Shame on "As It Happens"

I am writing this because 1) there is nowhere to comment on the As It Happens website or their Facebook page; 2) I am teaching a Canadian Women's History course & need to get this off my chest before this afternoon; 3) I am so disappointed in this news program & the CBC; 4) I don't even want to listen to The Current this morning; and 5) this whole thing is bothering me more than I would like to admit.

This is where the women's movement and the sexual revolution and social media world has taken us?

"As It Happens" is a CBC news show that is on in Canada 5 nights a week varying from 1 hour to 1 & 1/2 hours every weekday  night. I was one of those faithful listeners ever since it began in the 70s - even when we were overseas. It is a news and current affairs show. Over the last few years, I have listened to it less and less - not consciously, but because it just didn't seem worth listening to anymore (unlike The Current, which I will often stream if I miss it). We currently have a sex scandal going on across the country involving the man who hosted & has been fired from the show that he created called Q, which was (is?) an extremely popular morning radio Cultural Show. It has created a social media storm in Canada and the United States - even Salon & Jezebel have weighed in.

It is an unpleasant, murky case involving BDSM and issues of consent. Needless to say, perhaps, but social media has revolved around who is telling the truth. The women say he hit & beat them without consent, he says that he never hit a woman without consent.

So many people on my Facebook page were horribly disappointed & one was even "heartbroken" that this man could do such a thing. Others were outraged. The dangers of putting anyone on a pedestal.

Before I go on, a couple of points:

I have listened to the show on & off, depending on who was on and what I was doing. Can't say that I was a fan. And like with Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and others, all previously listened to shows will have the YUK factor - which is too bad because, ironically, there was a very interesting "Q debate" on the issue of rape culture back in March 24, 2014 (http://www.cbc.ca/q/blog/2014/03/24/rape-culture-debate/).

I have weighed in on Facebook (on my own status, which is public) & as a commenter on other pages, saying that we need to wait - "it will all come out in the wash". If Gomeshi is guilty of assault & battery & rape, then this needs to be in the courts, not social media, & he needs to be sent to jail. However, not one of the accusers has filed a complaint with the police. The reasons "why not" are part of the social media storm.

Shame on "As It Happens" and the CBC for letting it air: 

Listen to the interview in question at: http://www.cbc.ca/asithappens/features/2014/10/29/jian/  

This interview brings up all the murky issues around our attitudes towards women, the patriarchy, misogyny, sexuality, women's sense of self worth & most disturbingly, the issue of consent. The woman came forward on the condition of anonymity, which I understand. However, that will not make her immune to the fallout.

The quick story is that she went out with Gomeshi the first time and he yanked her head back & pulled her hair in the car at the end of the "date". Then she went out with him again - to his apartment this time - where he hit her and started to choke her. She began to cry, he stopped and said that it was late and she should leave. She was distraught and spent the rest of the night with a girlfriend crying her heart out.

What "As It Happens" and Carol Off don't seem to get, is that this interview gives Gomeshi - however distasteful the scenario - 1. the right to claim that he thought that he had consent (whether or not he did is up to the courts - see the addendum) & 2. when he realized that he had misread the situation, he stopped immediately. A case of the law of unintended consequences?????

Carol Off did ask her why she went out with him after the first time. The answer indicates that this has haunted her even though it all happened over 10 years ago. Part of her answer is that he was charming and "wow, my father would really like you", and she didn't really know how to think about it. She said that "we didn't discuss it" - "why didn't he ask me" & actually gave a scenario about how the conversation should have gone (what she would have considered consent), "it came out of nowhere".

The problem is that this is what we hear women say again and again. The warning sign was in the first violent act. She should never have gone out with him again. However, this is what women do. We excuse and excuse violent behaviour from men.

Did second wave feminism accomplish nothing????

My part of the story or why was I so upset?

This probably gets me to the point that has been bothering me ever since I heard the interview - took me a long time to get to sleep last night. No man ever hit me except my father, and I would have walked and never given any man who did (we could say "without consent") a second chance. However, it was violence that sent me on the road to leaving both my husbands. There were lots of other reasons in the mix, but these incidents were catalysts. One kicked our son for no reason; the other was so angry he almost killed his father and took a door off of its hinges in our house. In the one case, I broke up the marriage within 6 weeks; the other took longer for various reasons. Both men were extremely frustrated and unhappy at the time when they exhibited their violence.

