A Predator in the Red Sea
It’s a story we don’t yet know the length of, and many voices continue to add to the layers of what is now known as the Jian Ghomeshi scandal. Sadly, this type of story is all-too familiar to some of us, mostly but certainly not limited to women, who’ve had an experience like the women who are now speaking up. These incidents, these non-incidents some might say (because they were never reported) are real. I can’t stop reading about it.
The first chapter written by Jian himself on Facebook had me wondering what the real deal was. He was so quick to the draw. Many have already commented on Jian’s use of language in his post – the ‘jilted ex-girlfriend’. Of course he wants us to know that whatever transpired between him and these women was ‘okay’. Talked about. Agreed upon. BDSM with safe words between consenting adults.
But it wasn’t.
Evalyn Parry, writer, performer, and singer, said all the writing that is going about it opens the conversation that has been silenced for too long. “It hits at the root of how sexism is still alive and thriving, of how deeply the threads of gendered power and violence run through the fabric of our lives,” she wrote on Facebook. (Oct. 30, 2014). And more recently, in commentary for The Star, Gabor Maté writes, “We live in a society steeped in male narcissism, one in which aggression towards women is deeply entrenched in the collective male psyche.” (Nov. 4, 2014) It’s entrenched in all our psyches. I wrote a response immediately after hearing Lucy DeCoutere being interviewed by Anna Maria Tremonti on CBC’s The Current (radio interview Oct. 30, 2014). I shared it with a few close friends, both men and women, and it was remarkable the difference in how they responded. Of the men, one was my partner, the man I love, and with whom I have a child. We got into an argument. It wasn’t overly heated, and he was concerned and upset that this had happened and asked if there were other stories like this. He also mentioned that men get harassed and though I acknowledged this (see above), the mere mention of this from him threw me off my step enough to think, whoa, do I even have the right/knowledge/strength to put this piece out? His comment almost silenced this story.
The personal is political. This is not new, but how ingrained is this dynamic of men yielding power over women (mental/physical) for all of us? The majority of the women who first read this piece had a similar story, they were empathetic and questioned how complicit we are in our own degradation. In the following story I questioned my own memory of the experience.
As Lucy Decoutere said on The Current, “I’m sassy, yet this struck me.” She never spoke about what happened because it shocked her. She’s a self- proclaimed ‘light person’ who finds levity in any situation. Because she, like so many of us, chose to ‘not report’ because we want to roll with things, be cool, be strong, rise above, whatever it is, and most often it’s many elements playing with the conscious and subconscious that we can’t even narrow it down to one thing. Lucy said that she “learned something was missing in the way women are being heard.” That where “women sit in society is not on a comfortable sofa.” Certainly not.
In 2001 I travelled to Egypt with my partner at the time. We were working on a script with an Israeli director based on a true story about a mute Bedouin boy who befriended and swam with a wild dolphin.
Travelling in Egypt wasn’t the easiest but we eventually got to ‘the spot’, which was marked with tents and cushions and people selling tea and food. There were many tourists there too, I distinctly remember two German girls asking me, after I surfaced from my dip with the dolphin and then 30+year old man, “Where, where is the dolphin?”
I was stunned. I had just touched and ridden alongside a dolphin. I had also just been touched and caressed and groped by the Bedouin man who was famous in the region.
The dolphin would only swim with you if this man was by your side so the story went. My partner didn’t want to meet the dolphin and the director had already done so, so the experience was mine for the taking. Sure. I’m adventurous. I was excited. I took the snorkel that was handed me. I was worried about the fact that we could not communicate, but the director and the Bedouin man assured me I would be ok.
My only experience of dolphins before had been at Marineland, where I watched the apparently happy dolphins leaping and eating fish. Men, on the other hand, I knew a bit about. So when we were far enough away from the shore and the man let go of my hand and pulled me in closer to him, his hands around my waist, I held my breath. It’s ok, I told myself. It’s just like riding a motorcycle; we have to be that close, right? We kept coming to the surface for air and diving down and soon on a descent his hands were not just around my waist, they were moving up and down, over areas that were well beyond what needed to be touched to keep us near one another. Dammit. My prickly sense when my head was above water was right.
