The other day, I stopped to help a neighbour whose car was stuck in his driveway. (It was winter. Snow.)
“Want me to push while you give it some gas?” I offered.
“Do you think you can?” he replied.
Well, if I didn’t think I could, I wouldn’t’ve offered. Numbnuts.
On another day, I heard another neighbour say that he’d seen the small tree across the path alongside my cabin (dragged there in an attempt to discourage ATVers), but he didn’t think I’d put it there. He thought to himself it was “too heavy for Peggy”.
(And yes, note the ‘Peggy’ – I’ve never introduced myself to anyone as ‘Peggy’, but he is not the only one to have gone for the diminutive version – do I call him Bobby instead of Bob?).
Here’s the thing. Both neighbours see me kayak every spring/summer/fall afternoon – all afternoon. They both see me hiking through the bush every winter afternoon – all afternoon. They both know I used to be a marathon runner, they’ve seen me go running. They both know (or would, if they’d actually thought about it) that I shovel my own driveway and split my own wood.
And yet pushing a car and moving a small fallen tree is apparently beyond my capabilities.
But not, apparently, beyond their capabilities. Because they’re male. Even though one is in his 70s and the other is in his 60s. Which means I’m considerably younger. Still, they must be stronger than me. Their worldview depends on it.
According to the Canadian Criminal Code (and probably a lot of other criminal codes), murder can be reduced to manslaughter if the person was provoked. Provocation is defined as “a wrongful act or an insult that is of such a nature as to be sufficient to deprive an ordinary person of the power of self-control is provocation for the purposes of this section if the accused acted on it on the sudden and before there was time for his passion to cool” (CCC 232.(2)).
It is unfortunate that “an ordinary person” is used as the standard for judgment rather than “a reasonable person”. The ordinary person, in my experience, is not particularly reasonable. The ordinary person is a walking mess of unacknowledged emotions and unexamined opinions, most of which are decidedly unreasonable.
Furthermore, in our society, an ordinary person is gendered, and given the specific use of “his” in 232(2), it seems that it is men who are (mostly) in mind for use of this defence.
The ordinary man doesn’t have a very high opinion of women. In particular, in our society, our heterosexist masculist society, men consider women to be almost solely sexual. And they consider them to be sexual property. The ordinary man also considers himself to be almost solely sexual. His physical strength and other supposed attributes of power (from his income to his hair) are also important, but mostly only as indicators of his sexual prowess or attractiveness (go figure). This means that an insult to his sexual prowess, or to any of the stand-ins, especially if uttered by a woman, who is, it goes without saying, a subordinate, may provide grounds for invoking the provocation defence.
Perhaps the typical scenario in which the defence is invoked is that of a married man who discovers his wife having sex with another man and in a “crime of passion” kills – either his wife or the other man or both. We call the murder a crime of passion, but really it’s just an outrage of proprietorship. Of course, maybe that’s what passion is in men: the expression of conquest, and ownership. O. R. Sullivan (“Anger and Excuse: Reassessing Provocation” in Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 13, 1993) calls it an “outrage at a failure to dominate” – which also makes sense, given the subordination of women (and the defence’s applicability to men). And Judy Steele (private correspondence) calls it an honor killing (the man’s honor is at stake).
If it really is passion we want to allow, then I should be excused for stealing a painting because I really like it, I’ve studied and admired art all my life, you could say I’m quite passionate about it…
And what exactly is passion, in an ordinary man, except rage – a testosterone tantrum? So we’re legitimizing man’s anger. (‘I was angry.’ ‘Oh well then. That’s okay. The man was angry.’) (No wonder they get angry so often. It’s a get out of jail free ticket.)
In fact, somehow, in our society, an angry man is more of a man than a calm man, let alone a fearful man, a grieving man, and so on. Real men must control their emotions, or, better, not have any (well, except anger). (It’s just a little ironic to allow a defence of emotion to those who pride themselves on not being emotional. Well, except for being angry.)
