Badger Cave: Jian Ghomeshi

The Curious Case of Jian Ghomeshi

Jian Ghomeshi, a former broadcaster and host of the Canadian radio show Q, is now in the middle of a messy sex scandal. Eleven women in all and one man have brought forth allegations of sexual misconduct.

The thing that makes this notable is that Ghomeshi doesn’t fit the usual narrative. He’s Iranian, feminist, and liberal. He even minored in gender studies while in university.

He’s been described as an open-minded, progressive individual. He carries a teddy bear as a travel companion to deal with generalized anxiety disorder. Hardly the type of person you’d expect to strangle a woman.

However, this is where the conversation devolves into a matter of he said, she said. On the side of the alleged victims, Jian Ghomeshi is a shameless batterer of women. However, Ghomeshi tells a different story. He describes exiting what he felt was a relationship that was going nowhere a few months prior to the allegations of abuse.

He tells a tale of a jealous ex, who wasn’t ready to move on and was upset to see him with other women. Ghomeshi is also fond of BDSM, but his descriptions of the practice are a far cry from the allegations that he slapped a woman several time before choking her.

Ghomeshi discusses how there were lengthy conversations before these sessions describing what would happen, safe words, and how he checked at various times to assess how comfortable his partner was.

These are vastly different stories. One side paint Ghomeshi as a monster, and the other an innocent man with a jealous ex hungry for revenge. Whether or not the former story has any weight, it’s the version of events pushed through the media.

Is Jian Ghomeshi a monster? It doesn’t matter because he already is in the minds of feminists. While the formal investigation has barely begun, feminists and pretty much everyone else is convinced of his guilt.

He’s currently filing a suit against the CBC for wrongfully firing him, and says that he intends to fight the charges.

Submission from D

Douglas has made an inquiry:

Message:

I have no idea if there is a rad-fem sex negative angle to what is going on here. I do however, find it very interesting, and very telling, that the pinnacle of virtue in the progressosphere, the CBC, is so quick to turn on one of it’s own because of ‘bad optics’. Or is it just ‘bad optics’? Canada famously dealt with the morality of what business the public has in the bedroom, IE none, 30 years ago. An ideal most celebrated in, you guessed it, the CBC. Now however we find out that it is important, and it WILL get you fired. So what was on the minds of the CBC execs when they decided to fire Jian? Let’s play out a hypothetical situation. Jian Gomeshi instead had a sexual relationship with another man, with all of the same allegations made. Would the CBC act any differently? I think so. They’d probably be running a 12 part radio drama describing how ‘brave’ Jian is to live the way he does, and to hell with the detractors. Then they’d probably try and link it all to a conservative smear campaign. But no, the allegations involve violence against a woman, and now one of the biggest names in Canadian progressive thought has been brought low. I think the progressive community prides itself on it’s principles of tolerance, and social libertarianism. I say pride themselves on, not that they actually stand up and notice the totalitarian trends in their movement, that tend towards forcing people into certain ‘acceptable’ sets of behavior. This drive to be ‘acceptable’ to the right people, the intolerance of any heresy or improper thought and action, they are the hallmarks of a religion, not an intellectual movement. It would be interesting if it is finally radical feminism that brings that trend out into the light, so everyone can finally see it for what it is. I am not a fan of Jian Gomeshi, but to be fired over this is appalling. I hope him well in the future.

