We've Come a Long Way, Maybe?

December 6th marks the anniversary of the École Polytechnique massacre in Montréal. On this day in 1989, a lone gunman – Marc Lépine – walked into the school and specifically targeted women for shooting. After killing 14 women and injuring 14 others, he committed suicide. His suicide note blamed feminists for ruining his life. As Canadians commemorate this tragedy, we are called upon to reflect on how violence against women continues to permeate our culture and impact all of us.

According to Statistics Canada, women still only earn 71% of what men make on average, and that gap has not narrowed over the past decade. One Canadian woman is killed by her partner every six days, and one in four women is sexually assaulted at some point in her life. Far from being pathological, violence against women is in fact normalized and even sanctioned in a male-supremacist culture.

Yet even where systematic inequalities abound, there is a deafening silence on the part of many women – especially young women. Having piggy-backed off the progress of our feminist foremothers, young women today do not remember a time when women’s shelters did not exist and having a full-time job was uncommon.

We’ve become complacent in a male-dominated society that still limits our freedom – and we remain silent. Violence against women is so common that only 8% of us go through our entire lives without experiencing any sexual harassment or assault – and we remain silent. Misogynistic slurs and petty insults are so common so as to seem normal, and yet we are silent. We are mired in a post-modern, pornographic nightmare where violence against women has become sexy, and we are silent. As many as 3,000 Aboriginal women are estimated to be missing or murdered in Canada, and still there is silence.

The silence imposed on women is not metaphorical or abstract. In a culture that is dominated by men, controlled by men, defined by men, silence about our experiences means denying their meaning and their place in the world. The very reality of abuse sustained by women, despite its staggering prevalence, becomes buried in cultural invisibility.

As Susan Griffin wrote in Pornography and Silence, “We are like a colonized people who have been alienated from our experience by a foreign culture… Because the words used for one’s own soul are false, all words become false. And all descriptions of experience, as well as experience itself, becomes empty.”

Alienation from our own experiences is a natural consequence of this silence. We are also alienated from other women – those like us in status and fate – when we ignore that we are targeted precisely because we are women. Although men can be raped, they are usually victimized by other men; and most male victims are targeted because of other criteria that make them vulnerable – youth, poverty (in a classist society), race (in a racist society). Women only need to be female to be targeted for sexual violence.

It is time to stop pretending that what is done to women is an accident, or an aberration committed by deranged individuals. Male-supremacy is one of the oldest and most tenacious forms of power on the planet. It has deep roots in culture, in religion, in sexuality, in politics, and in the economy; its point-of-view often passes for neutrality. Its continued existence also largely depends on the collective silence and compliance of women – and therein lays its weakness.

Every female victim of sexual violence carries not only pain, but also knowledge – of what male-supremacy is and what it does. When we see that the crimes committed against us are political, we can learn something about the power that men have over us.

The potential of feminism is to make real the promise that the value of a woman’s life must be equal to that of a man’s. Without a firm commitment to this one single standard of dignity, freedom for women is meaningless, a flickering mirage in the desert at best.

As Catharine Mackinnon wrote, feminism “claims the voice of women’s silence… the fullness of ‘lack’… the public nature of privacy, the presence of women’s absence.”

Some will look back on the Montreal Massacre with unease, lamenting the frivolity of violence against women. Others will point out that Lepine’s actions, extreme as they might have seen, are in fact utterly consistent with the larger patriarchal culture that targets women. Without a real commitment to ending sexual violence, the 14 women who died on that day are just like the rest of us – buried in silence, this time six-feet under the ground.

It is time for all of us – young women especially – to turn our pain into knowledge and our knowledge into action. It is time to make the potential of feminism real.