If we open the door to this unreasoned and unreasonable action, this knee-jerk response, shouldn’t we open the door to all knee-jerk responses? What makes this one so different it excuses murder? If it’s okay to kill someone because you think you own her, shouldn’t it be okay to kill someone because, oh, I don’t know, you think she’s a spy for the aliens? Or because she (or he) called you stupid?
A further indication that this defence is primarily intended for men is that if a sexually unattractive man makes a move on a woman (an insult to our sexual prowess), even an illegal move such as sexual touching without consent, we generally don’t kill the guy. And yet, apparently, an unsolicited homosexual advance can provoke a man to kill. After all, such an unwelcome sexual advance is enough to make you lose control. (Oh yeah? Hm. Let me get my gun. There’s a construction crew outside and a bunch of assholes down at the bar. And another bunch at work.)
I’m also not impressed that with this defence, the act must be done “on the sudden and before there was time for his passion to cool.” This means we’re condoning a lack of control. It has always puzzled me that premeditated murder is considered worse, not better, than unpremeditated murder.[1] Doing something after some consideration should surely be better than doing something thoughtlessly, without stopping to think about it at all – even if the reasons for the behaviour turn out to be unacceptable ones. (And we should definitely teach kids the difference between acceptable reasons and unacceptable reasons.)
And funny how men seem to lose control only when a perceived-to-be subordinate frustrates their desires. When they lash out at a bigger guy, it’s just a fight. Better to be stupid than shamed? So the provocation defence is just a way out of the shame of ‘picking on’ someone not your own size? [2]
Furthermore, how can such loss of control be both a justification (as when the provocation defence is invoked – in which case what you did isn’t as wrong) and an excuse (as when temporary insanity is invoked – in which case what you did isn’t really your fault)?
Of course, yet another problem with allowing a provocation defence is that it puts at least part of the blame on the provoker. ‘It was her fault. She provoked me.’ I can see this for some situations; blame is often justly shared in a physical altercation. But in a murder? It’s her fault he killed her? Please. She mocks you? She nags? She makes fun of your sperm count? She complains about your failure to get a job, a real job, a good job? She talks to other men? She has sex with them? So call her a bitch and leave. And don’t look back. Send money for your kids or apply for custody if you want to look after them. Or put up with it until they’re sixteen and then leave. But geez louise d’ya have to kill her?
It is not irrelevant that short of the formal provocation defence, provocation is often invoked in sexual assault crimes as well. It’s a way to dodge blame. Not only do we allow this plea of provocation by men, we encourage, we expect, the provocation by women: women are expected to be sexually attractive all the time – to wear sexualizing make-up and attire, even at work. (Though given that men also rape asexualized women – we’ve all read about the 60-70-year-old victims – apparently it’s our fault just for being a woman. Can you say ‘Eve’?) It’s a neat little trick: encourage the provocative behavior, and allow the provocation defence. And yet, as Lucy Reed Harris (“Towards a Consent Standard in the Law of Rape” in University of Chicago Law Review 43, 1976) points out, “although a flagrant display of cash in public may very predictably precipitate a robbery, the law does not hold an alleged robbery victim responsible for his own foolishness in making such a display.” (Unless it were a woman being so foolish?)
When will we insist our boys grow up? If there’s a legitimate reason they lag behind girls in maturity development (and therefore have relatively little control) and language skills (which provide a much better response to an insult), then let’s just say it – they’re the inferior ones. And then let’s follow through, and restrict their access to weapons, for example. (A higher age limit for drinking, and driving, would also be a good idea. And a curfew for two or more men under thirty gathered together.)
[1] In the case of Robert Latimer, for example, the presence of premeditation should’ve made it better: he did not kill Tracy on the spur of the moment, out of anger; he thought about it, long and hard, literally for years, after trying every alternative…
[2] Because if it really is the case that you can’t control yourself, well, we can fix that – we can lock you up and keep you away from others or we can give you drugs that reduce that pesky testosterone.
