Photo by Norman Wong

Lowell’s bold, new vision for a women- and girl-friendly pop future

POP SINGER-SONGWRITER Lowell has recently been experiencing a recurring dream in which she’s robbing a bank, then driving away on a motorbike with her lesbian lover. Given the surreal imagery in the videos for her songs “The Bells” and “Cloud 69,” it’s easy to imagine visuals from her dream appearing in a future musical performance.

Since the September 2014 release of her album We Loved Her Dearly (released on Toronto indie label Arts & Crafts Productions, which also put out her 2014 five-song EP, I Killed Sara V.), Lowell (born Elizabeth Lowell Boland) has been in a state that she describes as both euphoric and cinematic, which is driving the creation of her new songs. “I can do anything,” she says.

At only 21 years old, the Calgary native was invited to London by a producer impressed by her demo tape. While there, she wrote songs for both herself and for pop groups like the Backstreet Boys—she received a co-writing credit for the bonus track “Take Care” on the band’s 2013 album In a World Like This. As a woman, Lowell knew she would have to work harder at getting through the door, and fought to make sure her ideas weren’t shut down. The struggle only ignited her competitive nature. While she describes herself as a control freak, she is certainly not ashamed— this kind of forceful attitude has gotten her this far.

Now, at 23, she is back in Canada, living in Toronto, and is in a position where she can choose who she works with. In a male-dominated industry, Lowell knows that it is expected for a female artist to walk in the room and have less interest, or less talent, to write songs. That said, she believes that while the bar has been set higher for women in music, more female pop artists are now propping each other up as opposed to being pitted against each other.

What sets Lowell apart is that her songs are all written with women in mind, touching on topics such as gender equality, abuse, and abortion. “There’s something more satisfying in writing to a girl,” she says. She is not inhibited when it comes to sex, or writing about it, but doesn’t do it to push the envelope: she’s just being honest. “We’re not in the 1800s, where women have to blush and guys can be dogs,” she says, admitting that people don’t always know how to receive a woman who talks openly about sex, and that others can mistake this for flirting. “Everyone I meet thinks I want to have sex with them,” she laughs. One day, she hopes, it will be commonplace in music for girls to write to girls and boys to write to boys, and it won’t be seen as so taboo.

Until then, we have Lowell writing about not worrying about the world around you, like in her song “I Love You Money,” or about sexual fantasies in “Cloud 69,” where she sings, “Oh my god, I think I need a girlfriend.”

“I like to have a purpose with my music,” Lowell says. “But sometimes I like to just write a stupid song.”

CHELSEA VOWEL, MOLLY SWAIN, AND SOME DALEKS AT COMICCON | Photo courtesy Métis in Space

Métis in Space is a hilariously smart take down of Indigenous stereotypes in popular science-fiction

LAST SUMMER, friends Molly Swain and Chelsea Vowel were having a rough time, and looking for an excuse to spend more time together. Swain and Vowel, who are both Métis and live in Montreal, came up with a solution to fix their woes: create a podcast where they could “nerd out,” drink red wine, and talk about science fiction.

Swain and Vowel created Métis in Space, a bi-weekly podcast that reviews and critiques movies and television featuring Indigenous tropes and themes. It took the friends three days to come up with the podcast, record their first episode, and upload it to SoundCloud.

“When Molly and I hang out, we’re hilarious. I thought that the rest of the world should hear that,” says Vowel. “We expected our entire audience to be our moms, and then our moms were not interested.”

Indian and Cowboy, an independent network that creates, produces, and publishes Indigenous media projects across multiple platforms, hosts Métis in Space. Swain says the network is a “fabulous, fabulous idea” in how it allows Indigenous people to build relationships and communicate with each other in new ways.

With episodes gaining thousands of listens on Indian and Cowboy, SoundCloud, and iTunes, Métis in Space frankly, and often hilariously, analyzes shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, and Supernatural, picking out common Indigenous representations that surface in mainstream pop culture. Vowel, who has been an avid fan of sci-fi since she was young, says she knew the tropes had always been there.

Recording Métis in Space, however, forces the friends to actively look for stereotypes. They’ve found that in science fiction, Indigenous people are often associated with mystic flutes and drum music, or the ability to turn into an animal.

Métis in Space recognizes that sci-fi creators are predominantly white men, who “explore concepts and anxieties related to colonialism in order to reassure themselves,” Swain says. Vowel adds she can’t “unsee” a pattern in science fiction that is often representative of colonial fears: the storylines often feature Indigenous people and societies who are “wiped out” or about to be erased.

“People don’t expect Indigenous people to be interested in the future,” Swain says. “That’s partially because nobody expects Indigenous people to have a future, which is what colonialism is.”

According to the hosts, Métis in Space listeners cite the “Ask a môniyâw (white man)” segment as their favourite part of the podcast, in which Swain and Vowel ask a stereotypical “white man” a question. Vowel’s husband, to his chagrin, participates in the segment by playing the môniyâw. After uploading episodes to SoundCloud, Métis in Space started receiving earnest requests from several men who wanted to be the guest môniyâw.

Métis in Space also actively confronts sci-fi creators. In Episode 5, they recorded a live-report podcast from the 2014 Montreal Comiccon. Knowing that Indigenous people are so often a part of science fiction, Swain and Vowel expected guests at the pop-culture fan convention to have some knowledge of Indigenous history, but they were surprised to find that wasn’t case. On top of that, there were vendors selling products with racist or inaccurate portrayals of Indigenous people.

“They had no consciousness. It was completely divorced from the fact that there are real Indigenous people out there,” Swain says. “It wasn’t only that we were confronting them about their lack of knowledge, but I think to a certain extent, we were almost confronting them with our existence.”

Despite the problems in science fiction, Swain and Vowel are still huge fans of the genre. For the second season, the hosts plan to uncover new ground by exploring what an Indigenous future look like 300 years from now.

“I think science fiction is almost inherently Indigenous because it is so much about world building and future building and telling stories in a way that points to where we want to go, or explores questions of, if this were to happen, how would we deal with it?” Swain says. “We’re going to reclaim ourselves from science fiction in order to create science fiction.”

Illustration by Matt Daley

Where are the women of Wikipedia?

Author update: When this column was filed, the final decisions regarding Gamergate edits and sanctions weren’t official. Ultimately, it didn’t end up being quite what I wrote here—and it was absolutely more reaching—but effectively, I don’t think it was much better. Their response to the coverage these events received can be read here. I’d also recommend reading Mark Bernstein’s series of posts about Wikipedia and GamerGate (and this follow up), as well as coverage from The Guardian, The Verge, and other sources.

THERE ARE OBJECTIVE TRUTHS in the universe, but they are few and far between. For everything else, we have Wikipedia.[1]

Wikipedia has become the de facto source for information. Stephen Colbert riffed on this idea for years with his “Truthiness” bit.[2] It was funny because it was true. We used to look to Encyclopedia Britannica and back issues of National Geographic to write grade-school essays on Mt. Vesuvius or the human circulatory system, but now we get all the information we need from Wikipedia, and we can reasonably assume that it’s the truth.

