On 5 September 2015, news broke of threats directed against “women and feminists” at the University of Toronto. It was right before the weekend, and on the weekends, I do my studying at UofT.
My thought process was as follows: should I risk my personal safety when I can simply study elsewhere? My poor mother! If I go to Robarts, there are lots of good hiding places and several exits, so I have a better chance of making it out should something happen. I might be able to convince an attacker that I am not a feminist.
Then the law student in me picked apart the wording: women and feminists. So even if one is not a feminist, she is still being threatened. Is there any merit in a disjunctive interpretation? If feminism is supposedly anti-male, why the need to include both women and feminists? Would not the one suffice? What about women who aren’t feminists and feminists who aren’t women? Never mind all that; it’s the weekend, and if there was going to be an attack, it would almost certainly happen on a weekday to maximize the impact.
So I packed my books and some snacks, and headed to a place for which I have a deep—some would say quirky—affinity. It was easy for me to pen a defiant tweet once I got there. But make no mistake, for a solid moment I was scared.
Several classes were cancelled that week, in the end the determination was made that women were safer at home than on campus. Campus police have been criticized for not doing more to protect women on campus and for not releasing more details sooner. This is only part of the problem, and cancelling classes is not a viable solution.
When women’s safety and security are threatened, the answer seems to always be for women to stay home, to not provoke an attack, to behave, to be silent. Being twice as good as the men so as to avoid accusations of quotas, dropping classes where the professors make misogynistic remarks, and rape whistles to ward off assaults: these are the tools which we are allowed to have.
Of course it would be more costly and complicated to address the underlying causes of these types of threats. Even when attempts are made, the backlash borders on hysteria (see the response to the new sex-ed curriculum).
It does not matter whether or not the threats were made with the intention to deliver on them. The fact that they were made at all is quite enough. Interrogate your reasoning every time you dismiss concerns raised about women’s safety—on or off campus.
There is a reason that these threats were directed at women in academia. It is the same reason that Marc Lépine went on a shooting rampage, murdering fourteen women at Montreal’s École Polytechnique in 1989.
Educated women are a threat. When women learn history, they learn how women have been subjugated for centuries. When they learn political science, they learn how women have been excluded from the political sphere and how their concerns have been relegated to the sidelines of political discourse. When they learn medicine, they learn that much of the knowledge about women’s reproductive health was acquired through experiments performed without patients’ consent.
Women who have not had the opportunity or who have chosen not to pursue studies have valuable insights as well, and it is not my intention to diminish the importance of those insights. In fact, someone very close to me did not have the opportunity to finish high school, let alone pursue legal studies, and she can easily tell you of the oppression she has suffered for, inter alia, being a woman. She may not wrap it in theories or link it to a particular wave of feminism, but she can articulate it just fine.
While it is not the only valid path, pursuing academic studies is a sacred and noble act. It is therefore deeply depressing that women do not feel, and indeed, have no reason to feel safe on campus.
I am trained in self-defence, I am deceptively strong, I generally consider myself capable of fending off an attacker, and yet, I do not feel entirely safe.
I penned this piece at Gerstein Library—another favourite UofT haunt—but it is the weekend, so I guess I will be fine.