Brown’s support foresaw Ford win (whack!)

I need to write faster. I really do. I kept trying to write a column on Patrick Brown, but it’s not easy to come up with thoughtful commentary on what Brown means in the broader cultural sense while the man himself careens from one desperate move to the next. It’s like editorial whack-a-mole.

And now the Patrick Brown Show is over. Except that it isn’t over, because without him, there’d be no Doug Ford sitting in the driver’s seat of the Ontario PC party. Sure, without Patrick Brown there wouldn’t have been a leadership race, but in the broader cultural sense (whack!), I mean if we take a thoughtful approach (whack!) to what he signified about the zeitgeist in Ontario (whack!), then anyone could have guessed that Ford would win the leadership race.

I listened to what people were saying during the three weeks when Brown stepped down, retreated to social media, stepped back in, and then stepped down again, and I noticed some dominant themes emerge in his defence. These themes signalled just how deeply some Ontarians were craving a return to the pre#metoo land of the conservative white male leader.

People said that there was no proof of any wrongdoing. People said that he hadn’t been charged with any crimes. People said that you couldn’t trust accusers who remained anonymous. People said that there hadn’t been a proper investigation. Each of these defences is a rejection of #metoo.

In terms of proof: what proof would be possible, exactly? The nature of sexual misconduct is typically private and secretive; unless women start wearing recording devices as part of their normal daily attire.

Nor is it a reasonable concern that Brown hasn’t been charged or convicted of any crimes. The criminal courts favour men in sexual harassment and assault cases — we know this from countless cases and expert opinions, especially those shared in the media after Jian Ghomeshi was acquitted despite the flood of revelations about his twenty year history of sexual misconduct. The reality is that the workings of the law have been demonstrably incapable of addressing or punishing sexual misconduct. Like so many long-standing institutions invented by men in times of stark gender inequality, the law favours men in these situations.

Nor is it logical to suspect women’s honesty because they remain anonymous. We know from umpteen examples that female accusers can expect to be shamed, blamed, punished, and/or sometimes assaulted with thousands of death and rape threats if they don’t remain anonymous. These threats are devastating, particularly in cases of doxxing, when a victim’s personal information (including their address) gets published online.

Finally, the assertion that there hasn’t been a proper investigation into the claims against Brown is false: he was the subject of a reputable journalistic investigation. For generations, women have tried to get justice in police stations, lawyers’ offices, and courtrooms. It hasn’t gone well. So now they’re trying media platforms, and it’s going better. Does Twitter have the cultural capital of the legal system or The New York Times? No, it doesn’t. As a feminist, it doesn’t sit easily with me that #metoo is a hashtag. It’s kind of … embarrassing. It makes the whole thing seem like a trend, instead of a just socio-political movement. But I’m in my 40s, and I was raised and legitimized by traditional institutions that were created to preserve white male privilege; I need to give my head a shake and remember that those institutions were never going to bust things open the way Twitter did.

Ultimately, the defences that structured the groundswell of support for Brown — backlashes against #metoo — were an indication of how far our province is from really rejecting the way things have been. Oh sure, “we believe the women,” until they accuse someone who signifies longstanding, conservative white male political power in Ontario. Doug Ford typifies the white male good old boy; the swaggering, tough-talking, plainand-simple straight shooter who’ll get rid of that lesbian ruining our province with bleeding heart crap like free medicine for children and youth, a living wage, and free university tuition for poor kids.

Christine Elliot, who nurtured awareness of mental illness, who was the provincial listener-in-chief for health care, who was the patient leader-in-waiting, ever-hopeful, everdenied, didn’t have a chance.