The promise of the future is finally realized! Except there’s a problem: women don’t contribute to Wikipedia. They make up less than 15 percent of contributors and as little as 8.5 percent of editors. History might be written by the winner, but truth, it seems, is mostly written by men.

So how does gender disparity manifest inside the world’s largest encyclopedia? After all, isn’t truth absolute?[3]

As a general rule, there are fewer articles about women and the articles that do exist are, on average, much shorter. Topics that might be of more interest to women are also less extensively covered. A few years ago an editor tried to clean up the site’s list of “American novelists” by removing all the women and relegating them to a new list called “American women novelists.”[4] On Wikipedia, as in so many other places, the default is straight and white and very, very male.

To combat gender disparity on the site, Wikipedia created a Gender Gap Task Force, with the goal of getting female participation up to 25 percent. One of its tactics is to hold “edit-a-thons” encouraging women to get involved. These have had limited success since Wikipedia is notoriously difficult for (and even hostile to) newcomers. After a dispute related to the Task Force last year, the Wikipedia Arbitration Committee—a volunteer group that’s basically the site’s highest court[5]—banned a prolific female editor after she was accused of promoting an anti-male agenda. The men she was arguing with were also sanctioned: they were told they couldn’t use abusive language anymore.

In the wake of last year’s Gamergate controversy—the most modern of culture wars and, no matter what its supporters say, a debate that’s explicitly vitriolic toward women—Wikipedia became a battleground with people on both sides working to create ostensibly objective articles while fundamentally disagreeing on what the objective facts were. This is known as an “edit war” and they happen all the time,[6] usually resulting in an article lockdown or sanctions against specific contributors/editors. In this case, it was five feminists and Gamergate critics who were banned from making further edits, leaving the pro-Gamergaters free to enshrine their version of events as truth on Wikipedia’s pages.

It would be laughably ironic if it weren’t so ironically tragic.

There is endless speculation on how we got here. Wikipedia has been said to foster a toxic culture with too much bureaucracy[7] to facilitate internal change. And there are more than few accusations of aggressive misogyny. But the female participation rate of 13 percent is only slightly behind the overall rate of 15 percent in other “public thought-leadership forums.”[8] This isn’t a Wikipedia problem, it’s just a problem. Why are women underrepresented anywhere? It’s a complex question and while we’ve gotten better at identifying the problem, we don’t seem any closer to solving it.

Wikipedia’s gender gap has a detrimental effect on its content[9]. But while Wikipedia didn’t create systemic sexism, it’s absolutely contributing to its continuation. More than that, it has a detrimental effect on society and is in and of itself both an impediment to and a sign of sexism.

If owning truth (dubious as it may be) isn’t proof of male privilege, I don’t know what is.

[1] And Google.
[2] Truthiness has its own Wikipedia article.
[3] Nope.
[4] These women were eventually returned to the primary list.
5] It’s a group, unshockingly, made up primarily of men.
[6] Previous edit wars of substance include articles related to the Israel/Palestine conflict, Pluto’s ever-changing planetary status, and whether or not Darth Vader and Anakin Skywalker should be two entries or one.
[7] “Kafkaesque” is a word that’s been repeatedly used.
[8] The term “public thought-leadership” comes from the New York-based OpEd Project.
[9] I know this is true because I copied that sentence entirely from Wikipedia.

Illustration by Dave Donald

Media loves celebrity redemption stories—if you’re a man

Lindsay Lohan’s 2015 Super Bowl ad for car insurance company Esurance generated more pre-game controversy than a million Deflategates. Admittedly, Lohan’s had issues with hitting people and things with her car, as well as with remembering to bring a valid driver’s licence, and not cocaine, to her next road trip. But the internet reacted like Lohan had travelled to the home of every Esurance customer, made them watch I Know Who Killed Me, raised their insurance rates, and then killed their entire family. Comments also turned to Lohan’s appearance (haggard, botoxed, photoshopped on Instagram) and her mental health (crazy, unstable, photoshopped on Instagram). The Lohanaissance failed—instead she was responsible for Esurance’s downfall. You’re welcome, Allstate.

It would be much easier for Lohan if she were a man. If you’re a male celebrity we’re quick to forget and forgive your bad deeds. Post train wreck, the careers of male celebrities recover and they’re free to become the face of auto insurance—or whatever else they want—for years to come.

Male celebrities have always had success rehabilitating their images. Celebrity Damage Control profiles celebrities as they attempt to get their lives, brand, and earning potential back after potential career killers like assaulting women, cheating on women, and being Mickey Rourke. The show’s episode guide is a reminder of how rarely celebrity redemption stories cast a female lead. Sean Penn, Tiger Woods and Michael Vick are among the males profiled; Martha Stewart is the only woman to appear in the first eight episodes.

The media has a short attention span when it comes to punishing male celebrities. Take successful humanitarian image makeover recipient Sean Penn. Before he became an Ambassador in Haiti, won countless awards, and single-handedly saved every Hurricane Katrina survivor, Penn was charged with assaulting his first wife Madonna, after tying her to a chair and beating her for nine hours. Good luck, Charlize Theron!

The media rarely discusses Penn’s violence. When they do he’s described as “difficult” or as a “reformed bad boy.” The focus is on his art; not his infidelity, his violent past or—thank god—Shanghai Surprise. The reformed bad boy image is certainly not exclusive to Penn. We see it repeatedly, most recently in December when Mark Wahlberg applied for an official pardon for racist violent crimes committed when he was teenager. These crimes are rarely mentioned when discussing Wahlberg’s acting work, and even when they are, they’re often attributed to Marky Mark. This is called the Eminem clause and enables you to attribute all the behaviour you don’t want to claim responsibility for to an alter ego. Enter stage left, Slim Shady.

Male celebrity entitlement came closer to home when comedian Bill Cosby—accused of drugging and raping 24 women at last count—performed a three-night Ontario tour in January. Despite protests and hecklers, audiences were not deterred, choosing instead to focus on pudding pops and The Cosby Show. Audience members even jumped to Cosby’s defence yelling “we love you Bill” when protestors threatened to derail the show.

It’s certainly easier to condemn a celebrity when you don’t like their work. It’s a lot harder when it’s an artist you like. The media is more than happy to accept and promote Bill Murray’s image as a likeable, fun guy—the karaoke crasher everybody loves to love. I recently discovered Murray was on the list of male celebrities accused of violence toward women, something rarely mentioned when the media discuss the actor. Among many things, Murray’s ex-wife accused him of assault and uttering death threats. As a big fan, Murray could fart the alphabet into a travel mug and I would be running for my wallet to shower him with cash and old ATM receipts.