Starting to wonder about this whole ‘boy who swims with the dolphin phenomenon’, when his hand was moving over one my breasts and I was doing my best to squeeze my arm in so he couldn’t move it more, to hurt his wrist enough to say ‘yo, dude, I didn’t sign up for this’, we turned around and I met the sea friend of his. I was afraid because this dolphin was mottled and had
scars and bite marks and was nothing like the all grey dolphins at Marineland. It was real and beautiful and scared the life out of me because here it was bigger than me, touching me, letting me hold it’s fin and when the boy/man/groper pushed me towards it, it didn’t swim away. It stopped moving so I could swim right on top of it.
Soon I had to surface for air, and that’s when those German girls asked where the dolphin was. I was stunned. “He’s here,” I said. Pointing nowhere, staring right at them.
On shore I was greeted with anxious questions, “Did you see it? Did he swim with you?” The groper was beside me having guided me back to my companions. “Yes,” I said. “I did.” When the man was out of earshot and the director was busy with tea I told my partner that it was odd. “Odd?” He asked. “What do you mean?”
“He groped me,” I said.
“What do you mean?” He asked again.
I explained what had happened and my partner was puzzled, a look of horror and disbelief and then we were all talking again, about the script, about the place, the sea, the dolphin. Part of me wanted my male companions to defend me, to challenge the man somehow. I wanted to go back in time, to slow things down, things that were already muted and muffled by water and take charge and move his hands away. I wanted to shout but for whatever reasons that day I didn’t. We were strangers in a foreign land, we were guests, there was a story here, and it was mostly beautiful and there was an economy here now around that story, something that is magical and ugly at the same time. I wanted to look the boy/man/groper in the eyes and ask ‘Really? You feel you need to do that? That gives you pleasure? Go wank off on your own, with your fantasies and not my body’ I wanted to say. I also had a small passing urge to hurt him.
I said nothing more.
The story of Jian Ghomeshi is so much bigger than the story of him and these women whose collective lives now include a memory of being touched/slapped/punched and who knows what else without their consent. My story about the Bedouin is no comparison to theirs. When the news first broke of ‘the scandal’ something was triggered, that memory that I don’t ever think of because I am complicit in many things in the past that I don’t care to acknowledge in shaping my future. How wrong that is, I see now, I wasn’t even listening to myself.
I thought Jian had come into being a great host over the years, but this is beside the point. We are filled with contradictions – we all are – and we can be both brilliant and horrific at times. What I want to talk about is how can we change the landscape of the power many men feel they have over women? Gabor Maté writes that “making this scandal all about Ghomeshi, we risk
ignoring the broader sources of male narcissistic rage towards females.” We need to stop silencing the stories about this. Because listening to, and bearing witness is something we can do to honour the person, to try and stop the title ‘victim’ or ‘liar’ or ‘jilted-ex’ or ‘tease’ or ‘sex-pot’ or ‘slut’ from being the norm.
Instead of asking why didn’t these and others go to the police, maybe we need to ask one another what are you going to do about it, from this point forward? I hope that is what’s being done here, that this particular story has created an opening, like Evalyn Parry said, so we can reduce the acceptance of unacceptable behavior that harms.
People are asking why these women haven’t come forward before. There are so many reasons why not. Fear of retaliation, wanting to move on from it, not wanting to deal with the backlash, being embarrassed, self-doubt, questioning their memory, etc. I ask, why are we not listening to one another, and what can we do to create a space and a society in which to do so? Daphne Gordon touches on this in her response to The Star commentary on how our children are raised and the relationship we have to our mothers coming to (potentially) play a role in our futures. There is so much to be said. I hope we are all listening.
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