Gift-Wrapping The Men's Movement: Canada's White Ribbon Foundation Campaign

Special Directed Studies, WMNS 501 at Queen’s University

Submitted to Professor Kathleen Lahey: June 30, 1994

 

© Roberta Spark MA

 

 

On December 6, 1989, one man

murdered fourteen women in Montreal.

It was not an isolated act.

Men who abuse and murder women

are brought up to have power

and control in a culture

that devalues women.

 

Violence is a chosen response.

Men must take responsibility for

their actions.  Every community and

every institution must work to build a

culture of safety, equality and

justice for women.

 

We must never forget the women

murdered on December 6, 1989

and all women who suffer

from male violence.  We must

transform our outrage and

our tears to action, now.

 

Always Remember:

Genevieve Bergeron

Helene Colgan

Nathalie Croteau

Barbara Daigneault

Anne-Marie Edward

Maud Haviernick

Barbara Maria Klueznick

Maryse Laganiere

Maryse Leclair

Anne-Marie Lemay

Sonia Pelletier

Michele Richard

Annie St-Arneault

Annie Turcotte

 

 

This was the message on a commemorative bookmark given out by the YWCA Community Awareness of Violence Against Women, Toronto, 1992.

 

 

 

                The primary function of this paper is to evaluate the work of the grassroots WRF campaign as it evolved into the corporate entity the WRF.  The paper will first analyze the Montreal Massacre, the grisly murders that mobilized a Canadian copycat of the American `men's movement'.  The paper locates the WRF movement as the men's movement in Canada, or at the least, the measure by which masculinist organizations are judged and positioned.

                Most men are afraid to talk about the men's movement, afraid that they will attract the scorn that dogged the women's movement and its early followers.  Across the country, a growing number of men are getting together in groups to share their feelings over potluck dinners.  On weekends, men are holding seminars, meetings, conferences, and workshops.  They are beating conga drums to release their "rage', sweating in communal saunas or sweat lodges letting out the “wild man” inside.  Men in the movement are writing poetry, singing songs, chanting and making art.  However, beating drums and hugging and kissing other men sit as well with most men as burning bras did with most women in the early 60s.  No traditionally self-respecting male would be caught dead doing these things, but the men in the movement are excited about their new feelings and behaviours.  In Canada, the Men's Network for Change launched the White Ribbon Foundation (WRF), an organization dedicated to eradicating male violence.  The Foundation was established after Marc Lepine massacred fourteen "feminists" in Montreal.

                The media presented the horrific massacre of fourteen female engineers at Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal in 1989; this paper documents the strange culmination of those events.  The outpouring of spontaneous grief and fear over the terrifying murders by anti-feminist Marc Lepine was, oddly enough, men wearing white ribbons on the anniversary of the women's deaths.  The second unexpected outcome was men using the public's memories and fear of the Montreal Massacre to raise funds for a largely pro-male organization, the WRF.  The final and astonishing result was that men suddenly became instant media experts on male violence, crowding out the expertise of women and children victims and front-line workers and feminists.  The paper will show, however, that while advancing the claim of being both pro-feminist and against male violence, the men's movement relentlessly, methodically, and unapologetically occupied feminist territory emotionally, practically, and theoretically.  This paper further examines the WRF's commitment to eradicating male violence against women and children by inspecting the Foundation's actions, records, and publications.  In particular, the WRF's stated intent to be accountable to feminists and front-line workers in shelters and rape crisis centres will be evaluated. 

                In addition, the main political positions and philosophies in the contemporary men's movement will be identified, and especially how they divide or unite around male violence against women and children.  The paper notes that the WRF movement's commitment to ending male violence does not exist in a vacuum.  Rather, the paper argues that it is deeply influenced by current thought on hegemonic institutions such as capitalism; and, furthermore, it is inextricably linked to the growing spectrum of positions beckoning from within a mysterious `men's movement'.  Therefore, events, and the White Ribbon's growth, will be positioned in the paper within a framework of masculinism, capitalism, and the patriarchy. 

 

 

                This paper argues that the WRF movement is representative of sectors of the multiple positional phenomena known as `the men's movement'.  Those sectors, and most of the movement's positions, according to this paper, are androcentric with male self-serving bias, ideologies, and values.  This research paper exposes the contradiction of trying to be both pro-male and pro-feminist.                 The paper further determines that a grass roots symbol of mourning, the white ribbon, was ultimately appropriated by a calculating and slick male corporate entity called the WRF.  The paper's contention is that the WRF largely exonerates male brutality by assigning categories of `good men' who wear the White Ribbon, and `bad men' who beat, rape and murder women and children.  The paper argues that those categories are false dichotomies because it is the ordinary man who beats his wife or molests his daughter in their private home, and it is the everyday male who sexually harasses employees or co-workers in the public sphere.

                The paper will trace development of a primarily white, elitist leadership and membership in the WRF.  The paper will also comment on the WRF funding strategies from grass-roots inception to its current status.  Employment growth and contractual arrangements surrounding the fundraising campaign will illustrate what this paper sees as a shameless and insensitive bid to capitalize on the tragic massacre of fourteen young women and the public outpouring of grief.  The paper maintains that the WRF’s exploitation continues over the raised voices of pro-feminist and feminist critics.              

                Finally, the paper will identify positive aspects of the men's movement.  The paper concludes by suggesting a viable alternative to evaluate, stimulate, and reform the contemporary WRF allowing achievement of its raison d'etre.

 

The Horrifying and Bloody Massacre of Canadian "Feminists"

                On December the 6, 1989, in Montreal Canada, women were the absolute centre of media attention.  This unusual state of affairs was because fourteen women engineering students were accused of being `feminist' and then murdered by a man who blamed feminism for his failures.  The assassin, Marc Lepine, sent compliant men out of the room as he targeted women engineers, shooting and killing fourteen women and wounding other people.  I am keenly aware that my deliberate use of the adjective "compliant" will cause many to raise objections.  Nevertheless, I stand by the word, and the unfolding of  sequential events will make my point. 

 

The Sequence of Events

                At 4:30 Lepine went in to a first-floor cafeteria where he killed three women¹.  The murderer then went into a packed classroom on the second floor where he waved a .223 Semi-automatic Sturm Ruger rifle with bloody fingerprints on the stock.  At first the students thought he was "only kidding" and "firing blanks" because he appeared very calm².  Then Lepine ordered men to leave the room, and he told the nine remaining women that "He was fighting feminism".  The men complied without protest, and the results were predictable. One student, Nathalie Provost, tried to reason with Lepine, letting him know that "she was not feminist, she had never fought against men".  Her pleas were ignored, and Lepine opened fire on them all.  When he thought they were dead, he went hunting for more women to kill³.  Lepine shot dead six of the nine young women in the classroom and then massacred a seventh woman in another room on the same floor.  The killer Lepine then climbed to the third floor where he killed four women in a corridor.  Lepine proceeded to the fourth and fifth floors where he injured several more people, returning finally to the third floor where he took his own life⁴.

                During his bloody prowl, Lepine fired so many shots that some men and women avoided him by running the opposite way of the sound of his gunshots, or else they locked themselves in safe offices⁵.  One male student, Francois Bordeleau, ran from floor to floor, literally dragging people away from the direction that Lepine was moving.  He told the media later that shortly after the police arrived that it was as though "It was a human hunt, (and) we were the quarry"⁶.  Bordeleau was right in saying that humans were targeted, but wrong in that he, as a man, was also target.  We would subsequently learn that Lepine specifically targeted women because he was convinced that all women in engineering were "feminists", and therefore responsible for his failure to be admitted into the engineering program that he had applied to attend.

                Lepine roamed aimlessly throughout his hunt, going in and out of several rooms including a computer centre where he shot his gun but did not kill anyone.  Lepine was heard shouting many times that he "wanted to get the women"⁷. The police arrived at 5:21 p.m., within six minutes of being summoned by to the University at 5:15⁸.  At the end of the blood bath at Ecole Polytechnique, Montreal, twenty-three women had been shot, fourteen of who would die, and four men were unintentionally wounded by ricocheting rifle bullets from Lepine’s gun⁹.

                I note that it must have taken some time to go from the cafeteria and proceed upwards while exploring halls and rooms, all the while killing and shooting.  Lepine's killing spree lasted for 51 minutes, nearly an hour, from 4:30 to 5:21 p.m. when the police arrived to find the dead victims and the dead murderer.  For an incredibly long forty-five minutes from the first three murders, no police arrived.  The assassin Lepine left both a letter and an attached hit list of high profile Quebec women that he wanted to kill¹⁰. It was recommended by psychiatrist Dr. Jacques Lesage that the letter's contents, and the names on the list be kept secret since:

It is possible that people with serious emotional problems might read the letter, identify with its contents and use Lepine as a model.  If the letter's contents are made public, there is a risk that we might awaken (other) Marc Lepines out there whom are sleeping, and we must let them sleep¹¹.

 

However, the letter’s contents were published in La Presse¹². 

                A copy of the three-page rant against feminists had been sent anonymously to the home of Montreal journalist Francine Pelletier, who was herself on the hit list of women Marc Lepine intended to kill.  Pelletier fought hard but unsuccessfully to have the police release the original letter.  In the letter, Lepine correctly predicted that the media would see him as a "mad killer", but that his actions were those of "a rational, erudite person".  Pelletier agrees with Lepine, saying that "his rampage at the school was calculated" and that "he was crazy when he started, but it was a cold, rational, and calculated act on his part"¹³.

                Two days after the massacre the families of the murdered or injured called for an inquiry into the length of time between the first murder and the arrival of the police, as well as into police behaviour at the site¹⁴.  There were many concerns that the families wanted to address, including but not limited to the fact that some of the women may have bled to death while the police kept ambulance technicians waiting outside the Polytechnique for half an hour.  In addition, the SWAT team arrived fully two hours after the event.  Also, parents of victims were kept waiting for up to eight hours to find out if their children were among the dead because the police wanted to photograph the carnage from all possible angles for "forensic evidence"¹⁵.  I think, although I am unable to reference it, that there may also have been grave concerns about the institutional response of Polytechnique as well, and the media did eventually pose the question to the Polytechnique officials¹⁶. 

                The request for a public inquiry was denied, but a municipal probe and a provincial task force was struck to probe the police response to the murders.  The municipal police probe exonerated police of blame¹⁷.  The Provincial Report was not available to the public, meaning the complete story would never be available to the public^{18 (}See also: `Task force to study police response at Polytechnique; but provincial teams won't hold a public inquiry into massacre by Lepine’ in the Montreal Gazette, July 18, 1990. p A6).  Although initially there was condemnation of Police action¹⁹, in the end they were fully exonerated by their inquiry²⁰.  Montreal, however, found it necessary to arrange additional emergency response training for their police force²¹.

                The gruesome massacre changed many lives, and had a ripple effect on many people.  It has altered forever the lives of those who were present but escaped death, the public, people paid to protect citizens, and institutional structures, including and far beyond Ecole Polytechnique.  However, it has so profoundly affected or damaged the lives of those who lost loved ones that at least three suicides are attributed to the aftermath of the massacre²².

 

Why Nobody Tried to Stop Lepine   

                I grant that many at the scene would have been in shock, especially those who had been in direct contact with Lepine, taking orders from him or watching as he murdered women.  Nevertheless, it is my contention that there must have been opportunity to challenge or confuse Lepine as he targeted and shot women, all the while ignoring both pleas and fervent claims that they were "not feminist."  I am convinced by personal experience that had I been there, I would have felt compelled to take intervening action²³.  I think there must have been opportunity to take action of some sort. After all, Lepine climbed stairs, spoke to and separated people, went in and out of rooms and hallways, was very loud as he shot randomly or targeted women.  Clearly, all of this took time, offering opportunities –risky though they might be- to intervene in his murderous rampage.

                My words may seem harsh, but I am accustomed to speaking my truth.  I was and still am shocked, dismayed, and ashamed that no-one attempted to avert the subsequent tragedy at the school. The relatively safe male students, staff, faculty, or security forces mounted no attempt to stop Lepine.  Arguably, the women he targeted did not have the ability to influence the misogynist Lepine; indeed, their words might have even fuelled greater tragedy.  Therefore only a man or group of men might have altered the bloody history of Ecole Polytechnique.  That is, the women who were Lepine's target could not possibly be expected to reason with an enraged Lepine.  Notably, and in support of my opinion, the few women who tried to convince Lepine that they were not feminist were killed anyway.  I contend, however, that the men present should have tried, and might have been successful, in reasoning with Lepine.  Therefore, harsh as it may be experienced or deemed, in my mind men were compliant in the Massacre. They took neither action nor control, responding only to terse orders from Lepine to leave the premises.  I argue, however, that in a situation of such horror and magnitude, it should have been incumbent upon the specifically non-targeted men to stop one of their own in their beloved ‘brotherhood of man’. 

 I believe that a man could have reasoned with Lepine because in a similar situation where a single and brave man convinced a different assassin, also intent on a multiple-victim blood bath, only in the Quebec Legislature on May 8, 1984.  In that incident, Corporal Denis Lortie killed three people when he opened fire with a machine gun in the National Assembly of Quebec²⁴.  Equally convinced of the “discrimination” against him, Lortie was persuaded not to continue shooting by a man who was the Gendarme at the Legislature. The Gendarme first identified himself as ex-military and commiserated with the killer, and finally he talked Lortie out of his plan to kill more people - speaking to Lortie “man to man”²⁵.  Furthermore, Lepine knew the story about Lortie, he held Lortie up as a role model and his last written words include a reference to Lortie's bloody rampage.

                I had already tried in my youth to enlist in the Forces as an officer cadet, which would have allowed me to enter the arsenal and precede Lortie in a rampage²⁶.

 

I am persuaded that Lepine, who admired the Lortie subdued by a male Gendarme, might also have been convinced to stop killing "feminists" by a man at the site.  However, no man tried to do so. Why did no man attempt to talk Lepine out of his plan to murder women?  After all, according to my analyses, Lepine simply represented the fanatical fringe of a common male point of view that feminists call “backlash”.  However, not a single man took any action unless specifically directed to do so by Lepine, or do anything at all except to take action to get away from Lepine's threat and in doing so protect himself from harm.  A poignant question ricochets in my mind: What did those escaping, compliant men think Lepine was going to do to the women he was professing to hate except to kill or harm them?  The urgency of the situation, and the fact that Lepine hunted and killed only women should have propelled some man to action.  I do not argue for a Rambo-like response from a testosterone-driven male who would subsequently pit himself against the ultimate evil, Lepine.  I do not even refer to a physical confrontation.  What I am unable to comprehend is why no man attempted to even talk Lepine out of his plan.  In my mind, this makes all men present at the time of the massacre complicit in Lepine's misogynist and bloody fantasy-cum-reality. 

 

Female Experience and Male Roles             

                Everyone experienced the murders as horrific and frightening, a massive trauma for both private individuals and the public whole.  Women were deeply moved, and feminists especially felt intense grief. They felt threatened; alternatively grieving, raging, and trembling in fear.  Lepine's acts resulted in sharpened analyses at many levels. A diversity of feminists have explored from various perspectives the theory and practices of Marc Lepine.  Many feminists saw the Massacre as backlash that boded ill for an egalitarian future.  Some were resentful of what they viewed as the Catholic Church's expropriation and exploitation of the victims' funerals.  Their feminist personal and political analyses implied that Catholic history amounted to collaboration and collusion in women's historical subordination.  This, therefore, was foremost in the minds of many women who objected to the dominant male presence of alter-boys, male priests, male bishops, and male Catholic officials at the funeral. 

Elite men led the funeral procession, figured predominantly at the church alter, or else sat in select pews²⁷.  The Montreal Massacre, (ed. Louise Malette and Marie Chalouh) documents the inadequate and misogyny-denying coverage by the media. It highlights the expropriation of the funeral by the equally misogynist Catholic Church. Letters in the book highlight the Catholic Church's complicity in women's subordination, concluding that the massive masculine funeral presence at the alter was offensive.  The book notes that, like Lepine, the Church offends women by gender and authority ranking, a fact underscored by endorsing patriarchy as a family model. It argues that an ostentatious display of profound sexism, the Catholic Church reserves sacerdotal rituals for men, thereby supporting hierarchical genders and role by preaching that gender differences are congruent to equal status.

                Nonetheless, the Montreal Massacre has changed the Canadian psyche by driving home the problem of men's violence against women, a problem exemplified by Lepine's backlash to feminism.  Ominously though, some reactions to the massacre show that other men share the hateful ideology of Marc Lepine. For example, shortly after reports of the shocking event, mocking portrayals of the massacre were witnessed, and death threats and hate messages were received by women and feminist organizations²⁸. 

 

Media (Re)Construction of the Montreal Massacre

                While Lepine took on the feminists with a gun, the media exposed their misogyny by attacking feminists with words.  Media concentration was riveted on Ecole Polytechnique de Montreal as reporters searched for plausible explanations.  Emotions tumbled one over the other as the commentators and the public dealt with disbelief, shock, horror, and, finally, overwhelming grief.  Although initially identified as misogyny, subsequent remedial media coverage of the massacre both illustrates the media's hegemonic power and typifies the media backlash against feminism.  The misogyny-denying coverage of the Montreal Massacre soon became totally androcentric²⁹. The publication The Montreal Massacre positions the community grief and anguish that led to the early grass roots WRC.  It also chronicles the early feminist endorsement and the benign feminist neglect concerning the men's movement, and the peculiarly Canadian phenomena of the WRC. 

 

Media Collusion

                Inevitably, the media proceeded to the only logical and ideological conclusion allowed by patriarchy, the blaming of the `feminist' victims and the exoneration of Lepine. Some in the media now reconstructed him a distressed man damaged by cunning feminists.  While initial coverage of the Massacre had featured a clear analysis of misogyny³⁰.  For example, the Globe and Mail on December 8, 1990 claimed that “Lepine absorbed his attitudes from the society around him” and that:

 “.... If the arrogance of male domination is to be found, naked and ashamed, at the heart of our democratic system and in centres of higher learning, it is evident that a deep-seated fear and resentment is at work among many men”.