I’m not alone in this. When news broke of Murray’s past, internet commenters rushed to his defence. Murray’s real crime seemed to be his responsibility for Ghostbusters 3 never happening, which is apparently everything that is wrong in the world (and the feminist reboot will suck because the ladies’ periods will repel the ghosts rendering bustin’ impossible).

Compare the media’s treatment of Penn or Murray, with treatment of Lohan. Her every bad deed, every bad performance, every bad choice is exhaustively chronicled, never to be forgotten. In the court of public opinion there is no disconnect between Lohan the actress and Lohan the trainwreck. She could be as likeable as Murray, giving impromptu bachelor party speeches till the end of time, but the media will never let us forget every DUI she has ever had.

Winona Ryder never beat Madonna with a baseball but, but in 2001 she was arrested for shoplifting. The media has never let her career recover—even though Saks Fifth Avenue loss prevention was arguably the only victim. It was what everybody wanted to talk about when she was promoting her new film at this year’s Sundance. Or, they focused on how great Ryder was in 1988’s Beetlejuice, a movie she made when she was 17—just as critics often talk about how great Lohan was in Mean Girls. The media keeps the actresses stuck in a pre-trainwreck time of innocence, forever reminding us of that time when they were young, successful, and had it all. The media will not allow them to make mistakes, to recover from them or to have a second act. They had their chance and they blew it. Not even getting Murray to commit to Ghostbusters 3 could redeem them.

Illustration by Alisha Davidson

Because there’s more power in crowd-based, grassroots action—that’s why. Soraya Roberts challenges the cult of feminist celebrity

IF A FEMINIST FELLS CANADA’S PATRIARCHY and the media isn’t around to hear it, does it make a sound? Last year, Toronto Star columnist Heather Mallick was lambasted online for using the headline “Why Can’t Canada Build a Feminist?” to promote How to Build a Girl, the new book by renowned British feminist Caitlin Moran. A few days later, Maclean’s seemed to prove her point by publishing a cover story on the new faces of feminism—Malala Yousafzai, Tavi Gevinson, Emma Watson—most of which belonged to celebrities. The article’s sole Canadian, feminist video game critic Anita Sarkeesian, actually lives in the U.S. and only recently became a household name in the wake of Gamergate.

Though the Star changed its headline to “Why Can’t Canada Build a Famous Feminist?” Mallick’s original message stuck. Though fame underscored it, the takeaway seemed to be the mainstream invisibility of Canada’s feminists. What Mallick didn’t realize—unsurprisingly in an era in which feminism has been celebrified to the point that its non-celebrities are eclipsed—was that their invisibility is integral to their work. Canada’s feminists are invisible precisely because being visible limits what they can represent. And what the country’s current crop of feminists represents is everybody—you can’t be a so-called “somebody” and everybody else all at once.

“If there’s one trend I’m seeing among feminist activists, it’s that we generally do not want to be ‘the voice of our generation’ because one truth that we, as a movement, are plodding toward, is that whenever there is a woman considered the voice of her generation of feminists, she is generally white, generally middle or upper middle class, generally cis, often straight or straight-presenting,” says Stephanie Guthrie, founder of Women in Toronto Politics. “The reality is that her perspective will inevitably have blind spots as a result of those privileges.”

Canadian-based feminist organizations such as SlutWalk are conceived in crowd form. Even more recent campaigns, such as #AmINext, which raises awareness of murdered aboriginal women, only give the semblance of individuality—they are defined by a chorus. But dispersing Canada’s feminist mandate across the population—to all genders, races and age groups—can imply a dilution of the movement’s original intention. “I think sometimes the fact that the movement is generally more inclusive and more sex-positive than in the past can sometimes make second-wavers feel like we’ve gone ‘soft,’” says Anne Thériault, a feminist blogger from Toronto.

But today’s feminists aren’t soft—far from it.

A number of the Canadians who took issue with Mallick’s column argued that our country’s feminists are too busy working to vie for her attention. This is particularly true in Canada where, as feminist icon Lee Lakeman notes, funding is not as developed as it is in the U.S. “The swing to the right since 1995 has wiped out the last generation of more nationally- based women’s organizations,” she says, “and [the government] has not been forced to allow any new global waves to form.” Since conservative leader Stephen Harper came to power in 2006, the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Canada’s largest national feminist organization, closed due to lack of funding (it now operates as an NGO). Canada’s Feminist Alliance for International Action and the Canadian Research Institute for the Advancement of Women also rely on donations. According to Lakeman, Canada’s desperation for funds causes its feminists to be “swamped” and “hidden from each other” at the grassroots level.

Canadian feminists are largely only visible to the people they help. They spend their days working directly with victims of domestic abuse, sexual assault, and various other forms of exigent exploitation—they are too preoccupied with the work to actually promote it. “They’re not celebrities, they’re not writers, they’re not famous people,” says Meghan Murphy, founder of the most-read feminist blog in Canada, Feminist Current. “That’s not the point of the work they’re doing.”

And their biggest workload comes in the form of Indigenous women’s rights. According to Statistics Canada, aboriginal women are three times more likely to face violence than non-aboriginal women, yet Harper slashed funding to the Sisters in Spirit initiative and the Aboriginal Healing Foundation and in August rejected a national inquiry into Canada’s murdered and missing aboriginal women, denying it was a “sociological phenomenon.” This compounds Canadian feminists’ invisibility—the fact that their biggest concern is women who are themselves invisible.

That these activists are still being ignored despite the increased awareness of feminism worldwide does not surprise Murphy. The issues they are addressing have been ignored for decades thanks to historical racism, not to mention abuse, addiction, and mental illness, all of which the government—and Canada as a whole—refuses to face. “The real issues of feminism are not very attractive issues,” Murphy says. “It’s not like Beyoncé.”

Canada does not have a Beyoncé. We don’t, in fact, have much of a celebrity culture in general—it’s not a natural fit for us to dress up feminism to make it more palatable or social media friendly even though that is what is currently being demanded of the movement. The internet has “democratized access to a platform,” says Guthrie. Authors of seminal feminist texts, such as Simone de Beauvoir and Gloria Steinem, the original thought leaders of feminism, have been replaced by bloggers, Tweeters, and YouTubers. “Increasingly,” Guthrie explains, “we are taking advantage of that access to a diversity of voices to listen, to learn, and to inform our activist approaches.”

But how do you get heard over the din? Increasingly individual feminists are branding themselves as distinct voices of the movement in order to stand out. It’s a culture that seems to agree less with Canadians than Americans, who come from a more individualistic society in which the self is favoured over the collective. “I don’t know that Canadian feminists would grow up thinking that they’re number one goal was to be Jessica Valenti or Gloria Steinem,” says Murphy. “Certainly when you start making feminism about personalities and individuals, it stops being representative of the work that’s being done.”

