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When did our society get so sensitive?

jen-grant

by Christie Blatchford

When did our society get so sensitive?

If ever you have wondered, as David Byrne and the Talking Heads once sang, “Well, how did I get here?,” I may be able to help.

I refer to the era of extreme delicacy in which we all live, wherein, as a colleague described it, the CBC this week convened a “solemn panel” to discuss the traumatizing effect of rude words (the hideous FHRITP phenomenon) upon women and ask the big question, “What does that say about us as a society?” — and that was before we all learned that a veteran female comedian recently fled a stage in tears after a man in the audience heckled her with lewd suggestions.

It was on Sept. 13, 1993 that I first remember feeling the axis shift.

I was covering a commission of inquiry that was examining the conduct of a wonderful and well-regarded Ontario Court judge named Wally Hryciuk.

A woman, a complainant, named Kelly Smith was testifying.

At the time, she was a 30-year-old assistant Crown attorney in the rough-and-tumble Scarborough courts.

A society that can’t tell the difference anymore has lost its way

Weeping, Smith described how the year before at another court, Hryciuk allegedly had kissed her hard, sending her into a tailspin of uncontrollable crying, frantic teeth-brushing and fears she might have caught a disease from him and would be unable to have children.

It was not the allegation that shocked me — the judge denied it in any case, and he was subsequently vindicated — but its characterization (a kiss being described by a lawyer as “tantamount” to sexual assault) and, even had it happened exactly as Smith said, her grotesque overreaction to it.

I wrote at the time, “If the purpose of this public inquiry is to answer the question, ‘Do we want as a judge a man who French kisses young female Crown attorneys?’, then I believe a secondary question is in order. It is, ‘Do we want as a Crown attorney a young woman who is reduced to irrational hysterics by such a kiss?’

“If the answer to the first question is ‘No’, so must the answer to the second one.”

Hryciuk’s vindication at the Ontario Court of Appeal was then three years away.

At the inquiry itself, in the final report that found he’d acted inappropriately, had engaged in “reckless” sexual humour and which recommended he be removed from office, and certainly in that hearing room that long-ago day, he was an object of contempt, his purported “victims” each and every one praised as brave little souls who had felt powerless.

In the 22 years since, things have only worsened, such that the latest shock-horror-outrage is what happened to the comedian Jen Grant at a printing industry awards dinner on May 13.

This was the Ontario Printing and Imaging Association (OPIA) awards dinner at Toronto’s St. George’s Golf and Country Club.

As the story of Grant’s experience emerged this week — she was harassed by a man whose opening gambit was “There’s a 51% chance that my buddy here will have sex with you and I take the other 49%” and then said, according to Grant, in “a very ‘rapey’ tone, ‘Ohhh, the things I would do to you’ ” — it turns out the whole event was a snafu of misplaced expectations.

The OPIA president, Tracey Preston, said she didn’t hear the heckler from where she was standing at the door but had she, she said, “We would have ceased the show and we would have reacted immediately.”

And the heckler’s employer, a full-service, Quebec-based printing company, publisher and distributor called TC Transcontinental, immediately suspended the offender with pay, apologized and its spokesperson Sylvain Morissette proclaimed, “This is not in our culture and values for sure.”

http://news.nationalpost.com/full-comment/christie-blatchford-when-did-our-society-get-so-sensitive

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