Also by Elizabeth Renzetti

  Non-Fiction

  Shrewed: A Wry and Closely Observed Look at the Lives of Women and Girls

  Fiction

  Bury the Lead (with Kate Hilton)

  Based on a True Story

  Copyright © 2024 by Elizabeth Renzetti

  First edition published 2024

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system, without the prior written consent of the publisher—or, in case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Please note that no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

  McClelland & Stewart and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House Canada Limited.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: What she said : conversations about equality / Elizabeth Renzetti.

  Names: Renzetti, Elizabeth, author.

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20240300939 | Canadiana (ebook) 20240300947 | ISBN 9780771010101 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780771010125 (EPUB)

  Subjects: LCSH: Women—Canada—Social conditions. | LCSH: Women—Canada—Economic conditions. | LCSH: Equality—Canada.

  Classification: LCC HQ1457 .R46 2024 | DDC 305.420971—dc23

  Cover design by Talia Abramson

  Cover art: doit / Getty Images

  Typeset by Terra Page, adapted for ebook

  McClelland & Stewart,

  a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited,

  a Penguin Random House Company

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  a_prh_7.0_148370028_c0_r1

  Contents

  Also by Elizabeth Renzetti

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1. What’s the Price of Silence?

  2. Who Cares?

  3. Whose Body Is It Anyway?

  4. Who Tells the Stories?

  5. Where’s the Value in That?

  6. When’s Your Sell-by Date?

  7. What Does a Leader Look Like?

  8. What Are You Willing to Sacrifice for the Truth?

  9. How Many Bodies Are Too Many?

  10. Who Designs the Future?

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  For Maud, Griff, and Doug

  Introduction

  THE MESSAGE ARRIVED AS I WAS PUTTING ON MY BOOTS on a sunny winter afternoon. “Hey,” my friend texted. “What are you up to?” I tapped out a quick response: “Going to the Women’s March!” Perhaps I also added an embarrassing selection of exclamation marks and emojis; I leave that to your imagination. “Oh,” my friend texted back. “Are we still doing that?”

  Fair question, I thought, and also: Hell yes we’re still doing that. How many of these protests had I been to in my life? Later, as I sidled through the marchers gathered on a slushy Toronto sidewalk, I was reminded why I was still there—and it was not because I liked having someone yell two-four-six-eight in my ear through a megaphone. It was, instead, to understand on a gut level how far we still had to go. Every person in that crowd, every sign, told the story of a job unfinished. Of wage gaps, exploited workers, silenced survivors.

  Six years earlier, it had felt like we were all on the streets. I had joined hundreds of thousands of protesters for the Women’s March in Washington, D.C. in 2017, the crowd fired up by the recent election of a bigot and misogynist to the most powerful political office in the world. My feet froze but my heart thawed as I checked my phone and saw millions of women marching in towns and cities around the world.

  The politely seething crowd had gathered on the Mall to hear Angela Davis and Gloria Steinem remind us that the fight for women’s freedom was like the paddlewheel on a steamer, constantly churning against the tide. I walked past an older woman carrying a sign that said, “I can’t believe I still have to protest this shit,” and I thought: Me neither, sister. Me neither.

  After that Women’s March in Washington, I went back to the Toronto newsroom where I worked as a journalist for the Globe and Mail, Canada’s national newspaper, and wrote stories and columns about how perhaps we were seeing a new dawn. The MeToo movement was nascent, women were running for public office in record numbers, Gal Gadot was Wonder Woman. What more could we want?

  But the new dawn was really just the headlight on a train that wanted to mow us down. Almost seven years later, there is a chasm between where we should be—equality for people of all genders, races, and abilities—and where we actually are, which is a world backsliding toward authoritarianism and inequality. We are experiencing a powerful backlash to women’s advancement, very much like the one Susan Faludi identified in her seminal 1991 book of the same name.

  We are in a strange, uncomfortable space at the moment, where feminism’s goal of equality exists as a commodity, a fashion item, a necessary upheaval in art and culture, but not yet as reality. Especially not for women who are racialized, who are poor, who are queer or trans, who do not fit the definition of able-bodied. It is these gaps between where we are and where we hope to be that I explore in this book.

  But first: a story.

  In 1993, I was a baby feminist working as an editor at the Globe and Mail when suddenly a new column appeared in its pages. A men’s column. No, seriously, that’s what it was called: Men.

  How odd, I remember thinking. Some of my friends liked to call the newspaper “the Globe and Old White Male,” and it was hard to argue with them. Men ran the paper, wrote and edited the majority of its stories, were the subject of most of its articles and photos. Periodically women in the newsroom would hold boozy gatherings called Femfests to plot paths toward a tiny bit more money or power or even just sanity. (One of those plans involved floating the idea of a newsroom daycare. An HR executive—a woman!—responded by saying we could have a daycare on site when she could bring her pet to work.)