Living in a world in which most people are blind to natural beauty is so painful. What little beauty there is left so often gets destroyed, irrevocably, without a thought. After polite requests and rational explanations, I simply beg, Please don’t, but they just smile at me, with incomprehension, perhaps amused by my apparently baseless hysteria—and carry on, tearing me apart as they cut down all the trees in one of the few remaining untouched coves and park a dirty aluminum boat right in the middle of the now decimated, and ugly, shoreline, as they put up gaudy halogen lights lakeside ensuring I will never again be able to gaze at the glimmering moonlight on the dark water, as they park a bright yellow floating raft ruining yet another view of nothing but trees and water.
I want to write a victim impact statement, I want to make them see what they’ve done, I want them to appreciate the full extent of their obliviousness, their negligence, at the very least their lack of respect for something they cannot see that is, so clearly, of such great value to another. I don’t ‘get’ men’s love of cars, but I get that they do love them, deeply, and on that basis alone wouldn’t spray paint someone’s truck with pink polka dots. I don’t get women’s love of shoes, but I get that they do love them, and, so again, would not drag them through the dirt. But I swear I am sorely tempted.
(Even though that wouldn’t make my point because they could simply repair the truck and replace the shoes. Options not available to me.)
So I noticed this morning the birds are gone. They used to wake me up every morning around five o’clock and since I’d just gone to bed at two or three, I’d roll over, put in my earplugs, and go back to sleep. And I just realized that I haven’t had to do this for…must be a week now.
And it occurred to me. This is how it will happen. This is how it is happening. I’ve been hoping for, waiting for, some catastrophic event, some wake-the-fuck-up change that will make the world sit up and take notice and finally, finally, do something to fix, to save, the planet.
But that’s not going to happen.
When’s the last time you saw a frog? A bee? Fish swimming in the water?
In March, it’s 80 degrees in Canada and 30 degrees in Greece, food prices have increased 25% because of droughts, and still people drive their cars into town several times a week, still people go on vacation by plane, and what’s on tv? Nonstop coverage of the Olympics. Of people trying to run a little bit faster than someone else or throw a ball a little bit further than someone else.
So I’m pissed off again at everyone.
And I’m pissed off at the scientists. The point of no return has been moved from 2040 to 2017. It’ll take just 2 degrees. We’re at 1.6 degrees. And what have they done? Quietly, politely, filed their reports. Just continued to publish their papers in journals that only a dozen other people read. They should be taking political leaders hostage! They should be—I don’t know, isn’t there any way they can force someone to do something? Students organize protests against higher tuition, larger groups made the Occupy Wall Street movement happen—where are the scientists storming Ottawa and Washington saying “LOOK, YOU MOTHER FUCKERS, YOU HAVE TO DO SOMETHING NOW!!”?
And why isn’t the rest of the world boycotting us? Telling us they won’t buy any of our shit until we get our act together about the environment?
So, this is how it’ll happen. First the frogs, then the bees, then the fish, then the birds… Life as we know it will end while everyone in the States and Canada is watching tv. Probably some new reality show.
– we’re barely in the top quarter when it comes to the gender gap in wages (we’re fourth worst)
– we’re barely in the top quarter when it comes to the gender gap in health (it’s safer to be pregnant in Estonia than in Canada)
– speaking of which, we’re one of the last six countries in the developed world not to have paternity leave
– we’re apparently unable to produce even one female Nobel prize winner (every single one of Canada’s 21 Nobel Laureates have been men)
– we’re barely in the top quarter when it comes to the gender gap in political power (even Rwanda, Senegal, South Africa, Mozambique, Costa Rica, Uganda, Angola, Nepal, Serbia, Slovenia, Ethiopia, and Mexico have more women in their parliaments than Canada does)
Every now and then, we hear the proposal that women be paid to stay at home and be moms. That women are paid to be surrogate mothers suggests that regular mothers also deserve payment. So. Should we pay regular mothers the same as surrogate mothers?
