"Women are an evil race?"
From the poem published in The Globe and Mail 3 years after the Montreal Massacre
When I learned this week that the University of Toronto asked a trans-identified male to give the memorial speech in honour of the victims of the Montreal Massacre on December 6, I dug up a speech I’d been asked to give on this very day thirty years earlier.
What I found astonishing is that during this man’s wildly self-absorbed speech about the day 14 young women were killed because and only because they were female was that he referred to himself as a “woman” and referred to the women as “people”.
Thirty years ago, I was an anti-pornography activist and you will see in this speech that I felt the need to describe pornography because, back then, most decent people thought porn was just a bunch of naughty little pictures and had no clue what it was really all about. Now that pornography has seeped into every part of our lives, it’s almost quaint to think of how innocent our politicians and liberal-minded citizens were who worried more about protecting pornography as “free speech” than protecting children from the onslaught of an international multi-billion dollar industry.
PS - You may think it odd that I was asked to speak of pornography on December 6, but my speech was scheduled to come after Sarah Daniels’ play on the pornography business called “How They Must Hate Us” and the Montreal Massacre was nothing if not a hate crime against women.
(Song)
So take it from me, if you like what you see
On a blond, or brunette, or a redhead
Remove what you'd like with an axe or a knife
And don't mind that you leave the girl quite dead.
I wish I could say that I simply made that song up to make a point, but I didn't. The song I just sang was the theme from a movie called Body Shop, a movie easily rented or purchased anywhere in North America, including Ontario1.
Body Shop is a movie, and, like so many other slasher movies, it features the slaughter of women as entertainment. And as you can tell from the theme song, the movie, like so many other slasher movies, is about making the perfect women by chopping them up and piecing together the "best" body parts, the pieces, the various bits and pieces of women.
When my colleague, Valerie Smith, first entered the Jumbo Video Horror Room in Brampton (Ontario), she saw row upon row upon row of slasher movies. These are movies that feature bleeding and mutilated women on the front cover -- women who have their eyes pulled out and a knife shoved down their throats, women who have their abdomen ripped open, women whose naked and bloodied, dismembered torsos are featured as a come on to the customer. Come watch this. Come look at this. Children wandered freely in this horror room. One little girl, less than five years old, stood holding her father's hand, looking up at the pictures of bleeding women on the video jackets and the large posters on the wall. Valerie stood next to the girl, and as she stood there she felt a sick feeling come over her. Depictions of excitement, glee and suggestions of sexuality were mixed with images of human mutilation – and the only humans depicted were young Caucasian women.
As Valerie long ago pointed out, if there was a whole genre that featured the mutilation of dogs or little cats, people would rise up in horror against that and yet here was a father with his little girl.
I'm entering my talk about pornography today by starting with slasher movies to highlight the extent to which our society has contempt and hatred of women. In Ontario, slasher movies are legal, acceptable and considered suitable entertainment. In Ontario, and the rest of North America, slasher movies are teen movies. In Ontario and the rest of North America, our culture has said that it is quite all right to titillate teenage boys with visions of obscene torture and cruelty against the female body -- a female body often in a state of undress just prior to or during her brutal murder.
Slasher movies sexualize violence, cruelty and contempt of women. Watching several slasher movies, back to back, I realized that the style of film, the pacing and the acting reminded me so very much of pornography. Why? I asked myself. Why, whenever I see a slasher movie do I feel like I'm watching pornography? Well, for one thing, many of the women in these sadistic movies are porn stars, too. But for those of you not familiar with the sadism in these "teen" movies, let me briefly describe them.
There appear to be three consistent slasher themes:
Women as food (sausages, steaks, stews, ritual feasts).
Making the perfect woman (by killing many beautiful women and piecing together their "best" body parts).
The frenzied pleasure of killing women (by viewing the murders through the killer's point of view and by introducing rape to the Jack the Ripper theme).
Interestingly, when a girl survives to the end of the movie, she typically has a boy’s name like Jo or Blake. All the Susies and Cathys and Katie’s end up dead.
