Jian Ghomeshi, Sexual Harassment and the Enchanted Crocodiles of Feminism

Posted on | April 25, 2016 | 58 Comments

 

Most Americans have never heard of Jian Ghomeshi, but he’s a celebrity in Canada. Ghomeshi was apparently a serial harasser of women. He was accused of sexual assault, put on trial and acquitted last month. This touched off an endless carnival of pontification by Canadian feminists, who are arguably the most unhinged feminists on the planet.

The largest Canadian feminist website, Feminist Current, is operated by Meghan Murphy, a latter-day disciple of Andrea Dworkin, and Murphy’s reaction to the Ghomeshi verdict was classic:

What we know about Ghomeshi — that he is sadistic; that he is a classic abuser, grooming and manipulating his victims, painting them as jealous liars after the fact; that he is a bully and a narcissist — unfortunately didn’t come into play in terms of [Judge William] Horkins‘ decision. My opinion is that, whether or not the judge was able to determine, without a doubt, that the stories told by the complainants were wholly true, Ghomeshi’s behaviour shows, without a shadow of a doubt, that he is an abusive man. . . .
To me, and to most other feminists in Canada, the small details don’t matter. What Ghomeshi’s victims remember, what they discussed with others, and what their responses to Ghomeshi’s behaviour were don’t make a shred of difference in terms of our understanding of both what the victims went through and continue to go through, as well as in terms of our opinion of Ghomeshi. . . .
“Guilty” or “not guilty” is not a good enough conversation, in this circumstance. If my ex hadn’t backhanded me across the face one night, how would I describe his abuse to a police officer or to a judge, in court? What would he have been found “guilty” of?
The answer, of course, is: nothing.
Not only do we not understand that psychological, verbal, financial, sexual, and emotional abuse are always at play when there is physical abuse, but it also isn’t acknowledged that these things are generally unprovable to outsiders. We don’t understand that men manipulate women into “consenting” to abusive, traumatic sex all the time, to the point that we feel we “chose” it willingly and tell ourselves we enjoyed it.

In Murphy’s interpretation, Ghomeshi is transformed from a guy on trial for specific crimes into a symbol, and his bad behavior is generalized to represent the abuse that all men (collectively) inflict on all women (collectively) under the oppressive system of male supremacy.

Three years ago, Ace of Spades wrote this:

It occurs to me — as a skeptic and secularist — that if you seek to put away Magical Thinking, you put it all away. If you disbelieve in God, then you really ought to disbelieve in Transcendence as well, and Rightwing Sorcerers, and Magic Words, and Sustaining Myth-Lies, and all the rest of it.
One amusement to me, as a lonely disbeliever on the right, is noticing this about the Left: The Left imagines that their disbelief in God frees them from superstition.
In fact it does no such thing. The Left’s disbelief in God does not free them from superstition — rather, it frees the superstition to infect all other modes of their thought.

Ace was writing about the way liberals interpreted the JFK assassination to suit their own essentially religious purposes. The Left clings to myths that justify their commitment to politics as religion and, in doing so, they immanetize the eschaton, as Eric Vogelin would say. Pursuing secular salvation, they become heaven-on-earth crusaders. As fanatical advocates for utopian schemes, they convince themselves that all The Smart People share their beliefs, and accuse their opponents of ignorance and prejudice. Liberals refused to accept the obvious explanation of JFK’s assassination — the pro-Castro madman Lee Harvey Oswald — because this did not fit their conception of how the world works and therefore Kennedy’s death was reinterpreted to fit the liberal mythology.

Correct Opinions and Confirmation Bias

We see this kind of “Enchanted Crocodile” thinking (you really have to read Ace’s whole piece to get the significance of that phrase) whenever the media seize on some event and go into What Does It Mean mode, where the news becomes a didactic lesson, an excuse for liberals to treat us like we are children who need adult guidance to form the Correct Opinions.