For starters, who is this ‘we’? Surrogate mothers are paid by the people who want their labor. Who wants the children of non-surrogate mothers? The state? If so, for what? There is no civil service labor shortage. We aren’t at war. And if we were, we would need more soldiers, not more children. So the job paid for should be not ‘making a child’ but ‘making a soldier’. Because if we’re going to pay, it would be a job. You’d have to wait for an opening and then apply. So not only would the state, should it be the employer of mothers, have the right to be quite specific about the job description (“Women wanted to make soldiers”), it would have the right to be quite specific about the qualifications (“genetic make-up must include average IQ or lower, above average physical health and fitness, pliant personality….”). And it would have the right to be quite specific about the performance standards – no drinking on the job, or substance abuse of any kind except that prescribed by the employer, etc.
You want to be paid for being a mother? Well, he who pays the piper picks the tune.
Why is it that a prerequisite for being a jury member is that you have no opinion about the case—in particular or in general. Those “who may have strong prejudices about the … issues involved in the case, typically will be excused” (uscourts.gov/FederalCourts/JuryService). Only airheads need apply.
I don’t believe there are such prerequisites for judges. So either the system is just inconsistent (ho-hum) or judges are trained to set aside their prejudices in order to render a fair judgement. (Some judgements certainly constitute evidence to the contrary, i.e., that judges are not so trained.)
Yes, the word ‘prejudice’ is usually intended to mean something negative, but really, isn’t a prejudice just an opinion, perhaps a very strong opinion? In ordinary contexts, the ‘pre’ in ‘prejudice’ suggests you’ve established your opinion before considering the individual facts—you’ve prejudged a person, for example, on the basis of their skin color or sex, without knowing anything about the individual person.
But in this context, if I have formed an opinion about, say, the issue of abortion, before considering the individual facts of the case (let’s assume it’s an ‘unlawful termination’ case or some such), why should that exclude me? Isn’t it a good thing that I have thought long and carefully about various issues? Apparently not. When it comes to juries, only airheads need apply. (Pity, ‘opinionated’ has become such a dirty word.)
Men, I mean. After all, they are the ones who define themselves in relation to us: to be a man is to be whatever is not to be a woman.
If women are graceful, then to be graceful is feminine. A graceful man is effeminate. A real man is not graceful. He’s not necessarily clumsy, he’s just not-graceful.
If women like flowers, then men do not.
If women like pink and orange and mauve, then men do not.
And when women change their abilities, their desires, the men also change. For example, as soon as women became banktellers, suddenly men (real men) did not become banktellers. As soon as women were typists, men were not-typists. Et cetera.
I pity a whole sex that is so dependent. Living in a rut of reaction, they are simply incapable of such a proactive move as defining themselves for themselves. They didn’t even know they didn’t like quiche until we said we liked it.
Frankly, I fear for their future. At the rate women are doing, well, doing whatever they please, men will soon be, well, not.
And even though you don’t know any other guys who want to be nurseladies, you persist. Because quite simply, you think you’ll like nursing, as a career, a job, an endeavour. So you take your high school maths and sciences, you do quite well, and you get accepted into nursing school.
Where almost all the students are women. You feel like you don’t really belong, you feel odd, you stand out. There are a few other men in the class and at first you hang around with them, but you don’t really like them. Part of you thinks you should like them, but, well, you just don’t. You try hanging around with some of the women, and they’re pleasant enough and they talk to you, but you never get included in their group things outside of class. So you become a loner, part of nothing, sort of invisible. But you persist, you keep coming to class.
All the profs are women and they keep saying things like “Well, ladies…” as if you weren’t there. There’s one who makes a point of adding, as a cute afterthought, “and gentlemen”, but something in her tone bugs you and you’d rather she just stick to “Well, ladies”. And there’s another one who asked once why, with your build, you weren’t playing football instead. You were speechless. But you persist, you don’t drop out. (Even though you wonder sometimes at the average marks you get for work you think is above average.)