Like slasher movies, pornography feasts on the hatred of women. The widespread distribution of pornography has been linked to increases in sexual assaults against women. Pornography is known to desensitize viewers to acts of rape and violence against women. Boys between 12 and 17 are heavy users of pornography.2 Boys between 12 and 17 are charged with 25% of sexual assaults in Canada.3
Pornography is clearly a public health and safety issue.
But What is "It"?
A Toronto Star poll published in the spring of 19934 found that 64% of women felt pornography discriminates against women and opposed its sale in corner stores. Two out of every three women know how pornography makes them feel. Two out of every three women know that pornography promotes contempt toward them. Two out of three women feel hurt and harmed by pornography.
The men were evenly divided on the subject, meaning that just about one out of every two men believed pornography discriminates against women.
So one out of every two men, and two out of every three women find pornography offensive. We know contempt when we see it. We know hatred when we see it. But what, exactly, is "it"?
I've noticed that powerful word smiths have pretty comfortably masked the issue of pornography by stating that "it" just can't be defined. Can't define erotica, can't define pornography. Oh well, guess we'll just do nothing and let "it" become normalized into every facet of our lives, from school playgrounds to the workplace to the magazine rack where I buy my milk and bread, to the mainstream movie theatres, to advertisements, to wherever the pornographers want to sell their poison.
In Canada, little boys now buy explicit 20-cent Hustler trading cards, complete with a dial-a-porn number -- and there's not much anyone is doing about it. There are no national laws forbidding the sale of pornography to children, and some parents even subscribe to extremely explicit magazines for their 13-year-old boys. One mother asked her 13-year-old son to just make sure his sister didn't see what he was reading every month. She wants to make sure that little boys and little girls grow up in two very different worlds and when these worlds collide, the little girls had better watch out.
Before I continue with the rest of my talk, today, I'm going to remove my white gloves so that none of you mistake me for a lady. I am not affiliated with any religion or religious organization. I approach the issue of pornography from a human rights perspective and I am not a practicing prude. What consenting adults choose to do on private property is their own business. When they place those activities on film it becomes educational material. We all know that it takes an entire community to educate a child. We need to be very careful about what we teach children about human relationships and how we treat one another on the street, in the home, in school, at work and how we treat one another in bed. Rape is not a synonym for healthy sexual relations but a cruel assault. Some children, thanks to the pornography riddled throughout our culture, don't understand this. And some men certainly don't, either.
Pornography and Erotica
So what is pornography? Maybe, before I try to give a definition, I'll read from two sexually stimulating texts and see if you hear a difference between pornography and erotica. From a June 1984 copy of High Society: A picture of a partly naked Asian woman stares out at the reader. The reader is informed that her name is "Jade", the Fortune Nookie. Next to her picture is the following text:
"For thousands of years, tradition has dictated that Chinese women be submissive to men. I must respect this, so I am the perfect sex slave. Not only do I service my lover's every whim gladly, I am obliged to offer my body to all his friends and relatives. My lover has six brothers, and since family is very important in our culture, you can imagine how sore my cunt and asshole become -- not to mention my bruised and swollen lips -- after he entertains them in my home. Recently, my lover brought over an American tourist. I nearly fainted when I saw that man's immense prick, but I bowed humbly, then stretched out and spread my legs. Every plunge of his cock made me wince in pleasure and pain."
That was from the porn magazine, High Society. But I would encourage all of you to go to the library and read the text of Playboy. Just spend a few hours reading a few articles and jokes and cartoons of Playboy. Spend an afternoon really reading Playboy, and then ask yourself what message is being given about women. When men jovially say to me that they just get Playboy for the "articles", I am not amused. I, too, read the text of Playboy and I read the jokes and the cartoons. Pornography magazines -- including Playboy until they got caught -- abound with jokes about rape and child abuse. Rape is not funny. Sticking a penis into a child is not funny.
The next thing I'd like to read is from the book, Lady Chatterly's Lover, by D. H. Lawrence. When my great-grandmother died back in the early 1960s, underneath her mattress they found a copy of a well-read Lady Chatterly's Lover, so you could say that this book has been a long-time family favourite.