Consider, for example, the Black Lives Matter movement that emerged in the wake of the death of Michael Brown in a St. Louis suburb. In her forthcoming book The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe, Heather Mac Donald tells how this incident was generalized and imbued with symbolic meaning:

The August 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, spawned a narrative as stubborn as it was false: Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson had allegedly shot the 18-year-old “gentle giant” in cold blood while the latter was pleading for his life, hands raised in surrender. After Brown’s death, rioters torched and looted Ferguson businesses. The facts were that Brown, a budding criminal who weighed nearly 300 pounds, had punched Wilson in the face, tried to grab Wilson’s gun, and charged at him, leading Wilson to fire in self-defense.
In the months that followed, the lie that Brown had died in racially motivated police execution was amplified by the media, college presidents, and the left-wing political class. The newly formed Black Lives Matter movement promoted the notion that black American males were being hunted down and killed with impunity by renegade white police officers.

There is an element of confirmation bias involved here that was exploited by Black Lives Matter. Let us stipulate that the average black person encounters racism on a regular basis, in small, ordinary ways. Very few people are truly “color-blind” and, while outright racial hatred is not common, every black person can describe certain attitudes and behaviors they notice that are in some way prejudicial or discriminatory. More than 50 years past the triumph of the civil rights movement, however, no intelligent adult in America needs another “Racism Is Bad” lecture and yet the liberal media seems to believe we do. To watch CNN coverage of any story with a racism angle, you get the idea that the producers think of their network as a sort of church, and the rest of us are all sinners in need of liberal salvation. All the problems afflicting black America could be solved, if only we cared as much about black people as the CNN producers do.

Of course, CNN producers are not better people than you or me. The liberal propagandists who get paid huge salaries by TV networks enjoy pretending to be better than us, but they really aren’t. Nor is this posture of the bien-pensants harmless. In seizing on incidents like the shooting of Michael Brown and turning them into fodder for a National Conversation About Race, the producers at CNN not only foster a sense of paranoid racial resentment that endangers the lives of police officers, but they also distract attention from the real causes of real problems afflicting the black community. Heather Mac Donald explains in The War on Cops:

A straight line can be drawn between family breakdown and youth violence. In Chicago’s poor black neighborhoods, criminal activity among the young has reached epidemic proportions. It’s a problem that no one, including the Chicago Police Department, seems able to solve. About 80 percent of black children in Chicago are born to single mothers. . . .
The sky-high illegitimacy rate meant that black boys were growing up in a world in which it was normal to impregnate a girl and then take off. When a boy is raised without any social expectation that he will support his children and marry his children’s mother, he fails to learn the most fundamental lesson of personal responsibility. The high black crime rate was one result of a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage.

This is not a new idea, nor is its meaning limited to Chicago. As far back as 1965, the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan described the breakdown of the family as a major problem in the black community (and was smeared as a racist for doing so), and a stubborn resistance to confronting this problem has typified the Left’s racial rhetoric ever since. Charles Murray’s classic 1984 study Losing Ground, examining the failures of liberal anti-poverty programs, showed how the “root causes” mentality — the attempt to make white racism the explanation for every problem in the black community — has prevented liberals from enacting effective policies to deal with these problems and, in fact, has caused these problems to get worse. As Murray has more recently shown in his book Coming Apart, the breakdown of the family has not left white America unscathed. Nearly a third of white children (29%) in the U.S. are now born to unmarried women, and nearly half of children whose parents do marry will subsequently see their families fractured by divorce. Nor do these statistics fully capture the decline of marriage-based families in our society. The median age at first marriage has risen dramatically in recent decades. Historically, the typical American women married between ages 20 and 22. From 1947 to 1972, the median age at first marriage for women ranged from 20.1 (in 1956) to 20.9 (in 1972). What this median number means is that the first-time bride in 1956 was more likely to be 18 than to be 23. In such an culture, most young men took a serious approach to their romantic pursuits, because by the time a man reached his early 20s, most young women were either already married or engaged. High-school boyfriend/girlfriend relationships often led directly to marriage and there were relatively few single people older than 25. The birth rate was substantially higher then, so that the typical 25-year-old man during that era was working to support a wife and two children. A teenage boy could see all around him the same pattern, and follow the familiar steps of a path — finish high school, get a job, marry his girlfriend, have babies — that would lead him toward the role of responsible adulthood by the time he was 25.

