Let’s put together a hypothetical scenario. Let’s say you’re five dudes attending the University of Ottawa, and you decide to express your collective dissatisfaction with the leadership of 24 year-old student federation leader Anne-Marie Roy in the middle of student federation elections. DO YOU:
- Organize a campaign for her position, running on the merits of your platform for students vs. her record?
- Opt out of running for office yourself, but vigilantly attend all election-related activity (e.g. debates), write letters to the campus paper, and campaign privately to your friends, classmates, and colleagues?
- Threaten to “punish her with [your] shaft,” in a totally legally shareable Facebook message?
Did you answer Option 3? Congratulations! Here is your degree from the University of Ottawa. Everyone there is probably ashamed of you.
So of course someone with a conscience screenshotted the graphic conversation (huge trigger warning on that link, doggs), which also includes the charming and also clearly very substantiated allegation that she has chlamydia, and then whoever that was leaked it to Roy and she confronted them about it, and then she decided to maybe bring this disgusting Basket Case baby of a conversation to the student federation board and have them deal with the (active campus organizer) assholes responsible. Around there is where the story hit the student press via the U of O Fulcrum and then it reached the national press and now, regrettably, it’s 2014 and somehow here we all are.
Pat Marquis, a now-ex-VP of the U of O student federation, did literally the only decent thing remaining for him to possibly do and resigned over the weekend, and it is presumably due to this sudden resurgence of actual humanity that he is not a signatory on the goddamn cease-and-desist order that the other four dudes sent to Roy.
Seriously:
After learning of Roy’s plan, four of the five individuals sent her a letter warning her that the conversation was a private one and that sharing it with others would amount to a violation of their rights.
After consulting with a lawyer, Roy chose to go ahead with sharing the conversation with the board, but received a cease and desist letter during the board meeting.
The letter — which identifies the four participants as Michel Fournier-Simard, Alexandre Giroux, Alexandre Larochelle and Robert-Marc Tremblay — threatened legal action against Roy if she did not “destroy” her copy of the online conversation and stop sharing it with others.
The letter also alleged that Roy, through an intermediary, had initially considered not sharing the conversation if the four participants would promise not to run for student leadership positions in the future.
Sounds above-board! Except, oh wait, I’m getting word of all this odious shit you’ve all said in relation to this case, which revolves around shared screenshots of a Facebook chat, which is, once again, totally not illegal:
- “I would never say that kind of thing out in the public but when it was a private conversation I guess it slipped my mind that that’s really not acceptable.” –Pat Marquis, speaking to the CBC.
- “My comment in that situation was about congratulating a friend about whether he would be able to seduce someone else.” –Pat Marquis signing his own career death warrant in conversation with the Fulcrum last Friday.
- “the participants didn’t believe they promoted rape culture, but ‘didn’t stop it,’ and now wanted to ‘promote the end of rape culture together.'” –the CBC, paraphrasing a very credible anonymous member of the lawsuit.
- “Nothing in my client’s statements are misogynistic, ‘slut-shaming’, or refer to ‘rape.'” –amazingly-named lawyer Michael D. Swindley, batting about a .333 in a letter to the Canadian Press.
- “[the] president will suck me off in her office chair and after I will fuck her in the ass on Pat‘s desk.” –student Bart Tremblay, one of the (I GUESS??? MAYBE?) potential plaintiffs.
Great job, guys, you’ve got a solid case.
If I can step up for a second on this soapbox conveniently though confusingly labelled “White Guys,” there are two really bad things at play here. One is the really obvious problem that dudes seem to think it’s totally cool and acceptable to talk about how you are going to fuck the politics out of the dumb broad who did a thing you don’t like when she was elected to a position of responsibility within the low-stakes realm of student governance. That’s bad. Nothing about it is good.
It’s hard to figure out how to frame this in a clearer way, but let’s try: when you got grounded as a kid, did you talk to your friends and privately threaten to fuck some sense into your own mom? No? What if another one of your 12 year-old buddies did that? What if another boy was like, “Damn, your mom grounded you? I will punish your mother with my erect penis, in her butthole and in her vagina.” You probably wouldn’t like that. That would probably make you upset. Now the only step remaining is to figure out why you wouldn’t like that and then go ahead apply that reasoning to the body of every woman alive. Congratulations! You are one teensy step closer to solving sexism.
But okay, here’s the other principle at play. A lot of the conversation revolves around the privacy of these dudes. That’s maybe the wrong thing to even talk about, let alone focus on.
“Whereas 20 years ago those guys might have been out sitting around having a beer and talking in that way, it is quite different when you’re putting in print, because it’s there as a record,” Simon Fraser associate professor and cyberbullying researcher Wanda Cassidy told the CBC. Which is a fair follow-up to her comments that there’s not a lot of conversation about what exactly cyberbullying is and who it hurts and also how it hurts them (which goes well beyond “intimate pictures,” it’s hopefully clear).
Except that it also suggests that “boys will be boys” or “it’s just locker-room chat” or “it was harmless back when it was just an ephemeral bit of dick-swinging in the winds of time,” which is not okay. Refer back to the first principle, please!
The problem is not that these conversations are less private than they used to be. The problem is not that these conversations are less private than they used to be. The problem is that anyone, at all, thinks not only that these conversations are acceptable to have anywhere, let alone in private, but also that the privacy of these conversations somehow trumps the condemnation of their awful, awful content.
These conversations aren’t acceptable in bars. They’re not acceptable on the bus. They’re not acceptable in living rooms or in line at the grocery store. They’re not acceptable on Gchat or Facebook or in text messages. They’re not acceptable, ever, ever, ever. Please don’t argue this. Please don’t take the side of guys who want to “punish” a woman with their “shaft” for – well, actually, it doesn’t matter what they want to punish her with their penis for. A guy wanted her to be fucked by a penis, as a punishment. That’s fucked up. That’s not acceptable, no matter how private it is. It’s heinous in any form. Scrawled, whispered, thought.