"Then with a quiver of exquisite pleasure he touched the warm soft body, and touched her navel for a moment in a kiss. And he had to come in to her at once, to enter the peace on earth of her soft, quiescent body. It was the moment of pure peace for him, the entry into the body of the woman."
Notice how Lawrence referred to the peace of a woman -- not a piece of a woman -- but the peace of a woman when engaging in an affectionate, human exchange. This is erotica, and erotica is soothing and kind. But unfortunately, I'm not here to speak about erotica, today. I'm here to talk about pornography.
Pornography - Definition
D.H. Lawrence (in his essay, Pornography and Obscenity5) had this to say about pornography:
"Pornography is the attempt to do insult sex, to do dirt on it. . . What I have seen [of pornography] is enough to make you cry. The insult to the human body, the insult to a vital human relationship! Ugly and cheap they make the human nudity, ugly and degraded they make the sexual act, trivial and cheap and nasty!" [p. 13]
Lawrence stated flatly that men who like pornography "have as great a hate and contempt of sex as the greyest Puritan ..."6 Pornography is not about an honest human exchange but about taking, about power imbalances, about freezing women on a page or on a film so that the viewer can take as much gratification as he would like, over and over again. Take as much as he'd like, and then throw her away. On to the next babe.
Erotica - Definition
In terms of erotica, and based on the description in the book, Criminal Neglect: Why Sex Offenders Go Free (by Dr. Wm. Marshall & Sylvia Barrett), erotica is depictions of adults engaged in affectionate, consensual, mutually rewarding sexual relations.
The word affectionate is very important here, as is the word adult.7 It is sad to have to remind so many people in our culture, today, that depicting sexual relations between children is flat out wrong. They expect me to engage in a tiresome dialogue about children's "right" to see other children engaged in sexual activities, saying that "safe sex" videos are needed for children without acknowledging child pornography is used by adult men, not by other children who need to "figure out" how to have sex. Children have a right to a childhood free from sexual abuse and exploitation. I'm not saying anything new, here. This fundamental right is documented in the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
Hate
The hatred and contempt of women in our society is so powerful and such a force that, to many people, it is entirely invisible. They just don't see it.
Hatred of women is so commonplace and, therefore, invisible that women are simply not protected from hate material in Canada. The Criminal Code states that it is illegal to willfully promote hatred against people based on their race, religion, country of origin or ethnicity.
Yet women are targetted daily for assault simply because they are women. Men are never assaulted simply because they're men. They may be assaulted because they fit into one of the Criminal Code's protected categories, or because they are homosexual, but they are never terrorized by strangers because they're men.
When the Metro (Toronto) Task Force on Hatred was initiated, it made an effort to extend protection to the homosexual community even though "sexual orientation" is not a protected group. This was the right course of action on the police's part -- but what about protecting women from hatred? When commentators speak about restricting pornography, they screech and shout censorship!, but when asked about whether hate material against racial minorities should be freely distributed, they flatly say "of course not". Only hate material against women should be available and easily accessible in every facet of our lives. It's normal, it's natural and it's invisible. Like gravity is invisible, this soup of hatred in which women live affects us every day. We are told to close our windows in summer, to stay inside at night, to take an escort to our car in the parking lot and to lock our car doors once we're inside. We have to. We're women.
On December 6, 1989, when 14 women were separated from the men and then shot dead, stunned commentators kept repeating that it was "just" the work of a madman. For a day or two, the media tried to calm a terrified public that it had no social significance except with respect to gun control.
But I knew what it was about. I knew, immediately, that the women were victims of a sick sexism taken to its extreme. Given that any effort on women's part to work our way into meaningful dialogue in our culture is met with so much verbal abuse guised as philosophy, is it any wonder that it took a while before the press acknowledged the naked hatred in the murderer's actions?