 

 However, this sharp analysis was soon replaced by denials of prejudice and by acrid media and personal criticism of men's exclusion at women's vigils honouring of the slain women³¹. In Kingston’s Community Newspaper Between The Lines, (January 18-31, 1990,) an article titled ‘Focus on the Genocide In Montreal’ by Martin Dufresne reported that the day after the massacre, a group of male student society executives from the University of Montreal muscled in on a vigil organized by the Concordia Women's Collective and the Montreal Women's Defence League.  They turned the sound truck back, and shoved away the women who had come to get their equipment. Meanwhile, other male students from the Polytechnique, using walkie-talkies, began to circle around the organizers, and kept them from speaking to the crowd of journalists; they started hissing at the women for allegedly "exploiting" the killing. They recommended that the crowd of a few thousand people, mostly women, be send off in to pray in silence at a nearby church.  When the organizers attempted to speak out, some people booed them because they spoke in English, yet even when a Francophone woman slated to address the rally tried to get to the front of the crowd, she was forcibly kept back.  "Shut the fuck up," shouted one man, "have some respect for the dead!”.  

                Perhaps the most representative and influential backlash was viewed on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's `Prime-Time Journal', where news anchor Barbara Frum insisted that viewers not focus on the fact that only women had been targeted for murder³².  Not only did Frum specifically deny the public an analysis reflecting women's experiences of violence, she refused to even use the word feminism or feminist.  This calculated exclusion of Lepine's obsession with feminism denied and trivialized the reality of women's lived -and now dying- experience of feminist backlash³³.  It also denied the fundamental nature of the murder victims' deaths. The CBC remained consistent in perpetuating misogyny, not allowing media personal to wear white commemorative ribbons while on the air, although they routinely wear red poppies on Remembrance Day³⁴.

                Following Frum's high profile lead, most media began to argue that Lepine was just "a crazy killer" and the massacre just "an isolated event." The media reflected, encouraged and perpetuated a massive denial of the deadly implications for all women, but especially for feminists.  Furthermore, the media claimed that Lepine had been "terribly hurt" by his family and by women³⁵.  The Toronto Star, (December 9, 1989. pp A5, A13) underscores that   `Lepine’s mother said that he was beaten by his father, and that may have been why he was so distraught to murder women. The media noted that Lepine couldn’t gain acceptance to the engineering program at the Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal, in Lepine’s mind because women and affirmative action had taken it over.  By presenting this analysis, it was subtly implied that his acts were an indication that women, and especially feminists, had gone too far too fast.  Consequently, and according to this mode of thought, the victims were to blame for their own demise³⁶.  In unrelenting irony, then, the murdered women were deemed feminists, and feminists were subsequently identified as ultimately responsible for Lepine's murderous acts³⁷. The Globe and Mail’s John Allermang (Dec 9, 1990) mused that:

 "Anger, alas, breeds anger, and even Marc Lepine was once a victim of someone's anger", in an apparent denouncement of feminist zeal. General feminist blaming became an excusatory tactic; feminists were castigated in the media for “using” the Montreal Murders as a “platform against men”.

 

The media gleefully focused on so-called “feminist man-hating” while ignoring the murderous woman-hating amply demonstrated both by the Massacre and by Lepine's demonstrably sexist disregard for women. The media turned an excusatory if not quite a blind eye to classically misogynist acts and preoccupations of Marc Lepine.  For example, the media collectively failed to disclose that Lepine had been influenced by the military while a civilian employee at an army base failed to tell us that Lepine's Uncle, a Green Beret, trained Lepine in armed assault techniques³⁸.  It also media failed to report that Lepine wrote and published misogynist tracts under the pen name of Gamil Gharbi.

                While feminists were rarely centre stage following the initial analyses of the murders, sensitive men were in great demand for media interviews and analysis to convince the public that men were all right but that Lepine was crazy. Michael Kaufman, National Director of the WRF and in a CBC's Prime Time News interview used the example boxers to convince viewers that society "brutalizes" men.  He argued that the boxers were paid to hit each other" in a fight broadcast on the night of the massacre, December 6, 1989³⁹.  Kaufman, in explanation if not endorsement, noted that backlash against feminism was “sometimes conscious and planned, but more often not”.  I cannot help but wonder, was it conscious or not when Kaufman, a psychologist men's studies' academic, twisted the Montreal Massacre around to bring attention not to the female victims or the killer's misogyny, but rather as a springboard to ponder the malaise of the contemporary male condition.   It is clear that to both Kaufman and the media expropriated the event, using the murders to illustrate how men in general feel about losing their previously  automatic privileges; or about how hurt Lepine must have been by women that it made him so bitter and vindictive. Arguably, attendant media coverage served dominant men like Kaufman. Still, it proved only a tiny taste of the support that would accrue to elite if sensitive men with the emergence of the WRF.

 

The Establishment of The WRF

                By 1990, women realized that men had not only shoved women off centre-stage in the funeral procession o0f the Montreal victims, but that men had also seized and capitalized on the momentum of a deep, community grief initially led by women.  Men accomplished this by claiming to initiate the WRF campaign, and later, the men who established the corporate WRF.  To understand the rise of the WRF campaign to its current prominence, we need to remember the Massacre and its effect on women, women's groups, the media, and the public. Anguish at the murders was undeniably widespread across race, class and gender lines. Shock and sorrow had led to the spontaneous wearing first of the commemorative white scarves by the victim’s colleagues in the funeral march, and later by the wearing of ribbons to commemorate the Montreal Massacre.

 

The Origins of the Commemorative White Ribbon

                There is considerable disagreement over who first wore the commemorative White Ribbon.  The most popular account is that in 1990, students and citizens of Ottawa and Montreal, led by the Ottawa Men's Network For Change, wore white ribbons as a spontaneous show of grief at the vigil commemorating the Massacre.  However, I find this account slightly self-serving.  More likely it originated with the women belonging to the Montreal Engineering Society, who, during the funeral march, wore fluttering ribbon-like, white scarves on their arms in commemoration of their murdered colleagues and friends.  The women engineers explained that they wore white scarves "because white was the colour of innocence, and all these women were innocent"⁴⁰.  Women engineering students across Canada had joined with this funeral tribute in 1989, and then yearly by wearing white scarves on subsequent commemorations.  Teachers and fellow students at Ecole Polytechnique, and mother female engineering colleagues joined the women engineers in this act.  By 1990 the women in engineering were joined by male colleagues who wore white armbands.

                A third to claim to ownership of the wearing white ribbons in commemoration of the Massacre is made by the Men's Network for Change in Toronto.  The Toronto men say that the wearing of white ribbons to commemorate the Massacre and raise public awareness about male violence against women and children originated in Toronto in 1991⁴¹.  According to this version, the author and former psychology professor Michael Kaufman, who coincidentally was also the National Director of the WRF, led the initiative. Along with the then mayoralty candidate Jack Layton, and on behalf of the Toronto Men's Network For Change, they claim that they conceived of the white ribbon campaign.  Then, they suggested to local and national dignitaries and politicians that “they wear a white ribbon or white carnation to support the grassroots opposition to men's violence against women⁴².  However, and regardless of who was first to wear the ribbons, by 1991 confusion reigned about whether or not women should wear WRF white ribbons that probably was started by women engineers and had been worn up to then by both sexes⁴³.

 

Women's Herstory of Wearing and Selling Ribbons

                The selling of symbolic ribbons in order to fund women's services was, and still is, a common practice.  So common, in fact, that it elicited a biting commentary by columnist Rosie DiManno:

We are a society that has become entangled in ribbons.  All trussed up in filaments of satin 'n' silk, wearing our convictions on our lapels, a little loop of conscience that tells the world I care, oh yes, I CARE. In fact, we hardly care at all.  It's a shortcut to atonement, a painless display of compassion, the iconography of a distracted populace that changes its ribbons as casually as it changes its underwear.  The crucifix, the mezuzah, the poppy, have been overtaken by strips of cloth in a bewildering assortment of flavours that will soon necessitate some NDP-funded directory of colour-coded social causes.

 

Today, it's the red ribbon campaign in token appreciation of AIDS awareness.  Next week, we can all don the white ribbons and hair shirts in condemnation of violence against women (Toronto Star, December 1, 1993. p A7).

 

While not in such caustic analysis, I nonetheless agree somewhat with DiManno.  Historically, ribbons were worn for peace in the sixties, for women's shelters in the seventies, for lesbian and gay rights in the eighties, and for rainbow coalitions in the nineties.  It raises the question, though, as to whether ribbons might replace action as well as real, visible and concrete support for the social issues the ribbons emerged to expose. What is crystalline clear, however, is that selling ribbons is historically a woman's funding strategy.  While men occasionally wore ribbons to promote sports teams or schools, they did not sell ribbons to fund their men's organizations.  The point is that selling ribbons are one of the few inexpensive, visible, and consciousness-raising strategies possible for under-resourced women's services, and therefore, is traditionally done by women.  Now, however, mainstream and male-stream groups are using ribbons to promote their causes.

                Arguably, the new age, sensitive male's appropriation of this seemingly trite funding technique of ribbon selling actually constitutes a profound occupation of women's territory.  While I am not suggesting a sexual stereotyping of funding techniques, it is noteworthy that while men are occupying and annexing this feminine and feminist practical and accessible ground, this inclusionary politic works only one way.  In other words, men's entry into women's funding domain has not been matched by women's successful access to traditionally male fund-raising terrain of corporations.  Men now occupy and appropriate women's position on the funding spectrum, but women do not enjoy reciprocity to men's increasingly successfully access to their traditional funding sources. 

 

The Roots of the White Ribbon Foundation’s Campaign

                The WRF's media prominence and image assured that volunteer organizations and individuals of both sexes (but especially appreciative women) lauded the actions of newly sensitised WRF men.  The public applauded the public promotion of men against male violence; but unfortunately, they were applauding a not accountable WRF.  In fact, the WRF movement aroused the ire of many feminists and some men's groups that raised doubts about its management style, motives, and sometimes, its ethics.  Argument emerged about the practice of white ribbons worn in commemoration; and conflict over who first linked white ribbons to the issue of male violence against women. The most common urban myth is the men's impulsive donning of the white ribbons in 1990 vigils of the Massacre worn to protest male violence against women.  Although research is unable to substantiate this claim, it is a persistent urban myth.  Still, no explanation is offered for the “spontaneous” materialization of rolls of ribbon and scissors, or about advance arrangements for and allocation of attendant donations.

                A counter, and arguably and more probable history is that the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre was joined by Toronto's Metro Action Committee on Public Violence Against Women and Children (METRAC), and local women's shelters in commemorative events in 1990.  They organised to point out that women were murdered throughout the province, and that women often experienced other misogynist acts of violence. They publicised the names of Ontario women murdered by men in 1990. Feminists in METRAC and the Toronto Action Committee have continued the practice, linking not only the massacre and male violence, but also identifying the regular, systemic, and misogynist murders of women through commemorative posters. 

Nonetheless, and regardless of who started wearing ribbons or who linked that practice to men's violence,  it resulted in a diminutive and possibly grassroots white ribbon campaign that would ultimately be come a corporate entity in  1991. Renamed the White Ribbon Foundation (WRF) it subsequently claimed to exist to serve and support women while promoting the abolition of male violence against women and children. 

 

The Birth of A Male Politic, AKA "The White Ribbon Campaign"

                First the campaign, then the newly formed Foundation decreed that, since men were responsible for violence against women, on principle they would accept donations from men only.  They publicly reasoned that since men abused women and children, then men were collectively responsible for eradicating the problem created by their brothers. The Foundation's second political commitment was to share the funds raised equitably with "under funded women's groups"⁴⁵.  In a quest for ‘guidance’, the Foundation allied itself with equally elite women feminists⁴⁶.  That is, to achieve “accountability to women”, they asked representatives of several women's groups to sit on an `Advisory Committee'.  Unfortunately, this Advisory Committee was never a priority for the WRF, and never truly representative of women's groups although it met their desire for the appearance of feminist support.

 

Manipulating Public Opinion to Serve -and Fund- Men

                The Foundation successfully created a public desire for men to partake in the image of the new, sensitive man who was concerned with violence against women and children.  Individual men and corporations not only endorsed the WRF Campaign, but donated in excess of $400,000 to the WRF in 1992.  This significant amount is more money than most women's groups have at their disposal, including front-line women's services such as Interval Houses that served the battered victims of male violence⁴⁷.  The WRF, with the assistance of the Canadian men's movements and the media, had achieved a phenomenal accomplishment.  Moreover, the campaign had raised both public consciousness and a great deal of money in a short time. 

 

Gambling With Wild Abandon

                By the early fall of 1992, engorged with success and money and oblivious to the Canadian recession, the WRF gambled all its resources on a roll of the dice⁴⁸.  With the assistance of corporate entity Carleton Cards, the Foundation targeted middle-class, professional men, mailing them two white ribbons and a "preferred invitation" to join the WRF⁴⁹.  Unfortunately, responses were slow and sluggish.  By December 6^th, 1992, the WRF knew that their huge, expensive, mail-out campaign had failed miserably. The return on their expenditures for developing and soliciting money essentially through a junk mail mode had cost $300,000 with a disastrous return of $80,000⁵⁰.  However, it was not until spring that the WRF experienced the full extent their failure.  By late summer in 1993, the Foundation was unable to pay staff salaries, and some positions reverted to part-time or volunteer status.  A few staff members worked in hopes of retroactive pay whenever finances improved⁵¹.  Such dedication is commendable and warrants unstinting recognition, particularly since powerful men rarely do “volunteer work” on behalf of women. Notwithstanding, these individual commitments do little to explain the how the Foundation squandered an enormous amount, becoming financially desperate when they had enjoyed an auspicious start.  

 

A Feminist Critique of the Gullible Public

                What is astonishing and telling is how first the grass roots ribbon campaign and then the corporate WRF have blended into the politics and landscape of corporate Canada.  It is paramount to question this easy acceptance and confident bonding of corporations and male-cum-pro-feminist social-change agents. The Foundation and its campaign workers claim to challenge hegemonic patriarchy that reigns in corporations and serves capitalism.   However, it gives rise to the question that since the current inequitable social and gender structures serve the  contemporary corporate world well, why would corporations and their agents want change?  Clearly, corporations benefit from the subordination of women, and from racism, ageism, and classism that allow the division of the haves and the have-nots in our society.  Why, then, were corporations compliant, comfortable and confident about bonding with a "pro-feminist” Foundation that demands they change sexist, racist and classist practices that are beneficial to them? 

 

Logically, one expects resistance to calling corporate men and institutionalised misogyny into account for their exploitive acts of domination. After all, a pro-feminist challenge to corporations, if successful, might result in massive social change that would remove men’s personal and corporate privilege and power. I can only conclude that corporations saw the Foundation's work as non-threatening, but still good publicity.

 

Why Men and Male-Dominated Corporations Support The Ribbon Campaign

                Perhaps the reason that corporations and their male representatives are compliant in endorsing the campaign and the Foundation is that neither poses a genuine threat to the hegemony of capitalist or to patriarchal ideals.  Both the Foundation and its campaign have softened and blurred their initial analyses, allowing men to escape the specific and contextual blame for acts of violence against women and children.  Arguably, the campaign’s and the Foundation's narrow, non-threatening and mostly apolitical agenda virtually guarantees corporate and governmental approval in part because of the WRF’s excusatory, non-political and non-confrontational policies, politics and tactics.   Perhaps this explains why the Foundation, unlike feminist organizations, can get Corporate donations of office space in the prestigious Toronto Eaton's Centre, as well as why they were given cash, furniture, office equipment, and computers. 

                The lack of response and donations to the WRF’s funding drive in 1992 gives rise to questions of whether it is possible for men to fund-raise and consciousness-raise at the same time. On the one hand, they were incredibly successful in raising both money and the public's consciousness when the issue was thrown into high relief by the dramatic and tragic grief surrounding the Montreal Massacre and its consequences.  Men and their institutions deemed male public support of women topical, advantageous and important.  On the other hand, when the WRF’s mail-out combined a mild, arguably even timid letter on the politics of male violence against women with a request for money, they were as massively unsuccessful as they had previously been overwhelmingly successful.  The WRF, by this time leaking red ink, unsuccessfully tried to stifle feminist criticism with carefully crafted and reasoned replies. The WRF at this juncture was particularly concerned about growing charges that it had exploited women and women’s historical work on the issue of men’s violence against themselves and their children. 

 

The White Ribbon Foundation's Damage Control Efforts

                The WRF continued to deny intent to appropriate women's issues or to exploit the mourning of the Montreal Massacre, in spite of having chosen the very anniversary date of the Massacre to distribute white ribbons and to highlight their message.  They refuted, and still refute, suggestions that they confiscated the feminist issue of male violence against women and children or the Montreal Massacre. However, to accommodate their critics, the now National Office of the WRF declined to participate in media interviews regarding the issue of male violence against women on the day of December 6, 1993.  The Foundation wound up the WRF campaign on December 5, ostensibly to allow women centre stage in commemorating of the Montreal Massacre.  But unfortunately, the Foundation's absence on the only day the media was preoccupied with the issue of male violence meant that the media was unable to access the new male advocates. 

While the media preferred the new male `experts' on male violence against women, when the WRF eschewed the spotlight on December 6^th, the media reluctantly called women's shelters or spokeswomen.  However, when they did contact women on that day, it was primarily to inquire about the “WRF Day”, or to ask how women felt about the men's movement, or to ask whether the women supported the WRF campaign⁵².  Intentional or not, men had obliterated women's lived experiences and hard-gained analyses, replacing them with a male gaze, an androcentric description of male violence, and a self-serving masculinist analysis.  Women's words and experiences were once again subordinate to men's words and experiences, even on the issue with which they, as recipient women, had the only real expertise.  Thanks to the men's movement that fostered the WRF, the recognizable public symbol of the eradication of male violence is not feminist services or front line crisis workers, but rather is the male driven WRF.  Men, then, occupy traditional feminist theoretical and practical space.