This skewed focus frustrates Cherry Smiley, a Thompson and Navajo Nations activist for Indigenous women and youth recipient of the 2013 Governor General’s Awards in Commemoration of the Persons Case. She thinks prioritizing individuals poses “a huge problem” for the movement. “I think my generation and younger have unfortunately embraced the idea of ‘feminisms’—that feminism can mean whatever you want it to be,” she says. “I think that idea has really watered-down feminism and has unfortunately embraced a very neoliberal ‘I’ as opposed to a collective ‘we,’ and it’s men and patriarchy that really benefit from these ‘me me me’ ideas.”

This misguided approach to feminism merely compounds the movement’s marginalisation by mainstream society, but that only makes Smiley work harder. “Feminism challenges patriarchy and colonialism, and it challenges racism and capitalism,” she says, “when we really begin ruffling feathers and pissing off the right people and truly challenging the status quo, that’s really when we’re on to something.” Hear that? That’s “we,” not “I.”

Illustration by Kris Noelle

Critics of social media say it’s nothing but white noise—but it can also amplify women’s voices

Antonia Zerbisias walks into the newsroom on what is her second last day before retirement. It’s early evening on October 30, 2014, and somewhere in between saying some of her last hellos and goodbyes to colleagues at One Yonge Street and attending to whatever final bits of business a columnist and writer has left after more than 25 years at the Toronto Star, she types out a tweet: “It was 1969 when, if you found you were the only girl in the rec room and no parents were home, it was your fault”

Period.

Then, “#BeenRapedNeverReported.” Send.

Minutes later, two more tweets, divulging memories that time couldn’t erase after 40 years.

“ … 1970: My friend’s friend from out of town ‘forgot his wallet’ in his hotel room …”

Period. “#BeenRapedNeverReported.” Send.

“ … 1974: A half-empty 747 to London. Traveling alone. Fell asleep…”

Period. “#BeenRapedNeverReported.” Send.

Hours before sending out these tweets, Zerbisias was messaging back and forth with longtime friend and Montreal Gazette justice reporter Sue Montgomery, together fuming over public reaction to the women who were then, for the first time, coming forward with their allegations of abuse against CBC’s former golden boy radio host, Jian Ghomeshi.

Zerbisias and Montgomery had watched, stunned, as the subsequent flood of questions on Twitter, Facebook, and the comment sections of online articles came in from coast-to-coast: Why didn’t the women report anything when it first happened? Why were they only coming out now?

The victim-blaming narrative infuriated both women, and Montgomery suggested they start a list with the names of women who had been raped but had never reported it—just to prove a point. She wanted to do something to “remove the fucking stigma” and get people to speak up and act up. Zerbisias agreed, suggesting they use social media to get their message out far and wide, landing on the hashtag: #BeenRapedNeverReported.

And so, at 2:55 p.m. she sent out her first tweet:

“#ibelievelucy #ibelievewomen And yes, I’ve been raped (more than once) and never reported it.”

Period. “#BeenRapedNeverReported.” Send.

“The rest is history as they say,” Zerbisias says with a laugh over the phone from her home in Toronto one evening in January. Three months after co-creating the hashtag that ignited a global conversation on why women don’t report rape, the describing word Zerbisias still uses over and over again is “overwhelmed.”

“I didn’t decide to start anything. It just happened. The time was right,” she says. “It seems to me that all we’ve been talking about on social media for the past two years is rape. That’s what focus of feminism is today. Much of the third wave, as it were, is about rape rage.”

“Social media is not just another way to connect feminist and activist voices—it amplifies our messages as well,” Jessica Valenti told Forbes magazine in 2012. Valenti is a columnist with the U.S Guardian and founder of Feministing, a feminist pop culture website, who, among other accolades, has been credited with bringing feminism online. Indeed, it seems today women’s voices are often heard loudest through our screens—a trend some are calling “hashtag feminism.” Although the term itself may be debatable, the phenomenon it points to is not: #Bringbackourgirls, #WhyIStayed, #WhyIleft, #YesAllWomen, #YouKnowHerName, and #BeenRapedNeverReported.

Odds are if you’re a Twitter user, or at all savvy to social media, you’ve come across these hashtags. Each was born out of public outcry in the wake of high-profile tragedies: The kidnapping of over 200 Nigerian girls by militant rebels Boko Haram; Janay Palmer’s decision to stand by hubby NFL running back Ray Rice after he knocked her unconscious in an elevator; the publication ban on Rehtaeh Parsons’ name; and the Elliot Rodger shooting rampage, in which six University of California, Santa Barbara students were killed. These hashtags were quickly taken up by millions around the world as outraged rallying cries for change—for women to raise their voices in unison and scream “enough is enough.”

Historically, feminists did this by marching and picket lines, staking out their causes with signs and speeches. Today many are turning their campaigning efforts toward the most public of public spheres: social media. But what’s the point of it all? When feminists grab their phones and type out an 140 character message, does it inspire positive change? Do these virtual mantras carry actual power?

Answering the questions surrounding the legitimacy of hashtag campaigns begins with a look back at the very roots of feminism, says Emily Lindin, founder of The UnSlut Project—a multimedia initiative working around cyberbullying and slut shaming. Social media most obviously lends itself to a spirit of solidarity between women, and speaks to the idea of a globalized sisterhood, hardly a new idea to the movement at all.

Lindin says the power of hashtag feminism lies not only in the content of a message, but the number of times that message is retweeted. Within the act of using a hashtag is a real sense of unity, or as Lindin so eloquently puts it: a way to “add your voice to a chorus.”

“It’s easy but impactful,” she explains to me one night in a phone call from California. “Feeling that you’re part of something, part of a movement; you’re not just feeling that way—you really become part of it.” Take the campaign she launched in the fall of 2014, #Okgirls. The hashtag originated from news that three high school girls from the city of Norman, Okla., alleged to have been raped by the same boy at their school, and, unfortunately to no one’s surprise, felt abandoned by the school and larger community once the word broke.

Lindin wanted her campaign to create solidarity for the three girls to connect with a globalized network of other sexual assault survivors—to reach out to the young women who had, unwillingly, opened themselves to bullying and potential triggers, just by being online. After all, as Lindin says, one of the hazards created by merging social media and feminism is the vulnerability of opening yourself to trolls, which at best means a slew of derogatory comments, slander, and hate speech. At its worst: death threats, which Lindin herself has experienced. “It works in the way that terrorism works,” she says. “If you speak out we attack you and we threaten you so just stop. Don’t speak up.”

Thinking of the Oklahoma girls, Lindin devised a plan. After contacting the mothers of the girls who had already began the hashtag #YesAllDaughters, Lindin created #Okgirls and asked people to use the hashtag to write direct messages of support and encouragement to the girls using Facebook and Twitter.

“For the #OKgirls: I was raped and then bullied in high school too. You are not alone. I stand with you. #survivor”

“#OKgirls: There is immutable, unmistakable power in your voices. Hear ours too: We believe you. It’s not your fault. Now, #NotOneMore.”

