Today is the 25th anniversary of the Montréal Massacre, a deliberate execution of 14 students at École Polytechnique. Every person killed was a woman, and the shooter Marc Lépine stated clearly that his intent was fighting feminism. He wounded ten other women and four men before killing himself. For 25 years, people have tried to explain away his explicit motive for executing those women. Canadian magazines and newspapers of great repute will give column inches to writers who want to reframe it as an issue of gun control, of mental health, of Islamic culture (!!), of feminisms own purported shortcomings or overreach. I think he told us what he was doing, and if that level of hate & violence stirred up in response to a fear of the aims of feminism seems shocking to you, I really want to invite you to read this 2008 speech by my friend, Halifax MP Megan Leslie, who provides the perfect incisive context to understand what happened then, and before, and what continues to happen. I want to especially invite my far-flung followers who may or may not know about this particular act of gender terrorism, but who have been watching the swirling maelstroms of male anger and entitlement that have manifested in movements like #GamerGate but which permeate our daily interactions quite apart from hashtags or social media, to read this speech and consider adopting this lens for analyzing those movements and interactions. I want to highlight that the women killed in 1989 were engineering students, and STEM fields remain an embattled ground for women. Consider an indictment of this culture as one that fosters, nourishes, & rewards casual misogyny. Consider what we can do to act to end that.
Posted on: Sat, 06 Dec 2014 16:40:54 +0000
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