This social script has been torn to tatters in the past 40 or 50 years. In 1973, the median age at first marriage for U.S. women reached 21 for the first time in more than two decades, and has continued rising steadily — to 23 in 1980, to 24 in 1991, to 25 in 1998. The median age at first marriage for men, meanwhile, increased from 22.8 (in 1966) to 27.1 (in 1996). What this means, culturally, is that adolescence has been extended and adulthood has been postponed, so that the typical 25-year-old American man nowadays is more irresponsible and immature than his grandfather was at the same age, and this postponement of maturity has social consequences — sometimes deadly consequences.

Who Is Committing These Massacres?

Chicago is Murder City, U.S.A., where there were 468 murders in 2015, compared with 416 the year before, a 12.5% increase, as well as 2,900 non-fatal shootings. Chicago had more homicides than any other American city last year, most of the victims were black, and is racism to blame for this? Are white people somehow responsible for the violent mayhem perpetrated in Chicago? The producers at CNN have been awfully remiss in providing us explanations for this ceaseless carnage. There have already been 179 people murdered in Chicago this year, and 70.6% of the victims were black. Just in the past week (April 17-23) Chicago had 94 shootings, including eight fatalities, and scarcely a day goes by that at least one person isn’t shot to death in Chicago.

CNN producers, like other liberals, do not want to face the reality behind the nightmare of violent crime in Murder City. U.S.A. Chicago is being terrorized by young black men who have not learned “the most fundamental lesson of personal responsibility,” as Heather Mac Donald says, and who are representative of “a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage.” This is a nationwide phenomenon, and its effect is not limited to the black community. Wherever the breakdown of the family occurs, wherever unwed motherhood is accepted as normal, wherever there are young men growing up with no sense of responsibility and moral duty, bad things happen and innocent people suffer.

You won’t hear that message from Democrat politicians or liberal pundits. Don’t expect CNN to admit this. Black Lives Matters is too busy demonizing cops, and feminists are never going to face this reality.

What Is it About Men
That They’re Committing
These Horrible Massacres?

That was the headline on a column at the left-wing site Alternet that Meghan Murphy published after the December 2012 massacre in Newtown, Connecticut. The perpetrator of that atrocity was 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who had been diagnosed with Asperger syndrome and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and may have also been schizophrenic. The Creepy Little Weirdo killed his own mother, then murdered 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School before committing suicide. Lanza was similar to other mass murderers, for example Elliot Rodger, the Creepy Little Weirdo who killed six people in Santa Barbara, California, in May 2014. Political correctness prohibits anyone in the mainstream media from remarking that such killers were dangerous lunatics who should have locked up in asylums, because this might unfairly “stigmatize” the mentally ill. However, no such prohibition prevents feminists like Meghan Murphy from using these Creepy Little Weirdo types to demonize men quite generally.

“Much of feminist rhetoric is a form of psychological warfare against men, employing a propaganda tactic in which atrocities. . . . are used as an indictment of all men. . . .
“This atrocity-as-representative tactic — where the very worst thing any man ever does is attributed to all men collectively — is simply a method of hate propaganda.”
— “The Queering of Feminism and the Silencing of Heterosexual Masculinity,” April 16

No one ever seems to notice this about feminism. The habitual dishonesty of feminist rhetoric (e.g., faulty generalization) is not consistently criticized, perhaps because it is taken for granted. Feminists have been indulging in this kind of haphazard sophistry for so long that most people don’t even recognize it as a propaganda tactic. Feminists are very selective in their choice of evidence, when they are using anecdotes to support their anti-male arguments, and their logic is quite often circular, the conclusion being merely a restatement of their original premise:

Premise A: Men oppress women;
Premise B: [Some terrible thing that happened];

ergo,

Conclusion: Women are oppressed by men.

You see that whatever terrible thing is Premise B in this “argument” — whether it is Elliot Rodger’s murder spree or the sexual abuse of which Jian Ghomeshi was accused — is really not relevant. Bad things happen every day in the world, and we cannot just go around picking and choosing examples to suit our purposes, where Event X shows Trend Y and is therefore proof of Phenomenon Z, which we have organized a political movement against. Feminism begins with the premise that women are victims of systematic injustice and this thesis of patriarchal oppression is asserted, rather than proven. That is to say, feminists are seldom challenged in their basic claim that every manner of inequality between men and women is proof of unjust oppression. Once we accept their definition of terms (“unequal” as a synonym for “wrong”), we find it is quite difficult to reject whatever argument feminists build upon that idea, because it is never difficult to find examples of “injustice” with which to elaborate this kind of claim.

