When Marc Lepine entered École Polytechnique in Montreal and killed 14 women he claimed he was fighting feminism.
Readers beware, this article uses the F-word.
Lepine wrote in his suicide letter he was angry at the women, mostly engineering students, for leaving their traditional gender roles.
He accused them of seeking social changes that took away from the rights of men. In becoming engineers, they were overstepping their bounds.
So they were killed.
December 6th will mark the 20th anniversary of this incident.
Now acknowledged each year as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women, memorial vigils are being held across the country.
It is to remind us all of the larger social issues at hand when Lepine went on his shooting rampage, violence against women and a fear of feminism.
“In general feminism is about the advancement of women,” says Diane Watts, researcher at REAL Women Canada.
“But it seems that feminism has become another F-word,” says Nancy Baroni, project coordinator for the Feminist Alliance for International Action.
Feminist efforts to eliminate this type of violence and obtain equality for women have not reached their full potential because stigmas have created barriers to feminism.
This is called backlash, which Dr. Victoria Bromley says is when feminism is attacked. She is a professor at the Pauline Jewett Institute of Women’s and Gender Studies at Carleton University.
In the last 50 years, there have been great shifts in what feminist activism looks like. The third wave shows there is more than one face to feminism. This means backlash is affecting more women than before.
Feminism is not the white housewife’s fight for the right to a divorce anymore.
The black lesbian woman is tired of facing discrimination and oppression, too. Disabled women refuse to be ignored. The personal is political and everyone has something to say.
This means protests, awareness campaigns, rallies, blogs and other forms of organization are constantly in progress. And they aren’t just bitching for the hell of it. This stuff matters.
“Maybe we don’t see frequent mass events like the Montreal Massacre, but the violence continues. Just look at the news,” says Baroni.
She’s referring to the headlines about oppressed women. Women battered by their husbands, women forced to work the streets for money, women raped and left for dead. They are common in the newspapers, but not a lot is being done about it.
Why aren’t more people outraged about this, ready to fight and roar to protect their daughters’ futures?
Maybe they don’t want to be ignored. Worse, they don’t want to be associated with the F-word.
In the western world, feminism is often synonymous with radical lesbianism. Feminists refuse to shave their legs, don’t want children, and are otherwise vulgar human beings.
These stereotypes are endless, obviously mislead, and nearly always negative. And it’s worse if you’re a male feminist.
Yes, they exist.
Baroni, a proud feminist, says that stereotype is far from the truth. “We get angry every once in awhile but we’re not man-hating beasts.”
Nevertheless, too many women are scared to associate themselves with this identity.
Women who seek gender equality and justice have to weigh their options: is the risk of being called a “feminist” worth it? Does standing up and speaking out come with too many negative implications?
Is it easier to just lay down and take it?
Even studying women and gender in university comes with stereotypes. Jacqui Wingrove, a fourth-year student at Carleton University, says she often stops herself from admitting what she studies to people because of what they might say.
“But then I get angry at myself, because what kind of feminist am I if I won’t even admit that I study women’s rights? What kind of woman am I?” she says.
But she has seen people rolling their eyes at feminism too many times.
“Sometimes I just can’t be bothered standing there and arguing with the person about why it all matters if they aren’t even going to hear me,” she says.
Wingrove says the “it” she’s referring to is women’s equality.
Canada still hasn’t achieved this.
Yes, we have come a long way. Women can vote, many women stay single and hold corporate positions. But women are still pressured to be a good wife and mother. A lack of femininity is suspicious.
And women are still victims of male-dominated violence.
Equality hasn’t been achieved in the global south either.
Last week a woman in Somalia was stoned to death in front of a crowd of 200 people for cheating on her husband. A week shy of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women.
So what has changed in the 20 years since Lepine opened fire at the Montreal university?
Not enough.
The victims of the Montreal Massacre were accused of being feminists because they were attending post-secondary education.
Now, any woman who offends others for not being feminine enough could be accused. Worse if she’s an activist.
What will her punishment be?
The stereotypes have cluttered the feminist identity so far that it becomes difficult to define what a feminist is.
The stigma continues because people always fear what they don’t know.
As author Margaret Atwood once said, “Does ‘feminist’ mean large unpleasant person who’ll shout at you or someone who believes women are human beings? To me it’s the latter, so I sign up.”
Pass the pen.