“#OKgirls: Your voices are strong, brave, clear. It’s okay to sometimes feel afraid, but know that there are so many in your corner now.”

Lindin then collected these, and hundreds of other similar tweets and curated them into a set of emails—partly to weed out the nasty comments, but also to allow the girls to remain offline and take a break from watching their own stories blown up in headlines and news stories. She emailed the girls’ mothers the lists of these tweets, which line after line, read as statements of commitment from survivors and allies to stand up and stand by the three girls as one unified community. “It was amazing,” says Lindin.

In January, 2014 Maisha Z. Johnson sends a tweet criticizing her former high school in California. The school had made headlines after spectators at a basketball game chanted, “USA, USA, USA,” to a Pakistani student while he stood at the free-throw line. Almost three hours later she’s calling out her online harassers with hashtags #OhYouMadHuh #WhyYouMadAboutJusticeTho. As evening rolls on, she switches her focus to a less serious subject matter: “The moon is gorgeous right now! I can’t stop staring at her.”

Twitter is all about expression; a space for free thought to abound, no matter how minuscule, seemingly insignificant, obxinious or profound. The phenomenon of status updates in social media offers a moment-by-moment transference of information from “real life” to whomever is behind a screen in a near instant. A point Johnson, a American-writer-activist-poet-turned-social-media-expert unintentionally proves through her own Twitter account, which is that the platform acts as a global space for women to express what she calls their “lived experience”—uncensored and unfiltered.

“I’m not asking for anyone else’s permission for what I tweet,” she says. “I’m not making sure I have the right terminology or anything like that, I’m just expressing myself.” That relationship between terminology and self-expression is pivotal and oftentimes problematic.

Too often, Johnson says, people, particularly women, are pre-occupied with finding the right wording to describe and define their own experiences and, as a result, remain silent. It’s easy for elitism and academia to dominate conversations about why a woman struggled to find an abortion clinic in her home province with vocabulary like “privilege” or “social transformation.” Twitter, says Johnson, brings us back to our “real selves”.

Real language can be used to connect with people, rather than being stuck in a bubble of academics—people who, says Johnson, may have all the vocabulary, but aren’t necessarily committed to communicating about the everyday.

Criticisms of hashtag feminism cover an array of understandably troubling aspects of digital culture that threaten to undermine the well-intentioned changes of social justice work: the temptation to make a hashtag go viral, for example, by picking a sensationalist message for the sake of garnering more attention, or even the inherent privilege associated with owning a smart phone, which raises questions of access and barriers to technology.

Freelance writer Meghan Murphy also writes on her own blog, Feminist Current, that hashtag campaigns give rise to the invention of the “feminist celebrity,” by invariably providing more visibility to certain perspectives on the grounds of popularity while silencing other more marginalized voices, which, in turn, she argues, erodes the very ideology of unity within the movement itself.

However, the most dangerous effect of hashtag feminism seen by Johnson today lays in the constraints of the 140 character limit. The threat: Over simplification. Take the issue of domestic violence, which Johnson herself advocates around in her own writings. On its own, the term, “domestic violence,” evokes images of a cis-man, presumably a husband, assaulting his wife, a cis-woman.

What happens to everyone else—LGTBQ folk—who do not fit into this normative understanding of a relationship? How can we communicate the dynamics of violence in an abusive same-sex or trans relationship, such as the fear of being “outed” by a threatening partner under a single blanket term, “domestic abuse”? And how do we do that surrounded by so many other social media campaigns against spousal abuse? The problem is we often can’t—well, at least not right away.

Johnson believes Twitter is an entry point for inevitably larger, more contextualized conversations. It is a tool designed to stay informed and get in the know about what’s happening, as well as to find the right language to talk about or express an issue.

Lindin agrees. Twitter should be recognized as a chance to jump aboard an idea, she says, not ignite any form of back-and-forth exchange. The 140 character limit is plenty to declare, “here I am,” and add your voice to a cause, but there is a deficiency to expound on the nuances of a topic.

“I told my boyfriend and he called me a whore. Broke up with me. #beenrapedneverreported.”

“The first question the police asked was, ‘what were you wearing?’ I was 10. #beenrapedneverreported <3”

“I’ve #BeenRapedNeverReported because I knew I would be blamed because I had been drinking.”

By the time Zerbisias went to sleep on the night of October 30, 2014, the hashtag was trending in the U.S. By morning she was receiving emails from American and European media asking for interviews. Four days later, the hashtag was translated into French—and who knows how many other languages since. “I was thrilled because it meant women were not allowing themselves to be re-victimized,” she says. “That they were saying ‘fuck you,’ I’m gonna say this.” The hashtag gave women and men the power, space and freedom to come out and reclaim their attack, declaring that they were indeed raped like so many, many others. It was exhilarating to watch, Zerbisias recalls.

Yet, she refused most of the interviews, and turned down offers from organizations and advocacy groups asking her to get involved with their projects. “That’s not my responsibility,” she says. “I’m a writer, I’m not a social worker, I’m not a jurist, I’m not a policy maker, I’m not a law maker, I’m not even an organizer.”

Headlines from around the world applauded Zerbisias and Montgomery for inventing the hashtag that ignited a global discussion into why 90 percent of women never report their sexual assaults to police. “The question,” says Zerbisias, “is, ‘What next?”

Illustration by Mariah Burton

Today’s skyrocketing daycare costs force many women to choose between work, children and poverty. Why Canada needs a national policy for affordable, accessible care

EMILY MLIECZKO HAS BEEN INVOLVED in the B.C.’s child care field since she was 19. Back then, she had no children of her own. “I just thought it would be a really nice thing to do,” she says. That was 22 years ago. Now, she has two sons, 19 and 16, both of whom grew up going to daycare. “I was a single parent who lived below the poverty level,” she says, “The support of my child care providers was one of the biggest assets I’ve ever had.”

Today, more than 75 percent of Canadian women with children under the age of six participate in the workforce—making child care an essential part of the labour puzzle. And yet, as Mlieczko says, Canada’s child care system is in crisis—and has been for the past four decades. High costs and few spaces in daycares across the country keep many mothers in poverty, at home or working several jobs, and federal and provincial governments have done little to address this. Affordable, accessible child care is a pressing feminist issue, but Canada is failing.

Mlieczko is now executive director of the Early Childhood Educators of B.C., and one of many fighting for more accessible child care. “Child care can cost more than post-secondary education,” she says. “There are some programs here in the lower mainland that charge close to $2,000 a month per child. That’s a lot of money.” Such fees aren’t unique to B.C. A recent report from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives (CCPA) revealed some shocking facts about child care costs in Canada. The study, dubbed “The Parent Trap,” found that Toronto parents, for instance, spend an average of $1,324 per month on child care for their toddlers—often accounting for over a third of the mother’s income. This, too, is not uncommon. But think about it: that’s four months of labour to pay for a year of child care.

