S'more Canadian Feminist Values

Yes. Yesterday i was waxing patriotically about Canada's vastly superior pro-woman culture by pointing to the (perhaps criminal) lack of resources devoted to finding a mass murderer of women in downtown Vancouver.

I neglected to mention two further examples of our pro-ogynist culture that were demonstrated in that particular case of Canuck Chivalry.

Let's not forget that most (almost all?) (all?) the women's groups that advocated on behalf of Vancouver's murdered and threatened women didn't get legal funding to prepare presentations and lawyers for the Pickton Inquiry into this travesty.

Oh, and that group that built the "ground-breaking database" on Vancouver's missing women, "Sisters in Spirit" was denied further funding and the money to manage any future databases will be going to .... the RCMP.

So here's how I see it. The governments and the police forces involved in this atrocity worked to make sure that the most critical voices wouldn't be present at the Inquiry. (Because advocating for missing street women isn't the most profitable avenue for investors' money in this particular era they depend on charity and public funding to a great degree. So cut 'em off.) Then, the assholes involved can do their best impression of a "heart-felt apology" all the while "categorically denying" or "strenuously denying" (or whatever their public relations advisers coach them to say) that institutional sexism had anything to do with it.

Then they make sure that the groups that put the pieces of the puzzle together lose their ability to work and you give the whole trouble-making database over to the fuckwads and it's business as usual.

Last summer I read a serious history about Jack the Ripper. At the time I wrote:

So, another neighbour with a box fulla boox, but i decided to take only Philip Sugden's The Complete History of Jack the Ripper. It looks at the case of the most famous serial killer in history in a professionally historical way. It doesn't pretend to know who Jack the Ripper was. In many respects, I'm reading it with the same response that i got from watching the movie Zodiac on the big screen. There's somebody out there killing people, but the world is such a huge place, that clues just come from nowhere and it's incredibly difficult to separate truth from lies. It's a good book.

As well, reading about the way the Whitechapel neighbourhood mobilized to defend their streets, when "only" four women had been killed, and those, from the disrespected group of prostitutes, Vancouver (and Canada) comes off looking badly with the total lack of concern for the 33 missing women who ended up at Picton's farm.

Of course, Picton's victims weren't found mutilated on the streets. But they WERE found to have been ground up into pig feed later on. Which makes the latest bullshit so hard to fathom.

Yesterday I was thinking about this again. Perhaps if those women's bodies had been found mutilated on the streets the police would have been more energetic about finding the killer. I was thinking of the visceral reaction to actual mutilated remains. But then I remembered that the police might have known about how the bodies were likely being disposed of and so the cops don't even have that avenue of escape for their dereliction of duty. If Pickton had left women's corpses lying around downtown Vancouver there would have surely been a public outcry. And that would have been s-o-o-o-o-o inconvenient.

What the police are doing right now is a version of the little kid mumbling "I'm sorry" in the most resentful, sullen manner possible.