Vox Newman
Jian Ghomeshi, Rape Culture and the Road to Peace. | October 31, 2014
I don’t know you Jian Ghomeshi but I now regret the enjoyment I had listening to your show. You and your ilk fill me with more than regret: I become burdened with a profound feeling that there is something terribly wrong with people. I don’t like that. I hate that. I want to like people: I want life to be enjoyed by all. But then people like you come along, people who support you come along, people worse than you come along: all those people come along and create and prolong pain for others.
Screw libel, screw defamation: I don’t know you, and I probably don’t know anyone who knows you; that means I don’t know anyone who’s been raped or abused by you, and yet, I’m going to call you a rapist, a predator and an abuser of women. And I certainly look forward to you finding my little corner of the internet and suing me.
But: blood from a stone buddy. I probably wouldn’t even bother showing up to court for that. Unfortunately, I doubt I have enough clout to ever be discovered by you. That’s a shame really, because if you’re not going to listen to all the other voices defaming you, you should at least read what I have to write. I wish I had the hits to climb out of the darkness into your computer, but I just have a humorous blog, that no one reads and I write novels that no one reads. Add to that, a newscaster sucks up six pages of Google when searching my name and I know I’ll never get through to you. I think it’s a shame, because I think you could benefit from what I have to say.
What I have to say is this:
You nearly managed to derail years of dubious progress in regards to giving victims a voice. That’s what you attempted to do. It seemed at first that you were succeeding. Your post hit all the key points a rapist would want to hit to get crowds of people to side with him and silence his victims. And on the first day, it seemed to do just that: there were over 100,000 likes on your Facebook post and of the first 30,000 comments, it looked like 90% of them were in blind support of you. I don’t know why people like to blame the victims of affluent celebrities, but they sure did in those first few days.
You also announced a lawsuit against the CBC, and people supported that. I don’t think many supporters realized that meant you’d actually be suing them because their taxes pay for the CBC. Here’s the thing: I would gladly pay more taxes just so the CBC could tie you up in litigation until you’re a bankrupt, destitute old man dying of cancer in a run-down nursing home.
But then something happened (one good thing in this whole sordid tale): they turned against you. Finally, the people turned against the abuser, the perpetrator, the predator, the rapist; finally, the people began to side with the victims. And as more victims spoke out and more of your acquaintances spoke out, more people turned against you. Now we are going down a road we may have never been. Now people seem to get it. I now see a light at the end of the tunnel that maybe; just maybe, the perpetrator might pay for his crimes.
Here’s the thing: I believe there can be salvation for you. I believe forgiveness is attainable. I can’t decide on how, because I’m not one of your victims: but they can decide how. You can ask for their forgiveness and they can tell you if they could possibly forgive you and what you would have to do to earn that forgiveness. Each and all of them. It can start with an apology: a public and sincere apology to all of them. This is diametrically the opposite of your reprehensible post on Facebook. At the very least, if you for some improbable reason believed you had consent, believed they were willing partners, you could have apologized for your own ignorance and acknowledged that you were too stupid to understand that you didn’t have consent and that what they perceived of the event was the valid perception. Not yours. The way you viewed all those past events was obviously not the truth, elsewise, there wouldn’t be a whole plethora of women who felt victimized by you.
If you hadn’t abused, raped or preyed on women you’d instead have what most guys have: prior relationships that ended. Some might have gone bad, some of the women might even have felt that you were a bad lay, a bad boyfriend, a boring guy etc.
Let me restate this: if you hadn’t victimized women, you wouldn’t have many women feeling and stating that they were victimized by you.
This is why you need to apologize: you need to help them feel like justice has been done, because you were the one who committed an injustice against them (not to mention that you repeated this injustice over and over, and then committed more injustices by your public accounting of the situation and your attempts to silence your victims).
And the only way for your apology to work is for you to meet the criteria by which they would grant forgiveness. Here’s what could be in store for you:
You might have to individually account publicly the abuses you committed. You might never have a career again. You might have to go to court. You might have to plead guilty (or even better, plead not-guilty and throw your own case, especially not bringing up he said/she said arguments, past or post sexual history, no witnesses on your side, no objections by your lawyers etc.). You might have to go to jail. You might have to pay restitution. You might have to beg for forgiveness. You might have to give a talk at every school about how you were a predator, rapist and abuser of women but how you learned your lesson. You might have to be in therapy for the rest of your life.
And there might be many other things that you have to do to earn the forgiveness of your victims.
What will you get out of this? Well, for one you might learn that you never need to ask that question again. You might learn that you are more fulfilled by asking “How will others benefit from this?” You might learn to like yourself. You might learn not to hate women. You might learn not to rely on violence to give you an erection. And your teddy bear might be able to watch you at all times because he would be proud of the man you have finally become.
How not to talk about rape culture
Tags: abuse, apologize, CBC, consent, forgiveness, guilty, injustice, Jian Ghomeshi, justice, predator, rape, salvation, victim
Comments
Powered by Facebook Comments