On mothers. sisters, wives, daughters and grannys

Butter Beans, by Frank Stanley Herring

Jean Vanier is known to most of us for his work in establishing L’Arche, a world wide community of support institutions for the developmentally challenged. Some of us know people who worked or are working in one of these charitable endeavours and the news of L’Arche’s good work has become legendary in our time. If you click HERE, you’ll see Wikipedia’s story of the man and his work . . . including a Globe and Mail headline that says he may soon be posthumously charged with the abuse of at least six women.

     Among the comments appended to a fb post on this development is only one male voice alongside numerous female voices, and one comment declares that the lack of men’s responses is meaningful. That may be true, possibly because women far outnumber male users of fb, and/or plus a possibility that men are ashamed to be of the same gender as the perpetrator, or that they just don’t really care that women are being abused sexually.

     I’m convinced that the way forward in stemming abuse issues needs a deep rethink of root causes. Two avenues suggest themselves to me: 1) we need to explore the anthropology and evolution of human reproduction in order to trace our arrival at the current, unsatisfactory situation, and 2) we need to abandon the typical religious/morality arguments and focus on the defense of individual human rights. (For Christians, that might mean re-reading the New Testament while thinking of Jesus as the founder of the human rights movement, which he arguably was.)

     In most of the animal kingdom, coitus only happens as a consequence of a signal/invitation of the female and only when ovulating. Sex as a purely pleasurable activity seems to be a factor only in humans and bonobo monkeys. (This is over-simplified, but a useful starting point to talk about the subject.) In humans, the foregoing of an aggressive pursuit of sexual pleasure must be accomplished through inhibition, and if the ability to inhibit is weak, the door opens to the taking of liberties, to abuse.

     Seen evolutionarily, status and power have always served to reduce the need to inhibit aggressive, abusive behaviours. Men who have political power or public adulation seem often to find that bad behaviour is excused as a consequence of their elevated status. Take Trump’s, “When you’re a celebrity, you can grab them by the pussy. They don’t care,” or words to that effect. John Howard Yoder preyed on students, Vanier (if this turns out to be true) probably preyed on developmentally challenged women or employees. And then there’s Harvey Weinstein who could make or break careers with a word. 

     What is consistent in the rest of the world of mammals is that the big buck gets to procreate; this principle has been perverted in a humanity where physical prowess no longer has anything to do with power; where the twerp who gets elected to government too easily sheds his inhibition against touching an employee in the office.

     Humanity has a history of granting males power by default. The arrangement has persisted long after it was needed or beneficial for survival of the species. This alone may explain why the abuse of women by men is the most prevalent kind of bullying, of violence.

     (None of this is meant to excuse abuse by women of power. That’s a subject for another day.)

     I’ve often heard negative comments about the human rights movement based on the premise that it invokes an entitlement mentality as opposed to a sense of responsibility. This is a false argument; the conviction of being oneself a worthy, dignified, protected human being is more likely to help us understand that the neighbour is equally heir to a life of worthiness, dignity and protection. How many are the stories of servant girls impregnated by the squire’s horny sons and then abandoned to a life of shame and derision while the sons scan the kitchen for new conquests. That’s to state the extreme, but in the pantheon of human rights—children’s rights, indigenous rights, developmentally-challenged rights—the chapter on women’s rights needs monumental attention. It took until the 1920s and Nellie McClung before women were even declared “persons” in law in Canada. What additional protections accrue to women that would ensure their “dignity, worthiness and safety?”

     If neither faith, education nor child-rearing can restore in men the appropriate level of inhibition that would allow women to feel safe walking home after dark, then we may end up trying to achieve that through law and harsh deterrents. For touching a person sexually without an explicit invitation, life in prison with no chance of parole for 25 years. Do we really want to go there? It’s nearly impossible to sort out the “he said, she said,” consent-or-no-consent tangles when they come to trial. Can enforcement achieve anything here? Should we once again stone adulterers?

     However we move forward to the day when our sisters, wives and mothers no longer need to endure the pain of abuse, no longer need to lock themselves in after dark, one thing seems clear to me: boys and girls need to grow up with an internalized reverence for others’ rights irrespective of gender, sexual orientation, physical/mental endowment, race or faith. They need to experience forgiveness, reconciliation, insistence on human rights of others until it becomes a part of them. Schools, families, Sunday Schools, police, social services, recreation & sports all need to be together on this. 

     This is a priority curriculum for all of us.

     And then there’s our response to the Jean Vaniers, the Trumps, the Weinsteins. It was their celebrity that robbed them of inhibitions; it was also their celebrity that led to the exposure of their abuses. How many women, meanwhile, have suffered sexual abuse that will never make the news?

     We’re all in this together.

     I’m not ashamed to be male, Trump, Weinstein and their like notwithstanding. But I am grateful to be one of those many, many men who through the example of their parents, their teachers, their churches learned at least the basics of human rights, even if not by that name. Granted, there’s a price to be paid for sexual repression, but in this world, you just can’t have it every way and to satisfy one's own needs at someone else's expense is . . . well we ought all to know what it is.

     There’s work to be done, folks.