While I have always understood that those incidents played a role in the breakup of the marriages, I don't think that I realized until this morning and as I am writing this post, just how important these were in my decision making. Both husbands scared the hell out of me - something that has, for years, been difficult to acknowledge. In both cases, I had to get the children away from these men. I have often voiced the fact that I could not change my husbands, but I could not let my sons grow up thinking that this violence and the way that they treated me was acceptable behaviour. If I stayed, I would have been implicitly, if not explicitly, condoning behaviour that I had years ago deemed completely unacceptable. My father never hit my mother, only his children.

We learn about relationships from our parents and those around us. What we learn is different in every case. My sisters and I all learned different complicated things from our childhoods, but  none of us ever allowed physical abuse to happen to our children (as far as we know, of course - but on this issue we were vigilant).

We still have a long, long way to go if we expect to end violence (whatever kind) in our society. Some days, I feel like we have gone nowhere on this issue. I can only go back to Alice Miller's For Your Own Good: The Hidden Roots of Violence in Child-Rearing Practices. If only the world would take it seriously.

An Addendum

Canadian law is very difficult in the area of the law and rough sex. See the following article, from which I have excerpted the relevant paragraph here (Ms. Leiper is a lawyer):

Nor is express consent at the outset of any sexual activity a complete answer for an alleged criminal assault. Ms. Leiper said certain provisions in the Criminal Code, such as sections 273.1 and 265, describe situations in which consent cannot be properly given. For example, consent is not obtained if the person engages in activity because the other person has taken advantage of a position of authority or trust. Consent is not obtained in law where it is given as a result of threats, fear of force, fraud or actual application of force. Also, consent in sexual cases must be ongoing. A person must be able to revoke consent, by words or conduct, even if initially he or she did consent to sexual activity at the outset. And if a complainant is incapable of expressing consent, the consent is gone.

Triggers: Ray Donovan: Season 2.7

I wrote that I was going to review Ray Donovan episodes after season 1 was finished. Well I didn't get around to it. After watching the second season to episode 7 (binge watching), I am beginning to wonder whether that was a deliberate avoidance.

Season 2:7 was full of triggers for me. The impact wasn't all immediate but the biggest "gotcha" was near the end when Ray stands in the middle of the room staring at his wife and says "Conor wanted the family; Conor got a family", snort-smiles, shrugs and walks away (at 46:45). Interestingly enough, I remembered it as "I wanted the family, I got the family." What is really boils down is that we keep looking for some kind of stability in the structures around us - even when we watch it crumbling. Ray tries to run, tries so hard to  make it right in all the wrong ways. The fights, the screaming, the drinking, the disintegration, the obliviousness - all because we can't change the past. The old truism "you can run, but you can't hide", it will come and bite you in the ass is borne out again and again.

My mother ran, my father took care of her. I ran, nobody took care of me, I just ended up in so many ways like Ray, trying to create stability, trying to take care of everyone and everything, and frankly, at times, not doing a very good job of it. This is not a pity comment, but a reflection comment. I think that I did better in many ways than my mother did (and certainly better than Ray - LOL). But watching this episode, brought back so many of the fights (with my original family, my marriages, my children). There were so many of the moments when one was incapable of doing anything but fight because there was no other release. Then the "I'm sorries" but nothing ever really changed. Then eventually, the complete sense of utter defeat. Things only seemed to change with the complete destruction of a world, sometimes forces from the outside, sometimes from within. Then one started all over again.

If one wonders whether or not this show is getting it right, I would say that, at least the personal aspect is certainly true to the reality of the intergenerational impact of childhood sexual abuse. The family dynamics of generations of sexual abuse, whether acknowledged or not, are being played out in this series. It is gut-wrenching and soul-destroying; it leaves no one undamaged.

I will get to the entire series, episode by episode, In the meantime, I boogie to "Walk this Way" and go find Aerosmith's Pump.

How will we change the past, if we don't know what it is?