“The Parent Trap” is a stark on-paper reinforcement of something long known by child care advocates: the negative costs of child care mainly affect women. Child care costs are directly tied to women’s labour force participation, says David Macdonald, CCPA senior economist and co-author of the report. “The cost of child care has an impact on women’s labor force participation,” he adds, “but it doesn’t on men’s.” When child care costs are too high to afford, in other words, women, so much more often than men, stay home—even if they want to return to work. Others may be forced to work multiple jobs.

Even more simply put: child care costs keep women from working well. For example, 49 percent of women in Alberta cite child care as their reason for working parttime rather than full-time. These women, says Macdonald, are doing the same type of calculation he did in the report, which is: Does it make sense to go back to work? Would a woman pay more in child care fees than she would make working? Too often the answer to the latter question is “yes”—making the answer to the first a “no.”

Overwhelmingly, though, women want to work (a fact that should come to no surprise to anyone who isn’t living in the 1950s). The positive effects that affordable child care has on women in the workforce can be seen easily in Quebec. The province has been subsidizing early childhood education to $7 a day since 1997. As a result, child care costs are only six percent of a mother’s salary in Quebec City and Montreal, and only four percent of her salary in Gatineau. Women’s labour force participation in Quebec is eight to 12 percent higher than in provinces without affordable, accessible child care, according to a 2012 Université de Sherbrooke study. “It used to be that Quebec was significantly below the Canadian average in terms of labor force participation,” Macdonald says. “With the introduction of inexpensive child care, however, you see that Quebec has moved to slightly above the Canadian average.”

And yet, despite this success, few other provinces have broached subsidized child care. The federal government, for its part, has actually promoted policies that have the opposite effect. Take income splitting, for example. This allows families with children under 18 to split a household income of up to $50,000 for tax purposes, giving a tax benefit to the lower-earning spouse. Unfortunately, this is usually the mother—and, perhaps even more unfortunately, policies like this only reinforce the encouragement for her to stay home. As well, income splitting, a key part of 2014 Family Tax Cut, mostly helps higher income families. In fact, more than 85 percent of households won’t benefit from the plan, according to a 2014 report from the Caledon Institute of Social Policy. The CCPA calculated that the top five percent of families would gain more from this policy than the bottom 60 percent.

Feminists and child care advocates are not willing to accept such an outdated and unequal solution. Joined by progressives across the country, they are demanding a plan that will make child care more affordable and accessible for everyone. Mlieczko is one of those working to develop such a plan. With the Coalition of Child Care Advocates of B.C., she helped create the $10-a-day plan for B.C.—a concrete solution to tackle this growing problem. The proposal, first introduced in 2011, would subsidize child care in B.C. to $10 per day for full-time care, and $7 for part-time care. It would also make child care free for families with an annual income under $40,000.

While initial supporters were mainly other mothers and those in the progressive political sphere, the $10-a-day plan is now receiving increased support from the business community, whose members are finally starting to realize that not only is affordable child care good for women, it’s also good for the economy. “This will actually stimulate the growth of the economy,” says Mlieczko. When more parents are able to work, more jobs are created in the economy. It’s just basic math: Subsidized child care more than pays for itself in the aggregate, adds Macdonald, as the additional income tax gained is greater than the cost of the program.

Still, provincial governments are reticent. Under the current strategy of provincially-subsidized child care, provinces arguably don’t reap the benefits. Quebec, for example, spends most of the money to pay for child care, but the federal government sees most of the benefit in increased income tax. This weird balance can give provinces little incentive. To change this, argue advocates, Canada needs to treat child care like other social services; it needs a national child care plan. Just like with health care, say advocates, the federal government could work with the provinces and split the costs, leaving the provinces to implement the services.

Many hope the looming federal election will lead to more interest in a national child care policy. It certainly seems likely. The NDP has recently announced a $15-aday plan as part of its platform, though the Liberal plan remains unclear. Meanwhile, the Conservative government has increased the Universal Child Care Benefit. While this will provide parents with a few extra dollars, it won’t make child care more accessible or more affordable.

It’s now been 45 years since the Royal Commission on the Status of Women first recommended a national child-care program, and yet little has changed outside of Quebec. “It’s time for us to do this,” says Mlieczko. “We’ve seen other countries do this. We’ve seen other provinces do this. We’ve seen the success of Quebec and other provinces that are moving towards helping families, and I think every family in Canada deserves to have that kind of support.”

Illustration by Alisha Davidson

Mainstream white feminism preaches a privileged, exclusive, saviour-based model. And it’s time for it to go

MY FIRST INTRODUCTION TO FEMINISM was through Tumblr. At 17, I opened an account, and began the search for feminist blogs. As I tumbled through, I landed on the same images and topics: body hair growth, sexual liberation, pastel-coloured hair, flowers photoshopped onto women’s bodies—they all seemed to be at the forefront of feminism. Topless protests were the ultimate key to freedom. I was drawn in by the fierce vibrance of it. Yet, as I absorbed it all, I began to realize many of these women weren’t just interested in leg hair and periods. They were interested in saving a certain kind of woman: me.

It made me feel increasingly self-conscious: I wondered whether I did, indeed, need saving. Did I need to rely on white women for “real” freedom, as all those Tumblr posts seemed to suggest? After all, according to mainstream white feminism, I have all the hallmarks of an oppressed brown woman who needs saving. I’m a Middle Eastern and South Asian Muslim woman of colour who can, apparently, only find liberation through the West. I am part of a misunderstood, over-exotified culture, part of the mystical backwards Orient where women are subservient and trapped.

These ideas are both true and untrue. I am a woman facing oppression, from my own culture and from Western culture. But what saved me and liberated me wasn’t the topless protests of FEMEN, or white feminists in flower crowns, but rather other women of colour, who showed, despite all the ideas put forth by white feminism, that they did not need saving from the West. They had saved themselves.

This isn’t, on the whole, an idea that white feminism likes. Through social media sites, in particular Twitter, women of colour have pushed criticisms of white feminism to the forefront of public discourse. With stars such as Taylor Swift, Emma Watson, and Lena Dunham acting as the new faces of feminism, feminists of colour have become more and more aware that the mainstream form of feminism just doesn’t represent them—or any other marginalized groups for that matter. And white feminists have largely not taken this criticism well. Today, there is an obvious divide in feminism, and constant tensions within the movement of which feminism is “real” or “fake.”

The question, of course, is: What exactly is white feminism? Is it feminism practiced by exclusively white women? No. While many white women do subscribe to white feminism, they are not the only ones who do. White feminism, essentially, fails to acknowledge the intersections of race and gender. For example: it’s commonly lamented that women—as in all women—make about 77–82 cents for every dollar that a man makes. But that’s only white women. Black and Hispanic women make even less, 69 cents and 60 cents, respectively, for every dollar that a white man makes. While patriarchy is toxic to women, women of colour face the double burden of patriarchy and white supremacy, which have intrinsically throughout history gone hand-in-hand though processes of colonization. And, too often, that fact is ignored.