At a certain level, feminist rhetoric is just the expression of prejudice against men, or perhaps an invitation to a pity-party for women, and what sort of women do we expect to find supporting such a movement?

 

Just as there is a certain type of man who commits mass murder, so also is there a certain type of woman who devotes her life to demonizing men through anti-male hate propaganda campaigns. Probably she wasn’t the most popular girl in high school, and maybe she resented this.

Maybe she looked at the way the world works and decided that her own disappointments were the result of disadvantages that seemed to her unfair, and decided that ending this unfairness was a cause that everyone should support. Rather than honestly seeking to maximize her own happiness as an individual, instead she joined a collective movement of women against men, to change the way the world works. The rhetoric of such movements is dishonest, because their motives are dishonest.

“It never ceases to amaze me that people think feminism is about vilifying men as violent rapists. Feminism would not exist if not for women’s belief that things can be different — that men can be different. We know that masculinity is not innate and we know that men need not rape and abuse. Men choose it. They choose to force themselves on women, they choose to buy sex from desperate women and girls, they choose to treat those women and girls in inhumane ways, they choose to ogle and intimidate us in public places, they choose to call us names and beat us. They also choose to bully other men — their friends, their classmates, their sons — into perpetuating and replicating this behaviour — masculinity, it’s called.”
— Meghan Murphy, April 9, 2015

Let any student of rhetoric examine that paragraph and note particularly the use of the word “they.” Ask yourself, “Who is the presumed reader of this article, and who is ‘they’?” The reader is presumed to be female and she is being told that men (“they”) do all these dreadful things. “Men choose it.” What is “it”? Rape. Do all men rape? Do all men patronize prostitutes? Do all men beat women? Do all men bully other men?

The answers are: No, no, no, and no.

If you are a man and do not do these things, does this mean that you are not “masculine”? Why does Meghan Murphy make “masculinity” the target of her attack? Are masculine men always bad men?

Selfish, Dishonest and Cruel

Re-read her paragraph carefully, and Meghan Murphy’s dishonesty becomes apparent. She is doing exactly what she claims she is not doing — “vilifying men as violent rapists” — and she does this by using “masculinity” as a synonym for abusive sexual violence.

This is very much like the way some people use “Zionist” or “neocon” as synonyms for Jew, yet claim not to be anti-Semites. It is not my habit to volunteer for duty with the Thought Police, and I am aware that policy discussions about the Middle East require a certain tolerance in this regard. The late Robert Novak, for example, was proudly Jewish and yet a critic of neoconservatives, especially those in the Bush administration who insisted on war in Iraq. Still, there comes a point at which anti-Zionism is clearly an excuse for Jew-hating and, in the same way, we see how feminism so often is simply man-hating. And the paragraph by Meghan Murphy I’ve quoted is from a column headlined, “Maligning Andrea Dworkin in death amounts to little more than misogyny.”

 

Well, what can anyone say in reply to this? If Andrea Dworkin could not be called a man-hater, no feminist ever could. Dworkin was also one of the most dishonest writers who ever lived, both in the assertions she sought to prove and the methods by which she prove them. Permit me here to quote from my own book, Sex Trouble:

