Large Fierce Mammal

Source: CBC News

The Jian Ghomeshi sexual assault trial awaits its verdict, scheduled for 24 March 2016, and the world of polarized politics driven and abetted by social media can’t understand why all this due process crap should even be allowed to stand in the way of a well deserved lynching.

This morning over coffee, I read a couple of articles that I’d like to spotlight here. To begin, there’s this excerpt from a CBC News piece by Neil MacDonald titled Jian Ghomeshi trial: When #BelieveTheVictims meets #DueProcess, There are already special rules for sexual assault cases, ignoring due process would go too far:

“Nothing resembles the ideological left quite so much as the ideological right; objectively, they are often political allies.

“Both the doctrinaire left and the hardline right generally agree, for example, that there’s far too much free speech nowadays; they differ only over who needs censoring.

“What’s more, both the left and right argue that bad people get far too soft a ride in the legal system.  

“The right would happily toss the constitution out the window to punish those it considers terrorists, and many on the left, judging from the trial of Jian Ghomeshi, think that due process — the steadfast application of evidentiary law — should be set aside in cases of sexual assault.

“Every time Marie Henein, Ghomeshi’s lawyer, produced another email or letter that contradicted, or, yes, showed a witness’s previous testimony to have been false, social media swelled and roiled with loathing.

“Henein was villainized, and those who defended her pitiless tactics were labelled rape-culture-denying, victim-blaming, pro-rapist, patriarchal, misogynist scum (I’m choosing the milder, more printable epithets here).

“Those tweeting social media hashtags like #BelieveTheVictims basically argued that, once lodged, the sexual assault complaint itself should be the beginning and end of the judicial process.”

MacDonald adds:

“But the #BelieveTheVictim crowd seems to resent an accused’s right to full disclosure of the Crown’s case, and cross-examination itself.

“They applaud the system adopted by many universities, particularly in the U.S., in which an administrative tribunal takes sexual assault testimony separately, and cross-examination is forbidden, on the grounds that it can re-traumatize someone; and the criterion for guilt is whether the offence likely happened, rather than reasonable doubt.

“‘It is absolutely remarkable,’ tweeted Toronto lawyer Alison Craig, “how many people seem to think that in cases of sexual assault, the guilty verdict should just be mailed in.'”

“Likely happened”, as in, “I read it in Rolling Stone,” happened. That lamentable case is still supported by some as a parable supporting a Great Truth that, although discredited as the fiction of a pathetic woman, if not true, could have been anywhere, at any time. In this, they assign and cling to value that doesn’t exist, and by so doing, do the greatest of harm to the very victims and potential victims they claim to support.

Moving on, let’s swivel our spotlight to a Toronto Star piece written by “Vancouver-based author and speaker”, Gabor Maté, M.D., under the headline, Jian Ghomeshi and the problem of narcissistic male rage, Jian Ghomeshi, in all his traumatized dysfunction and for all the pain he has inflicted, may have done us the favour of waking us up to a larger problem.

My ears pricked as I read the second paragraph:

We live in a society steeped in male narcissism, one in which aggression towards women is deeply entrenched in the collective male psyche. Nor is male sexual predation confined to a few “sick” individuals: that we see it portrayed, relentlessly and voyeuristically, in movies, TV shows, and advertising is beyond obvious, except for those mired in denial.

And stayed that way as he completed that line of reasoning in the third:

Acknowledging such realities is not “a tremendous slur against men,” as one denial-mired national columnist suggested recently; it is not to label men as “pigs.” It is simply to recognize that Ghomeshi’s reported behaviours arise from a misogynistic culture that degrades and confuses people of all genders. Few men enact extreme hostility, but few are those who do not harbour anti-feminine aggression somewhere in their psyche.

An invitation to engagement in The Arte of Intelligent Discourse this is not, and I would posit that in the spirit of charity, what I read was in gross violation of Rules 1 and 7. For now, let me tell you that my ears prick as soon as I hear a statement of position in a matter that comes packaged with a characterization of potential naysayers as being somehow unenlightened, mentally challenged, or as in the good doctor’s case, “… mired in denial”. On this path, absent spoken word nor even raised an eyebrow, the speaker begins by unilaterally discarding any weight of veracity from all but absolute acceptance from his audience.