 

Why the Damage Controls Failed

                In fairness, the WRF has struggled with, and is examining, the issue of possible appropriation or up staging of women and women's issues on December 6. Its members admit that, conceivably if unintentionally, they may have unknowingly aided in degrading feminists' long and arduous work on the issues surrounding women and male violence.  They claim to have tried to extract themselves from this dilemma by changing the group's focus and activities.  The WRF claims to be expanding a year-round outreach for funds, as well as developing an educational outreach program for schools.  Their members address organizations and governments on the issue of male violence year round.  The Foundation claims that it has organized community fundraisers for local women's groups.  Some member's also have tried to highlight Father's Day as an appropriate time for men to question their traditional macho roles and actions.  In a final attempt to return the December 6 commemoration to women, the Foundation wound up their campaign on December 5 in 1993, the day before women's commemoration of the Massacre⁵³.

                Prophetically though, all strategies to change WRF’s focus on the Montreal Massacre, particularly in the media, have failed miserably. This is because, putting the issue of intent aside, in an androcentric world it is difficult for men who are viewed as authoritative not to upstage women, and to do so regardless of their intentions.  The reality is that just by being a collection of men (not to mention elite white men) the WRF enjoyed phenomenal public attention and meteoric success. Additionally, their success edged feminists out of the traditional marginalized theoretical space they usually occupied. Therefore, by December 6, 1992 and 1993, women no longer dominated the headlines even on the single day of mourning when the public joined feminists in deep sadness.  Women's ways of knowing, and women's experiences of male violence were jostled out by male analyses and male organizations.  Constant media interest in high profile endorsements by male politicians, academics, media personnel, writers, and actors had established the WRF's credibility as "instant experts" on male violence against women.  Following the brief public dominance of feminism during the initial days following the Massacre, normality had returned and men was again the centre of media attention. Even in discussions of violence against women or in analyses of the Montreal Massacre, men dominated all once again. 

 

Does It Matter If He Wears a White Ribbon?

                In spite of the WRF’s stated commitment to change, many problems remain for feminists and about women's safety.  Gender equality, which is simply justice for women, requires massive social and legal reform as well as amended gender and power dynamics throughout society.  I argue that simply talking education or sharing male resources with women just `does not cut it'.  In fact, merely wearing a white ribbon to challenge men's systemic privilege is something that I personally find suspect.  Pinning on the white ribbon on December 6 is both risk-free and socially supported. Moreover, the man wearing the white ribbon is deemed to be safe, non-threatening, non-provocative, and possibly even apolitical.  Often the ribbon is even free of charge, and wearing it is publicly rewarding for men.  Problematically a rapist or batterer can wear a white ribbon; there is no test or standard to do so.  

 

How I Experience the White Ribbon Campaign

                I lived in Kingston, where there are many penal institutions in which I had volunteered. In the crowds at December 6 commemoration in 1991, I recognized a murderer, a paedophile, and a rapist, all wearing the innocent-looking white ribbon on their person.  This gives rise to the question -does it matter that they may be on parole, in therapy, or remorseful?  Women know well the frequency of incest, date and marital rape.  How many men at the Kingston vigil, whether inmate or citizen, were guilty of one or more crimes against vulnerable women?  Basically, I argue that there is no way that a woman standing beside a rapist could know that he rapes.  In moments of complete despair, I think that we should fear the man wearing the white ribbon more than the man not wearing the white ribbon. After all, who needs to appear empathetic and acceptable more than an abuser stalking his prey?  And what easier, cheaper, and visible way than to wear the white ribbon?  I am deeply troubled by this aspect of the white ribbon campaign.  My conclusion is that as a change agent, the WRF and its white ribbon campaign fails the test, acting in ways that merely reinforce the status quo of male dominance, this time is experts of abused women.  In addition, at Queen's University, the now prerequisite white ribbon on December 6^th that makes men appear to be "sensitive and supportive" is simply a new seduction technique to "get women" according to several young men at the 1990 vigil. According to the Engineering paper Golden Words, "getting women" for those men translated, in the vernacular, to "getting fucked"⁵⁴.

 

Does the WRF Have a Saving Grace? A Perfunctory Defence

                I am prepared to accept that a genuine community grief and anguish informed the initial grass roots wearing of commemorative white ribbons. Unfortunately, later the campaign took on a unfavourable, arguably inappropriate significance to the men's movement.  Inauspiciously, feminism because of its benign neglect to theorize this men's movement, when coupled with an early and possibly imprudent feminist endorsement of the Canadian WRF and its attendant white ribbon campaign enabled its initial and phenomenal early successes. 

 

 

 

The Theoretical Paradigm of the White Ribbon Campaign

                The WRC, and the subsequent legal entity the WRF, claims to accept feminist theories that feature analyses of male systemic advantages. Moreover, they agree that these male bonuses underpin patriarchal structures that reinforce and replicate male domination. They admit this necessarily situates all males as complicit in women's subordination. But before considering the political locus of the WRF and its individual members, it is helpful to position the rise and divisions among the contemporary phenomena known as the "men's movement".   We need to understand and analyse the political climate that created consciousness-raising among men. The men’s movement featured various techniques, emphases, rituals, and politics.  It can arguably be said to have created and/or informed the environment in which the initial WRC and the subsequent WRF could flourish.  It does exhibit some diversity. For example, just as there is a political continuum within the men's movement, there is a continuum of support to opposition for the WRF in both the men's movement and the feminist community. 

 

How Men of the WRF Colonized and Appropriated Women's Experiences

                The WRF is a good example of men's colonization and appropriation of women's experiences.  Women are murdered because they are thought to be feminist, and other women experience fear and grief.  Their colleagues and sisters organize commemorative events, but it is the women who are silenced and perhaps lost in subsequent tributes.  Men newly occupy women's territory as they appropriate the issue, the symbolic white ribbon, and its fund-raising potential.  It seems that whenever women get centre stage, a man rushes in the social control booth⁸⁵ to re-establish that male power naturally trumps women's power.  Moreover, this male occupation and appropriation of women's work is highlighted in a letter to the WRF Advisory Committee that is comprised of elite Toronto women activists.  Written by the Coalition for the Safety of Our Daughters in Guelph Ontario, a group of women that had petitioned the elite feminists on the WRF Advisory Committee to take up their cause with the elite WRF men.  They wanted to the Foundation to draw to men's attention the cruel and dangerous level of violence in computer video games and virtual reality technology, specifically the games called `Night Slasher', `Mortal Kombat' and `Robo-babes', but the WRF had used the Saga video `Night Slasher' as a fundraising enterprise.  When they wrote the WRF and the Woman’s Committee in 1993 to enlist their support, but were basically ignored⁸⁶.  Besides asking for remedial legislation, the Guelph group and other feminist anti-pornography organizations wanted people to boycott Saga until they had "acquired legislation to protect women and children from dangerous entertainment products".  This seemingly echoes the WRF mandate. But not only were they ignored by the WRF and the Women’s Advisory Committee, when politicians and the federal committees wanted to legislate against the offensive videos, the WRF opposed the legislation.  According to the ‘Coalition for Our Daughters’ Safety” the WRF men said that: 

While I appreciate your organization taking a stand against the celebration of violence against women and that one response is to boycott dangerous products, it is not the only response, which should be put before the public.  This summer, representatives of your organization boldly stated that legislation should not be enacted to keep young children from these products; contradicting all of the work my organization has done at the political level.  I suspect that your organization's response was well-considered from a philosophical standpoint, and one to which I would have agreed before watching slasher movie after slasher movie and prior to discovering that it is perfectly legal to promote hatred of women in this country⁸⁷.

 The Toronto women on the WRF Advisory Committee included Olivia Chow, Columnist Michele Landsberg, Maria Aujimeri, and legal feminist Marylou McPhendren were advised by the Guelph women of the WRF’s lack of response.  The Guelph women told the Toronto women that:

 We strongly oppose slasher movies and video games, and were alarmed when this summer the WRF stated that government should not legislate to keep slasher video games from children. Instead, they said that we should simply boycott those nasty multi-million dollar corporations, which reap profits without paying the kind of price that women pay with their lives⁸⁸.

 

With the threat of publicity, the WRF apparently -and suddenly- had their consciousness raised, and immediately began a campaign to educate people about the dangers as well as to boycott Saga.

                Moreover, in retrospect, the WRF seems to be re-writing history. Antidotal to the issue of the slasher movies/video games, while I was interviewing staff and visiting their corporate headquarters in Eaton's Centre in 1993, the WRF men I interviewed impressed upon me that they were taking the initiative against the slasher videos.  I was specifically told that it was their initiation in response to women's general concerns about violent material.  There was no information forthcoming on the Guelph initiative, but I was given copies of press clipping and an information sheet about the WRF action in boycotting Saga.  I admit, before hearing the entire story, I was impressed, but, as often happens when one scrutinises men's movements, it proved to be froth with little substance.  Their information sheet gave no credit to the Guelph women's group. I examined the Guelph group’s correspondence to the WRF through a Toronto feminist’s files, not because the WRF made them available. Once again in this gendered world, whenever women get a toehold on authority and regardless of the subject matter, the female point of view is immediately superseded by a male reaction of "me-too" and "what about us?”.   Subsequently, public and media eagerness to present the male side of woman's issue, in effect, replaces what women know and experience with what men know and experience. 

                For example, women raised the issue of rape, sexual assaults and incest based on collective knowledge and experiences. There are dramatically fewer male victims of rape.  And although women make up the vast majority of rape victims, the social construction of the pain and importance of male victimization regularly trumps women's sad prominence as rape victims.  The notion of "an equal opportunity of misery"⁸⁹ between men, women, and rape, assaults, or incest is patently ridiculous.  I argue that furthermore, the inversion of truth in claiming that physical or psychological damage to a small number of male rape victims is somehow more important than the damage to many raped and abused women is both misleading and effectively distorts lived realities.   That is, during the Montreal Massacre, it was not women who were sent out while men were murdered for their ideologies or sexuality.  Women's safety, whether sexual, political, or ideological, is a deep concern for contemporary women.  While certain men may be at risk at certain times and in certain places, we know that all women are at risk most, and also are possibly at risk most of the time everywhere. 

 

 

 

 

Unfocused `Pro-Feminism'

                Victor Seidler and his followers claim to come from a political, pro-woman site where men explore the challenges of the feminism, and come together in consciousness-raising sessions of their own⁹⁰, that they seek to change our male-normative practices⁹¹.  They do recognize the maleness of our language, and male acts of violence, hate and terror, but I think, in ways seeking to excuse if not justify male violence⁹².  For example, Seidler's statement that "whilst men derive benefits from the male monopoly of violence, there is a price to pay" subtly implies that this prominence as abusers and dominators cost men more than it does women. According to him, the price consists of the fact that "partaking in, and retaining the image of, being a `man' involves the loss of our [male] sensitivity, vulnerability, and ability to love".   Furthermore, according to Seidler:

 

We [men] have become so good at deceiving ourselves that even though we feel the pain we are paralysed by the complexity with which we have colluded.  Imprisoned like this our violence and anger often emerge as substitutes for other -disallowed- feelings of weakness, fear, and pain. The appearance of physical strength or a dominating social presence is so often a mask for inner weakness, confusion and underdevelopment.  Men rage because their vulnerability is touched and they have no language to express it⁹³.

 

I disagree, arguing that men do indeed have "language" to express anything they want, but that they chose not to express certain emotions or things in order to be macho and thus accrue masculine privilege.  I am of the opinion that our language belongs to, and describes male experience. I think that it is women, because they were not allowed public participation where language evolved, who lacks words to express their experiences and feelings. 

                While the rhetoric in Seidler's politically correct group of followers is impressive and their goals are lofty, unfortunately, this blocs politic is both individual and cerebral, remaining inconclusive, strangely fluffy or unfocused.  While they may have done some psychoanalytic work to prepare for change, they are reluctant, incapable, or unwilling to transcend the mental work to political action.  While Seidler's sector of the men's movement digs deep to unearth male feelings "akin to those of women", I wonder if this is not simply one more male trick to access women's theoretical space.  Seidler's political position most closely resembles that of the Canadian WRF.  The idiom, style, and language are curiously similar that used by Foundation spokespeople.  The Foundation representatives speak of "owning" the issue of violence toward women and children since men are the perpetrators.  The Foundation also acclaims their support for a pro-feminist position. 

                Many feminists, however, find the positions of both Seidler and of the WRF suspicious and self-serving.  I, as have others, experience feminism as a compulsion, fuelling a pro-active role simultaneously in a number of areas; doing personal consciousness-raising, educating others, advocating, providing alternatives, while politically challenging and reforming social power structures and dominating practices.  Feminism neither trades action for esoteric theory, nor theory for action.  Rather, it engages parallel streams of activity at the same time. The problem with Seidler's and the WRF’s version of masculine reform is that they centre on a loud critique in public venues without political action. Neither group offers a specific political, let alone radical, agenda. Both movements rely on consciousness-raising, dialogue, and moral persuasion, and both seek to occupy a theoretical margin currently held by precariously balanced feminist theories and feminist issues. 

Moreover, Neither group appears unduly concerned with their dislodging of feminism from its hard won ledge, nor with their appropriation of issues germane to women.  Additionally, both groups are deeply concerned with men's and not women's emotional lives.  Both groups spend countless hours in talking, meeting, feeling, and intellectual contemplation.  Unfortunately, it is often at the expense of the hard work of combined action and challenge that force social and political reform.  It raises the question as to why men, and especially the WRF men, feel compelled to try to occupy or replace women's well-documented, shared, and theorized experiences? 

                An idiom says that if it walks like a duck, sounds like a duck, and looks like a duck - it is a duck. Seidler and the WRF are simply pro-male men in pro-feminist duck costumes. Women do not seek or enjoy injustice, and that there is no reality to the myth of female masochism.  Rather, injustice is a by-product of women's lived realities.  By injustice, I am referring to the degradation of women and their ways of knowing, and to the absence of women's experiences in the construct of normality.  I am aware of long-held and deeply embedded masculinist and everyday ideology in our common stock of social knowledge that instructs us that women crave, seek, and enjoy the degradation of themselves and other women.  I argue that this is simply another androcentric rationale allowing men to exploit and degrade women.  The rationale allows, perpetuates, and polices the degradation, exploitation, and oppression of women by men.  Both women's and men's actions are both affected by this belief.

                Injustice, because of this masculinist but commonly accepted rationale, is thrust upon women when we are expected to view the fourteen murdered women in engineering as the "equals" of the men in engineering.  To agree that women are equal to men would mean that the women were murdered because of their privileged equality with elite male engineering students.  This sounds like a sophisticated way of saying that the women should not be in the engineering department of Ecole Polytechnique.  And this in turn smacks of justifying Lepine's bloody rampage.  It would also mean that Lepine did not target women.  Common-sense, however, tells me that if they were truly "equal", the fourteen women would not be dead, or, alternatively, at the very least fourteen men would have also been murdered by Lepine.  In fact, given the ratio of men to women, random selection alone would have virtually guaranteed that Lepine would have killed more men than women in the male-dominated institution. 

 

"Liberal Equality", or, the Inversion of Rationality

                The liberal ideal of "equality" is often applied to `men in feminism' or to `pro-feminist men', who, nevertheless usually insist on autonomy without feminist guidance or accountability.  "Equality" works to give men equal entry into feminist territory, and goes a long way to helping understand how men managed to upstage women's grief at the Montreal murders.  Some small percentage of men may genuinely care about social and gender reforms.  Therefore, we are told by men that women should, forgive, forget, or minimize the fact that untold men also beat, rape, make war, shoot guns, and murder.  I argue that there is nothing `rationale' in asking women today to believe that men are changing, or in women trusting men whose hundreds of years of good advice has only served to ensnare women in their power.  According to this perspective, Lepine would simply be an ordinary man acting out an ordinary backlash against feminists, albeit a man whose actions exceeded those of most men. That is, he lived out the male fantasy of obliterating feminists.  But, he was not a crazed or irrational man.

The WRC, in spite of historical experiences of changes and reforms that actually serve the status quo, asks women to put their faith in their group of largely elite, white, men of power and privilege who claim to want to make change that would benefit women.  Perhaps it is this inversion of lived reality that women detect in the WRF, at least in abstract if not concrete ways.  That is, our collective historical experience tells us that men are not to be trusted to act in women’s interests absolutely or without accountability, but if they are, women are at peril.  The WRF, however, asks us to trust them without being accountable to women, in effect, ensuring us they have our best interests at heart. Is this request, itself an inversion of feminist rationality simply a clever, post-modern trick that nonetheless requires both individual and societal complicity to work?  Most people fail to do a full and painful analysis of a patriarchy grown powerful through supporting mechanisms of capitalism, racism, sexism, and homophobia.  Therefore, most women and men are relatively unaware of their collusion in their construction and support of the functional role of women's subordination.  Being unaware, or perhaps being unable to bear the reality of knowing about women's lives, people are then vulnerable targets for male tricksters that stand women's reality on its head.  For example, the WRF male shape-shifters slyly appropriate women's experiences, issues, and theories as their own.  Hence, feminists now share scarce space within the thin theoretical margin of feminist theory with new, so-called male pro-feminists.  Furthermore, men are arguably pushing women's epistemological knowing off that ledge in a fight for scarce space in this marginalized mode of theorising.  The WRF's occupation of the feminist issue of male violence against women and children is a classic example of the crazy-making inversion of women's reality.  The male "experts" on women's battering are themselves members of the sex that generally and usually perpetuates, condones, excuses and does the bulk of the physical and psychological battering. Yet, untangling this inversion of feminine and feminist reality and masculine and masculinist rationality is only part of the puzzle but  not all of the answer.  The biggest riddle of all may be how men have constructed rationality.

