A Revealing Parallel

The intellectual corruption surrounding the incident at the University of Alberta may be revealed through comparison with another event just a few weeks later, when the medical students there had their own annual skit night. One of the acts was a lengthy parody of the Mt. Cashel Orphanage child-abuse tragedy, which was also fresh in the public mind from recent revelations. Though reporting the skit, the Edmonton Journal did not make an issue of it. Even though in this case there was no question that the allusion to a horrible evil was deliberate rather than accidental, hence no question of the callousness being displayed, no throngs of activists or media pundits made public denunciations. The victims of that holocaust were all boys, yet no one claimed that the performance on stage revealed hatred, or even insensitivity, toward males and male pain.

The ideology driving the very different interpretations of events at the two skit nights is crystal clear--and it involves sexism toward males, not toward females. Such grotesque dishonesty and hypocrisy as are revealed in this episode--and many others over time--do not arise from nowhere. The real origin of the perennial false accusations of uncaring or outright hostility toward women is the makers' own uncaring or outright hostility toward men. Just keep watching for the pattern.