Some of the motive behind Dr. Maté’s thesis began to reveal itself as I read his fourth paragraph:

As a man, a husband and the father of an articulate and proudly feminist daughter from whom I have learned much, I know that Ghomeshi’s alleged actions — hitting women even as he hits on them — are symptoms of a larger problem. Inside what has been called a “rape culture,” many men are familiar with fantasies of non-consensual sexual dominance and violence. Although not in physically violent ways, I, too, have acted out male rage, including toward the woman with whom I am about to celebrate our 45th wedding anniversary. Much as I regret it, it’s the truth.

Ah! OK, I get it. He has sinned, and feels he has that sin to atone for by way of public confession. Alas however, if that was it I wouldn’t be involving you with him here today. From here, he makes a rather impassioned argument for diluting his guilt by enlisting all men to blunt its sting by sharing it, and in this I couldn’t help finding it remarkably Christian. After all, we’re all sinners straight out of the gate, are we not? No sense in denying it.

I’ve long since lost patience with arguments that might seek to explain Masculinity and Manhood as an unstable contraption built from fundamentally flawed materials, assembled upon a foundation of clinically diagnosable and treatable conditions. That there is no such thing as a healthy and well balanced male character absent therapy, constant supervision, and most likely medication to blunt those pesky hard edges. Apparently though, Dr. Maté doesn’t share my distaste, for he continues:

The rage against women is rooted in what the late feminist scholar Dorothy Dinnerstein identified as the “female monopoly of early child care,” where an isolated woman is seen by the child as the sole source of nourishment, physical soothing, and emotional support. In a mobile and economically unstable society, it falls upon an individual female to become the entire world for the child. The male child, finding his needs frustrated, develops rage. As the brilliant Canadian psychologist Gordon Neufeld points out, “frustration is the engine of aggression.”

Rage against the mother later becomes generalized into rage against women. In pathological cases, that hostility is acted out precisely in moments when intimacy is sought, such as sex, because it was in early moments of vulnerable intimacy that the narcissistic wound was sustained. The rage is an implicit memory of intense proximal separation. Many boys also witness and absorb the hostility of their overworked and emotionally alienated fathers and, unconsciously, blame their mothers for not having protected them.

After reading that, I was at a loss to understand how a female child would experience the situation described any differently, but after earnest searching of the article, I was granted no enlightenment.

In the end, I found nothing helpful in Dr. Maté’s article, and in fact quite the opposite, ending as it does with this observation — “… A new consciousness and a new conversation are needed. Jian Ghomeshi, in all his traumatized dysfunction and for all the pain he has inflicted, may have done us the favour of waking us up.”

I will be the first to agree that a new consciousness and a new conversation are needed, beginning with an understanding that the trauma to the life of one falsely accused of sexual assault is every bit as terrible as that felt by an actual victim of the same. In our culture, for the falsely accused of such a heinous act, there is no return to grace on any level, as the attitudes described by Neil MacDonald illustrate. Notwithstanding its lack of legal entrenchment, for all practical purposes, the mere accusation is the end of discussion, and guilt immediately assigned. All the faster and more widely proclaimed in the day of social media.

Mr. Ghomeshi, in my personal opinion, is a sleazy, self-indulgent, little shit who gets off on surprising women with the infliction of pain in sexual encounters, was granted entirely too much rope by his employers during his tenure as the golden boy of CBC Radio, and lacks the honour and good grace to do the world a favour by using that rope to literally hang himself. That being said, he at no point was called to the stand during his trial so I’m not sure where Dr. Maté’s diagnosis of “traumatized dysfunction” was drawn from, nor (like it or not) is the contradictory and fabricated testimony of his accusers, coupled with their universal and more than graphic pursuit of further sexual interaction after the events in question, indicative of him having “inflicted” all that much pain, at least not as I understand the meaning of the word.

The “pain” referred to here, it would seem, arises from the frustration of the frenzied need of zealots for a scapegoat to whip through the streets and burn at the stake in the town square, and in this pursuit, real horrors are being drowned out in the clamour.

There’s your wake up call.