Women and men have a different experience of the world; I would go so far as to say the difference between being a male oppressor and being an oppressed female. In our androcentric world, something is rationale because a man validates its rationality.  However, women's experiences are not validated in our society because men say, according to how they experience the world, women's experiences and understandings are abnormal or irrational.  But women's experiences are rational given our historical analysis. For Elizabeth Stanko, "everyday violence" refers to how women experience the male-centred world as female outsiders, people requiring a different set of understandings that allows her to survive⁹⁵.  Women do not fit a male-constructed world. The poor fit of women in a man's world is experienced, according to her, as having to endure typical male behaviour directed towards women that is really violence, intimidation, and coercion.  Stanko says that sexual advances and date or marital rape are viewed as natural expressions of maleness; and only vicious rapes, brutal murders of women, and cruel physical torture of women are seen as "aberrant" male behaviour⁹⁶.

                Still, men frequently call women’s daily threatening experiences or fearful reactions paranoid.  She argues, however, that women's heightened sense of anxiety is born of an "accurate reading of their relationship to safety"⁹⁷.  Therefore, if anyone takes measures to guarantee their safety, they accept the possibility of violence as a fact in their life⁹⁸.  Furthermore, women must negotiate their safety everywhere⁹⁹.  She maintains that women's peripheral vision monitors surrounding landscapes and people for potential danger, making the word `safety' different for women than it is for men.  Stanko says:

On the street, we listen for footsteps approaching and avoid looking in men's eyes.  At home, women are more likely than men to ask callers to identify themselves before opening the door, and to search for ways to minimize conflict with potentially violent partners.  Not only do women incorporate countless avoidance tactics into all aspects of their lives - the very meaning of the word safety differs between the sexes.  Women understand it to be both sexual and physical, while men tend to think of their safety as physical. Women's lives rest on a continuum of unsafety¹⁰⁰.

 

Stanko argues that the reason women's fears and other realities are called irrational or paranoid is because women's experiences are being evaluated by masculine-normative standards. In essence, I am using Stanko's words to argue that what is seen to constitute critical thinking on women's safety, or indeed, any issue affecting women, is actually itself shaped by masculinist social biases.  Therefore,             I ask the reader to consider the Montreal Massacre and the WRF as examples of masculine biases are based on logocentrism, ethnocentrism, patriarchal experience, androcentric discourse, and a male-normative value system.  Furthermore, I note that the universalism of male thought and standards has come to be associated with the ability of dominant interests to use and impose their so-called ‘universal thought’ as a guise for particular self-serving interests such as racism and capitalism. 

Jane Caputi sees rape and misogyny as perpetrated not by an "aberrant fringe", but by ordinary men. She i views rape as a direct expression of sexual politics, as an enactment of a male dominance serving the status quo.  She argues that most men actually admire a man who rapes and murders women, disassociating themselves from the perpetrator only upon fearing public humiliation. Murderers of women, according to Caputi, are men who are the henchmen that maintain patriarchal order through force¹⁰¹.  In agreement, I argue that the WRF has (re) inscribed women's reality with a male serving overlay that subtly includes a coded rationale for murdering, raping and battering men, including Marc Lepine. Moreover, I argue that the media coverage of the Montreal Massacre, the rise of the WRF with its financial and moral elite corporate support, constructs the basis for an analysis that women's truth is constantly (re) written by self-serving men. A classic example of (re) construction of women's truth is the WRF's appropriation of the Montreal Massacre, women's subsequent grief, and the issue of male violence against women and children.  I note that both Stanko and Caputi speak to the dualities of binary patriarchal thinking.  In my opinion, wherever you have a comparative spectrum with opposite ends, you automatically have both a hierarchy and an ascending value system.  In this context, we make conscious and unconscious judgments that impact in the everyday world on how women are viewed and treated.  Therefore, I argue that Marc Lepine was simply one more social control agent and the Montreal Massacre was a intentional, deliberate, and clearly threatening message to feminists. Lepine was simply a man, albeit a man dedicated to the masculinist project of keeping women oppressed and subordinated.  Male protection of women was in turn dependent upon women being subdued, silenced, softened, trivialized, and (re) constructed through a male gaze.  Lepine needed to make women hesitant and fearful; to remind them of women’s need for male protection, and to ensure that women remained dependant on male largesse and power. He delivered this logical and rationale male message by murdering non-compliant uppity feminist women embedded in a male dominated institution and discipline.

               

                Still, in spite of male-normative universality, there are a few thoughtful, open, and empathic men who can at least theorize their male biases.  For example, Dennis Drummond refers to the "double role of Other"¹⁰². He examines the writings of Gabrielle Roy, and, in particular, a female character named Florentine.  Drummond finds that Florentine’s whole identity is constructed by her reflection in a man's eyes.  She is completely alienated from her identity; unable to say "I am what I do".  According to Drummond:

The very experience of "I am" is almost unknown to Florentine, and it is this "I am" experience that is the precondition for the authentic realization of oneself in freedom.  She has reduced herself to the level of an object to such an extent that she can experience her identity and her existence only through their reflection in the eyes of another¹⁰³. 

 

This illustrates how women are (re) constructed to fit male ideals and values.  I note that this (re) construction socializes women to accept, even to perpetuate male ideology through the socialization of children. Drummond is not the only one to describe this phenomenon; feminists in many ways have articulated women’s sense of not belonging and of being “other”.  Dorothy Smith speaks of women "being outside the frame", outside "the relations of ruling" in society, Guaranteeing then that women do not participate in the construction of knowledge as subjects; that rather they are deemed to be viewed as objects¹⁰⁴.  Smith also refers to women's exclusion as "a particular eclipsing" when speaking about our male-stream culture where men's standpoint is represented as universal¹⁰⁵.  She identifies a "line of fault" or "point of rupture" in the ideology or culture of women's everyday world. This juncture is where what is idealized collides with what really is happening.  Smith identifies the crazy-making contradiction, seeing it as a disjuncture or "problematic" for women in terms of their individual and collective thoughts, symbols, concepts, frames of reference, and even discourses¹⁰⁶.

                Smith's analysis speaks to women's experiences of the Montreal Massacre and the WRF.  Lepine was reacting to women's intrusion and occupation of previously nearly exclusive male academic privilege.  Lepine is overstated, a violent and brutal example of the everyday problematic of women's safety in a male-normative world.  The WRF is also a problematic for feminists.  The Foundation uses personal and collective male thoughts, concepts, frames of references and discourse to annex women's experience.  Finally, the WRF movement, representing the power of elite white men, evaluates and explains the events in a fashion that exonerates them and situates the perpetrators as men damaged by aggressive feminism(s).

                French feminist Luce Irigaray's psychoanalytic analysis also maintains that men dominate knowledge.  She attributes this dominance to aggressiveness, narcissism, and the visibility of the penis.  Irigaray argues that these male characteristics give rise to male denial of sex difference so that women are viewed as castrated men, therefore, having lesser value in the male world¹⁰⁷.  Irigaray's analysis is that phallocentric values rest on equating women's oppressed existence with non-existence, which she says is not a valid equation.  In other words, Irigaray is saying that the category of `women' is invalid in a male-ruled world.  Irigaray's analysis is helpful in explaining media collusion and feminists’ reticence to challenge male occupation of feminist issues.  If women are socially invalided, it is then incumbent upon men to speak for women.  Naturally, with women invalidated, WRF men would analyse, historise, and explain the event according to their understanding of the world.

 

Not surprisingly, the WRF men are slyly excusatory of their violence-perpetrating brothers.  That is, the WRF literature is peppered with the messages that men too are "wounded".  However, that on the day of the Montreal Massacre the only men "wounded" were those hit accidentally by ricocheting bullets. Julia Penelope describes the exclusion of women from the construct of our androcentric society and women’s designated place in the men’s world succinctly:

Two well-known clichés state the situation accurately: "A man's home is his castle"; and "A woman's place is in the home".  We hear both assertions, all too often, mouthed by women and men alike as though they stated some essential truth. There is the male domain, called "The World," which men describe for themselves, and the female domain, of "the world" but not The World. When men talk about The World, they describe their experiential domain, making it all there is.  In one sense, this is true, but only because women's allotted sphere lies confined within the domain of men. "Women's world" is simply our place in "man's world"^108.            

 

Penelope is making the point that women's identity and experiences in a patriarchal world are marginalia at best and completely missing or blank at worst.   

                Dale Spender agrees with Penelope, finding women historically excluded from the production of all cultural forms, including language.  Spender notes that with a male constructed language, women are unable to give weight to their own symbolic meanings, and in effect, women have been silenced¹⁰⁹.  It seems to me that while both sexes have the capacity to generate meanings women are not in a social position to ensure that those meanings will be integrated into society.  Spender's analysis helps us to understand the social meaning that men ascribed to the Montreal Massacre, and why that description was generally accepted by the media and public.  Lepine was presented as a crazed, emotionally damaged men who went too far in acting out his fantasy.  His home life, his relations with women, and even "feminists" become scapegoat-reasons for Lepine's monstrous actions.

                I find that Spender's theories are not hopeful about change, but possibly Andrea Dworkin¹¹⁰ offers us the bleakest analysis of male socialization. Dworkin says that culture predetermines who we are, what we will do, and the emotional stimuli to which we respond.  She says that the messages are given by means of our birth-sex, which are later called gender.  According to Dworkin, we relentlessly follow scenarios from birth, to youth, to maturity, and even into old age and death.  During these times, our sex determines our actions.  According to Dworkin, "As a direct consequence of the imperatives of those roles, we as a society commit homicide, suicide, and genocide". She claims that we envision Heaven as sexless and without suffering, but what we really mean is a Heaven without culture and without gender.  I am moved by, if not totally committed, to Dworkin's analysis, since her thesis supports my theory that `masculinity' is formed around the psychological investment men make in a system of unequal power, income, and respect.  In my opinion, any challenge to the system, any attempt to limit the power or reduce male dividends are likely to be experienced and resisted by men as an attack against their masculinity. Perhaps this explains why the WRF was so insensitive to feminist criticisms. 

Feminisms and feminists were justifiably critical of many parts of both their men's movement and Foundation.  Critical women were surely challenging the patriarchal system, and more specifically, the WRF and its members.  The WRF had two choices, to listen and act upon women's criticism, or to ignore the women's criticism and act according to male experience.  Had the WRF chosen to listen and incorporate the critic's points of view, by now they might have been a different organization.  Instead, they chose tradition, that is, to silence, trivialize and ignore women as they proceeded with the colonization and (re) inscription on women's herstory and experience.  We recognize that the traditional male has concrete reasons to fear feminism, but the WRF’s members claim a new and progressive masculinity.  Unfortunately, they are nearly indistinguishable from the traditional patriarch.  I am unconvinced that they will, or can, act on pro-feminist theories or inclinations.  Under patriarchy, traditional men, including many members of the WRF movement, fit the dominant hegemonic form of masculinity.  I note that this traditional masculinity has effective mechanisms to subordinating women, that is, they are male, white, heterosexual, homo-social, aggressive, and competitive. 

                However, all men do not meet the criteria of dominant masculinity. Not all men are of the ruling class, culture or race, so it there are marginalized groups of oppressed men: gay, black, working class, and ethnics.  There are even multiply marginalized men.  But in the world where we are drawn into social relations as social actors engaged in constructing the world, I would argue that even multiply marginalized males trump women of similar disadvantage in terms of a power dynamic.  By that I do not mean that there are not white, rich, women who are more powerful than, for instance, a poor black man.  Rather, I mean that all other things being equal, men enjoy more authority than women.  In our constructed world of male-dominant groups and interests, when inequality arises, it is a generally a politic that oppresses woman asymmetrically.  By that I am suggesting that a woman's separate oppressions interact, and therefore I avoid treating gender, race/ethnicity, or class in ranked isolation of one another.  I find it problematic to simply add women's multiple oppressions one by one to total three or more oppressions¹¹¹.  Simply "doing the addition" denies the interactive nature of multiple oppressions, and the diffuse and discursive sources of those oppressions.  I propose rather a simultaneous examination of how the various combinations of women's oppressions combine to interact and underpin androcentric tradition¹¹².  By incorporating the theoretical perspectives of multiply marginalized women, contemporary feminist theory exhibits new sensitivity to the intersections of multiple oppressions of women¹¹³.  In the genre of theorizing by exploring how multiple oppressions marginalize women, deconstructionist Elizabeth Spelman says that:

We can get the clearest picture of how women are oppressed "as women" if we focus on the lives of women who are subject only to sexism and not to any other form of oppression.  We then don't have to look at a woman's race or class to understand how she is  being treated as a women.  But this idea is preposterous... the fact that a woman is not oppressed on account of her racial identity hardly leads to the conclusion that the sexist oppression to which she is subject can be understood without reference to her racial identity.  One's gender identity is not related to one's racial and class identity as the parts of pop-bead necklaces are related, separable and insertable in other "strands" (and) with different racial and class "parts"¹¹⁴

 

Spelman's theory of the interactive constructs of gender, race or ethnicity and class is a multiple marginalization that can be expanded to include the diverse forms of discrimination against women¹¹⁵.  Spelman recognizes that multiple marginalizations are experienced as an asymmetrical force, as well as an inter-related and interactive power.  The multiple marginalization of women leave men in authority, power and enforcement.  Men, then, are primarily the beneficiaries of women's multiple marginalizations.

 

                What is both unclear and unexplainable, however, is how and why some men, given this historical power imbalance, expect feminists to believe that their male goal is to disempower themselves and other men.  I am speaking here of the WRF, who, if they adopt pro-feminist ideologies will de facto disempower themselves.  After all, the WRF is composed largely of elite white men, and within this theoretical position they are men occupying prime centre space, or if you want their hierarchical view, the top rungs of the ladder.  The WRF members are, by and large, educated men economically wealthy or at least, financially comfortable.  Therefore, WRF members wield political, economic, and media power.  They have accrued privilege by competing and practising the same patriarchal power in their bid to reach the apex of dominance that they now claim to oppose.  Nonetheless, according to these pro-feminist men, they claim to “get feminism”.   It is difficult for me to accept that these men, acting against their own interests, truly demand, and support "reforms" on behalf of women, minorities, and diversities; reforms that will disengage the automatic powers men have gained from oppressing the same groups they now claim to be concerned about.  Nonetheless, some men, including the WRF men, wax eloquently about feminism. 

 

Pro-Feminist and Problematic?

                By far the most pro-feminist position in the men's movement is represented and articulated by John Stoltenburg who renounces men's racism, sexism, and homophobia.  A celebrant of gay and bisexual love, he advocates pro-woman legislation, profeminism, and a strong pro-activist political stance.  Stoltenburg and his political men's movement splinter group are tiny in number, but go much farther left than most proponents of the men's movement.  They advocate an active stance rather than an apologetic one.  They argue that the mainstream men's movement needs to get past its current role as a men's auxiliary to join women in the political struggle for social justice.  This pro-feminist men's movement group is critical of the other positions on the men's movement spectrum.  They say that the men's movement is full of self-satisfied, lazy, uninvolved "men of conscience" who are just inert and apathetic cheerleaders for feminists who are trying to solve the veal problems.  This political, pro-woman sector urges men to join women actively and politically in addressing patriarchy as the foundation of all oppression, and the anticipated source of new oppressions¹¹⁶.        Stoltenburg's alternate male ethic of social justice compels its male readers to be active dissidents challenging the gender class of men. 

                I am impressed by Stoltenburg's commitment to feminism and social justice, and especially with his insistence that men own the problems that they have created and perpetuated.  However, his book is comprised of articles not yet woven into a complete analysis of the patriarchy and its complicity with capitalism, racism, sexism and masculinism.  Stoltenburg's profeminism, plus a view from his privileged male vantage point, could possibly add much data and analysis to existing pro-feminist theory about the shape, texture, and function of male domination of women.  Stoltenburg, in a venue with an aim other than exposing the men's movement's potentiality and limitations, could be open to charges that he is puritanical, protestant, and insensitive to the alternate sexual choices of both men and women.  In addition, I think that Stoltenburg borrows heavily from radical feminist theory without always giving due credit.  In my opinion, regardless of one's personal relationships, one's highlighting of `ownership' should extend to crediting radical feminism's discourse, authors and theorists.

In addition, Stoltenburg often skips over the gaping chasms of diversities, conflicts, and challenges within the framework of feminism. His essentialist theoretical position parallels that of the early feminist universalistic and essentialist positions taken by the 1960's women's liberation movement.  The Montreal Men Against Sexism exemplifies Stoltenburg's pro-feminist approach but surpass him in theory, and especially, in action.  This Montreal group does not support the WRF's single-issue politic or apolitical actions.  Clearly, the WRF, with its commitment to men and the education of men, is not balanced on this fulcrum of "the men's movement".  In my opinion, the Montreal Group and their members take enormous risks and, having experienced myself the power of the patriarchy, I assume that they pay a price in personal ways in their private world, and collective and observable professional or business ways in the public world.

 

The Men's Movement Operationalized - A Small Continuum

                Earlier in this paper I made a reference to the men's movement's development resembling that of the women's movement of the early 1970s¹¹⁷.   That reference spoke to the how the men seem unable to assimilate, or possibly to accept the knowledge and experience documented during the emergence of the contemporary women's movement.  I want to make my reader aware of similarities, and differences between the women's movement and the men's movement.   These observations are primarily based on my personal experiences and general knowledge.

                Both movements are experienced by participants as intense, and both movements advance the possibility of  major life-changes.  Both movements, in my opinion, are quite rightly judged to be essentialist and universalistic in ideology.  The charge of essentialism after nearly twenty years, however, is finally being addressed in feminism, but not yet in the men's movement¹¹⁸                In that work, I understand the term accomplished when applied to black men to mean educated and elite black men who could afford Bly's expensive, masculinist retreat.  Nonetheless, they did not feel connected to the elite white men at the retreat. During a session asking male participants to get to know and trust one another, one black man is reported to say,  "I know all the white men I need to know.  I know everything about you (the white man)".  He said bluntly, "I'm here to be with the brothers" (p 29).  I suspect that Bly’s mythopoetic movement lacks the political will to change a self-serving, male dominant society.  Similarly resisting change, the WRF continues to stubbornly defend its archaic, self-serving structure. Arguably, it mirrors the very androcentric and misogynist society that socialized the reactionary Marc Lepine. 

