NEWS
6 Obiter Dicta
Women and Feminists
esther medelsohn › staffwriter
O
n 5 september 2015, news broke of
threats directed against “women and
feminists” at the University of Toronto. It
was right before the weekend, and on the
weekends, I do my studying at UofT.
My thought process was as follows: should I risk
my personal safety when I can simply study elsewhere? My poor mother! If I go to Robarts, there are
lots of good hiding places and several exits, so I have
a better chance of making it out should something
happen. I might be able to convince an attacker that
I am not a feminist.
Then the law student in me picked apart the wording: women and feminists. So even if one is not a
feminist, she is still being threatened. Is there any
merit in a disjunctive interpretation? If feminism is
supposedly anti-male, why the need to include both
women and feminists? Would not the one suffice?
What about women who aren’t feminists and feminists who aren’t women? Never mind all that; it’s
the weekend, and if there was going to be an attack,
it would almost certainly happen on a weekday to
maximize the impact.
So I packed my books and some snacks, and headed
to a place for which I have a deep—some would say
quirky—affinity. It was easy for me to pen a defiant
tweet once I got there. But make no mistake, for a solid
moment I was scared.
Several classes were cancelled that week, in the
end the determination was made that women were
safer at home than on campus. Campus police have
been criticized for not doing more to protect women
on campus and for not releasing more details sooner.
ê Photo credit: Toronto Star
This is only part of the problem, and cancelling classes
is not a viable solution.
When women’s safety and security are threatened,
the answer seems to always be for women to stay
home, to not provoke an attack, to behave, to be silent.
Being twice as good as the men so as to avoid accusations of quotas, dropping classes where the professors make misogynistic remarks, and rape whistles
to ward off assaults: these are the tools which we are
allowed to have.
Of course it
would be more
costly and complicated to address
the underlying causes of these types of threats.
Even when attempts are made, the backlash borders on hysteria (see the response to the new sex-ed
curriculum).
It does not matter whether or not the threats were
made with the intention to deliver on them. The fact
that they were made at all is quite enough. Interrogate
your reasoning every time you dismiss concerns
raised about women’s safety—on or off campus.
There is a reason that these threats were directed
at women in academia. It is the same reason that Marc
Lépine went on a shooting rampage, murdering fourteen women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in
1989.
Educated women are a threat. When women learn
history, they learn how women have been subjugated
for centuries. When they learn political science, they
learn how women have been excluded from the political sphere and how their concerns have been relegated
to the sidelines of political discourse. When they learn
me dicine, they learn that much of the knowledge
about women’s reproductive health was acquired
through experiments performed without patients’
consent.
Women who have not had the opportunity or
who have chosen not to pursue studies have valuable
insights as well, and it is not my intention to diminish the importance of those insights. In fact, someone
very close to me did not have the opportunity to finish
high school, let alone pursue legal studies, and she can
easily tell you of
the oppression she
has suffered for,
inter alia, being a
woman. She may
not wrap it in theories or link it to a particular wave of
feminism, but she can articulate it just fine.
While it is not the only valid path, pursuing academic studies is a sacred and noble act. It is therefore
deeply depressing that women do not feel, and indeed,
have no reason to feel safe on campus.
I am trained in self-defence, I am deceptively
strong, I generally consider myself capable of fending
off an attacker, and yet, I do not feel entirely safe.
I penned this piece at Gerstein Library—another
favourite UofT haunt—but it is the weekend, so I guess
I will be fine. u
“...cancelling classes is not a
viable solution.”