If a mad gunman had rushed into a school room and separated all of the Blacks, or all of the Jews, or all of the homosexuals from the rest of the students and then shot them dead, wouldn't the act have been immediately acknowledged as hatred? The press would most surely have named it immediately. Instead, they stuttered and stumbled and looked away. The radio and television commentators were baffled, tongue-tied for a couple of days. I didn't document their statements, but I remember asking, why, why were they refusing to name the hate of women in that horrible, terrorist act of murder? Were they afraid to name it because it binds all of the other arguments against women's rights so seamlessly that to name the hate they would expose themselves when commenting on the efforts of women to build a world that respects us?
This is how two Toronto papers handled the situation:
The Toronto Sun took a few opportunities berate feminists. In their editorials they yelled, not at the murderer but at feminists, venting the murderer's anger on his behalf. Yet interestingly, the Sun moved the SUNshine Girl to the back of the paper, off the 3rd page, until the 14 victims were buried. For one week, the Toronto Sun showed a drop of respect for women.
The Globe and Mail wrote compassionately of that horrible moment, but in December of 1992, exactly 3 years and 10 days after the Montreal Massacre, the Globe jovially printed the following "poem":
"Women are an evil race . . . Let's face it, women are a curse . . . but if they didn't drop their pants, You'd hunt them down and shoot 'em."8
You'd hunt us down and shoot us, if we don't drop our pants? This was coyly printed in Canada's national newspaper three years after fourteen women were hunted down and shot to death.
The next day, the Globe apologized for having printed the poem, but for 24 hours, I hurt. How could they keep doing this to us? I asked. How can they keep doing this to us?
My colleague, Valerie Smith, has documented, time and time again, how freely the Toronto Star uses the word slut and bitch to describe a woman. These are not terms of endearment. So how many times have you seen the Star use derogatory words to describe other groups of people? Thankfully, in the 1990s, you don't.
But why is it O.K. to treat women this way? Why? Believe me, any attempt to ensure that our culture treats women as equal partners during our dance on this earth will be met with ridicule and contempt. I, for one, keep a running list of the names I'm called for trying to call attention to the treatment dished out at women. Fascist, prudish, femi-Nazi, sex-hater, ignorant, foolish, naive and, my personal favourite, reptilian.
Pornography & Assault
I am working to de-normalize pornography in our popular culture because we have enough evidence to link pornography with increased sexual assaults against women. The following data is from the book, Criminal Neglect: Why Sex Offenders Go Free by Dr. William Marshall and Sylvia Barrett, in the chapter "The Link to Pornography". Doubleday, 1991.
You'll not read this information in any popular Toronto paper. Instead, the reporters will look over the reports and state to the reader that there's no evidence linking pornography to sexual assault, but listen to this.
Denmark
When Denmark decriminalized pornography and prostitution (back in the 60's), the number of violent rapes increased. The original study mistakenly said pornography was harmless, neglecting to highlight some very important points:
Prior to the new laws in Denmark, pornography and prostitution were counted as "sex crimes".
The original study (by Kutchinsky) compared the wrong information and mistakenly reported that sex crimes went down. They only appeared to go down because pornography and prostitution were no longer counted as "sex crimes" after the new laws were in place.9[9]
Australia
Two Australian states handled pornography differently. Queensland refused to allow the easy distribution of pornography while South Australia relaxed its laws and permitted easy and accessible pornography.
In comparing the rape rate per 100,000 at risk over a 13-year period, a study conducted by John Court found:
Queensland, which did not permit pornography, showed no increase in its rape rate.
South Australia, which allowed easy access to pornography, had a rape rate which increased six-fold over the same period.
Hate in Pornography
I read the text of pornographic magazines and I feel the message -- just like two out of every three women know the message of pornography.
In pornography, women are referred to as "bitches", sluts, whores and cock-sucking bitches. The July 1992 issue contained an ad to increase Hustler subscription. The ad featured a woman having her face shoved into the toilet.