“White feminism works on the assumption that all women are equally oppressed,” says 23-year-old Kenyan-Canadian Truphena Matunda who is currently studying journalism at Sheridan. “The power structure within white feminism puts the concerns of Western white women before any other group,” Matunda adds, “often leaving issues concerning women of colour out of the conversation completely.”

Black women were the first to identify the idea of intersectional feminism, the term initially coined by academic Kimberlé Crenshaw. “Contemporary feminist and antiracist discourses have failed to consider intersectional identities such as women of colour,” says Crenshaw in her 1989 essay “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Colour.” Intersectional feminism is a type of feminism that focuses on the multiple oppressions people face: gender, race, sexual orientation, gender identity, class, disability, and so on. While the mainstream feminism holds high the heroic actions of North American suffragists, for instance, many black feminists have accurately stressed suffragists were only fighting for the right for white women to vote.

“White feminism dehumanizes racialized women by ignoring and erasing the voice of women of colour,” says Matunda. “It passively reaffirms ideas that whiteness and white opinions are the only ideas that really matter.”

This makes me think not only of my ignored experiences, but also of the women in my family and their erased voices—one of my aunts in particular. She wears hijab and abaya. Conventionally-speaking, herimage could be used as that of the oppressed Muslim women, doomed to a life of subservience to men. But my aunt has been skydiving and has scaled Mount Kilimanjaro; she is an educated woman with a great job, who hiked for days through the English countryside alone. Does she sound oppressed to you?

I think also of my mother. She moved to Canada with no connections and two young children to raise. She was able to make the transition from full-time housewife to full-time managerial work without the network a first- or second- generation Canadian white woman would have. In an unfamiliar country and culture, my mother thrived—not from having a white saviour, but from her own relentless hard work. (And let’s just say that whenever I went to my father asking if I could go to a friend’s house, his first words were always “go ask your mother.”)

And the truth is, in white feminism’s attempt to save women of colour, they have done the opposite. Their pursuit to save women of colour oppresses us further; it erases our lived experiences of racist and sexist discrimination. By insinuating that women of colour need saving, white feminism has undermined our capability to liberate ourselves through our own means. Whenever I see white feminists looking to the Middle East, I wonder why they are forgetting to look at the sexism within communities here. Women here struggle with domestic violence, with rape culture, with discrimination in the job market, with daily microaggressions. Why are we looking across oceans to fight oppression, when oppression is alive and well in Canada?

As someone who comes from both worlds, I often feel torn in two. I have seen and experienced the repressive attitudes of the Middle East, but most of my life has been spent in here, in Canada, nestled within assumed superiority of the West. The sexism I experience on a day-to-day basis is here. I’m not the woman on the cover of your average Orientalist novel, shrouded in the black veil, silhouetted by the orange glow of the desert’s setting sun.

“Before becoming an intersectional feminist I was a white feminist despite my ethnicity,” says Tina Cody, a 22-year-old economics grad student at University of Toronto. Cody is Iranian, Irish, and French- Canadian. “It takes a lot more subtlety and nuance,” she adds, “to recognize the other intersections that impact one’s daily life, like race, sexuality, and ability.” Identifying those other intersections is in the subtleties; it requires looking beyond simplistic ideas of man versus woman.

Like Cody, I also once identified with white feminism. When I first entered the world of feminism, I did believe I was escaping the dangers of the Eastern world, into the more accepting, more vibrant realm of the West. It was like a fairytale; shedding Islamic verses to enter this North American utopia of full women’s equality, mini-skirts, and proud pink banners. The aesthetic itself makes it appealing, a feminism that seems lovely and uncomplicated: men are pushing us down, women must unite and rise up.

But this polarized Western feminist narrative is doomed by its own simplicity. Everywhere, women who face layered oppressions like racism and sexism, for example, realize that women’s equality is a highly complicated matter: one that must look internally within women themselves and ask difficult questions. Do some women have advantages in life that others don’t have? Are some women benefiting from the system that they outwardly seem to be against?

For 16-year-old New York high school student Tasmi Imlak, expressing criticism of white feminism has even resulted in backlash. “As a Twitter user, when voicing my opinions about intersectional feminism, I am often attacked by white feminists,” says Imlak. I know what she means: As much as Twitter has started conversations, it can also shut them down. These online spaces are conflicted with both external harassment from feminists who are not intersectional, as well as internal, personal conflicts.

I have been deeply let down by feminists that I once idolized, only to discover that they have contributed to the erasure of experiences of women of colour. White feminists donning Om earrings and bindis follow me, failing to realize that such cultural appropriation is offensive and utterly toxic to a woman of colour like myself. And when Imlak criticized Emma Watson’s speech on feminism, feeling that it was too male-orientated, she received backlash online from white feminists.

She says she feels her opinions are often undermined because she identifies as a Muslim and a feminist, an idea that many white feminists believe is not valid. “Women of colour have to make their own spaces,” Imlak says, “because we are not valued within white feminism.” When these spaces are formed, they can work well. Angry Women of Color United, a Tumblr blog, is one woman of colour centred space that has succeeded. As the name suggests, it’s meant to be entirely focused on the voices, questions, and concerns of women of colour. White users are welcome to follow the blog, but are asked to not engage in any tone-policing, or send repetitive questions seeking to be educated by the moderators of the blog.

Spaces with other women of colour have helped me progress my ideas of feminism. Intersectional feminists have helped me come to terms with my own conflicted identity, and opened my eyes to the struggles of women who do not have some of the privileges that I do. And, despite the backlash women of colour often face there, social media networks have become valuable. On Twitter, for example, intersectional feminists also form bonds with each other, creating a special cyber space where they can talk about their unique experiences. It shattered my initial unwavering trust in the movement to realize that feminism is a divided and complicated ideology. Internal strife within feminism is rampant, as white heterosexual, cisgender, ablebodied women remain the default of the movement, while women with marginalized identities find their efforts and voices driven to the back.

Yet in some ways, white feminism has its benefits. Like Cody and myself, Matunda also was introduced to feminist ideas through white feminism—an easy and non-threatening way to start immersing oneself in feminism ideology. “Although there is a lot of things I find wrong with white feminism, I do think it is a gateway to feminism,” says Matunda. “I will admit that I did prescribe to white feminism when I started my journey.” Matunda says she landed on her intersectional beliefs after she began to feel frustration with white feminism, and began the search for something better. “I did this because I’m black and I felt ignored.”

The catch is that you have to face the reality of white feminism’s downfalls, and the subsequent disappointment, in order to start branching out into a more intersectional ideology. Intersectional feminists have helped me relieve the inner conflict I faced when I first entered the world of white feminism. They have helped me understand that I don’t have to shed my entire identity to be a perfect feminist, or go against my own culture to be pro-women’s rights. I realize now that my liberation is not necessarily the same as a white woman’s liberation, and that I do not have to be a woman seeking a white saviour, but one who can find freedom for myself and other women of colour.

