Spare Us the White Ribbon Attack

By popular demand (no, really), I am reprinting here a column I wrote some years ago for good old Report newsmagazine. Note that it was written back on December 6, 2001:


It was damned embarrassing. Just inside the door of my church, someone tried to pin a white ribbon to my coat. I grabbed it, thanked her, and jammed it in my pocket.

I know the woman; a good woman. She said it was against pornography. I'm as against pornography as the next red-blooded Canadian male. But I don't wear white ribbons.

I checked the Internet to see what a white ribbon might commit me to these days. Apparently, any of a dozen things, from protesting "gay teen suicide" to supporting those “whose life has been touched by a nonprofit organization."

That last seems most plausible. White ribbons witness to a lack of imagination in nonprofit fundraising. Still, in Canada and elsewhere, white ribbons in December are most often in remembrance of the "Montreal massacre," the shooting by Marc Lepine on December 6, 1989 of 14 woman at l'Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal.

I would gladly wear a ribbon in their memory. As I would in memory of those killed more recently by Karla Homolka and Paul Bernardo, or the 2,395 who died at Pearl Harbor, their anniversary this same week. Or the 2,000 killed in the Halifax Explosion, their anniversary on this same date. Or the 26 killed in Israel by suicide bombers as I write. But this one mass murder is singled out from others. Why?

For a wider symbolism. The white ribbon represents "men's violence against women." It is "a personal pledge never to commit, condone, nor remain silent about violence against women."

I am against men's violence against women. As I am against men's violence against men, women's against women, and women's against men. But again we seem to be selective: is other violence okay? Worse, we make all men guilty of Lepine's crime.

Was he other than a lone gunman? Am I also responsible for Vlad the Impaler and Sweeney Todd? Is this not blood guilt? Is it different from asking all Jews to wear gabardine, because some Jew supposedly killed someone once?

"We recognize," the white ribbon pledge explains "that most violence among adults is committed by men." This is statistically true of criminal convictions. Most stereotypes are true, as far as they go. But if men are thus more violent than women, African-Canadians are statistically more violent than whites; First Nations more violent than Europeans; the poor more violent than the rich. Should Cree be asked to wear ribbons to protest their violent nature, or blacks to protest violence against whites? It seems tasteless. Is it morally worse to ask women to wear ribbons to protest female vanity, or in pledge not to gossip?

Is it, indeed, even a fair generalization? In a recent New York Times, Maureen Dowd writes: "If the U.S. can bomb a path to victory for the Northern Alliance, we can lay down some terms for what women can attain in the new Afghanistan. And if the U.S. can go to war to protect Saudi Arabia and liberate Kuwait, we can move up the bar a notch for women there, too. So why on earth don't we?"

Why not, but for the violence of the thing?

All God’s children want peace; but are women more apt than men to put peace before justice? I see no evidence. Mad Albright was reputedly the hawk in Clinton's administration, Colin Powell the dove, on Bosnia. "What's the point of having an army," Albright is reported saying, "if you don't use it?" And so it goes: have women been less forthright in demanding an end to slavery, or the drug trade? Are they more pacifist, or merely accustomed to men doing the heavy lifting?

Kipling had it pegged, speaking as always, love or hate him, for the working class: "It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Chuck him out, the brute!' But it's 'Saviour of 'is country' when the guns begin to shoot." At least, Tommy was once given that much credit.

Women have not often held political power. But as a group, they have not distinguished themselves for non-violence: Margaret Thatcher, Golda Meir, Indira Gandhi, Bloody Mary, Elizabeth I, Catherine the Great, Mrs. Bandaranaike, all warred tolerably well. Even little Dominica, under Mary Eugenia Charles, managed to invade neighboring Grenada. Probably nobody has done the math, but I doubt women leaders would come out on the demure, sweet end.

On the home front, we have, no doubt fortunately, forgotten the old stereotype of the angry wife waiting with her rolling pin. But our new stereotype, of male batterer and female victim, is no nobler. And probably no closer to the truth. Several studies suggest that, when the definition of abuse is the same for both sexes, women give as good as they get, perhaps a bit better.

Nor does one score points with hardcore feminists for wearing the white ribbon. No indeed. The Vancouver Rape Relief & Women's Shelter warns it is an "appropriation" of a symbol that only women should wear, to protest "men's daily war against them." The white ribbon campaign, they complain, is "accountable to no one but … the media and international bodies such as the UN." (It should be subject instead to "national or regional coalitions of feminists.") Worse, the white ribbon supports that ugly pretense "officially defined as 'love,'" and distorts the "perception of a war."

Doesn't sound pacifist to me.