The women's movement resisted reform and change for some long time, but has succumbed to critical analysis of its essentialism¹¹⁹.  The men's movement, however, has not successfully become accessible to diversity.  At the juncture of social change, the women's movement and the men's movement divide sharply and split deeply.  One the one hand, the women's movement, although splintered into factions, found all factions still advocating political and social change.  Moreover, the actions and theories in the women's movement addressed issues of race, class and gender.  Furthermore, and regardless of their rate of success, most reforms advocated or won by the women's movement were designed to help disadvantaged groups to empowerment through some form of political or personal action. 

 

While it is fair to be critical of the contemporary women's movement for its theoretically universalistic standpoint, it nevertheless named and addressed many political issues that the elitist theorists may not have themselves experienced. Yet, from radical feminist to liberal legal reformists, none in the women's movement argued that education alone would achieve a variety of collective and/or individual goals.  The men's movement, on the other hand, except for tiny splinter groups like the Montreal Men Against Sexism, rarely advocates political action.  In fact, the only significantly large group in the relatively small men's movement that is advocating legal "reforms" that are anti-woman, anti-child, and pro-male equality groups like Father’s Rights. They are profoundly anti-women and anti-feminist. For example, the father's rights sector of the men's movement is petitioning the courts to grant the dominant group, men, more power over the less powerful groups, women and children.

                I consider the WRF representative of the majority of so-called pro-feminist men in Canada that advocate primarily that we "educate" men about their violence towards women and children.  The Foundation's position presumes that the battering, raping, and murdering men are ignorant and do not know any better than to act in a hostile and cruel manner towards women. I disagree profoundly with the Foundation's analysis, as I believe that battering men are knowing and wilful. Furthermore, I note that men are empowered by the male dominated state apparatus to act on this social knowing.  My position is furthered by common and specific knowledge on how and why men batter, rape, mutilate, or kill women and children, and what actions the state takes to punish, eradicate, or prevent such incidents.  I argue that it is only when men  ‘go too far’,  ‘cross the line’, or ‘push the envelope’ that more powerful men deign to intervene and punish the perpetrators of women's and children's degradation, torture, or destruction. That is, there are acceptable standards of domination of women and children, and therefore men are punished only when they are too forceful in its application. Furthermore, I do not agree that education, the Foundation's ultimate goal, will change men, reform our adult society into an egalitarian one without sexism, racism or homophobia, or give children legal rights and social value.

                I argue that the men's movement presents the false image of being a wide spectrum of action and philosophies, but in actuality it presents a narrow range of choice with limited positions and possibilities.  The limitations are mostly self-imposed, leaving only three main points on their tiny continuum, that is, the excusatory masculinist majority, the smaller but still powerful right-wing men's rights group, and finally, the minuscule number of radical, left-wing confrontationalist willing to take on the gigantic task of politically dismantling the patriarchy.  I predict the failure of two, the educators and the reformers.  I fear the success of the woman bashing, right wing father's rights group.  These groups see themselves as representing different aspects of the men's movement, but I see little difference except for radical fringe men’s movements like the Montreal Men Against Sexism.  

****** put in some of about Martins D criticisms of my paper here *****

               

 

 

 

 

Each section of the men's movement can identify differences in their individual politics, rituals, actions, emphasizes, or how they advance their doctrinaire philosophies.  However, all sections of the men's movement are rooted in the same androcentric soil.  All sectors share the same structural stem, and, the same sap flows in all their branches.  The only difference is in the sweet flower produced.  As a bee to the bloom, the public is lured dependant upon personal and political preferences, by the attractive presentation and compelling perfume to one or another parts of the small phenomenon, the men's movement.  But, regardless of how alluring they may seem, I find most blooms in the evolving garden of the men's movement have the same sickly-sweet smell.

 

Centre Position, or, Balanced on the Fence

                In the centre of the "spectrum" of the men's movement, and most supportive of the WRF and campaign is, predictably enough its founders, the Men's Network for Change.  Unlike the WRF, the Network considers a broad base of issues pertaining to men, including ending male violence, sexism, racism and homophobia.  They are interested in changing men's "isolation", "alienation" and "brutalization"¹²⁰.  The Network aims to provide men a public and collective voice to support women's liberation¹²¹.  Most chapters fully endorse, participate in, publicize, and coordinate media events surrounding the WRF campaign and ribbon distribution.  The Network has commented on how the WRF is experiencing a largely silent resistance and hostility to confronting and changing our male dominated society.  The resistance and hostility the WRF from feminists and male pro-feminist critics face is similar to that faced over the years by feminists.  However, both the Men’s Network and WRF men agree that their easy success in fund-raising from corporate donors, compared to the barriers faced by women's groups, has impressed on them the hegemonic power of the patriarchy¹²².  

 

Exit Centre Left - The Kingston Men's Network For Change

                The centre political position taken by the Kingston chapter of the Men's Network For Change "respectfully dissented" to participate in the WRF campaign since 1992.  Arguably, the politics of the Kingston Network most closely emulates John Stoltenburg’s pro-feminist and pro-activist political position.  Kingston Network members at confess that they always had grave concerns about the WRF movement.  Nevertheless, they initially participated in distributing the white ribbons in malls while talking to men about male violence against women and children.  The Kingston Network specifically did not emphasize raising money for the WRF; instead, they urged men to make financial contributions to local women's shelters and rape crisis centres.  Although Kingston's Men's Network raised awareness of the issues of male violence, and although they were rewarded by hearing teens and grade school students talk about the issue of male violence, they remained uncomfortable occupying the theoretical space of feminists, usually at the exclusion of women.  After only eight months, they were the first to separate formally from the WRF campaign.  According to one group member, the Kingston group was dissatisfied with the "glossy solicitations" that the Foundation mailed out to possible donors in 1993.  The Kingston Men's group felt that the material included in the request for money exonerated most men from the stigma of being an abuser, of practising complicity with the patriarchy, or of systemically benefiting from sexism and women's domination.  

The Kingston group, according to this person, was also in disagreement with the emphasis on a national campaign, feeling it should be grass-roots with have benefits flowing directly to local and front-line women's services or groups¹²³.    Although recognizing the WRF as a catalyst to get men talking about the issue of male violence against women and a way to support feminist initiative, the Kingston Men's Network for Change disassociated with the WRF campaign for "principled reasons" that they published in the Men's Network Newsletter¹²⁴.  The "principled reasons" included knowledge that the WRF campaign benefited a small group of elite white urban men more than it did the victims of male violence.  In addition, they knew that the campaign offended feminists by indicating that wearing a WRF as a symbolic concern about men's violence while refusing to do the tough political work¹²⁵. Meanwhile, some of Kingston Men's Network members remained active in and even served on the Foundation's Board, but by group consensus the Network withdrew official group participation in the Foundation in 1992.  At a later date, the Men's Network members became concerned about the nature of the information distributed in the WRF mailout¹²⁶. The group felt that the questionnaire, requests for funds, and information on male violence was expensive, unclear, and possibly excusatory.  The Kingston group's consensus was that the funds would have been better spent in front-line political and personal work on issues pertaining to women.

                Instead of participating in the Foundation activities the group established a week in April 1993, called the Community Action week replacing the work they had previously done for the WRF campaign on December 6.  During the Community Action Week, Network members did practical community work at the direction of women and women's services¹²⁷.  This was organized after a process of holding an open community meeting with childcare provided.  Seven women attended the organizing meeting representing five women's organizations.  As well, a food drive was held, to "symbolically represent the violence against women that takes the form of a lack of basic resources such as food and clothing".  The Men's Network had also organized the 4C Cabaret (cash, cans, clothing and comedy) that was attended by about 120 people.  The $790 collected was distributed according to needs identified in a local mail-out survey¹²⁸.  On subsequent occasions the Kingston group of men did manual and service work for women that consisted of activities such as moving single mothers or battered women, childcare, painting in a women's shelter and cleaning up their storage areas.  Some members baked or provided refreshments for an event at Interval House.  However, group membership and attendance in the Men's Network had fallen to one or two by early 1994, and the group no longer meets on a regular basis.   Past members interviewed in May and June 1994 described the Men's Network for Change as "dead in the water, in effect, non-existent"¹²⁹, and "awaiting its karmic fate"¹³⁰, and "over because key members (had) left"¹³¹.  No-one interviewed attributed the group's demise to their foray into direct services to women, in fact, all men that were interviewed specifically denied the charge.  Explanations included losing key members for practical reasons such as physical relocation, time constraints due to career or academic demands, or problems with Network's group processes.  One man said the problem was that men were afraid to participate due to the anti-feminist backlash that also spilled over to them, and due as well to the harsh critiques of "political correctness"¹³².  This man indicated that men were afraid of doing the wrong thing; therefore the safest was to do nothing.  Whatever the reason, working at the dictates of women, fearing reprisals, or evolving priorities, men no longer have participation in the Kingston Men's Network as a political option.

                I cannot help but repeat the same question that I asked of the Men's Network members, and that is, did changing the focus from men to women explain why membership fell so drastically, and is that the reason the group ultimately folded?  Although all the Network members denied it, but I think that it was.  I suggest that men who argue that changing focus was not the reason for the demise of their group are in deep denial about the nature of the Men's movement.  The men's movement, after all, is about men.  However lofty their goals of eradicating male violence, it was and is about men working for and with men.  I suggest that the drastic change to doing what a labourer calls the `bull work', and Network men might experience as demeaning, that is, what myself and my labouring colleagues in community work call the ‘shit work’ of community organising.  And perhaps, doing it modestly, quietly, at the behest and for the benefit of women may make it even more so. 

                I argue that the demise of the Network in Kingston is a micro example of what may happen if the WRF changes its emphasis from the educational to the political and confrontational work needed to achieve effective social reforms and equality for women.  I suggest the media-wise men at the Foundation were, and are, aware of this possibility.  Furthermore, the men know that the Foundation would lose its vast financial potential if it told the truth about everyday men just like their members, ruling and dominant men who practice everyday violence against women.  This violence might be physical, psychological, political, or economic. I argue that the Foundation literally cannot afford to speak bitterness about men and violence by naming names and taking political action.  The Foundation's extensive and exclusive membership would soon parallel that of a small consciousness-raising group called  Men Walking Against Male Violence, or another small political-action group known as the Montreal Men Against Sexism.    

 

Exit Middle Left, with the Men Taking a Walk

                Six men, including organizer Ken Hancock, comprised the core of a group of men that walked from Toronto to Ottawa in November 1992.  The walkers said that it was important to them that they not focus attention away from the Montreal Massacre, that they wanted to talk to men they met during their walk about male violence¹³³.  They did not support the non-political WRF.  Scott Anthony, one of the walkers, also said that while it was important to for issues of male violence to be raised men, it was also important that women's input be a strong element of any action that they took¹³⁴.  In attempting to be accountable to women, the group had a policy that for a man to be allowed to join the walk for more than two days, a panel of women must vet the applicant.  Many men resisted, finding the policy too confrontational or too controversial.  Hancock spoke at Queen's University in a panel discussion that his group had initiated, saying that men resisted the policy of being judged by women because of "a very powerful iron law of anti-matriarchy in society that resulted in men refusing to be governed by women"¹³⁵.  Hancock also said that the relations of power and authority between men and women were indicated by the embeddedness of gender in the world's hierarchical relations.  Hancock's delivery was crisp, his analysis sharp, and he aggressively challenged the small number of men in the audience on their sexism instead of leaving it to the feminists on the panel to challenge the sexist men. 

 

                However, in spite of rhetoric about female empowerment, Hancock had to be chided by the feminist Chairperson about speaking first as a matter of rote, and because he spoke longer, louder, and more abstractly than the other panel members.  He displayed frustration and defensiveness when I asked him if walking was enough "to combat male violence that is systemic as well as individualized".  I have some empathy with Hancock's defensive frustration as he struggled with my question; in fact, he said that it seemed to him that men "couldn't get it right". However, I think he meant that men couldn’t please feminists like myself.

                I am still compelled to ask why men couldn't simply pose the question of what was needed by the majority of women to women themselves. We know that women endure situations of poverty, gender and other discriminations, inadequate housing, systemic biases, dead end jobs, familial responsibilities and male brutality in their everyday lives.  Therefore, what women would recommend that to help women, empathetic men should take long consciousness-raising walks and educate any abusive men they might happen upon?  However, as Hancock pointed out, women were involved with his group.  I think that the women who supported this group's walk and vetted the male's participants probably supported the walk because it was the best, or perhaps the only thing suggested by the men.  Now, Men Walking Against Male Violence is no longer an observably functioning group. I want to make the point though, that while the Men Walking Against Male Violence did not support The WRF's educational thrust, they themselves arguably theorize from the same space, position, and ideology.

                The notion that consciousness-raising among men can address or reform a hegemonic gender inequality is shared by the two groups, that is, both the WRF and the Men Walking Against Male Violence.  Admittedly, Men Walking Against Male Violence may not share with the WRF the intent of blurring or softening the message about a man's responsibility for the battering of women and children.  Still, intentional or not, by using "male" instead of "man" when speaking of violence toward women and children, Hancock (a man) and the group (men) are objectifying the violent perpetrators.  This objectification acts in turn to distance Hancock and his group from such vile and brutal acts, a parody of the old Hollywood ‘good guy, bad guy’ routine.  Nonetheless, in my mind the acts of a man count more than his intent.

 

Exit Far Left - Montreal Men Against Sexism

                The strongest male criticism of the WRF comes from a men's group called Montreal Men Against Sexism.  This group is highly political and active in its community, though small in membership.  In 1992 the Montreal group charged that the WRF had "blown it" by not being accountable to the feminist movement.  The Montreal group was concerned about men occupying centre stage and edging out feminists.  The Montreal group itself had adopted a policy of never speaking publicly unless feminists are also invited to voice their perspectives¹³⁶. By 1993 the Montreal Men Against Sexism's opposition to the Foundation had increased in both volume and breadth.  It now censured the WRF movement because:

 

The WRC, in effect, sets up feminists, who cannot voice any critique of the campaign without being dubbed man-hating radicals by the media . . . (And) . . . As often [happens], a pro-feminist stance is used to put a kinder, gentler face on a structurally masculinist men's movement.

 

 

According to the Montreal Men Against Sexism, transgressions against women included the WRF campaign's habit of collecting money for women's groups but spending it on themselves.  In addition, the Montreal group notes that the Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH) had demanded fiscal accountability on the part of the WRF but were refused access to their financial records.  Also, the Montreal group saw that many men's groups and male activists who were initially supportive of the WRF were now boycotting it.  Finally, the Montreal group was offended at the Foundation's commitment of financial support for "anti-feminist men's organizations" in British Columbia, specifically, the mythopoetic groups whose members oppose women's reproductive rights¹³⁷.  

                The Montreal group was lobbying the federal Department of Justice to ensure that proposed legal reforms to custody and child access during divorce will not give undue and automatic child-access requested by right-wing `father's rights' groups.  The Montreal Men Against Sexism point out that these fathers' rights groups also claim to be concerned about `children's rights', `grandparent's rights', `societal rights', `the family' and `mothers without custody'.  The Montreal Men Against sexism group maintains that the father's rights groups simply use these lofty ideals of the family to advance their own purposes.  In particular, the Men Against Sexism point out that the proposed `friendly parent rule' ensuring maximum access to the non-custodial parent puts vulnerable women and children at risk.  The Montreal group challenges the media, the courts, and the WRF.               

Most recently, the Montreal Men Against Sexism linked the strangulation of a seven-year old boy by his psychotherapist father with Guy Corneau's Jungian and masculinist bible of the Father's Rights Movement entitled `Missing Fathers, Lost Sons: The Search for Masculine Identity'.  The murderer, Daniel Riendeau, had just been released from custody on charges of beating, raping, and threatening to kill his separated wife.  Riendeau placed a copy of Corneau's book on his son's corpse, and then waited all afternoon beside his son's corpse.  Riendeau then beat and raped his ex-partner, and physically and sexually assaulted his ex-partner's seventeen-year old niece who had accompanied her.   They note that the courts, in spite of the serious charges against Riendeau, had granted him liberal holiday access to his son.  The group claims that masculinism, the same masculinism exhibited in the Montreal Massacre and the WRF campaign and finances, "shows the extent to which the political advocacy of male identity and privilege, also known as ‘male positiveness’ is a major factor in the everyday assassination of women and children"¹³⁸.  

                The Montreal Men against Sexism are increasing the pressure and their demonstrations about this issue. In addition, they have extended their analysis of the Riendeau murders:

The extent to which masculinism -the political advocacy of men and privilege -AKA male positivism- is a major factor in the everyday assassination of women and children have yet to surface as an issue, even within pro-feminist writings and activism.  Men who work with batters could provide help in that regard, but they cover-up for clients and protect their pay-checks¹³⁹.

 

For the Montreal Men Against sexism all the men who enabled, ordered, arranged, or facilitated Riendeau's release from custody against local police advise to share the guilt of his heinous crimes.  According to them, Riendeau's accomplices are many.  They include the lawyer who represented Riendeau, the judge who released him with instructions to "get therapy within three weeks", and the `expert witnesses' who appeared for Riendeau. 

Also included as an accomplice, according to the Montreal Men Against Sexism, is the Crown Prosecutor who signed a "gentleman's agreement" with the murdering Riendeau, one allowing him an opportunity to beat, rape and kill women and to murder his own child. Topping the Montreal group's list of complicit men, however, is Guy Corneau, whose book was left on the dead boy's stomach to justify the boy’s murder in the name of "sparing him the anguish of a divorce" and also sparing him "life without a father".  Corneau's book stresses both themes. One might like to read or carefully re-read by the standards being applied by the Montreal Men Against sexism; a group holding him to account for his ‘writings' repercussions’¹⁴⁰.   

