To the National Post:

In this business (that is, the business of being an arch-feminist), you get a bit thrown by the popular media’s failure to acknowledge violence against women as violence. Journalists are all too ready to dismiss these “rare occasions” as flukes or one-off tragedies — every day, constantly.

But when I came across Barbara Kay’s article rebuking women and men who oppose violence against women as creating a culture of male self-loathing and female suspicion, I had to ask myself if this wasn’t some poorly-devised joke. It’s no joke to the families of the victims of December 6, 1989 — nor is it particularly funny for women who endure violence because of their gender on a continual basis.

Us arch-feminists get accused of “man-hating” a lot. And now not even the men who stand by feminism are safe (especially from Barbara Kay). The only people who are safe, as far as Ms. Kay is concerned, are those who recognize the grand farce that the “man-hating” feminist campaign has saddled upon society. Gender-based violence is a lie, or perhaps a plot; whatever it is, it is sinister and whiny and bad for national morale.

How short Ms. Kay’s memory must be that the recent school killings targeting young girls didn’t even register with her. Gender-based violence happens all the time, in dramatic and not-so-dramatic ways. It happened in a dramatic way in October in Pennsylvania when five schoolgirls were separated from the boys, singled out and killed. It happened in Colorado in September at a high school when at least two women were sexually assaulted and one was murdered.

Moreover, I wonder why Ms. Kay assumes that the tragedy of the Montreal Massacre is lessened because Marc Lépine was planning other acts of violence: this is the one he did commit, screaming “I hate feminists” as he opened fire on the female students of L’Ecole Polytechnique.

Remarkable, too, that mere moments after Ms. Kay railed against male feminists who oppose violence against women, she turned on female feminists for being “divisive”: feminism manages to both draw men into its web and segregate women — amazing. It should be no great revelation that women are targeted because they are women, by men, everyday.

This does not mean that all men are violent, and is not a blanket condemnation of “the male race,” as Ms. Kay herself pointed out when she brought up anti-violence campaigns led by men, such as White Ribbon and Montreal Men Against Sexism. The “enemy” here isn’t men — how could it be? Rather, men and women are working together to combat environments and attitudes that produce or encourage gender-based violence, statistically (in 97 per cent of reported cases) enacted most often by men against women.

That men recognize that they participate in and benefit from such a system, and want to help stop it, should not reduce them to “shame” but is cause for hope.

I was also surprised at Ms. Kay’s conviction that educational curricula had taken a turn for the wimpy, urging students to — heaven forbid — analyze gender, or learn about feminism. In fact, the opposite is true. Back in the ’70s, the Ontario curriculum included a fair amount of gender and equity content. Since the ’80s, and until today, the same document has been quietly and deliberately emptied of all such content. And we wonder that the violence continues.

It was good of her, though, to pay a condescending nod to all the hapless Third World women out there getting beaten or burned on their husbands’ funeral pyres. Naturally, wife-beating and other such atrocities are inconceivable in Canada.

Perhaps violence against women is inconceivable to people like Barbara Kay because to them violence is only legitimate as some sort of public spectacle. As Ms. Kay kindly verified, it took the killing of six million Jews before anyone in Europe (much less North America) was willing to admit that anti-Semitism wasn’t a hoax dreamed up by conspiratorial Zionist bankers. Until then, despite centuries of persecution and mass expulsions, anti-Semitism had captured little attention and made few headlines except to deny or even condone it in the name of (what a surprise) “national morale.”

What is baffling, though, is that no matter how many headlines read “Woman killed by ex-boyfriend,” “Wife and children abducted by husband,” “Student raped in library,” “Girl found dead, tortured,” and on and on, such “incidents” of violence are singular “unthinkable” and “incomprehensible” tragedies — every day, constantly: read, vaguely digested, forgotten, until the next day. The sheer enormity of the problem of violence against women is at such a scale as to render it banal, and thus invisible.

Moreover, most such violence is inevitably within domestic settings, and thus often doesn’t get aired in public, or when it does, is trivialized. Perhaps Ms. Kay would prefer if rapists and wife-beaters would get out of the bushes, collectively organize, and clarify their intentions. Perhaps she’d like fire-works to announce that a pandemic of violence is going on. If so, she’s unlikely to get it. Such is the nature of violence against women.

If the term “gendercide” makes sense to Ms. Kay, then that’s the term I’ll use. And if her complaint is that no gendercide has targeted women before or after the Montreal Massacre, I’d ask her to imagine a single gendercide in history that has targeted men for being men. Most recorded acts of mass violence have been against men, by men, simply because men have historically dominated politics, the military, the public sphere, and, incidentally, the writing of history. They weren’t killed for their gender.

And just because our history books don’t tell us that many (indeed, most) forms of military conflict both historically and today involve rape and sexual violence as weapons of war doesn’t mean it didn’t and doesn’t happen.

Gendercide in domestic settings is no less prevalent and should be no less repugnant. Just look at the headlines. Ask yourself who should feel less safe walking alone at night. Look on the internet, look at snuff porn, the child and spousal abuse that happens everywhere, every day, constantly.

December 6 is important not only because of the 14 women killed by Marc Lépine; it occupies a place on the calendar as a day to remember all women who’ve been victims of gender-based violence. We remember these women on December 6 because that tragedy threw into stark relief the everyday violence Canadians might otherwise take for granted, and forget. The violence is constant, and so must the remembrance be, if we’re ever to stop it.

Considering the immensity of the problem, that the popular media cannot even afford one day of the year to render some degree of solemnity to the countless women who’ve endured violence for being women is outstanding. That one journalist took the opportunity to deny this pandemic is disgusting.

Had Ms. Kay ever actually attended a December 6 vigil, she might have noticed the yearly ritual in which vigil-goers light candles to honour friends and family members they’ve lost to gender-violence. It is a startling, hollowing experience. The candles keep being lit. Constantly. Every day.