This was back before “Family Guy” had built an entire empire on jokes about violence against women
Back in university, I used to write for a campus paper called Golden Words. During my third year, in fact, I was one of its co-editors. It was Canada’s only weekly campus humour paper – and “Canada’s other national newspaper,” if our billing in those pre-National Post days could be believed.
But it was also the official newspaper of the university’s Faculty of Engineering, even though it was mainly staffed by arts majors. As a result, we had to devote a certain amount of space in every issue to engineering announcements, coverage of their events, and what have you.
if there are two things I learned as a writer and editor at Golden Words – and I sure hope there were, because my grades told the story of a man who was hopefully learning other things elsewhere – then they were as follows:
1. People will believe anything. I hope I’m not alone in having learned that lesson again about people on all points on the political spectrum during the G20, for example, but that’s another story.
2. People will get offended by anything. For all of their supposed enlightenment, university students – and arts majors in particular – were and sadly apparently are the most easily offended people on the planet, and often by the most trivial nonsense imaginable. And once you realize that, it takes a level of personal character that I hadn’t reached at that age not to bait those people at every turn.
Obviously, I’m not talking about all arts majors. But if you’re one of them, and you’re offended on principle by what I just said, then haven’t you proven my point?
At any rate, there’s a time and a place for everything, and we certainly didn’t want our loyal readers – some of which, I assure you, were picking up the paper just to see what they were supposed to be offended by each week – mistaking actual news for jokes. In fact, we had a big “This Is For Real” logo that we used to slap on all of our serious content, just to eliminate all ambiguity.
But the reason that restrictive censorship laws don’t work is that you can’t possibly depend on everyone out there to interpret your message the right way. Even with that logo firmly in place, there were still plenty of people who didn’t take the serious stuff seriously.
That’s why I never felt quite right about running the Engineering Faculty’s annual Montreal Massacre remembrance spread in our paper – even though it was an important message, and it was technically their paper.
Yes, it was an important spread with a vital point to make. Yes, L’École Polytechnique is an engineering school, and the violent tragedy bore a special significance for our engineering students, female and male alike. And no, I certainly didn’t object to running the piece in our paper; obviously, I was proud to do it.
But at the same time, I was conscious of the fact that a lot of our readers would be looking for the joke. And I knew then, as I know now, that you can’t be responsible for what every last one of your readers is going to take away from something you publish. You can try to minimize the wrong interpretation – and you should in cases like this – but you can never totally prevent it. So although I was always happy to see that memorial spread run in the paper, I was always a little uneasy about it, especially as a co-editor.
To be fair, I was also conscious of the fact that Golden Words had given plenty of people good reason to take offense at various points throughout its history. I’m obviously not proud of everything I wrote for the paper about a decade ago, but it’s certainly not because I wrote anything hotly misogynistic or otherwise prejudicial; it’s just because I was in my early twenties and I wasn’t a very good writer yet. In contrast, the paper ran a lot of things in the late eighties, for example, that would have made me ashamed to call myself one of its readers, let alone one of its writers or editors.
But times change, and cultures evolve. I haven’t read Golden Words in years – I’m far too old to be considered a member of its target audience – but I can only hope that the students of the day have kept evolving, and that they can tell a great piece of satire from a totally inappropriate piece of backlash. In fact, if there are things that we published in the year 2000 that disgust today’s writers and editors, then I guess that’s not so bad.
But on a day like today, I’ll admit that I’ve got mixed feelings on the progress we’ve made. For every step towards equality, you can easily find a point of regression – and for every instance of forward thinking satire, there’s an example of what you could easily call a resurgence of mainstream misogynistic humour. But again, and as always, the message and its interpretation are two different things.
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The only thing that made me uneasy about that particular pull-out section was that it was outsources to the Equality Issues Committee, who also did the paper’s weekly “Voices” column. The EIC’s contributions were occasionally so sloppy that you have to wonder if they weren’t trying to take the paper down from the inside.
For example, in one “Voices column about Rainbow Flag Week, they managed to leave the “l” out of that second word until I caught it. But the year I was editor, the front page of the Dec. 6 pull-out section (overseen by the staffer we all called “Sizzler”, though I forget his actual pseudonym) consisted simply of a vertical list of the names of the women killed in the École Polytechnique Massacre.
Thirteen names…
… out of fourteen victims.
I blew a gasket. I was furious that they’d managed to screw up something so simple as making a complete list of the victims, and even angrier at myself for not double-checking their work before seeing it in print that Wednesday morning. That has to be the worst error I’ve ever failed to catch.
Yikes! That’s another story, and one I’d never heard before. Sorry to hear it.
The thing about Sizzler is that, after a couple of years of giving his personal life no thought whatsoever, I found out one day all at once that he was (a) Jewish and (b) gay.
Suddenly, I thought (a) that all those parody show tune lyrics he kept submitting suddenly made sense and (b) where I’d always generally found him a little annoying and not very funny, now I’d be a homophobic Anti-Semite if I continued to dislike him.
