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From: gcf@mydog.UUCP
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Montreal
Message-ID: <202@ora.ora.com>
Date: 16 Dec 89 14:54:18 GMT
References: <5771@yunexus.UUCP>
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Approved: ambar@ora.com

Beryl Logan (logan@nexus.yorku.ca):
}I am concerned about something regarding the Montreal massacre and I
}want to put it out for comments.  Women in Thunder Bay, Ontario have
}organized a vigil for the victims, to mourn them, and will bar men
}from attending. ...

}Violence against women is a societal problem, not men's problem or
}women's problem. .... I don't think it is treating men with respect
}if we say to them that we can't mourn alongside you.  This is a
}tragedy of society.

But what is being grieved?  Thunder Bay is a long way from Montreal,
and it's more than likely that none of the women in Thunder Bay knew
any of the victims of Montreal personally.  Thousands of people, many
of them young, are killed every day, and we don't experience grief,
unless something makes them real for us.  Sometimes it is media 
attention alone: sixty or so children are beaten to death every year
in New York City, but only Lisa Steinberg was noticed.  There have
been plenty of mass killings in recent years.  What distinguishes
this one?  I see two different distinctions: first, that it occurred
in Canada, where these things aren't supposed to happen, and second,
the overt motivation of the killer was misogyny.  He said that women,
or feminists, had "ruined his life."

It is the second quality which makes the slaughter real for anyone
who has experienced misogyny; and that experience is much more real
for the object of it, than for an observer however sympathetic.
What the women in Thunder Bay are grieving for is not something
which happened to someone else far away but something which happened
to them.  Which is happening to them.

When a person who experiences grief is in contact with one who
doesn't, except vicariously, the former has to work at expressing
her grief to the latter.  The grief has to be packaged in language
and gestures, all of which is a distraction from the work that
the grief itself requires, which must be gone through.

This, I think, is the explanation of why the women in Thunder Bay 
wanted to exclude men from their vigil, and I think it's a good 
reason.  The vigil, for the women, was something different from
whatever political and social action the persistence of misogyny 
calls for.  The latter is certainly a common project; the former 
isn't.
--
Gordon Fitch  |  gcf@mydog  |  uunet!hombre!mydog!gcf