There’s only one men’s washroom in the whole building. On particularly bad days, it annoys you when you have to go to a different floor just to go to the washroom.
And it seems that some knowledge is assumed as background. Things like how to hold a baby. How are you supposed to know what they haven’t taught you yet?
And there are no nursing uniforms for you in the campus shop. Something special has to be ordered. It’s different, of course, and makes you stand out even more, as someone who doesn’t really belong with the group. This is especially bad in the training hospital – people keep thinking you’re security or something. Sometimes it seems you have to spend so much time and effort just getting accepted as a nurse, you don’t have anything left to actually do any nursing.
But you persist. Even though you probably won’t get a job when you graduate – men are thought to be not as emotionally sensitive, you’ve already been criticized for being gruff (you swear you were just speaking normally). And if you do get a job, it’ll probably be in some no-name hospital god-knows-where with no chance for advancement. None of the headnurses in any of the hospitals you’ve been in were men. But you persist.
One day it occurs to you that it would help if they stopped calling it ‘nurselady’ and just called it ‘nurse’. When you suggest that, you get weird looks as if you’re obsessed with sex or over-reacting (or both). A few agree to use just ‘nurse’, but the way they say it defeats the purpose. The same sort of thing happened when you said something about the uniforms and the washrooms. You were criticized for making a fuss. But you persist. Because damn it you want to be a nurse!
There should be regulations about what people can put on their private property that will be in view of their neighbours. Even more than in public spaces, visual material on private property is not easily avoided. If you put a swastika or a pornographic image on your garage door, and that door is right across from your neighbours’ living room window, they will have to see it every time they look out their window. Asking them not to look out their window is unreasonable. If they were there first, they have a right to ask you not to put the image on your garage door. If you were there first and had the image on your garage door when they were looking for a place, they could have chosen to not move in (and so don’t have the right to ask you to remove it) (maybe).
But it’s not even, or not only, so-called ‘offensive’ images that I’d prohibit. It’s anything the neighbour doesn’t want to see every day, anything that’s an unwanted intrusion on their consciousness. It could be a ‘Jesus Loves You’ sign (unwanted by the atheist), the Canadian flag (upsetting to someone who is well aware of Canada’s environmental record), or even an inoffensive and non-upsetting image of an infant playing with building blocks. Who knows? It doesn’t matter. The people who are forced to see your house every day are the ones who get a say in how it looks. From the outside. To them. What you put in your back yard doesn’t affect them, so they don’t have a say. What you put inside your garage, or inside your house, doesn’t affect them, so they don’t have a say. But what you put in plain view? They should have a say. A reasonable say.
Obviously the effects of such a prohibition increase the more visible you are. If you own a penthouse apartment that can be seen by thousands, guess what. If you own a house on a lake that can be seen by everyone on the lake, guess what.
To provide just one example, I live in a cabin on a lake in a forest and several people consider it appropriate to ‘decorate’ their property, lakeside, with solar lights that can never be turned off. Some are arranged in a runway fashion to mark a path from their house to their lake; some are arranged in a row along their frontage. Needless to say, the lights really ruin the beauty of the lovely moonlight glimmering on the water, the otherwise dark forest… I claim that such lights shouldn’t be allowed.
First, my right to revel in the natural beauty every night trumps their right to ‘decoration’ that isn’t even being appreciated (if they’re weekenders, they’re back in the city during the week and so don’t see their lights; if they live there, they’re typically asleep in bed after midnight and so don’t see their lights). Second, my right to revel in the natural beauty trumps the marginal utility of the lights even when they are there or awake because there are alternatives (one can use a flashlight or install motion sensor lights that go on only when one needs to see the way). People with lakeside solar lights are imposing their conception of decoration and utility on everyone else, and they are preventing others from appreciating their own conception of beauty (the dark night, the moonlight glimmering on the water). If your property is in the middle of natural beauty, you have an obligation not to ruin it. And if you don’t see that, you shouldn’t live there. Similarly, people who don’t appreciate Beethoven shouldn’t go to concerts and talk all the way through.