Dear Jian Ghomeshi, an open letter

By: Karen Straughan

I have never liked your show. The primary reason I have always found you insufferable is because you have consistently pandered to feminism. You softball any feminist guest—hell, you tend to not just softball, but softball slow and wide and soggy enough to give them a walk every damn time, instead of ever asking them any difficult questions, or demanding they provide empirical evidence for their assertions. And while I know that asking the really hard questions isn’t what the Q is about, I have no doubt that had you ever interviewed me, you’d have been asking those hard questions. You’d have been demanding I prove every single claim I made. You’d do it the way every mainstream interviewer, whether on the political left or the political right, who has dared to talk to me has.You have been told all your life that the rape of women is not taken seriously enough, even in Western cultures. That women who claim they’ve been sexually violated are not believed, and even when they are believed, they’re blamed or dismissed. You’ve been told that we live in a rape culture where the sexual terrorizing of women is normalized, and men are absolved through the toxically masculine “boys will be boys.”You have implicitly agreed with that, every time you’ve swallowed any given feminist assertion at face value, instead of telling that person to prove it to you, and to everyone. You are now reaping what a feminist culture sows. What it sows is an assumption of sexual malice and malfeasance on the part of all men, and the attitude, to paraphrase Alan Dershowitz, that rape is so heinous a crime, even innocence is not a defence. You said yourself, the CBC doesn’t give two shits about whether what you did with your partner was consensual—it’s only concerned with the fact that some women have impugned your sexuality and your integrity. Some woman somewhere says Jian Ghomeshi is a creep? Here comes your pink slip.I’ve been surfing on mainstream websites, and the “goss” is that you’re a scumbag and a predator, all based on a single blog post about an alleged ass-grab, written by a female “writer” that “Literotica” wouldn’t lower themselves to publishing, a story so cloying and saturated with rape-fantasy narrative that I’d be surprised the author doesn’t masturbate to it every night before bed.

I have to say, Jian, I’m not happy with you. I’m really not. You’ve contributed to a culture where a woman’s pointed finger is equivalent to a conviction. A culture Theodore Roosevelt predicted would eventually emerge all the way back in 1904—a future dystopia where any man so much as accused of rape would be as subject to public lynching as the black man was in his own day.

You have consistently and repeatedly enabled the architects of your own undoing, almost certainly thinking they would never, ever turn on you, and almost certainly thinking no man was ever accused of sexual misconduct who didn’t deserve it. You were willing to believe the worst of every man who was not you—an entire society of them!—while simultaneously believing that playing by the feminist rulebook would somehow inoculate you against persecution.

I am a public figure who has spoken at political conventions and gender issues conferences, an advocate for men and boys, and a philosophical opponent of ideological feminism. I’m a high school graduate whose writings are currently included in the curricula of more than one university sociology or psychology class. I’m a waitress who is a friend of Warren Farrell (best-selling author of several books on the male experience), and Anne Cools, the first black female to become a senator in North America, and a leading opponent of ideological feminism. I am unusual in background. Atypical in my opinions and my associates. Not your average Jane. People like me have been out here all this time, for the 8 years you have hosted your show, and yet not once have you found any of us interesting enough to interview. Not when there’s another Rape Culture hysteric to pander to, for lulz and listens, anyway.

I find you smarmy, self-satisfied, repugnant and unctuous in your 8 years of asking easy questions and avoiding controversy. I detest your smug interview style, your moralizing, prerecorded intros to the show, and your lack of journalistic integrity when presenting the status quo as truth by journalistic fiat.

But as much as I detest the way you’ve enabled and abetted what I have come to believe are the most insidious organized fraudsters in living memory, I detest even more the way you have been treated by them, by your employer, and by the general public.

Again, I don’t like you, and I don’t like what you have stood for over my years of listening to your program. But that does not mean I will automatically believe what is being said about you, and given the propensity for feminists to lie about men and about sex, I want to offer you my support, such as it is. I wish you well in your lawsuit.

If it turns out you are a scumbag (as many prominent male feminists somehow magically turn out to be, almost as if they view feminism as a means to groom their victims), I will condemn you as wholeheartedly as anyone else. But until the evidence surfaces to convince me of that, I will be in your corner.

Good luck to you, and here’s hoping the all the evidence is heard.

-Karen

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Rachel Edwards

Rachel is a former host of Honey Badger Radio, a recurring member of the Tales from the Infrared crew. She wanders around the web researching feminist insanity, poking people with a large stick, and keeping everyone in the silly place. When she isn't doing any of those things she spends her time doing even more blogging, grooming her rather large fluffy cat, nerding out with her favorite people, and burying herself in various fandoms. Pinkie Pie is best Pony! (You spelled "Fluttershy" wrong. -- Zen)

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