I have been having a hard time working since Friday. I had the wonderful plan to get a couple of weeks ahead solidifying my lecture outlines so that I could go and see my children & grandchildren. I just couldn't focus enough to organize anything. I spent a few hours with my mother on Friday and again on Saturday morning, but I didn't really want to talk to anyone. My son phoned and I spent an hour talking, the upshot of which was that I sometimes have a hard time believing that both my sons are so "together". It wasn't until a long talk with my sister this morning that I managed to begin to sort through the funk that I have been in. Strange how that works! The topic of the conversation began in a similar vein. The discussion began with "given our mother, it is truly amazing that we have managed to raise four self-sufficient, highly functioning children". This is not to say that they don't have problems, everyone does. Sometimes life sucks, sometimes it is wonderful. It is just that they all have the easy capacity (whether they know it or not) to live and resolve their difficulties when they occur effectively. They are able to move forward and live. [It is hard to write about one's children - but I never cease to be very proud and amazed by them]

I am still not sure what the trigger points were that set off the funk but I know where it took me. My mother is now truly going downhill. She has just moved into a beautiful one bedroom apartment in the priciest senior's residence in town & bought lovely new furniture for it. She is almost 90 and has lived a fairly good life in her 30 year retirement. We have never know about her past, her childhood - this was verboten. We never had grandparents; our paternal grandparents were both dead by the time I was 2. We never met my maternal grandmother because my mother talked to her but once after she left home at 14 or 15. My maternal grandfather died when she was 18. She built a life for herself, had an amazingly productive career even before she met and married my father and came to Canada as a WW2 war bride from Holland. She also worked in her chosen profession for years in Canada. This is to say that whatever happened in my mother's life to make her the way she was & is, is a closed book. I once asked my aunt and uncle about my grandmother when I was in Holland. I finally saw a picture of her (she had died the year before) and was stunned to realize that I looked very similar - there was no mistaking the genetics [it explained a lot about my extremely convoluted relationship with my mother]. I also learned that, not only did I have an uncle but another aunt, as well. My mother was aware of the "half-brother" (or full brother according to my aunt - another part of the story!), but had no idea that there was another sibling. And it was clear that she didn't want to know. I got no answers as to why my mother left home so early and went and worked in a hospital the year before she started training; it was as if her life only began after the Second World War; little but her ties to her sister remained of that life.

What does this have to do with anything? Well, now we get to my father. Without my father, I doubt that we would have had any fun at all. I suspect that despite his temper, this is where my sister and I learned whatever positive child-rearing skills we had that came from our home. He was very easy going most of the time. He spent a lot of time with us, took us everywhere from the library to skiing. He took one or all of us fishing, camping, when he went to work building houses (during periods of lay-offs from the mill). I certainly learned how to fix cars, how to do electrical work, how to use a saw, besides all the female stuff. It should go without saying that I have no brothers! He cooked, he cleaned, he ironed. In other words, before the days of feminism, my mother had an equal partner around the house - particularly, when compared to his fellow steelworkers. He didn't drink when I was growing up - that seems to have changed somewhat later. He loved having people around and he died way too soon from an industrial accident when I was in my twenties. If he had lived, I suspect that my first marriage might have lasted, but he never even got to have grandchildren - and he would have loved the boys. However, he did have a temper and he did beat us. It was inconsistent. About the only consistency that we could ever figure out was if we upset my mother, there was all hell to pay & we could be assured that we would feel the belt. But when it was over, it was over. My father never made us pay endlessly for whatever we had done wrong & there was no doubting that he felt bad afterwards and he could say "I'm sorry". In the end, it has been relatively easy forgiving my father, he was only human and on the whole, the good outweighed the bad - at least for me. I wouldn't presume to speak for my sisters.