  One particular Men’s column caused my mercury to skyrocket. The subject was an anti-feminist publication called The Backlash! (The title was, of course, appropriated from Faludi’s book.) Its editor trotted out a familiar line of complaints, and gave this gem of a quote: “If men don’t express their anger and start laughing at some of the stuff being spread by the pop-feminists, in a few years there will be a real explosion of male violence and of men oppressing women.”

  With my hair standing on end, I proposed writing a rebuttal to this absurd column. I was not a writer, at that point, but electricity crackled out of my fingertips. Had feminism really ruined things for men? On the contrary, I wrote, women suffered high rates of violence, sexual harassment, wage discrepancies. We paid more for our girly pink pens. After my angry response ran, two things happened: letters of support poured in, and I was offered a regular column.

  That was thirty years ago. I’ve been writing variations on that column ever since, the world’s longest and most irritating Groundhog Day. I’ve written about intimate partner violence and pay gaps, the harms done to Indigenous and racialized women by colonial mindsets, child care and emotional labour, femicide and the underreporting of sexual assault, the MeToo movement and the backlash to it, incel killers, health discrepancies facing women, menopause stigma, period stigma, the hunt for even one wrinkle on the big screen…well, the list goes on. All of this writing and reporting informed the discussions you’ll read in this book. Nothing ever got fixed, not entirely. A patch would go up over here; a leak would immediately spring over there.

  Some readers loved these columns, while others thoughtfully opined that I was a “man-hating cunt.” By the time I wrote my last Globe and Mail column, in June 2022, I felt discouraged once again. I’d noticed a destructive zero-sum game developing. One group had to be seen to be “winning,” another “losing.” The early men’s rights movement and publications like Backlash! had morphed into the online manosphere, which fattens on grievance as it straddles the world like a malignant spider.

  It was this tension that led me to write this book. Is the playing field really level now, as we’re told? Really? When women make up half the population but take up only 30 per cent of the seats in Canada’s Parliament, and 5 per cent of CEO offices; when they make a fraction of the salary of male athletes? Really? When only one in ten sexual assault cases reported to police results in a conviction? When domestic violence, which spiked during the pandemic, continues to increase and intensify? When three of the largest mass killings in modern Canadian history were tied to misogyny? When Indigenous women continue to experience violence at shockingly high rates?

  As I was gathering notes for this book in 2023, my typing fingers became sore. My heart became sore. In Winnipeg, a man with a history of domestic violence was accused of the murders of four Indigenous women, whose bodies were allegedly dumped in landfill sites. In Ontario, a coroner’s inquest into the murders of three women by a former partner recommended that the province declare intimate partner violence an epidemic. Those stories soon disappeared from the headlines.

 
In Iran, schoolgirls were being beaten and poisoned for the crime of protesting a tyrannical government regime. In Afghanistan, they were forbidden from going to school at all. In Mexico and Kenya, women gathered en masse to protest the epidemic of women-killing. In France and South Korea, frightening anti-feminist movements gathered strength.

  Of course, it’s not just France and South Korea: in the U.S., the giant whose every movement causes our balanced-on-top country to shudder, women’s reproductive rights have been rolled back in a terrifying manner (along with the rights of LGBTQ+ Americans). In 2022, when abortion had been protected by law for nearly fifty years, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, depriving women of the most basic control over their own bodies. Perhaps worst of all, as I write this, the malicious narcissist whose presidency we protested in 2017 is once again the Republican nominee for president. Donald Trump might even succeed, in spite of the criminal charges and accusations that dog him like a leper’s bell. Even a slew of sexual assault allegations have failed to deter his devout fans. Deter? Hell, it heats them up.

  “Women’s rights are being abused, threatened, and violated around the world. Progress won over decades is vanishing before our eyes,” UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a speech before International Women’s Day 2023. “Gender equality is growing more distant.” The UN estimates that gender equality is 300 years away. Those are not numbers I find comforting. I don’t know about you, but I’d like equality to arrive before we start bringing our baggage to other planets, thanks very much.

  Until we can stop protesting this shit, maybe we can have some conversations. I know, the word conversation brings us back to shag-covered sunken living rooms where the Chianti flowed and the collective consciousness was raised, but doesn’t that sound inviting? I’m not interested in demonization, us-and-them discussions, or—to continue the 1970s metaphor—battle-of-the-sexes replays where we all wear tiny satin shorts and wave our cigarettes angrily at each other. I am more interested in the structural scaffolding of power rather than the individuals who beat their chest from its heights.

  It is the systems of power that we need to confront and dismantle. I interviewed Paulette Senior for this book when she was the head of the Canadian Women’s Foundation (she’s now a Canadian senator). She told me some harrowing stories about being a Black woman in leadership, and how those experiences strengthened her resolve to change institutions from within. She said something that I wanted to embroider on a tea towel, if I could find a towel big enough (and also learn to embroider): “The structure was created to benefit those who put it together and continue to maintain it.”

