Have A (Sexy) Feminist Christmas!

A Feminist Christmas Poem

'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the old flat
Not a creature was stirring, not even a cat
The shoes were all lined on the mat by the door
In hopes that snow would not melt on the floor

The feminist was nestled all snug in her bed
while visions of vibrators vibrated in her head
And boys in their boxers and boys in their briefs
Just had some "me-time" into their kerchiefs

When out on the street there arose such a clatter
The feminist sprung from her bed to see what was the matter
Away to the front door she flew with her sash
(To close her nightgown so she wouldn't flash)

The moon on the boob of the new-fallen snow
Gave the lustre of mid-day to the people below
When, what to her wondering eyes should appear
But a young couple, doin' it in the rear!

With the half-naked guy so lively and quick
She knew in a moment it would be over in a lick
More rapid than eagles his thrusts they came
And he whistled, and shouted, and yelled out her name;

"Oh Brenda, wait Brittany? No, Tiffany...or Tia?
Is it Tori? Or Laurie? Not Laura...it's Leah!"
To the top of the porch, leaned up on the wall
The feminist dashed away, dashed away, dashed down the hall

As poles help with the pitching of a tent
so too did this young woman give consent
and on down the hallway the feminist flew
Til she ran into a housemate or two

And then, in a twinkling, she heard on the roof
the unmistakable sound of a "woof"
As she drew to her door and turned around
the couple from apartment 4 fell down the stairs with a bound

He dressed all in latex, from his head to his toes
She wearing nothing but some fishnet panty hose
A bundle of toys he had flung on his hip
While in her two hands she cradled a whip

His eyes - how they shifted! His face all blushed!
His cheeks were like roses, his face was so flushed
His droll little mouth was about to apologize
When his lady friend silenced him with her eyes

The stump of the whip he held tight in his mouth
And he kept his submissive eyes trained south
She said "sorry for this, I mean - hell we
were just going to get some more lubricating jelly"

Then she led him to their door by his tiny rhinestone collar
It was easy to see which one of them was the brawler
But a wink of his eye and a twist of his head
Soon gave her to know she had nothing to dread

He spoke not a word, but went straight inside
And his lady friend loudly tanned his hide
Tonight the feminist had seen just two kids of femme
It takes all kinds, even BDSM

She sprang to her bed, turned on by the night
and got herself off, as is her right
And, she thought, as she slowly drifted away
"Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good lay!"

14 Women Died - PAY ATTENTION TO THAT

On this day 24 years ago, Marc Lepine entered Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal and found a classroom of 60 engineering students. At gunpoint, he ordered the men to leave the classroom while the 9 women in the class were asked to line up against the wall. Later, the men would say they were confused, hesitant - but they all left. The women were shot. Six were killed instantly and three were injured. Lepine then left the classroom and continued to seek out female students throughout the school, entering classrooms, administration offices and the cafeteria and firing on every woman he saw. At one point a wounded woman asked for help. He stabbed her to death.

Before he took his own life he had murdered 14 women and injured several more.

In the wake of this massacre, the press labeled Lepine a sick man and said that it was coincidence that only women were killed. They said that he, too, was a victim of society's cruelty. When his suicide note was later leaked anonymously to Francine Pelletier, a reporter whose name was found on a hit-list in Lepine's pocket, it showed that he was specifically targeting women he viewed as feminists, stating that they had ruined his life. Lepine was denied entry to the school and determined that if the school - which traditionally had only enrolled men - hadn't had female students, he would have been granted admission. For the record, this is untrue. He did not meet the school's enrollment standards.

On this day we remember:

Genevieve Bergeron

Helene Colgan

Nathalie Croteau

Barbara Daigneault

Anne-Marie Edward

Maud Haviernick

Maryse Laganiere

Maryse Leclair

Anne-Marie Lemay

Sonia Pelletier

Michele Richard

Annie St-Arneault

Annie Turcotte

Barbara Klucznik-Widajewicz

I know most of you scrolled through that list. I know it seems like just a bunch of names. But it is so much more. Each of those names is a woman who would be an engineer today. They would be mothers and wives. Their parents would be grandparents now. They would have never heard of Marc Lepine. Instead, there are childless parents. There is cold stone where there should be warm skin. There is a man today who is married to a different woman, or who never married at all because the woman he was meant to be with was killed December 6th, 1989. People compare death to snuffing out a candle, but that's not true. A candle can be reignited. We lost those women forever, and with their deaths the face of Canadian feminism changed.

Here's why this is still relevant.

For a heartbeat in Canadian history, people thought about taking a step back. They thought, why put our women's lives at risk by pushing them into uncharted territory? If those 14 women were never in an engineering school, they'd still be alive. Maybe we should stop progressing towards this mythical concept of equality. Maybe we should focus on sheltering women from these harsh realities. Maybe we don't need female engineers. Maybe...

And then the Canadian heart, strong as always, beat on. As a collective we realized that that line of thinking is toxic. It's repulsive. One man's delusional actions should not halt the progress that we've made as a society. We must fight back! Not with guns, not with knives (the weapons of choice for Lepine) but with female engineers! Female politicians! Female doctors and lawyers and welders and electricians! With equality! With rights! What a beautiful thing.  As feminist Andrea Dworkin said "It is incumbent upon each of us to be the woman that Marc Lepine wanted to kill. We must live with this honour, this courage. We must drive out fear. We must hold on. We must create. We must resist."

Here's why I wrote this post. Because I have a point to drive home, and it is this: If you, like me, are glad to hear of the progress we've made in spite of Lepine's wishes, if you felt inspired by Dworkin's words, if you are happy that we have female engineers today, then why do we ask women to stay home at night, or not drink as much, or dress more conservatively to avoid sexual assault? In the circumstances of the Montreal Massacre, Canada could have withdrawn all female students. But we didn't. We pushed on, because we knew that it was not feminism but Lepine's anti-feminism that was at fault. We knew not to blame the victims simply for being in a classroom learning about a male-dominated field. We knew that they were innocent, and Lepine was guilty. Why then, when it is sexual assault do we ask what the woman could have done to prevent it?

We must, as a culture, as a community, acknowledge whole-heartedly that the victim is innocent and the aggressor is guilty. Should women deny their freedoms so that they avoid cruel men? If we always let the cruelty of the world dictate our actions, we would not be mourning the loss of the great Nelson Mandela, who believed in love over hatred. We would not celebrate Rosa Parks, who was tired in every sense of the word. We would have a history that would include Adolph Hitler's victory and Nellie McClung's defeat. But we didn't tolerate that. Let's be a culture that looks back in 50 years at the way we handled discussions on sexual assault and be proud. Don't settle. Don't accept. Do what Dworkin insisted upon. I will say it again:

"It is incumbent upon each of us to be the woman that Marc Lepine wanted to kill. We must live with this honour, this courage. We must drive out fear. We must hold on. We must create. We must resist."