A recent Hustler advertising supplement was given to a female welder at a plant in Kitchener-Waterloo. It featured half-naked women holding placards with images of a woman lying on her back, spread eagle and the words "Just Say Yes". Beneath the picture was the following:
"Date-Rape Prevention Guide. Just Say yes. It's simple, and it prevents rape. HUSTLER girls follow this easy piece of advice when it comes to the vertical shuffle with a pushy frat prick. When she thinks of the legal fees, the humiliation and waste of time a rape trial can bring --- not to mention torn clothes and contusions -- she'll want to say yes."
This Hustler Date Rape Prevention Guide was not given to the Kitchener woman to make her feel good. When co-workers hand pornography to women at work, it is not done to make women feel good about themselves. Two out of every three women in Canada know this.
One corner store magazine is entitled Oriental Snatch and contains only photographs of oriental women. In this magazine, women are referred to as "hot bitches," etc.
When featuring women of African descent, Playboy and Penthouse "animalize" the women (in one, a naked black woman crouches on her belly like a lizard and from her mouth a forked, snake-like tongue lashes out).
Sado-masochistic themes, played out "playfully" in soft-core porn, often include Nazi gear, minimizing the tragedy of the Holocaust.10
For years, now, pornography has been mainstreamed. It has been mainstreamed to such an extent that, not only do some people have a hard time seeing the hate in pornography, they can't even "see" the pornography! The Governments of Canada and Ontario funded a sado-masochistic movie masquerading as "art"11[11] and we Canadians are so weary of the pervasive pornography that there was hardly even a peep of protest when the movie was released. Just a casual mention in a movie review and on to the next insult.
Pornography can now be seen on television, at home from a video, on the playground, in prisons, on university computers, billboards, street windows, corner stores, mainstream movies.
Two out of every three (64 %) Canadian women know what pornography does to them. Two out of three women feel that hatred, that contempt. We don't want it in our corner stores or in our homes. We want to live in neighbourhoods where the message is that we are human and are to be treated with respect.
We can not squeeze erotica out of pornography. THEY COME FROM TWO DIFFERENT PLACES. Erotica comes from a place of affection, and pornography comes from a place of contempt and hatred.
We must say no to pornography and the lies it produces. We must stop and ask ourselves whether we value artifacts more than people.
Pornography helps no one
Pretending that the contempt of women spread through pornography, spread through images and messages which convey that we deserve less than compassionate human treatment, is not worthy of public attention puts all women at risk. In the early 1980's, there was a lively and provocative public debate over pornography. Our reward was simply more pornography in more places. In the early 1980's, I could make a business decision as to which hotel I would stay in depending on whether they offered pornography. Now, all hotels offer pornography. Now, mainstream movies offer pornography. Now, advertisements are blatantly pornographic and proud of it. Now, the public discussion around pornography is so confused because pornography is so infused into our cultural life. I've heard intelligent men state that there shouldn't be a problem with selling pornography in corner stores because, afterall, fashion ads are pornographic, now, so what's the problem?
The father of Montreal Massacre victim Nathalie Croteau, 23, spoke so directly to my heart. I'd like to share his words with you in the hope that each of you commit to facing and naming and working to remove the hatred and contempt of women -- in your life, in the lives of those around you, in the press, in society at large.
"They lifted up the sheet and showed me my daughter. I held her in my arms and cried. My life ended when I saw my daughter."12
Each woman in this room, each girl and woman that you know, is someone's daughter.
The day after the Montreal Massacre, a cab driver in Montreal exclaimed that he "could understand if [the murderer's] wife [was] cheating on him, or a woman giving him a hard time, but he didn't even know [his victims]." The cab driver spoke from a culture that hates women. The man responsible for the Montreal Massacre spoke from a culture that hates women. Pornography speaks from a culture that hates women and doesn't even try to hide it.
To Mr. Croteau, to the Mahaffy and French families, to the families of Valerie Stevens, Helen Betty Osbourne, Nina DeVilliers, Cindy Halliday and to those who knew and loved the many now forgotten victims of pornographic violence, I will not sit back and take it any more. No matter how many names I am called and no matter how much I am publicly belittled, I will continue to speak against the lies and twisted half-truths which fill our eyes and minds.