This is an immensely freeing idea. It is one that shatters default ideas of feminism, and allows me the freedom to practice a feminism that takes into consideration the intricacies of my identity and the particular oppressions I face. Feminism is not a one size fits all concept. White feminism robs women of the choice to tailor their feminism to their needs and lived struggles. Intersectional feminism gives us the opportunity to tweak our feminism to have a personal understanding of our stories. And that is the definition of true liberation and equality.

Illustration by Kris Noelle

The feminist battle for Gamergate victory isn’t done

When it comes to feminism and Gamergate, I want to say that feminism—unquestionably—won. But then I think: at what cost? Maybe it’s better to say: we know unequivocally we are on the right side of Gamergate.

There was a Mission Accomplished moment in October 2014, when the New York Times published an article that seemed confused about what Gamergate was and why it was happening—not in a fumbling, tech-illiterate sense, but more of a sense of incredulity. The writer, Nick Wingfield, appeared to be saying: “So you’re harassing women … for liking video games. Huh.” The article was published right after Anita Sarkeesian, a feminist critic best known for her YouTube series “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games,” cancelled an appearance at Utah State University after she received an anonymous threat of a shooting massacre were the talk to go ahead (as a concealed carry state, security at the event could not guarantee no one with a gun would be allowed in the building while Sarkeesian was speaking).

Sadly, Sarkeesian has long been the target of sexist attacks—ever since she first launched a Kickstarter campaign in 2012 to support the series. “The threats against Ms. Sarkeesian are the most noxious example of a weeks-long campaign to discredit or intimidate outspoken critics of the male-dominated gaming industry and its culture,” Wingfield wrote. New York Times may have been removed from the specifics and scope of the Gamergate conflict, yet it was clear the only response could be “this is baffling and terrible.” As an outsider’s perspective, it was invaluable and it illuminated something that was at once crucial and deeply disheartening: that it was even more terrible, and equally baffling, for the women caught up within Gamergate—we are on the wrong end, in the middle of something incomprehensible and horrific. And since October, Gamergate has only become more ridiculous.

Even former avowed Gamergaters have hung up their trilbies and abandoned their positions as everything became more extreme and untenable—or they suddenly found themselves on the opposing side of the harassment campaign. Those within the industry openly made statements against Gamergate, including: gaming companies such as Blizzard and the Entertainment Software Association (commonly know as the ESA and gaming’s top trade group); publications like Game Informer, Polygon, and Giant Bomb; and creative luminaries such as Tim Schafer and Damion Schubert. Some statements where measured, like the ESA’s assertion that “There is no place in the video game community—or our society—for personal attacks and threats.” But others weren’t. Schubert called it “an unprecedented catastrofuck,” which remains one of my favourite combinations of words ever. Even the vaguest of questions about the legitimacy of the movement seemed to evaporate.

And yet—and yet—it is still happening. On January 11, Zoe Quinn wrote a piece called “August Never Ends” on her blog Dispatches from The Quinnspiracy. It charted her struggles to get the legal system to do something about the avalanche of hate spewing her way. She talked about how demolished her life was and continued to be by the campaign. She wrote, in full: “The same wheels of abuse are still turning, five months later. I’ve been coming to terms that this is a part of my life now, trying to figure out what to do about it, and how to move forward with so many people trying to wrap themselves around my ankles. It’s been hard to accept that my old life is gone and that I can never get back to it. But I’ve found purpose in the trauma, in trying to stop it from happening again, to use my experience to show how these things are allowed to happen, and to further a dialog on how to actually stop it. If I can’t go home, maybe I can at least get out of this elevator shaft. Maybe I can help end August. Maybe you can, too.”

As much as there is hope here, and grim determination, and a strength of will that is barely fathomable, there is also so much pain and loss. Quinn’s piece is not the sort of thing that gets written looking back on a hard and well-fought victory—it’s the barest beginning, starting to see the light at the end of the darkest tunnel, the way out of the elevator shaft. Quinn has since gone on to found Crash Override Network, an anti-harassment network that attempts to help victims of Gamergate rebuild their lives and careers after the threats, doxing, and sabotage—a way to provide the support Quinn found lacking in the community. Today, she is taking the extra step to help others. That is victorious. That is what willpower is.

But the cost—my god, the cost. Crash Override Network and services like it are necessary. Certainly, people are going to be suffering the ramifications of this trauma for years, if not their entire lives and careers. In the games publication Giant Bomb’s discussion forums, game developer and tech writer Brianna Wu wrote “I was talking to Zoe Quinn this week, who told me about a folder on her computer called, ‘The ones we lost.’ And it was young girls that wrote her saying they were too scared to become game developers. I started crying because I have another folder just like it.” Wu went on to excoriate those who had not yet spoken out about Gamergate or who were not actively making policies to hire, support, and defend the women targeted, stating “I would suggest every man in this industry has a hell of a lot of soul-searching to do about the part they played in creating this situation.”

For every visible woman who has stepped away from their platform, how many less vocal or less well-known participants have we lost? In the wake of Gamergate, for instance, Kathy Sierra, a tech writer who was once the target of hacker and horrible person weev, walked away from the online persona she’d built as Serious Pony to insulate herself from further violence. Jenn Frank, who had built a nine-year career out of writing about games and was deluged with hatred for a Guardian piece about how women in the games industry are attacked, announced publicly that she was leaving the industry out of fear for her family’s safety. How many young women have chosen not to enter the industry at all? How many game developers have left the industry? How many journalists? How many women stopped participating in online communities and massively multiplayer online and co-op games? How can we possibly know the real numbers of the ones we lost?

The thing is, we can’t. It’s going to take years to sort out the impact on the industry, on the community, on the way games are made and played. Years before we figure out what games journalism can possibly look like in a post-Gamergate world. Years before we can even begin to get a grip on the personal trauma suffered by so many after such a massive campaign of harassment and violence. And before any of that work can be done, Gamergate has to end first. It’s an inevitable victory, perhaps, but one that’s going to leave deep, presently unfathomable scars.

To help kick off the issue, we’re hosting another This is Not a Ted Talk, featuring talks from fierce feminists on body positivity, consent, trans* rights, and more.

SPEAKERS:

–Jill Andrew and Aisha Fairclough, the amazing women behind Fat in the City and the Body Confidence Canada Awards
–Kick-ass trans* rights activist Christin Milloy
–The awesome Sheila Sampath of Shameless magazine
–Plus a video feature from Project Slut

WHERE: The Supermarket, 268 Augusta Avenue, Toronto, Ont.
WHEN: March 25, 2015. Doors open at 6:30 p.m., “This is Not a Ted Talk” speakers take the stage at 7 p.m.
COST: $5 at the door, which includes a copy of our March/April Feminist Issue