Barbara Kay: How misandry scuttled Steven Galloway’s career

The defamation trial of University of British Columbia denizens who alleged or publicly supported others’ allegations of rape against former UBC creative writing department head Steven Galloway continues rivetingly apace. Between the reports of columnists Jamie Sarkonak and Amy Hamm, National Post readers have been kept fully informed of the 10-year-long vendetta that laid waste to this award-winning Canadian artist’s career, creativity and mental health.

The alleged rape victim, A.B., withdrew from participation in the trial, dropping her defences of both “truth” and “fair comment.” Of the many others Galloway named in his 2018 defamation claim, all but four settled out of court and many issued public apologies.

The longest and most interesting apology was penned by Chelsea Rooney, a former student and protégée of the plaintiff, and arguably the most effective supporter of the rape allegations. Her statement is therefore worth a close reading for the light it throws on the belief system that protected Rooney over the course of years from any soul-searching about her actions. That belief system has a familiar name: feminism.

Rooney admits she took up her activism against Galloway “with an assumption he had committed the offenses,” and that her “one-sided understanding” had shaped her participation in the process. Her “misguided” approach to the “believe women” movement, she writes, arose from her position “that an allegation was all that a person should require to come to the conclusion that an accused person was guilty.” Rooney ascribes her bias to the belief that the case was about “broader issues” like “the protection of those who come forward with allegations of sexual violence.”

I don’t question the sincerity of Rooney’s apology. Being mugged by consequential reality can have a clarifying effect. But there are millions of potential Chelsea Rooneys still out there, not only unaware of the harm they may be doing by putting “broader issues” before the right to due process of half the human race, but also assuming that they hold the moral high ground in so doing.

A critic of feminism, Wendy Kraminer, wrote, sarcastically, in a 1993 Atlantic essay: “It is a primary article of faith among many feminists that women don’t lie about rape, ever; they lack the dishonesty gene.” The “believe women” movement peaked between 2013 and 2017, when North American universities were assumed to be awash in a “rape culture” that failed to stand up to objective scrutiny. It was smack in the middle of that period that Galloway’s troubles began.

Movements coalesce around enemies. As American social critic Eric Hoffer noted, mass movements can rise and spread without a belief in God, but never without a belief in a devil. For feminism, the (theory of) patriarchy is that devil, the original sin of all (white heterosexual) men. Feminism began as a demand for equality of rights, but morphed into a Marxist template of the sexes as warring classes. In this war, such legal niceties as due process for men may in good conscience be subordinated to social justice for women. Such a belief also has a name: misandry.

Misandry is a bloodless term for hatred of men — real hatred, the kind that, if directed against any other visible group, would be called out as a hate crime. So Rooney’s former indifference to Galloway’s protestation of innocence is understandable because, born in 1983, she has been steeped in feminism’s normalization of misandry for much of her life.

In 2018, academic Suzanna Danuta Walters wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post titled, “Why can’t we hate men?” in which she concluded, addressing men who claim to be women’s allies, “if you really are #WithUs and would like us to not hate you for all the millennia of woe you have produced and benefited from, start with this: Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down. Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. We got this. And please know that your crocodile tears won’t be wiped away by us anymore. We have every right to hate you. You have done us wrong. #BecausePatriarchy.”

Walters is an academic ideologue, so readers might consider it fair comment to accuse me of choosing a fringe feminist’s contempt for men to bolster my own anti-feminist bias (although such critics would then have to explain how it was that a mainstream newspaper thought nothing of publishing her screed with a title they would never dream of applying to any other identifiable group). But previous radical feminists in positions of influence had already moved the Overton window so far leftward in normalizing contempt for males in everyday life that Walters’ overt misandry was, far from fringe, already standard issue in popular culture.

In 2003-4, for example, ordinary non-ideological consumers proved themselves guilty, purely by cultural osmosis, of casual misandry when they purchased a popular T-shirt for their daughters, sporting the catchphrase: “Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them!“ accompanied by a cartoon of a boy running from a hail of rocks aimed at his head.

Stores stopped selling them when they were bombarded by thousands of emails and phone calls, largely from listeners to radio host Glenn Sacks, who was himself inspired to make an issue of it by his 11-year old son’s question, “Dad, why are they always saying things like that about boys?”

The “broader issue” reflected in that innocent child’s question is a pernicious, male-dehumanizing ideology that permitted Steven Galloway’s band of campus-insulated stalkers to “throw rocks” at him for years and years and years.

National Post

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X: @BarbaraRkay