                The Montreal Men Against Sexism have learned to recognize masculinism, and so not surprisingly they point out a little known fact: the Montreal Massacre murderer, Marc Lepine, was an articulate masculinist who wrote under the pen name Gamil Gharbi.  In addition, they note also that Lepine left a masculinist suicide note that was designed to have "justified his attack on women and his hatred of feminism by protesting what he called the unfair advantages of women"¹⁴¹.   The Montreal Men Against Sexism contend that masculinism intentionally and specifically targets women and children. Accordingly, they reason that the acts of Lepine and Riendeau are not misrepresentations or misunderstandings of Corneau's masculinist work, but the logical conclusion and application of his misogynist text.

 

A Critical Analysis of The WRF

                My feminist version of how the largely grass-roots WRF campaign was appropriated features a takeover of a grass-roots movement by a self-serving, calculating, and slick male organization dominated by elitist white men.  This group of elites proceeded to exonerate themselves and the majority of men in the complicity, profit, and perpetuation of the oppression and brutalisation of women and children.  But this simplistic and stark analysis, while technically correct, sharp, and appealing to my feminist instinct, misses the nuances and experiences of the male participants.  It also misses the nature and subtly of interacting and recipient women's groups, and of citizens-at-large. Therefore, I want to be more inclusive of perspectives and so I present an overview of how groups viewed the WRF, and how they operated internally.  According to them, the corporate WRF was ostensibly formed to raise funds to promote education among men about male violence against women and children.  The Foundation also had a commitment to sharing its resources with women's groups.  However, for women, their herstorical experiences intruded, making feminists wary of those principles couched in high moral terms.  This explains how and why some feminists experienced men's heightened interest in male violence against women as a hostile takeover of women's territory and women’s concerns.

 

 WRF's Accountability and Money

                Canadian feminists were practically -and politically- concerned about how the $400,000 raised by the Foundation was spent.  They noted there was something masculine in a decision to risk most of their $300,000 plus on a direct marketing scheme generally referred to in polite company as ‘junk mail’.  They were astonished that WRF's all-male board had gambled scarce resources in a massive but risky funding drive during a recession. 

They noted that this reckless decision was taken at the same time as governments cut funding to women's programs both federally and provincially.  I too question the WRF's political and educational value, and I puzzle at their strange strategy.  I must pose the question - is offering a short and surface education on the issue of male violence against women useful?  And if the answer is yes, then I ask, useful to whom?  I note that as a political entity of the WRF primarily addresses the single issue of male violence against women.  As well, that is theorised and done in non-threatening and non-blaming ways. 

After my research, and in my opinion, the WRF literature consistently implies that somehow ‘other’ bad men are the problem. Unfortunately, it does not position the reality of women’s and children's lives, nor the daily terror of abuse by the similarly ordinary-looking men that we pass daily in the street without knowing of their violent acts.  I am aware of how convenient it is for men to write a check and don a white ribbon for one day a year, as opposed to doing the hard work of sharing power and making change, or of facilitating or assisting community and/or participant and female empowerment. 

               

The WRF: Soft-Peddling The Message

                Even the feminist organizations that publicly support the WRF's work objected and still object to the slick, glib marketing approach, and the gentle, generic soft-blaming of individual men.  After all, those individual men, for all we know, may also be battering and raping husbands, fathers, and sons, or harassing and assaulting employers, clerics and professionals.  In the literature of the WRF, men are absolved of personal responsibility and complicity in practising, perpetuating and benefiting from patriarchy and its inherent violence against women¹⁴².  True, some literature on the subject of men's violence against women was included in the WRF's mail-out money grab.  However, pro-feminist ideals do not translate well to the genre of junk mail¹⁴³ (See: Attachment from WRF entitled `The 1993 National Survey of Canadian Men', dated April 8, 1993).

 

Feminist Overview(s)

                Radical feminism would explain the Montreal Massacre and the WRF as the ultimate domination of women, for what could be more powerful than decisions about a woman's life, death, or her descriptions of her reality?  While many feminists theorized the reasons and methods of women's inequality, some feminists theories have a special resonance in analysing the Montreal Massacre; and the especially in theorising the subsequent WRF.  

                Feminists who were long time community activists, workers and fund-raisers had for years suffered financially lean times.  Therefore, they were rightly angry and discouraged at the easy success and lack of accountability and sensitivity exhibited by WRF members.  Some feminists asked how could these men have raised so much money when they had not been able to.  After all, they thought, women were the front line service providers to the victims of men's violence, and so should be believed.  Unfortunately, in the crazy-making world of corporate funding, men telling women's stories got more money to work on educating abusing men than women did to provide a service to the abused women. WRF men had raised more corporate money although the front line services for women dealt with the multiplicity of victims (including damaged children), legal concepts, and issues.  Moreover, the WRF men raised more money in spite of the fact that women and children victims desperately and chronically needed expanded services that addressed the financial and psychological aftermath of male violence more than they needed an educational or consciousness-raising men's program.

                Women are arguably justifiably cynical when if asking if is necessary to be a man sharing male privilege and solidarity to raise successfully raise money for ‘feminist causes’¹⁴⁴.  After all, women had the example of the WRF's successful money grab mocking their own puny public funding successes.  I lament that the secret to pro-feminist corporate funding appears simply to be ‘one of the guys’ doing direct ‘male’ marketing.  The fact that men were so successful in raising money and consciousness regarding the issue of violence against women gives rise to questions about why gender politics are taken seriously only when men lead the discussion. 

 

A Feminist Diversity of Opinion     

                Feminist activists who did not simply ignore the WRF campaign took diverse, and sometimes competing positions, or else explored often-contradictory theoretical positions.  Feminists claimed that the WRF campaign confiscated women's work on the issue of male violence against women and children.  They argued that regardless intentions, first the all-male WRF campaign, and then the all-male WRF had claimed media attention.  These men, they charged, had also seized the symbolism of the December 6 Massacre and even the white ribbons that commemorated first the funerals and then the anniversaries of the Massacre. The right to lead public grief on December 6 had become a hotly contested symbol in a painful struggle between feminists and ‘men in feminism’¹⁴⁵.

                Feminist theory tried to explain the men's movement and the massacre from a number of perspectives.  Women saw that the targeted and murdered women were engineering students and employees in a university where normality was male and white.  Most feminists agreed that women, and feminists in particular, pay a high price to participate in male activities such as attending engineering classes in the Ecole Polytechnique. Beyond that, differences in opinion started to emerge, many sprouting from different branches of the women's movement.  In order to understand the perspectives, it is necessary to briefly position them historically.

 

Largely Liberal Feminists

                Alison Jagger claims that liberal philosophy had emerged with the rise of capitalism, concerning itself primarily with the equality of men expressed by demands for democracy and political liberties.  However, Jagger also points out that liberal feminism, while always a voice because of mostly anonymous suffragettes, has had little impact and has been mostly unheeded throughout the 300 years of liberal political theory¹⁴⁶.  Liberalism is predicated on the notion that all individuals have a capacity for reason, and all individuals are due dignity, autonomy and self-fulfilment¹⁴⁷.  Historically, then, liberalism has been associated with the capitalist economic system, and assumes as main tenets timeless and universal human conditions.  Therefore, liberalism believes that social progress is accomplished by persuading other individuals that certain principles are both morally right and in their best interest¹⁴⁸. 

 

                Jagger argues that this liberal philosophy had certain repercussions for women, one of which was ensuring that liberal feminism was based only on an application of liberal principles to women as well as to men.  Liberal feminism presumes a separation of the mind and the body.  According to Jagger, liberal feminism also assumes that there is no ‘male’ or ‘female’ nature, only "a human nature that has no sex"¹⁴⁹.  Unfortunately, to date liberal feminists have been unsuccessful in convincing the general public that women have the same potentiality for rational and moral action, as do men.  In short, Jagger says

Contemporary liberalism . . . does presume . . . what I have called normative dualism, namely, the view that what is especially valuable about human beings is their "mental" capacity for rationality¹⁵⁰.  

 

The liberal paradigm described by Jagger is profoundly male biased.        According to Jagger, liberalism is "based on liberal normative dualism", on "the association of woman as body and man as mind", and on "male experience as opposed to female experience"¹⁵¹.   Liberal feminists, then, argue that women's liberation and equality would benefit all society and not just women.  Therefore, liberal feminists' organized political efforts focused on public issues such as legal reforms, affirmative action, anti-harassment law, and equal pay legislation through liberal feminism. 

                Susan Faludi confirms the existence of male dominance, and the systemic reasons supported by sameness\difference standards. Faludi notes how the sameness of men (when men are the ‘normal’ male standard) coupled with the difference of women (women as compared to the ‘normal’ male standard) translates and replicates an imbalance in the power relations between men and women. An application of Faludi's theory shows that the power imbalance between men and women in society may inhibit but does not specifically prohibit the potential power of men.  Arguably, the WRF men are powerful and have the ability to influence social and moral impact, and  they say that they want to change the current power bias favouring men.  Faludi’s observation about male equalling our understanding of ‘normality’ is supported by Foundation members who noted with “surprise” the powerful resistance to their stated desire to change a male dominated society within this hegemonic, patriarchal world¹⁵². 

                I maintain, however, that in spite of its rather narrow focus, feminism(s) owe a debt to liberal feminism for raising both consciousness and public issues, and for initiating legal and social reforms.  Still, I think that liberalism in its current state is unable to theorize women's authentic liberation because of normative dualism, abstract individualization, and male notions of rationality.  My research and interviews convinced me that liberal feminists comprise the preponderance of women supporting the WRF.

 

Within Liberalism -the Sameness/Difference Debate

                One theoretical approach is to examine the Montreal Massacre and focus on how feminism and post-structuralism go beyond the ‘text’ of language¹⁵³.  This would mean looking at how the ‘differences’ of the murdered women attracted the attention of a man who expected, but did not get, his measure of inalienable, white male, academic privilege.  Perhaps only deconstruction can solve the dilemma of a sameness/difference debate within feminist theory.  This theoretical position necessarily takes a step backwards to start by explaining that the term `deconstruction' is derived from a criticism of structural linguistics that defines language as a system employing binary opposition, or differences. 

According to this perspective, wherever differences are noted, however equal they may appear to the observer, there is in fact a subtle and hierarchical relationship where one difference is valued over the other.  Arguing not for a difference-standard or sameness-standard, rather, it suggests a pragmatic methodology of differences that bypasses the reductive and oppositional categories of male and female.  Simply put, this theoretical perspective claims that it will redefine equality so that it no longer assumes white male heterosexual as the norm.  Essentially, it argues that women's equality must necessarily feature both sameness and difference appropriate to the specific circumstances.  The problem remains that while this is an innovative way to theorize about women's lives and may even hold promise in a pluralistic future, it gives little relief to woman's realities in male dominated structures today.  For example, when considering Susan Faludi's documentation of a backlash against women, we find it operating at three levels against women.  First it confirms how our society forces women to internalise their anger, frustrations and failure while blaming feminism for all their problems.  Second, it shows how the hegemony of patriarchy undermines women and women's minimal progress toward equality.  Third, it analyses how an  insidious war against women is a cultural phenomena underpinned and reinforced by fashion, entertainment, media, rhetoric, politics, women's harassment at work, and institutions such as the Academy. 

 

Socialist Feminism

                According to Alison Jagger, socialist feminist concepts of human nature, in its most abstract form, is identical to that of traditional Marxism.  Socialist feminism is more inclusive of women, acknowledging changing conditions, including reproductive labour.  It also goes beyond conventional definitions of `the economy as money' to recognize the economic value of women's unpaid labour in the home.  The distinctive contribution to feminism by socialist feminism is the theory that the differences between men and women are neither innate nor inherent, but rather socially constructed.  Jagger notes that what is socially constructed can be altered or changed¹⁵⁴.  Socialist feminists propose social change through recognition of the two workplaces of women, the public and the private home. In the view of socialist feminists, women need reproductive freedom and rights including ability to control her body.  Socialist feminism, according to Jagger, see women’s experiences of our contemporary society as a perfect example of alienation.  Socialist feminists see that women are alienated as sexual beings and as wives and mothers¹⁵⁵.  Jagger says that

Socialist feminist strategies for ending oppression seek to combine traditional emphasis on changing the material conditions of life with the 20th-century emphasis on the importance of changing ideas and feelings¹⁵⁶.

 

                My critique of socialist feminism is its presumption that, if successfully applied, socialist feminism could achieve a society where everyone was equal and free in every area of life.  I do not believe, nor has my personal experience convinced me, that socialist feminism has shown how `democracy', let alone control of a women's own reproductive capacity can be reached in a male dominated society.  My argument stands, and would be the same regardless of whether we are talking about liberal, conservative or socialist policies if the normative standard remains male with male interests.  Furthermore, depending on time and global or personal issues, I am at best ambivalent and at worst frightened of socialist feminisms commitment to working-class men.

Radical Feminism

                Radical feminism is a contemporary phenomenon generated by the women's movement of the 1960s¹⁵⁷.  Radical feminism, influenced by the politics of the new left and the special experiences of a small, privileged group of predominantly white, middle-class, college educated women, emphasizes the importance of feelings and personal relationships.  Radical feminism has evolved, and is now a grass roots movement concerned with literature, music, spirituality, health services, sexuality, employment and technology¹⁵⁸.           As I understand radical feminism, it is a political, action-based group immersed in the sexual politic of biology, sexuality, and the social construction of women.  Radical feminism is informed too by nature, the environment, and women's spirituality.  Radical feminism is celebratory of all things female, valuing women's rites of passage such birth, menses, and ageing.  The most important insights of radical feminism sprang from women's own experiences of oppression. 

                Problematically, radical feminism does not feature a unified methodological approach, although there are some areas of fundamental agreement.  One of the fundamental areas of agreement is the rejection of metaphysical dualism in favour of a practical view that humans are necessarily embodied.  According to Jagger,

Radical feminists acknowledge specifically that humans have sex, that their sex is defined by differences in reproductive physiology, that women bear children, that infant survival depends on human milk or a close substitute, and that human young require a long period of adult care¹⁵⁹.   

 

There are strengths and weaknesses in radical feminist theory, and paradoxically, sometimes they are the same thing.  For example, radical feminism's scrutiny of reproduction politics has expanded the private role, making visible previously hidden oppressions.  However, the examination of women's private world of oppression has also had the effect of tending to propel sexuality, birth and child-work deeply into the domain of nature, separating them from man-made `culture'. 

                Also, I think that radical feminism pits women against men, leaving little room for compromise.  Radical feminism, I note is more descriptive than prescriptive.  I theorize that this is why the women on record as opposing the WRF are usually coming from this political position on the spectrum.  Radical feminism has used women's personal stories and experiences to evaluate, and find wanting, the WRF campaign.   Moreover, radical feminism has a fatalistic view that the status quo between men and women will never change, so radical feminists frequently embrace social, political, and sexual separateness.  Radical feminism frequently leads to the somewhat reductionist conclusion that there is some biological deviance in men that compel them to act in violent and wanton ways toward women and children.  In my opinion, radical feminism holds future promise, but only if it produces wider theoretical explanations than testosterone for our nearly universal male dominance.

 

But, Is It Accessible or Simply All Esoteric If Feminist Theory?            

                Feminist observations and theories seem to me to make much feminist theoretical work inaccessible in terms of a women being able to ‘get it’, and then to apply ‘it’ to her daily life.  Liberal feminism tends to be the domain of privilege, with educated, employed, largely middle income, professional women. Alternatively, liberal feminists are often the wives and daughters of powerful or wealthy men who have extended male privilege and access to the women in their lives. 

Therefore, there is not much space or opportunity for an unemployed and unemployable single-parent mother to discuss or analyse her experiences within liberal feminism.  Radical feminism is often inaccessible to straight women who may be viewed as sleeping with the enemy, and to liberals who challenge only public patriarchal norms.  Socialist feminism presumes an unspoken agreement to work with men on issues of class, with gendered sexism as a subtopic. Moreover, as feminists, we are all guilty of assuming that the reader understands elite, possibly even privileged concepts such as the economy, the patriarchy, masculinism, and normative white or North American experience(s).  While it is true that a number of countries, including a small number of third world countries, are producing or refining feminist theory, they are marginally included in a marginalized theoretical space; and even then largely at their insistence not invitation.  In fact, all feminisms arguably imply privilege beyond that normally found in third world societies. 

For example, feminism has centred on the written word, mostly ignoring the long traditions of story telling, drawing, and music found in many cultures.  In addition, feminist criticism has long dwelt on the politics of reproduction, and most recently high technology choices and the morality surrounding that hopefully freely made decision. Yet, in the third world rudimentary medicine may not be available. Perhaps the greatest and most problematic assumption is the universalistic notion that third world women could share priorities, and should share politics with us.  This is questionable in view of our North American and European colonizing, militaristic, and exploitative history and practices that should and would serve as instructive information to third world women. 

 

Bitter Medicine for Feminists

                The men's movement, and the WRF campaign, offer equal doses of hope and despair to feminists.  As women with herstories of cautionary tales, women accept little at  face value.  We also know that since the Massacre there is little evidence of change, save the occasional man who, meeting no feminist test, dons a white ribbon.  Does society have an inability "get it" when "it" is a truth with the potential to damage male status, or when the "it" challenges male authority?  Even as both black and white America refused to believe Anita Hill's charges of harassment against Supreme Court candidate Clarence Thomas; so too did Canada refuse to believe the women who called the murders feminist backlash, genocide, or femicide.  In both cases and with ample media assistance, a more palatable social reality was (re)constructed.  In America, Anita Hill was a seductress and a liar, in Canada; feminists calling the Massacre misogynist backlash were strident liars¹⁶⁰.

 

Given Herstorical Perspective, Why Would Women Be Hopeful?           

                A good question, why would women be hopeful?  I think that a different school of thought explains women's desire to believe, to even support the men's movement and the WRF.  According to Kay Leigh Hagen, women's responses to the men's movement ranges from anger and frustration to hope and humour.  However, I note that the theme recurring throughout Hagen's book is a plaintive strain of hope, indicating that most women want to believe in men and men's work for social and egalitarian change.

