A primary school teacher asks her students if they have ever been bullied online. A 10 or 11 year old girl raises her hand. “He called me…” she said, grimacing. She doesn’t dare utter the words. “You can tell us,” reassures her teacher. “Host of a whore,” she finally added.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
She didn’t know him, the boy who insulted her. A girl of 10 or 11, who is called a whore. Her teacher, who may be 15 years older, experienced much the same thing when she was a university student. In addition to being harassed and receiving threats.
The scene is taken from the disturbing documentary I salute you bitch by Léa Clermont-Dion and Guylaine Maroist, which is to be released on Friday. Among the four main women presented to us by the documentary filmmakers, there is this primary school teacher from Quebec as well as a young French actress, who says she has stopped counting the number of misogynistic insults she received on her YouTube channel… after 40 000.
The other two women are politicians who have been targeted by far-right groups. White supremacists have called for the lynching of Kiah Morris, an African-American from Vermont, elected to Congress. They knocked on her house in the middle of the night, tried to break into it, called her all the names on social networks (and not just the one that starts with the letter N).
PHOTO JOHN TULLY, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
Kiah Morris, elected to the Vermont General Assembly
Laura Boldrini, a former spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, was speaker of the Chamber of Deputies in Italy when far-right politician Matteo Salvini compared her to a blow-up doll. The mayor of the town of Savona, in Liguria, wished on his Facebook page that she would be raped by migrants.
Under his presidency, the Italian Chamber of Deputies passed a law against cyberbullying of minors. In the documentary, we see her presenting the wing of the Chamber of Deputies where she had installed two mirrors under which we find the inscriptions “president” and “prime minister”, so that young girls, she says, can project in those positions that have never been occupied by women in Italy.
I saw these scenes of I salute you bitch and I wondered, in light of the recent death threats aimed at Liberal MP Marwah Rizqy, who is eight months pregnant, what young Quebec girl today would want to enter politics as an adult.
10-year-old girls are called whores on the web. Students are harassed to the point of fearing for their safety. With us. Imagine those who do a public job!
We’ve been talking about it more for a few days because Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland was intimidated by a man in Alberta, because the one who threatened Marwah Rizqy was released, because the documentary by Léa Clermont-Dion and Guylaine Maroist was introduced to journalists.
The phenomenon, of course, is not new. We attack women, reducing them to their bodies or their sexuality, with degrading, sexist and misogynistic comments, since forever. Surprisingly, many seem to be taken aback every time the media talks about cyberbullying against women. However, email was democratized a quarter of a century ago.
Why do we fall from the clouds? Because misogynistic slurs are constantly trivialized, especially by men who fail to grasp the depth of the chasm that separates them from women. I measure it every time I hear a man claim that insults are now the price to pay for speaking in public. It’s wrong. The price is not the same for men and women.
I have been a columnist for over 20 years. Almost every day, on social networks or on the web, I receive insults. Some make me laugh, others not so much. I received my share of threats, I had to complain to the police.
But the insults that I receive are a jet of water compared to the torrent of hatred that pours daily on my sisters. For a racialized politician like Marwah Rizqy or Kiah Morris, it’s even worse.
To say it’s the same for men and women is to wear blinders and deny the reality. Few men are threatened with rape. Few men are afraid to walk down the street, even after being insulted. Few white men are constantly being told to go back to where they came from.
In 2016, British MP Jo Cox was murdered by a white supremacist. The extreme right, which we too often refuse to name in Quebec, exists. And not just on the web. Let’s not wait until it’s too late to react.