And if those lights are blinking, it’s even worse: given the way our brains are wired, our attention is coerced. No one has a right to force me to pay attention to something I don’t want to attend to, and blinking lights do just that.
One may counter by claiming that surely one is allowed to do what one wants on and with one’s own property. Well, no. For example, you shouldn’t be allowed to dump oil on your property because it will seep through the soil into other people’s property and into the lake. When your actions affect others, there are limits to what you can do.
In short, even though your property is ‘private’, what you put on it is not: as long as it can be seen by others, it’s public. And it should therefore be subject to restrictions: you don’t have a right to coerce other people’s attention, especially if what you’re forcing them to pay attention to is something they don’t want to pay attention to.
"We License Plumbers and Pilots - Why Not Parents?"At Issue: Is Parenthood a Right or a Privilege? ed. Stefan Kiesbye (Greenhaven, 2009); Current Controversies: Child Abuse, ed. Lucinda Almond (Thomson/Gale, 2006); Seattle Post-Intelligencer (October 2004)
"A Humanist View of Animal Rights"New Humanist September 99; The New Zealand Rationalist and Humanist Winter 98; Humanist in Canada Winter 97
have been previously published in Canadian Woman Studies, Herizons, Humanist in Canada, The Humanist, and The Philosopher's Magazine - contact Peg for acknowledgement details.
ImpactAn extended confrontation between a sexual assault victim and her assailants, as part of an imagined slightly revised court process, in order to understand why they did what they did and, on that basis, to make a recommendation to the court regarding sentence does not go … as expected.
What Happened to TomTom, like many men, assumes that since pregnancy is a natural part of being a woman, it’s no big deal: a woman finds herself pregnant, she does or does not go through with it, end of story. But then …
Aiding the EnemyWhen Private Ann Jones faces execution for “aiding the enemy,” she points to American weapons manufacturers who sell to whatever country is in the market.
Bang BangWhen a young boy playing “Cops and Robbers” jumps out at a man passing by, the man shoots him, thinking the boy’s toy gun is real. Who’s to blame?
ForeseeableAn awful choice in a time of war. Whose choice was it really?
Exile (full-length drama) Finalist, WriteMovies; Quarterfinalist, Fade-In.
LJ lives in a U . S. of A., with a new Three Strikes Law: first crime, rehab; second crime, prison; third crime, you’re simply kicked out – permanently exiled to a designated remote area, to fend for yourself without the benefits of society. At least he used to live in that new U. S. of A. He’s just committed his third crime.
What Happened to Tom (full-length drama) Semifinalist, Moondance.
This guy wakes up to find his body’s been hijacked and turned into a human kidney dialysis machine – for nine months.
Aiding the Enemy (short drama 15min)
When Private Ann Jones faces execution for “aiding the enemy,” she points to American weapons manufacturers who sell to whatever country is in the market.
Bang Bang (short drama 30min) Finalist, Gimme Credit; Quarter-finalist, American Gem.
When a young boy playing “Cops and Robbers” jumps out at a man passing by, the man shoots him, thinking the boy’s toy gun is real. Who’s to blame?
Foreseeable (short drama 30min)
An awful choice in a time of war. Whose choice was it really?
What is Wrong with this Picture?
Nothing. There’s no reason women can’t be the superordinates and men the subordinates. But life’s not like that (yet).
Minding Our Own Business A collection of skits (including “The Price is Not Quite Right,” “Singin’ in the (Acid) Rain,” “Adverse Reactions,” “The Band-Aid Solution,” and “See Jane. See Dick.”) with a not-so-subtle environmental message
Rot in Hell A soapbox zealot and an atheist face off…