[Dworkin’s 1987 book] Intercourse is a book difficult to describe, mainly because it is so distasteful to describe it. What it is, really, is a series of literary essays. Dworkin takes up the works of a number of male authors, classical and contemporary, and extracts from their writings passages that exhibit (or can be interpreted as exhibiting) what Dworkin considers the universal meaning of sexual intercourse. That is to say, Dworkin finds in these authors the expression of her idea that sex with men is inherently degrading to women, that sexual intercourse involves male dominance and a humiliation of women that is at least symbolic, if not deliberate. In Dworkin’s reading, men desire intercourse with women only as a way to dehumanize women. Male sexuality in Intercourse is always predatory, if not violent, and Dworkin sees male sexuality as rooted in hateful contempt for women. . . .
Andrea Dworkin’s feminism was not about equality with men. Equality would mean that at some point, there might be an occasion when a man could be right and Andrea Dworkin could be wrong. . . .
Here we have a woman whose anger at half the human race was her professional raison d’etre, for whom hatred of men was a litmus test of one’s moral worth: If you did not hate men as much as she did, you were her inferior. And because nobody could ever hate men more than Andrea Dworkin did, this meant she was the most moral person on Earth. Conveniently, then, her worldview had the effect of making her better than everybody else, in her own mind.
Feminism is fundamentally inhumane. It is a totalitarian belief system, intolerant of dissent. It is a rationalization of hate, and therefore feminism can justify telling any lie, so long as men are hurt (and feminists are empowered) by the lie.

To defend Andrea Dworkin is to defend the indefensible, to choose lies instead of the truth, to choose hate instead of love. Andrea Dworkin was selfish, dishonest and cruel, and no decent person could admire her.

By insisting that Dworkin must be praised, therefore, Meghan Murphy has lashed herself to the mast, so to speak. Feminism is synonymous with Andrea Dworkin, and criticizing Andrea Dworkin is misogyny — so we are told by the founder of “Canada’s leading feminist website.”

So, what about Jian Ghomeshi? Meghan Murphy tells us that “the small details don’t matter,” because Ghomeshi “is a classic abuser . . . a bully and a narcissist.” This is very personal to Murphy:

What was most traumatic about my experience coming forward about abuse was not that my abuser wasn’t jailed (I didn’t file a report and, had I, there’s no way he would have been charged. The abuse I experienced, for the most part, wasn’t the kind of vicious and obvious violence the police and courts like to see, in order to fit their definition of “abuse.”) — it was that I was not believed by those around me. It was that my abuser was supported by my community and continues to be supported. That he continues to bully and manipulate and abuse with no repercussions, as far as his social privilege, status, and acceptance go. He is free to do what he wishes and will, as far as I can tell, always get away with it.

Who is this man who abused Meghan Murphy? No friend of mine, and probably no friend of anyone else who reads my blog. He’s somewhere in the “progressive” community in British Columbia, I believe. “All the abusive men I’ve known seemed super nice at first,” Meghan Murphy explained in a 2012 column, and maybe “super nice” is her synonym for “progressive.” If she’s spent any time lately hanging out with fundamentalist Christians, she’s been awfully quiet about it.

“When your abuser calls himself a feminist” was the title of Meghan Murphy’s column about “Dan,” 20 years older than her, “a silly middle-aged man who was trying a little too hard to hang on to his youth.” But I guess he “seemed super nice at first,” eh? It’s weird how Magical Thinking operates, and how political superstition requires the leftist to re-arrange definitions and categories to explain how Good People — the super-nice progressive bien-pensants — are so often not actually good at all.

Why had Dan, 47, never married? Why was he dating girls 20 years younger? If the violence of black teenagers in Chicago is produced by “a culture that fails to civilize men through marriage,” as Heather Mac Donald says, what happens to “progressive” men who avoid marriage? Shouldn’t we be suspicion of “a silly middle-aged man who was trying a little too hard to hang on to his youth”? Why must innocent men — the all-inclusive “they” who are scapegoated by Meghan Murphy for their “masculinity” — take the blame for her own poor judgment? Magical Thinking rescues her from having to take responsibility for her folly, however, and the man who abused her becomes an Enchanted Crocodile. There seem to be a lot of these strange creatures around.