 

                The message in Hagen's book is that many women long for a new era of true partnership with men, of shared power and gender justice.  In fact, I theorize that women want desperately to be able to support men because of women's complex relationships and dependency on men.  By extension women also may wish to support, or chose to believe in the WRF campaign.  Women are ever hopeful of male support, in spite of herstory's example and our their personal experiences¹⁶¹.         

                Lynn Segal takes a hopeful approach to the "problem" of men by looking not at masculinity, but looking rather in new ways at emerging constructs of a range of `masculinities'.  Segal says that these masculinities can vary from tough guys and military men to gay, black-macho or anti-sexist men, and that they can feature competing roles and politics.  According to Segal, in an attempt to create a new social agenda, women theorists recognize contemporary, complex and contradictory webs of diverse masculinities.  Hagen agrees, saying that men are discovering a approach to gender politics that appreciates the intersections of class, race and any other diversity¹⁶².  Segal's approach supports the theory that while there are categories of men for whom the "new masculinities" remain obscure, there has been a paradigmatic and critical shift in the range of choices available to men.  In Canada, this shift to new definitions of manhood that includes tenderness and compassion, and while still fragile and tentative, men know that they have been lacerated by the callous and misogynist actions of the male killer at the Polytechnique in Montreal.  Although I am critical of the men's movement, this helps explain what I think is some men's genuinely felt concern for women, although I argue that it plays out as a misguided politic of the WRF in a commitment to eradicate male violence against women that is verbal only.

 

Discrepancies, or, Romanticism VS Reality

                Yvonne Roberts points out that on the one hand, how, when and if pro-feminist men and feminists can work together is unclear and uncertain.  Feminists point to historical examples of women's colonization and subordination to underscore the danger of subordinate peoples conferring with their rulers.  On the other hand, Roberts says that some women want a new alliance with men to challenge the world's ills, arguing that without the women's movement, changes have occurred that affect women's status¹⁶³.   An example of what Roberts is saying is that the capitalist market requires women to work as capitalist producers, as well as to be another economic resource as consumers.  Women now have a vested interest in "conferring" with the male capitalist power-brokers.  Other factors also intrude, for example, demography requires older women to return to work and the marital and familial breakdown of the nuclear family means that many women and children are left to fend for themselves.  At the same time, men too are charting new emotional waters within the men's movement and exhibiting unheard of nurturing skills.  I agree somewhat with Roberts that this perspective stresses that new organizations and social contracts are needed, while arguing passionately that feminist theory holds the definitive answer(s). The major problem with what I perceive to be this romantic approach is that it appears to justify the often heard "defence" of the men's movement, oft-repeated in spite of its theoretical flaws.  First this hopeful mode is suspiciously timely and self-serving for men, who control social hegemony by manipulating both the text and construct of a discourse.  Second, these men further control the communication systems that circulate the text's ideology in a myriad of ways throughout our society. 

                This romantic and excusatory mode of theorizing also tends to capitalize on feminist ambivalency on the importance to women to the political, personal, or organizational shortcomings of the so-called `pro-feminist' men.  In the context of this paper, in effect, this strategy would be excusatory of the arguably insensitive response by leaders of the WRF campaign and Foundation to feminist concerns.  This non-accusatory, forgiving and assisting stance appears to be the theoretical position held by the Canadian Women's Fund (CWF), the "feminists" least critical of the WRF. 

 

The Canadian Women's Foundation: a Weak Link?

                The Canadian Women's Foundation were recipients of the Foundation's first extravagant commitment to giving women's groups one half of the "surplus" of all money the Foundation expected to raise.  The amount was later reduced to $30.000, and that sum is now considered by the Foundation as an "unretired debt".  As the only actual financial beneficiary of the campaign, the Canadian Women's Foundation performed an early advisory role to the WRF¹⁶⁴.  The Foundation does not appear to have a constitution, nor, at least early on, be committed to developing one.  As a community organizer, I find it problematic that specifics are not spelled out constitutionally, that definitions are not stated, and in the case of the women with whom the Foundation ‘liased’; some participants are not identified. However, whatever my personal beliefs, it is impossible to determine if this resulted from the speed at which they grew had to publicly respond, or to organizational incompetence, or to intended obliqueness.   

                The WRF raised funds in excess of $400,000 plus donations in kind.  They used this money for salaries, office costs, travel, and the direct mail campaign to increase revenues, giving women not a penny of those funds.  However, the Foundation and its members informally claim to have participated in many events to raise money given directly to women's shelters, rape crisis centres, and women's services.  When pressed for documentation, the WRF members admit it is impossible to provide anything but an estimate, still, they claim that $30,000 to $50,000 was raised for local women's groups.  Furthermore, they point out, that this is in addition to benefits accrued from a heightened public consciousness of the issue, or acts that cannot be directly attributed to Foundation work, yet have been enormously affected or influenced by it¹⁶⁵.  It is certain, however, that one woman’s group, the Canadian Women's Foundation, has financially benefited from their relationship to the WRF, but not to the extent promised.

                The Canadian Women's Foundation claims to be the only national foundation specifically designed to raise and grant funds to meet the "special needs" of women and children.  It was established in 1990 to counter the ongoing gender disparity in non-profit funding, where only 2.5% of all Canadian foundation dollars go to programs that directly benefit girls or women.  The Women's Foundation makes awards for projects that they determine will help women to achieve greater self-reliance and economic independence.  The Women's Foundation's mandate is to transform poverty to economic independence, uneducated women to educated women, underpaid workers to workers whose worth is recognized, and fearful women to confident women.  The Women's Foundation dollars are doubled by the Canadian Challenge Fund, which, in turn, is supported by Toronto's wealthy "feminist", Nancy Jackman.  The Women's Foundation is the only documented recipient of funds from the WRF campaign at this time. 

 

However, the exclusiveness and secrecy surrounding the relationship between the Canadian Women's Foundation and the WRF raises troubling questions.  The WRF tells of early and major commitments to finance the Canadian Women's Foundation, but also report that they failed to deliver even the promised minimum of $30,000.  This is in spite of the fact that the WRF raised in excess of $400,000.  Their critics claim that to avoid public censure, embarrassment, and growing public criticism, the WRF arranged for a corporate citizen (Upper Canada Brewery) to give the Women's Foundation a grant of $2,000 on their behalf.  The WRF says that the corporation did not do the Upper Canada Fundraising event, rather, the corporation just put up `front money' to pay for ticket printing, toasters, and the location. According to this version, the WRF men did the organizing and work.  According to the WRF, the money is a corporate grant only in that a corporation provided the up-front money and was repaid when they processed the event's financial returns.        It seems confusing and convoluted.                The WRF claims that this funding is an example of their commitment to raise money for women's groups.  They point out that in addition to the $2,000 from that night (and that will be doubled by the Challenge Fund, they claim) the WRF shared its list of donors and sponsors with the Canadian Women's Foundation.  The Women's Foundation in turn used the WRF's donor list to hold two appeals for funds raising $4,000 to $5,000 respectively.  They plan a third appeal¹⁶⁶.

                Nonetheless, the entire role and relationship of the Canadian Women's Foundation and the WRF is clouded and mysterious.  Clearly, the Women's Foundation met early with the Foundation, and equally clearly they enjoy an inside track in influencing the WRF. The problem is, there has been no mandate from other women's groups to support the Women's Foundation initial, and possibly exclusive access to the WRF's money; nor has there been consensus that the Women's Foundation alone should interact and influence the WRF men in the interest of all women’s groups. It is not apparent who appointed or selected the Women's Foundation as the WRF's major beneficiary, or how the Women's Foundation became connected with the Men's Network.  There is even less information on how or why the Women's Foundation was named as the first official recipient, and in a promise that was so binding to the WRF that it is referred to as "a debt of $30,000¹⁶⁷".  Also according to Board minutes:

We (the WRF) have made a public commitment to make a substantial donation to women's programs.  This conforms to an important goal of the WRC.  It is true that we do not have threw funds to pay them this $300.000 now, but we should treat it as an obligation and a debt” . . . and. . . We should make payments from time to time and, eventually, retire this obligation. 

 

The Executive Director of the Canadian Women's Foundation declined to be interviewed; giving only guarded answers via the telephone to my questions¹⁶⁸.  One could be charitable and say that the Canadian Women's Foundation did not realize that they had become a pawn in the power dynamics of fundraising.  It is possible to claim that they were unaware that controversy swirled around the WRF.  Perhaps one might argue that the Canadian women's Foundation was consumed with their own financial survival in times of vicious government cutbacks and lean charitable donations.   Unfortunately, it is equally and possibly more plausible to theorize that a reluctance to be interviewed, coupled with wilful ignorance or complicity in currying favour with the WRF, is at the least self-serving, and at the worst hypocritical and offensive. The Women's Foundation is a strange choice for the anti-violence, single issue WRF to choose since it does not have a specific interest or history in helping the battered victims of beating, raping or killing men. 

But, whatever their  morality or intent, the Canadian Women's Foundation is the organization most closely allied with the WRF campaign, and is the primary financial beneficiary of the WRF, and enjoys the only clear commitment of  future largess. 

It is possible to hypothesize that this dilemma is a causal factor in the reticent, taciturn and timorous response from feminists in evaluating the work of the WRF.  Perhaps feminists decline to critique women, or perhaps they simply trusted that since women were involved that it would be a moral or good project. Nonetheless, this stereotypical thinking is simply a mirror of patriarchal binary thought, and so  illustrates the trap that even informed women often fail to  recognize.

 

METRAC: High Powered Feminism

                Toronto's Metro Action Committee on Violence Against Women (METRAC) experienced the schizophrenic dilemma faced by most women's groups who were critical of WRF men’s work.  On the one hand, women had been painfully working to develop expertise and community solutions and processes while under funded and largely unrecognised on issues of male violence against women and children.  On the other hand, women were delighted to hear of male support and even male ownership of the issue of male abuse.  Still, many women and feminists felt that the WRF campaign had stolen the show from women on December the 6th, and that they had shifted media attention away from women's long-term work.

                METRAC's Executive Director, Susan Vander Voets, had a minor connection in the plans to establish the WRF; however, she soon found that the men had already effectively established a full-blown organization when they asked for her "help".  Vander Voets contends that the Foundation was asking for help after the fact.  Concerns about the WRF’s accountability were widespread immediately in feminist communities.  Women were troubled by a variety of issues, including who should raise money to deal with male violence, what women's organizations should share in money raised by the WRF, and by what criteria that should be decided.  As well, the women's communities expressed concerns about what women were involved and by what authority they represented all women and women’s perspectives to the WRF.

 

The Women's "Advisory" Committee, Low Priority and No Budget       

                METRAC, and Toronto's December 6 Coalition decided to express their concerns about male accountability, so they unsuccessfully attempted to initiate a mutual working and accountability process with and within the WRF. While irregular meetings of the WRF’s Women’s Advisory Committee did occur, they were neither comprehensive nor a high priority for the WRF.  There were problems from the start. For example, the Liaison Committee was given sporadic and incomplete data, including limited and dated financial information.  According to facilitator Susan Vander Voet, who attended Committee meetings on behalf of her organization from January to May 1993, they never got the accountability they had demanded.

 

 

 

 Susan explains that:

The problem was that they knew they needed women's input, but did not know what to do with it when they got it (and this is still the case). The foundation was to produce all minutes, memos and financial documents, and take the liaison Committee minutes, but they always kept sparse records. The so-called "action minutes" are typical to their chaotic action style. The whole operation of the WRF campaign focuses on action.  Action was their whole attitude or way to do business.  In the women's community process is what is important.  Women take action too, but only after process work is done. 

and . . .

The WRF campaign made some bad judgements.  The idea of men being responsible for stopping men's violence gets approval as the essence of what they are trying to do. But their methodology left much to be desired, women need men involved to solve the problem of male violence. Still, community women want to see the substance, want to know what is behind the "flash" of the WRF campaign. It was good to see men organizing and struggling to overcome the male way do things, struggling with the issue of male power over others.  There are some very good men in the organization, and they have very good intentions. Still, the WRF is a hierarchy in spite of what they say. They truly think they have created alternative to patriarchy, but their unilateral creation of their structures have recreated patriarchy in spite of any intentions they may have had otherwise¹⁶⁹.

 

The Coordinator of METRAC shared this with me: when the WRF guru and author Michael Kaufman wrote a "whining letter" about feminist and media criticism of the campaign to Ms. Vander Voet and a few elite feminists (including NAC President Judy Rebick and Member of Provincial Parliament Marion Boyd) Ms. Vander Voet lost patience.  She replied to his letter, pointing out that while she did not want to appear facetious about his "urgent concerns", she just "took this opportunity" and "welcomed him to the women's movement, and the political ground feminists inhabit and the process feminists were engaged in daily!"  In her sharp reply, Ms. Vander Voet told Mr. Kaufman that by not having consultations with women, (who, after all, were not a monolithic group) the men had skipped what would have been literally years of feminist process work to get "consensus".  Ms. Vander Voet noted that if there had been discussions with women, not a single group would not have approved the design and action chosen by men.  But, since the campaign was there, and the men had done it without consolidation, women were doing their damnedest trying to accommodate what the men had designed.  She chided Kaufman, saying that it was unrealistic to expect non-critical or wholehearted embrace of unilateral decisions by men about issues concerning women¹⁷⁰.

                There seems to be great confusion about the meaning of the word accountability.  Interestingly, the WRF sees “the structure of accountability’ as ‘fluid thing’, and most specifically ‘not a structure, but rather a process’¹⁷¹.  This political statement, of course, begs the question as to why the WRF rejected the offer of feminists (to whom they state accountability) to engage in "a process".  It also closes the door to a plea of ignorance of the real meaning of process work, since it is terminology embedded in their own rhetoric.  I note that "process" and "accountability" may have been the stated and written intentions of the WRF, yet they failed to complete or prioritise the arduous task of full community consultation leading to a pro-feminist consensus.  Accepting some criticisms, the WRF says that accountability is occurring but that the process needs perfecting. 

 

The Foundation claims that it remains committed to responding to the criticisms raised on their slowness, priorities, response to women's charges, and on-going concerns about the timing and focus of their events.  It is because of this commitment of being accountable to women that the Board is currently considering shifting its major focus to Father's Day to challenge its commercialised hypocrisy¹⁷². 

 

OAITH, Spirited and Hostile Opposition to the Foundation

                The Ontario Association of Interval and Transition Houses (OAITH) typify women’s hostile opposition to the WRF and the WRFcampaign.  OAITH passed a motion of concern about the lack of consultation with them, and in particular, about the lack of accountability or control of who could wear white ribbons.  OAITH sent a letter and a copy of the resolution to the WRF. The WRF didn't formally respond to their letter, although one representative called to verbally apologized for not consulting with them on behalf of the organization.  OAITH got a single fax from their call for greater accountability to women, and that missive arrived fully one year later. OAITH asks why they should have to call the WRF, noting that they should rightfully be calling them.

                In general, OAITH argues that the only potential for the WRF campaign is to tie it to a careful selection of who gets to wear a white ribbon¹⁷³.  They say that while it is great to have men talk about the issue of their violence, why do men have wear a deceitful ribbon that connotes false safety for women?  OAITH notes that the WRF campaign's concern about women doing the hard work of male violence is self-serving, since it keeps men in charge of the money.  They see a problem in terms of men setting up a system, putting it in action, and only then are asking after the fact for women's input and evaluation.  Implicitly, they argue, this process is wrong.  For OAITH, the WRF should fold so that women's shelters may benefit by selling the white ribbons to raise money for local shelters.  According to OAITH, every penny spent by men of the Foundation or campaign is money taken directly from women's organizations that desperately need it.

                OAITH scoffs at WRF’s recent claims that they have down-scaled salaries to equal salaries in the contemporary shelter movement, suggesting that since it took OAITH twenty years to get where they are, these men should be paid the same starting salaries that they had endured, not today’s rates.  Alternatively, OAITH says that the $30,000 that the Foundation pays a man to work on male violence against women might be more appropriately used to top up shelter salaries to $60,000 per annum, an amount which reflects the real value of their intensive and painful work.  OAITH claims that their limited experiences with the Foundation have all been negative.  For example, the Foundation responded to OAITH's monetary concerns after one year, and even then only when OAITH had involved the media.  They point out that no-one asked the men's movement to sell ribbons, and while it is good for men to educate men about their violence, they must not raise funds on the backs of abused and murdered women. 

                OAITH is troubled by not having a WRF accounting -of either policy or money.  They emphasise that their annual budget is $180,000, three times smaller than the money and donations in kind made available to the WRF.  OAITH fields many complaints, for example the Foundation claims that its offices were a free donation, when they actually spent $20,000 on rent in the first six months of operation.  They resent the Eaton's Centre high profile location, since OAITH itself existed for three years in a basement, and even now are not located "at the Ritz".  Although the WRF has offered to share its space with women's groups, OAITH's Executive Director Trudy Don says:

Even if the WRF wants to share their elite offices with women, what women's service to abused women wants to be located next to men, and furthermore, who wants to be in Eaton's Centre when it is contrary to the image we project and detrimental to women's comfort levels ¹⁷⁴ ?  

 

METRAC and OAITH both gave the WRF heaping doses of critical analyses, but claim that they were ignored.

 

A Wilfully Ignorant WRF?

                I think that when there was such enormous opposition to the WRF's campaign, they had to have been aware of it.  Some critics spoke or wrote directly to the Foundation or its representatives, some opposition organized against the campaign, and some opponents spoke to the media.  Kingston feminists including myself challenged the Foundation in a public meeting arranged by the Kingston Men's Network For Change.  Issues brought up by the audience included their concerns about the appropriation of women's commemorative events of the Montreal Massacre, and the male invasion and expropriation and exploitation of women's grief, and finally, the occupation of traditionally feminist territory. 