  I learned so much from her, and from the other women—and men!—who I’ve been fortunate enough to interview over the years, and who generously shared their stories and wisdom with me. These are the conversations of this book’s subtitle: they educated me, informed my thinking, and crucially raised more questions than answers.

  I invite you into my book parlour to participate in these conversations. This is not intended as a comprehensive survey of women’s lives across Canada or the world; such a project would be beyond my reach. Instead, I’d like to ask questions about some of the issues I’ve reported on over the years and which strike me as important: about health and wealth and well-being, about caring and exploitation, about culture and media, about being young and old, about where the future is taking us and why we keep repeating the past. Come in and join the conversation. Feel free to start some of your own.

  1.

  What’s the Price of Silence?

  ON A NOVEMBER NIGHT IN 2022, I RODE A VERY LONG escalator up to a movie theatre in Toronto. Always on the lookout for metaphors, I thought the elevator provided a lovely one: it was long and very slow, much like the progress of women’s equality in this world. But it was still going somewhere.

  Inside the theatre, women milled about, calling to each other: You’re coming to my place for dinner soon? I’ll text you! The atmosphere was part potluck, part meeting of the revolutionary council. I got the sense that an invasion could have been organized that night, or a takeover, or at the very least a kickass party. I waved to friends and fellow journalists.

  Were there any men in attendance? Very few. It was disappointing, but understandable. Perhaps they felt excluded from, and unsettled by, this particular conversation. The lack of men in the audience meant that this was a story they would not hear, even though they needed to hear it.

  Listening, talking, silence, shame. These were all themes of the film we were about to see, She Said. It hadn’t even hit theatres yet, but every woman in the audience was familiar with the story it would tell: the explosive investigation by New York Times reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey into the reign of assault and terror conducted by Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein. The MeToo movement that followed upended the polite game of complicity like a kick to a chessboard. The pieces scattered around the globe. We’re still picking them up.

  Our host for the evening, a trim woman with short hair, came out and picked up the microphone. She wore a yellow t-shirt with the words “Can’t Buy My Silence” written in black. This was Julie Macfarlane, formerly a law professor at the University of Windsor, a survivor of sexual violence, and the co-founder of a campaign to ban non-disclosure agreements, which are legal contracts that effectively put tape over the mouths of people who have suffered abuse. NDAs were central to Weinstein’s ability to continue his campaign of harassment, and they’re being used to silence victims to this day.

  “There’s no point bringing people into the light to talk about sexual harassment and other misconduct,” Julie said, “if we then tell them they can never talk about it again.”

  The lights went down. The film began. I was thrown five years into the past. And before that. And before that.

  * * *

  —

  I’d run away from the newsroom that day, October 5, 2017. The Globe and Mail had recently moved to new digs, abandoning the beloved but derelict building that one of my colleagues called a “basement in the sky.” The new headquarters were shiny, sterile, and acoustically terrible for a newsroom. You could hear colleagues having conversations or crunching carrots across the wide-open expanse. We hid in stairwells or tiny glass cubicles to conduct sensitive interviews. The newsroom had beautiful views. It made my head ache.

  I was sitting in the handsome hipster coffee shop downstairs, wondering what I was going to put in my column that week, when the news broke. The New York Times story arrived with a gentle ping that held no hint of the cacophony that would follow. “Harvey Weinstein Paid Off Sexual Harassment Accusers for Decades.”

  I knew as soon as I started reading that reporters Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey had the goods. This was explosive. (Even if we had no idea at that point how far the shock waves would travel.) The reporters had uncovered nearly three decades of allegations of “harassment and unwanted physical contact” by Weinstein, then one of the most powerful producers in Hollywood.

  Crucially, dozens of people at his film company said they’d known about the allegations. As Kantor and Twohey wrote, “Only a handful said they ever confronted him.” One brave employee, Lauren O’Connor, had written to executives at the Weinstein Company to say: “There is a toxic environment for women at this company.” Nothing was done to restrain the predator at the top, let alone report him.

  I read every word of the story, barely breathing, as my flat white got flatter. Once I’d finished, I emailed my editor. Holy shit, this is big. Maybe I should scrap my column for this week and write about Weinstein instead?

  There were many Globe and Mail reporters writing powerful stories about gender inequality. My colleague Robyn Doolittle’s series “Unfounded,” to name just one, had changed the way some Canadian police forces investigated sexual assault. Meanwhile, I was the go-to columnist when feminist outrage was called for—as it was a little too frequently for my liking. I was also working on a book of feminist essays. My cup overflowed in a most distressing way. I had no idea that the stories would keep coming, and coming, and coming.