Jian Ghomeshi’s progressive persona
was the perfect cover for his abuse

That’s the headline on a column by (you guessed it) Meghan Murphy:

Initially, the allegations against Ghomeshi did come as a huge shock to me — up until the day he was fired, I’d been a fan — but that shock didn’t, for a moment, lead me to question whether they were true. He gave himself away immediately — the red flags were all there. Beyond that, women rarely make this stuff up. As I read Ghomeshi’s defensive Facebook post, I was filled with a familiar rage — his attempts to pin the accusations on a “bitter ex” à la, “bitches be crazy, wink wink,” to paint himself as a victim, and, of course, his appeal to the current “anything goes because, consent” political climate (“Sexual preferences are a human right,” he stated confidently) were so transparent.
What was and is “shocking,” to me, is not that a seemingly progressive man could be a predator, but that we still refuse to acknowledge how common this is.
I have an ex much like Ghomeshi. . . .
My ex seemed, like Ghomeshi, to enjoy playing the role of Good Guy Activist while simultaneously behaving in abusive ways. I think it thrilled him, in a kind of perverted sense, to be surrounded and supported by “strong” or feminist women (like myself).

The personal is political, always and forever, and Meghan Murphy was a fan of Jian Ghomeshi, whose preference for “rough sex” was not his only problem. He had initially won fame in Canada as drummer for the folk-rock band Moxy Früvous when he was in his early 20s, and apparently he became fixated in a state of arrested development. Ghomeshi was habitually promiscuous and also bisexual.

 

Toronto journalist Leah McLaren knew him well:

As Jian’s star rose, and we both got older, the age of many of the girls he dated stayed the same. It became a standing joke between us that while I’d rejected his advances when we first met, I was now no longer in his preferred demographic. “When did you get too old for me, Leah McLaren?” he used to tease. . . .
Jian wove the most cherished and sacred liberal values of Canadian society into an ingenious disguise that he used to hide in plain sight. He was a wolf in organic, fair-trade lamb’s clothing. One woman I spoke to for this story who is now accusing Jian of sexual assault believes his persona was a deliberate cover for his predatory behaviour. She thinks he created and used his personal brand . . . to get in touch with women so he could abuse them. She also believes that for him, in his sickness, that dark irony was a turn-on. . . .
The fact that we believed the cuddly, wholesome version of Jian makes the crimes he’s accused of doubly galling. Though he never mentioned anything about bondage, domination or a fondness for choking his dinner dates to me, he did enjoy trying to shock me. He once dropped an offhand comment about sleeping with a mutual male friend who was ostensibly straight and had a girlfriend. “It’s no secret I’m bisexual,” he said. His equal-opportunity orientation was known among his close friends, but I always thought of it as more of a political stance than a burning desire. Jian slept with men whenever he felt like it, which was occasionally but not that often. His real preoccupation was women. There were so many I couldn’t keep up. He was unabashedly promiscuous, or at least purported to be. After one bad breakup, he confided in a friend that he’d had sex with dozens of women in two months. . . .
He was attracted to women who were clever and women who weren’t, women who’d achieved professional success and women who hadn’t, but two things almost always remained the same: they were all young and they were all thin. Though he’s not a big guy, the women Jian dated were tiny by comparison. His promiscuity was something his friends remarked on, but it wasn’t a big deal, apart from the occasional social embarrassment, like at my wedding, where he aggressively hit on a family friend’s university-age lesbian daughter. To most of his casual acquaintances, Jian was just another successful, commitment-phobic bachelor with a roving eye in a city that’s full of them.

Hmmm. Why is Toronto full of successful bachelors who are “commitment-phobic”? Isn’t this because Toronto, like most other major cities, is also full of ambitious and hedonistic young women? Oh, the successful “bachelor with a roving eye” has no trouble finding skinny young women who are willing to accommodate him, just so they can brag to their friends that they dated the famous rock-drummer-turned-radio-personality. In the music business, such women are called “star-f–kers,” and in Washington, D.C. — a town renowned as “Hollywood for ugly people” — a similar phenomenon can be observed, but there’s no need to drag Monica Lewinsky into this, is there?

“I would be happy to give [Bill Clinton] a blowjob just to thank him for keeping abortion legal. I think American women should be lining up with their presidential kneepads on to show their gratitude for keeping the theocracy off our backs.”
— Nina Burleigh, 1998

How is it that “liberal values” provide “an ingenious disguise,” as Leah McLaren says, that abusive men can use “to hide in plain sight”? Perhaps someone should ask Juanita Broaddrick that question. Oh, and maybe someone should ask Kathleen Willey, too.

Not all of those Enchanted Crocodiles are in Canada, you know.

 

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