                In addition, monetary concerns about perceived fiscal irresponsibility were raised.  OAITH had formally requested access to the Foundations books for audit them as am accountability measure.  The Vancouver Rape Crisis centre had demanded open books, as had the Toronto Rape Crisis Centre.  The National Action Committee said that the WRF should be donating money directly to women's shelters and rape crisis centres, but knew that "they will simply put more money back into their own organization"¹⁷⁵.  Finally, even the media and especially magazine articles asked for greater public accountability both fiscally and politically¹⁷⁶. 

                A Kingston Interval House worker said that "Its not as though the politicians who wear the ribbon actually care, just wearing the “ribbon du jour” doesn't actually mean very much"^177.   The Alliance For Non-Violent Action that had staged "an enraged women's civil resistance" in Ottawa on December 4, 1992 said that if the Prime Minister of Canada can wear a white ribbon, so could Jack the Ripper¹⁷⁸.  A Concordia university-based organization, the Montreal Women's Defence Committee, expected that their office would be closed around December every year because "it was death threat season again".  While admitting that the WRF campaign may have contributed to convincing people that Lepine was not just a madman, they added that the simple wearing of a white ribbon is "just not enough".  Patricia Rossi, President of a network of battered women's shelters in Quebec said that violence is getting worse, and while there is a lot of talk about violence against women, she wondered when men would take action.      In other venues, sociologist Bert Young, who runs anti-sexist programs for John Abbot College, said that the campaign rankles him by not dealing with the reality of violence.  His conclusion is that men have to really get working, and not just wear a symbol for a few days¹⁷⁹. "A WRF doesn't mean anything to the woman who has been raped yesterday or will be raped to-day", said Andrea Kim, a worker at Vancouver's Women Against Violence Against Women.  She added that she is angry that the $400,000 spent to mail out ribbons equals or exceeds the amount spent on a year's front-line work¹⁸⁰.                

However, the most indicative of all should have been the virtual silence from a multitude of immobilized battered women, feminists, reformers and their organizations.  This is to say nothing of the legal system, which, if they believed even in the possible success of the WRF campaign, should have been joyfully proclaiming victory from the rooftops.  No such favourable sounds could be detected in the cataclysmic and real world of male violence against women and children.

 

When White Ribbons Equate With White Lies

                In my opinion WRF has not been entirely forthright with either the public or the feminist community to whom they claim a measure of accountability¹⁸¹.  Scarce or sketchy financial accountability is rife in both the initial WRF campaign and the subsequent WRF campaigns.  The first case in point is the vague financial information concerning the money being given to local women's groups.  While the Foundation claims to have raised $30,000 to $50,000, there are no records to substantiate this declaration¹⁸².  Another criticism is their failure to open books for public inspection to OAITH, the umbrella organizations of feminists who work with victims of male violence.  A third criticism is the Foundation's negligence in not incorporating and registering a definitive constitution after fully three years existence¹⁸³.  Why did they not have charitable status of their own, instead of borrowing charitable status from other organizations? 

                An additional charge is the reluctant and contentious information; added to the pugnacious defence of the Foundation residency in the elite and expensive Eaton's Centre in downtown Toronto.  The Foundation is on record as saying that they are there simply because it is free space donated by realtors Cadillac-Fairview¹⁸⁴.  However, their financial records dispute this, record report that rent of  $6,000 was paid in their first six months there.  A later elaboration is that confusion stems from the fact that at first they paid rent, but later, although it remains registered on the books as an un-discharged obligation, Cadillac-Fairview in effect allowed them to stay in an otherwise vacant suite rent-free.  Still, I note that while a rent of $600 dollars a month in Eaton's Centre is a bargain if that's where you want to be, it is troubling ethically that the Foundation did not publicly acknowledge this reality. 

                Finally, there was a great deal of conflicting information about leadership wages and expenses, and staff salaries.  Initial leaked draft reports that the staff would be making executive level salaries were "incorrect", pay levels eventually were set on par with women working in the front-lines shelter movement.  Those women comment that they should have started at the minimum wage they started at, and not the level they have attained through struggle. Furthermore, The WRF's elite participants created the public perception that they were all volunteers with no financial gain from the campaign or their work in the men's movement.  Yet consider the work of WRF man Jack Layton.  He informed the Kingston public meeting that I attended in the spring of 1993 that he certainly "was not in it for the money, he never made cent off the WRF campaign".  While technically this is correct, his public relations company was on contract to the Foundation at $2,200 per month at that very time¹⁸⁵.  Mr. Layton later clarified upon my questions that his company, Jack Layton Associates, was paid by the Foundation, first $1,000 a month for part of the 1992 campaign, and that was increased after April 1993 because he paid an assistant $2.200 a month to work for the WRF.

Mr Layton points out that in many months he participated as a volunteer, and although he has billed for other months, he has not been paid for them all.  Furthermore, he recognizes that the WRF’s obligation to pay this may never be retired.  In addition, he notes that his Company billed the foundation at a very modest rate compared to his other clients, and eventually, that he stopped billing at all.  Jack Layton, sometime volunteer-cum-contract employee, high profile municipal politician, businessman, circuitously defends the WRF’s entire management. He is the spokesperson who said that accountability is not a structure; it's a process, that accountability must be fluid. His fluid practices, and his unstructured process may work for him, but I find it problematic.  Nonetheless, Layton insists that there is accountability, but that their accountability process needs perfecting.  Layton further asserts that the WRF remains committed to responding to the criticisms about their slowness, their priorities, their response –or lack of responses one presumes- to women's charges, and to on-going concerns about the timing and focus of their events.  While not having unanimous support, it is because of this commitment to accountability to women that the Board is currently considering shifting its major focus to Father's Day to challenge its commercialised hypocrisy.  Layton says they have and will continue to respond to women's concerns¹⁸⁶.                 

Basically, the Foundation gives a simplistic reply.  It claims that it has "toned down" the request for funds for the Foundation during the time of commemoration of the Montreal Massacre, asking  instead that money be given directly to women's centres¹⁸⁷.

 

Where Do We Go From Here?

                Feminists, the men's movement, and the media have articulated many concerns, have named names, and asked that financial and policy specifics be documented and made public.  The Foundation has made some attempt to do so, with varying levels of success and failure.  The question is, where do we go from here?  On the one hand, there is ample evidence of men's cynicism, self-serving practices and moral debauchery.  On the other hand, there is a persuasive argument to be made for the blending of feminism and the new male politic. 

                On the negative side, there is a strong justification to be made, and being made, for a complete abandonment of the WRF campaign and Foundation.  This call for male abandonment of their flawed model of reform is appealing, and would give women a somewhat self-righteous but clear signal of support and solidarity.  Alternatively, some women want the men's movement to return the symbol of the WRF and its fund-raising potential to them as the rightful owners.  Arguably, male dominion of the issue as to how a male dominated society should evaluate, explore and resolve women's problems related to male violence against women and children will not be solved by those same dominating men it serves.  Simply put, it is not in their best or practical interest. The expectation that men will solve male violence is a dilemma akin to the fable that teaches us not to leave hen-houses under the protection of greedy foxes.

                In my opinion, a grass-roots concern about male violence resulting from the murder of fourteen women manifested spontaneous support for wearing a WRF ribbon as a symbol of solidarity with feminists who led the fight in this issue.  This was in turn was appropriated by white, urban, male elites who exploited the Montreal Massacre of fourteen feminists.  These elite men then appropriated even women's grieving commemorative ceremonies on behalf of their sisters.  The men of authority who finessed the take-over of community initiative are powerful men with experience in hostile political and corporate assimilation.  The powerful, elite, white men used their connections, notoriety, and networks to readily raise both awareness of their efforts and money from their corporate colleagues and male-bonded associations.  They used the funds raised by private individual and corporate donors primarily for staff, offices, travel, and to attempt even more fund-raising.  The funds were spent on men's "consciousness-raising", with an embarrassingly small amount being made available to local shelter movement and the Canadian Women's Foundation.  These relatively small donations (read charity) to women were determined by men, so once again needy women begged powerful men for money to provide necessary services to themselves as victims of male abuse.  This is a mirror image of what women do with to get money for necessities in a male-dominated world of marital partners, bosses, and governments.  Whether the men in the WRF intended to re-create the hierarchies and practices of the patriarchy is a moot point.  Women experience the take-over as subordination, silencing, an appropriation of their issues, as male power and domination over them, all this regardless of men’s intention. 

                There is no doubt in my mind that some men in the WRF, and in various political spheres of the men's movement are intending to be better than the generation of men that preceded them.  They try harder, care more, speak and own male-created problems more often, and even appreciate and believe in feminist and womanist theory.  There is also no doubt that many men are in flux both emotionally and in terms of their contemporary identities and roles. They may be experiencing real pain, shock, angst, anguish and guilt.  Perhaps some men are learning to appreciate many potential qualities of mutual and meaning bonding with other men and with children.  Some good men, with moral intentions and lofty ideals are trying to change the world. The problem is that they did not take the time to listen or learn about the nature of their victims, nor about the feminist process of such empowerment work. 

                As one of many concerned feminists, I am unable to speak for all feminists or to evaluate the WRF's intent on behalf of all feminism(s).  I can only examine their words and actions, and the impact of their deeds. From my perspective, the WRF campaign falls far short of holding men accountable for their own or their brothers' actions.  The WRF disappoints in its often-stated desire to held accountable to feminist standards and to feminists themselves.  In fact, the WRF campaign is in passive collusion with men's historical convention of minimizing, trivializing, and silencing women, only this time by commandeering women's potential funding and theoretical and practical space to develop their own theory.  Because I have seen the soft and soiled underbelly of the men's movement, I now question its potential as a change agent.

 

A Holistic Critique Based on My Everyday Feminism

                It seems to me that the WRF just did not, and does not; go far enough. Its fear of taking concrete political action or to go beyond words and symbols infuriates me. Their reticence means that I, and other women, still have to do the hard work if naming and eradicating male violence against women and children.   I resent that they get the money and adulation, while feminists get to retain the down and dirty front-line shit-work.  I find the WRF men’s movement is profoundly more pro-man than pro-women; it may actually be a male-driven misogynist phenomenon with a near-automatic androcentric bias. 

Moreover, for me the WRF campaign -from the moment men got involved in the grass-roots inception to the corporate Foundation's exploitation of the issue of male violence against women- has again served and supported men's interests and male egos far more than it does women.  Whether this occurred by intent, design or accident is immaterial, no doubt to be debated by theoreticians, academics and other cerebral persons. 

                According to my lived experiences, I deem the WRF and the men's movement to be both created through the occupation of feminist space.  Both the men's movement in general and the WRF movement in particular steals feminist theory and text, asserts its ownership of feminist theory, and it does this, unfortunately, without credit, consultation, or accountability to feminism and feminists.  Men, then, have successfully twisted the evolution of feminisms of diversity and inclusion to seize feminist issues, and to expropriate feminist terrain.    

 

My Feminist Ambivalence

                After having theorized and written straight from the heart/ gut (am I a medical oddity? They are inseparable for me), this should be the end of the issue and this paper.  But I am curiously unsatisfied with simply the idea that the men's movement, and the WRF, should simply be discounted or jettisoned.  Perhaps it is a reflection of the eco-feminist ideal of recycling and reforming, bringing a new verve to previously enjoyed cloth of theory and practice.  It is not that I would enjoy the rare experience of toppling a male- dominated empire, for I am bitter enough at my experiences at the hands of patriarchal society to thoroughly relish the experience.  What makes uncomfortable, however, is the possibility that, embedded in the pretentious ideology of the WRF and in parts of the men's movement may be a sincere desire to change society.  In some cases, possibly even to change themselves as men with experience power and privilege. 

                Still, I am wary. I experience the December 6^th white ribbon on a man's lapel as the same ribbon threatening my theoretical neck. I am aware that some men are saying the right things, especially since constructing their new age, oh-so-egalitarian, yet curiously elitist hierarchy of the WRF.  But unfortunately, their acts do not match their words, for they have not done the right thing.  Sadly, the new men look a lot like the old. For example, the WRC men have not shared power or decision-making, and they certainly have not shared funds equitably.  Moreover, they failed to consult feminists or any women in meaningful ways; although it is feminists who have worked for years in the front lines of a male violence that the WRF claims to want educate men about, and ultimately, to eradicate. 

                Yet, the problem for me is, that having arrived at a point where I can justify the death of the WRF, I am unsure that I want to do this and even less certain about the future of gender relations if I do.  Still, I am loath to justify the continuation of the arrogant and elitist WRF.  I abhor the thought that even one single feminist should feel wounded and betrayed by my words in defence of them.  Still, since as feminists we tend to tolerate and exhibit a range of opinion, some may grieve the fact that I had the opportunity but did not call for closure on the WRF and its white ribbon campaign.  My quandary seems irresolvable; there are no correct answers.  My truth is that I am both incapable and unwilling to judge others by my limited set of experiences and understandings of humankind and our society.  Even armed with my feminist principles, I am unworthy of such a portentous task. 

 

My observations my age, however, have taught me that women do most of the hard emotional and moral work in our society, and moreover, that they do so with precious little thanks or recognition.  Therefore I refuse to do this for the WRF, which, at its base, is just a collection of individual men.  These men must account for and to themselves, first privately and collectively, then to a continuum of women feminists, and then to their donating public.  The only thing that I can do is to make my evaluation and this paper available to the WRF. They alone must determine their actions regarding their fate and future.  My role, along with other feminists, is to take whatever action we deem necessary dependant on the decisions, proceedings, and future accountability of the WRF. 

                However, I will share with the men of the WRF, and my readers, some directions that I think must be taken if  the WRF is determined to forge ahead as a corporate entity.  I want to preface my remarks by saying that it is not my intention to preach or judge, rather, it is to facilitate their decisions about their organization through consideration of one feminist critique.

 

How The WRF Could Enlist My Feminist Support

                This paper presumes that there are at least microcosms of men who genuinely want to be accountable to feminists for pro-feminist initiatives.  It is to this miniature splinter of men that I speak.  In my opinion, it is imperative that the WRF remove all traces of subterfuge and duplicity regarding financial matters, and it is my hope that this tiny cadre of men will attempt it. It is urgent to the WRF's credibility that your priority be a public and scrupulous audit of even the most minuscule item of your financial history.  Please make full disclosure of your sources of revenue, amounts of donations, value donations in kind, and all manner of other donations including volunteer’s services or time.  To be even marginally accountable, you must reveal staff names, job descriptions, salaries, contracts, travel expenses and costs.  Furthermore, if there has been mismanagement or chicanery, wear it, correct it, and ask forgiveness for your transgressions.  Whatever infraction the audit might disclose, I guarantee that public censure or reaction will be less then it now given your lack of accountability.  You must analyse what happened internally within your organization, but you must explain it publicly.  Thereafter, you must remain scrupulously financially accountable.   

                Secondly, rethink your mandate, both in terms of your single issue, corporate-clone focus on funding and the public sphere, and on the calendar date of December 6^th.  You might consider the suggestions of other men and target your awareness campaign to night before the macho vent known as Superbowl Sunday, when men's violence against women reaches extreme heights¹⁸⁸.  Know that you have not only silenced women, you have silenced, marginalized and stigmatised your male brothers in the men's movement simply for questioning your beloved WRF.  You need these men and their questions, reconnect with them as quickly as possible. Integrate their concerns, modify your behaviour and negotiate a peace with them, I suspect may mirror your conscience.  I advise you to take the (long) time to consult with many women and their organizations in meaningful and egalitarian ways.  If you are worried about exploiting them or wasting their time, or else fear you are asking them to do your hard mental work, then hire those women and pay them extremely well with the funds you so handily raise.  When you do that, you are not exploiting them, but that is what has been done historically, freely exploiting their expertise.

Paying them and involving them meaningfully in the process and accountability of your work is not the same as your past practices of dominating and manipulating them to appear to have been included in decisions and your decision making processes when in real practice when they were simply asked to endorse decisions already made. .  You as individual men, and the WRF collectively have stolen women's territory, ideas, history and work.  The practical way to correct this is to do intense supportive work directed by front-line workers and feminist activists in issues of male violence against women and children.

                I want to share an observation with you.  Unequivocally, the structure of the Foundation is top heavy and a mirror image of the patriarchy against which you claim to struggle.  If you doubt what I claim, ask yourselves who among you is not an educational elite, a business elite, or a political elite.  Are a majority of your decision-makers at the Board level members working class, and a number of you black, Indian, or immigrant?  I think not, and therefore your elite structure needs revision you make it reflective of the majority of Canadian men.  I suggest an overhaul that reduces the elitist focus of your work, while encouraging you to return to the community roots of your movement. 

I suggest that if your commitment to feminism is concrete, that you immediately enlist community-selected feminists and male activists to your Board, hopefully replacing, but at least enhancing, existing membership.  In addition, if you believe in feminism, trust feminists by making 51% of your Board membership feminist women.  This move will gain the expertise, guidance, trust and experience of women to add to your considerable ingenuity in raising money.  It will also allow 51% of Canada's population to participate as donors and workers in an issue intensely crucial to them.   If feminist women do not wish to participate, ask them to help you decide how to make your Board and organization accountable.  When you do so, make sure their needs are met by providing child-care, transportation and participation costs, and by offering a honorariums or salaries that reflect women's value to your troubled operation.  If they need it to justify and allow their participation, they will take it, if not they may chose to decline.  Either way, you will have been sensitive to women's realities. 

                Finally, do the deep work of change - change yourself, look at your daily lives, your habits and activities.  Question everything -authority, history, how you think, even why you think that way.  Probe the terms you use, the examples you set.  Compare what you say to what you have done in the past, and what you wilfully or casually intend to do in the future. 

 

A Troubled and Pessimistic Conclusion

                I am not hopeful that the men's movement or the WRF will -or can- follow my suggestions.  I suspect I ask the impossible.  I know that reshaping and reforming traditional and even newer concepts of masculinities will disempower men.  Still, men might be able to transcend traditional masculinity, or the masculinities of a post-modern men's movement.  But I doubt it.

 

 

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