I ask that each of you make this commitment with me, for the safety of our daughters, for all of the women and girls we know and love.
Please note that in my talks and my writing, I never name the murderer and always name the victims. Reporters often insert the murderer's name back into my speeches when reporting on them. Kindly focus on the victims and their families.
In fact, Valerie Smith purchased Body Shop in the Bargain Store, a general discount store in Brampton, Ontario. It is also available in neighbourhood, "family" video stores.
Dr. James Check, of York University (Toronto), has highlighted that Canadian boys between the ages of 12 and 17 are heavy users of pornography. See Criminal Neglect, by Dr. William Marshall & Sylvia Barrett.
Drummie, Gretchen, "Younger than Ever: Adolescent Sex Crimes on Increase," Toronto Sun, August 19, 1990.
"Majority oppose adult magazines Gallup poll shows," The Toronto Star, April 25, 1993, p.A13. The men were evenly divided on this subject. 45% of the men felt that pornography discriminates against women, while 46% of the men felt that it did not.
Lawrence, D.H., Pornography and Obscenity, No. XIII - The Outcast Chapbooks No. 13, Lincoln Press, Yonkers, New York, July 1942.
Ibid, p. 14.
In Canada and the United States, there appears to be pressure to "allow" children to explore their sexuality on film --- for later sale and distribution to pedophiles, naturally. These clever people couch their words so eloquently that some people don't see past the message of allowing children to be used to adults' sexual pleasure. This is in direct contravention of the Human Rights of the Child, passed by the United Nations.
"Social Studies" column ("The Back Page"), The Globe and Mail, December 16, 1992.
Interesting to note that in 1991, a Quebec man who had lived in Copenhagen wrote a book about pornography and mentioned the original and flawed Denmark study without referencing the follow-up work which clearly indicated that the number of violent rapes increased. The book was full of fascinating historical and anthropological information but I wanted to point out that despite his attempt to appear "neutral" with respect to pornography, he could not disguise his attitude about anti-pornography feminists, or feminists in general.
When discounting a feminist claim, he would use the word "ignorant" repeatedly. As well, when referring to some findings/perceptions from authors Shere Hite and Nancy Friday, Mr. Arcand prefaces their ideas by stating, "Whether these authors are trustworthy is of little consequence." Let me point out that, to support ideas throughout his book, Mr. Arcand frequently refers to the Marquis de Sade and never, never, never questions his "trustworthiness."
This is fascinating, because the Marquis wrote, "There's not a woman on earth who'd ever had cause to complain of my services if I'd been sure of being able to kill her afterwards."
Mr. Arcand, who lived in Copenhagen for a while, quoted Kutchinsky's Denmark study which proudly stated that the onslaught of pornography in that country is somehow related to a decrease in the number of sex crimes. In point of fact, the number of violent rapes increased once pornography and prostitution were decriminalized in that country. You see, prior to the decriminalization of pornography and prostitution, those two acts were counted as sex crimes. After the laws changed, they were no longer part of the statistical "bucket", so technically, sex crimes went down but more women were victims of assault.
Mr. Arcand summarizes his book with his perception that pornography's real danger is causing "us" (mostly men) to live like "anteaters", receiving sexual gratification from machines rather than each other. I guess all of the harms identified by "ignorant" anti-porn feminists are simply of no account when measured against the isolation of whacking off to your television set. He won a Governor General's Award for his book.
Nazi gear is featured in the pubically-funded S/M movie, Paris, France.
Paris, France (released in 1993) is a movie about a woman engaging in sado-masochistic sexual practices to help get rid of her writer's block. This movie was funded by the Canadian and Ontario governments!
"We all grieve", editorial, Toronto Sun, December 6, 1989. Note that the Sun took this opportunity to belittle feminists. "How dare they. How dare a small clique of bogus intellectuals and professional man-haters across this country attempt to turn the tragic Montreal Massacre of 14 young women into an issue of men vs women" starts the editorial. The editorial then used the father's touching quote to off-set feminist claims and closed with a line that stated, "The only person who should feel guilty is dead," meaning the murderer.