But then the above incident happened and I had a legitimate reason to be annoyed with him, so everything was all right in the end.
Damn it, Peter! Just seconds ago, I told Golden Words alumni all over the web to check out this post because you’d kicked off an interesting discussion! Now they’re just going to think I’m endorsing your reluctant bigotry!
What the fuck guys?
This blog is definitely the most racist thing on the internet. And sexist. So sexist. You should be kicked off the internet by the internet police.
Elan and Kem: Hey, guys!
Also Elan: No!
Did everyone hear that Matty’s been endorsing bigotry lately? That’s not okay, you guys.
I basically use the lessons I learned at Golden Words every day of my professional life. If it wasn’t for my experiences at GW, I actually don’t know that I would be able to do my job as well as I can. Nothing else really prepared me for being a screenwriter.
I mean, I studied film at university. But as much as I enjoyed it, there’s not much opportunity to learn how to deliver comedy on a deadline, find your specific voice as a writer, trial-and-error your way to figuring out the difference between funny out loud versus funny on the page or funny between friends versus funny to strangers.
My daily work life essentially mimics press-nite, minus the body odour and greasy pizza.
Okay, maybe just minus the greasy pizza…
I was at GW a bit later than you folks (although, paradoxically, I’m probably a bit older). For a few brief, shining weeks, we ditched 2-for-1 and went with Joe Dough’s… before it burnt to the ground.
Also: I never knew Matt endorsed bigotry so vigorously.
But, more to the point: I agree that the stuff from the ’80s was truly horrendous, and there’s no way in hell anything like that has been printed in the past decade. When I’d be in on conversations the eds would be having about how an article could possibly be considered offensive, I’d be perplexed at how something so innocuous could be taken so out-of-context… but, then again, I didn’t ever have to deal with the complaints.
I think having more women on staff in recent years has probably helped to right the ship, too.
Wait… what? WOMEN are now writing for GW? MULTIPLE women?
I mean, Matt’s virulent bigotry is one thing. I may not support it, but I understand he’s simply trying to create a safe space on-line for the racists of the world to share ideas and practice synchronous masturbation.
But multiple female staffers… that’s just crazy. And probably sexist.
I for one am not comfortable with Matt’s virulent bigotry. I like my bigots to clearly identify themselves with swastika tattoos on their faces, and now I feel like Matt has been dishonestly misrepresenting himself to us all this time.
To follow up what I was saying, I was just happy that Sizzler helped me overcome my crisis of confidence and see that it really wasn’t about religion or sexual preference and that I really could just be annoyed with him for who he was as a person after all. In a way, he exactly achieved the goals toward which the Equality Issues Committee was working. In a way, he was a hero. An annoying, incompetent hero.
That’s why it’s so beneficial to have two editors heading up the newspaper.
I remember when my co-editor wrote this massive editorial praising the brutal, totalitarian government of Robert Mugabe. I don’t want to say his name, because it’s Jon something and he’s friends with Matt, but I had to pull him aside before the issue went to print and say “Listen Jon: I understand that you think Mugabe has quote unquote ‘a lot of good ideas’ and that when you and Matt graduate you two would really like to go to Zimbabwe for a couple of years and run PR for him and maybe drive a few jeeps into some shanty towns. I understand that. But what I can’t do is let you run this editorial. It’s 7 pages long, and we agreed you only get half a page. We need the rest of the space for ads and to let the layout staff rip-off jokes they heard on last week’s Simpsons in the personal/impersonals.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to lock myself in the boardroom like I’m busy, but actually I’m going to huff some glue and wait for Pinkerton and Skinner to get in and save the issue. See you in four hours.”
Wow, look at all the people who showed up! Great to see you. And great to hear, courtesy of Jason, that the paper still has standards.
I can totally relate to any editor who might have seemed excessively cautious, simply because you never know what’s going to offend people. And even the simplest thing could get dragged out for weeks if the person who was offended took it to the Human Rights Office, for example.
One would like to think that a reasonable person would take it up with the editors directly, but all too often, one would be wrong.
In my experience, a reasonable person was more likely to take up a problem with GW with the editors of the Queen’s Journal, the Kingston Whig-Standard, or, for the really big issues, the Toronto-based national media. It seems like complaining to Walmart customer service about your problem with Canadian Tire, but it actually is sort of reasonable decision based on the assumption that a complaint letter sent to GW would be either thrown in the garbage or mocked in print.
Hmmm… Now that you mention it, there was the time that one of our writers cracked a bunch of jokes about Smiths Falls, and some guy who happened to be from Smiths Falls wrote to complain and demand an apology, so the editors told him that they were very, very sorry that he was from Smiths Falls.
I’ve been to Smiths Falls. And ever since the Hershey’s chocolate plant was shut down and all the Oompa-Loopmas were laid off, there’s little reason ever to go there again. The editors’ response was the correct one.
After hearing that story, I prefer to think that a jaunty cautionary song about the importance of not living in Smiths Falls would have been an ever better response.
“Oompa Loompa Doompity Dalls…”