But there was another reason why, in the end, the good outweighed the bad. Totally repressing traumatic events as I did as a child can be very problematic. The problem is that I didn't just repress the bad memories, I also repressed everything else within the time frame. In fact, growing up, I had virtually no memories prior to the age of about 12. What I did have were mostly negative and unrelated to the sexual relationship with the priest. During my years of therapy, my father would figure periodically in the sessions - usually dealing with his violence, but sometimes around the fringes of the abuse issues. They were always nebulous. I would wonder sometimes if I had everything wrong and my father was a real bastard - but it never rang true (therapy is a strange beast - never assume you have the whole picture - you get discreet memories that might mean one thing, they might mean something else entirely - like jigsaw puzzles - when you put the pieces in the wrong place, it creates a distorted picture - I had to learn to trust my feelings in therapy - no matter what anyone suggested, if it didn't feel right in my gut, I didn't have the whole picture). Over the years, I would claw away at the walls, I would open the doors a little bit, sometimes the doors and boxes where my memories were gathering dust would fly open no matter what I did. And when the ones that held the role my father played flew open, the adult me could only feel so sorry for him. It was my father who told me that sex between adults and children was wrong; it was because of my father that I "broke up" with the priest; it was because of my father that the priest stalked me and tried to kill me. It was in my father's arms that I cried and cried and cried. It was my father who told me that everything would be all right [just to let the reader know, I am crying right now and reliving all of this one more time as I write]. It is now clear to me why I never had any sexual transference issues with my therapist - he replaced my father in the part of my life that needed to believe that everything would one day be all right - no matter how bad it seemed at the time. In many ways, my father has carried me through a rather raucous life. It also explained why I dreamed of my father after I was sexually assaulted in Paris, but he was too far away to help me - I just couldn't get to him (he had died by this time). I was alone.

You may be asking yourself: "where was her mother in all this?" Well that is a question that I haven't even asked myself until recently. This brings us to the point of "why the funk?" In fact, it is only in writing this that I have found the answer. About three weeks ago, my mother was completely disoriented, she clung to me and was crying and couldn't function at all. There were other people around and when they asked, I said that it was like PTSD - lord knows, I recognize it in others. I don't know what started it exactly but there was no question what it was. Over the last couple of days, she has been somewhat disoriented as well - not as extreme as 3 weeks ago but the look and the feel were there - she was disengaged. That was the trigger for the funk - it just took longer to have an impact on me. Where was my mother when I was eight? Somewhere else in her own world. I can only assume that what was happening to me, had completely incapacitated my mother. She couldn't help me. I desperately needed my mother to hold me and tell me everything was going to be all right and she couldn't do it. My father had to do it. I don't think that it came naturally to him (he was a man after all!), but he did it. He took care of me. The adult me also knows that he must have been taking care of my mother as well. I do know that I never trusted or depended on my mother again.

I have been her "therapist" over the years after my father's death (I'd be a rich woman now, if I had charged by the hour). My sisters and I have done this, probably as long as we can remember. When things would happen, we could not really go to her for emotional support - she never knew how to do that. Along with my sisters, I will support her until she dies (hopefully, peacefully in her sleep). I even moved back home four years ago to support my sister as mother started to fail. One could say that old habits die hard. I rather think that, for my part, this is the least that I can do for my father. He loved and adored her. As much as was possible, she loved him back. My father loved us as we were, no matter what we did, no matter how angry he got. As much as was possible, she loved us, but it was always qualified. Sometimes I think that she needs us; I am not sure that that qualifies as love. It was and is the best that she can do. Do I love my mother? Probably not, if I were to try and explain what love is to me. But I do care about her. She is my mother, and deep down inside, I know that she tried her best. She just didn't know how and I suspect that this is because she never learned how.

Maybe this is finally my eulogy for my father. Unlike my eulogy for god, I still miss my father. I wish he could have lived longer. I wish that he could have known that I have my PhD. I wish he could have spent time with his grandchildren and now, great grandchildren. It was not to be. Without him, both good and bad, my life would have been a lot less happy than it was. Maybe the Mik'maq child-rearing practices managed to work their way down, even to my generation.

One day, I hope I can be as generous about my mother's faults. I am not ready to write about how difficult those made my life. Perhaps this blog is also a start of finally forgiving my mother as well. The past creates the present and the future. Secrets destroy our lives and the lives of those around us. I am often asked whether all this "washing of the dirty linen" (read sexual abuse of children), in public is a good thing. My answer is always an unqualified "yes". I know that there are downsides - e.g., too much fear becomes generated in children and parents - there are, after all, lots of people who do not have this as part of their life story - more of them than us. However, how will we ever change the past if we don't know what it is? I know that I wish that we had all known more about my mother's past. I wish that my mother could have talked about it - it would have helped us, it would have helped my father. Life could have been so much easier for all of us if we had known at least some of my mother's past.