There have always been deranged individuals in our societies. But until the advent of social media, their influence was narrow; their voices muted; their anger contained
He was a giant of a man. Big, burly but somehow able to fade into the background. He looked like a friendly next-door neighbour, the kind of man who would help someone move a piano.
Standing next to him, less than half his size, was the woman I was talking to at the time. As it seems inevitable in a heightened political climate, exacerbated by the poisonous vitriol on the internet, the subject of harassment and safety arose. She nodded over her right shoulder to the man standing just behind her. He was her security.
I quipped, “Where’s your gun?” He smiled and patted his right-hand pocket.
This, then, is the life of a woman in the public eye; this is the reality of living in a vicious, misogynistic world where civility in public has been replaced by such now-common sights as trucks bearing F— Trudeau written across their windshields.
This, too, is where the Canadian flag is being co-opted by so-called protesters who have set up shop on the Trans-Canada Highway just west of Old Banff Coach Road. What they are protesting is debatable, given that at 110 km/h, one has a tendency — if not the brains — to pay attention to the highway and not the assembled rabble ostensibly arguing for their “freedom.”
There have always been deranged individuals in our societies. But until the advent of social media, their influence was narrow; their voices muted; their anger contained.
Now, no woman in the public eye, especially a politician, has not been the target of anger and hatred. From Calgary’s Mayor Jyoti Gondek to Canada’s Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland, down through town councils and provincial politics, no woman can escape the vitriol unleashed by omnipresent websites used to demonize them. (An aside: Chutzpah is too complimentary a word to use for Alberta Premier Danielle Smith when she emerged from the Council of the Federation conference last week and sanctimoniously chided “the left” for its criticism of Conservatives. What feeble comments the left-of-centre crowd has uttered pale in comparison with her own party’s disdain for progressive policies and their federal counterparts’ public utterances. Give your head a shake, Danielle.)
It’s not just women — politicians or otherwise — who are the target of madmen. With rare exceptions, such as domestic violence or the horror that was Montreal’s L’Ecole Polytechnique where a lone gunman in 1989 killed 14 women, we usually aren’t the victims or the murderers.
Proof of that came again only last week with the attempted assassination of the former American president. (No, he doesn’t deserve for his name to appear here, even as so many of us breathed a little easier when the would-be assassin missed by a centimetre.)
But for every woman who greets her job or her calling with some measure of fear, would someone please explain to me why the rich and powerful men who control social media companies have not been ordered to police their property?
Free speech is no argument when women are being continuously harassed online or threatened in public. There is not a country in the world that has escaped this, as a casual sift through serious news sites from the CBC and BBC to CTV and Global shows worldwide incidents of harassment and, frequently, outright threats based, I believe, solely on gender. “Uppity” women used to be the worst insult before civility took a nosedive.
No woman should fear for her safety in the course of everyday life. All it would take is a mandatory identification of anyone who posts on social media, even if that information is only available through a court order. Anonymity has made social media poisonous. It needs to stop, and only the authorities and all those rich guys making a fortune off hatred need to act. Don’t pull the “free speech” argument out; hatred and vitriol aren’t included in that.
As for the presumptive Democratic nominee for U.S. president, Kamala Harris will become the target of viciousness masquerading as “free” speech. If we thought Hillary Clinton was targeted, that was so long ago as to be pale by comparison with this year’s coming contest.
Catherine Ford is a regular columnist.