I know it’s not “rational” to be filled with rage when I hear yet another man saying that feminism has victimized his entire gender, boo-hoo. Or to be damn near ready to blow up at assholes who make a tidy cottage industry out of their hatred for women in general and feminists in particular. Or to think that guys who rant about the evils of “gun grabbing” (because they need that AK-47 under the bed, bitch!) are just fucking nuts. Surely it’s not rational to insist that women are still victims of sexism, or that gun control is still necessary in Canada, say the whining oil slicks.
Well, yeah. It must not seem rational, unless maybe you’re a woman. A woman with not so distant memories of what happened in Montreal on this day in 1989.
I was a student in Kingston, Ontario at the time, so the Montreal Massacre hit me especially hard. I volunteered at the Queen’s University Women’s Centre–a small office in a grey house on campus that was home to a couple of other student groups as well, including a gay rights/support/social group. We had occasional policy meetings and potluck suppers, but that wasn’t the main part. Mostly what we did was sit at the desk, taking phone calls (the few we got), draft occasional press releases and letters to editors, sign out books to borrowers from our small reference library, and read. I did a lot of reading. It was the most peaceful volunteer job I ever had.
Until.
I got a phone call at home one night from Bridget, a fellow volunteer. She wanted to know if I’d heard the news from Montreal. A gunman had walked into a classroom in a Montreal engineering school, separated the women from the men, then opened fire on them, screaming that he was “at war against feminists”. He then went into a cafeteria and shot some more women. Fourteen women were killed, and numerous others injured, before the fucked-up freak did what he should have done without fanfare in the first place, and turned the gun on himself.
How do we know this was a hate crime against women? some apologists still ask, sneering. How do you know this wasn’t just some deranged guy shooting the place up at random?
Well, there’s the suicide note he left. It includes some pretty unambiguous language:
Please note that if I am committing suicide today … it is not for economic reasons … but for political reasons. For I have decided to send Ad Patres [Latin: “to the fathers”] the feminists who have ruined my life. … The feminists always have a talent for enraging me. They want to retain the advantages of being women … while trying to grab those of men. … They are so opportunistic that they neglect to profit from the knowledge accumulated by men throughout the ages. They always try to misrepresent them every time they can.
The “knowledge accumulated by men throughout the ages”, bitch! Yours doesn’t count. YOU don’t count. You have no right to an education. Suck my cock, bitch! And if you won’t suck my cock, you can suck my fucking GUN!
Notice how this loser never takes responsibility for anything. It’s always some woman’s fault. He doesn’t have anger-management problems; it’s “feminists” who “always have a talent for enraging” him. He didn’t putz away his own piss-pathetic life; the feminists “ruined” it. He’s not the stupid one; it’s the evil wicked feminists, who “always try to misrepresent” all the “knowledge accumulated by men throughout the ages”. They robbed him of the higher education he thought he was entitled to, simply by possession of a penis, when they took all those university slots in engineering.
It never occurs to him that even if women had remained debarred from university, he probably still would not have gotten in. Penises may entitle the bearer to a great many unfair advantages in life, but when it comes to Higher Learning, regardless of the penile status of those who “accumulated” it, your grades and test scores, not your genitalia, are the ultimate deciding factor. Or at least that is how it works here in Canada.
But this guy couldn’t see an elementary thing like that. No, he wuz robbed, and it was the feh-muh-nists whut robbed him! Damn uppity women must DIE!
And die they did, 14 of them. You can see their faces and names above.
I wonder how many of those women would have proudly called themselves feminists, as I was doing then, and still do today. I’m guessing not all; in fact, it probably never even occurred to most of them to think of themselves that way. Their minds were on their jobs, on their classwork, their friends, their families. They were just women, making their way in a world which was gradually beginning to open more doors to them.
A world which Gamil Rodrigue Gharbi didn’t want opening doors to anyone who didn’t possess a penis.
I dare anyone to tell me what’s “rational” about THAT. Or what’s not rational about women fighting back. Because baby, we are going on fighting until the last misogynist goes to his own damn “fathers” and ALL the world’s doors are open to us, forever.
