Am I a Bad Feminist?: A Selection from Margaret Atwood’s Burning Questions (2022)

“It seems that I am a ‘Bad Feminist.’ I can add that to the other things I’ve been accused of since 1972, such as climbing to fame up a pyramid of decapitated men’s heads (a lefty journal), of being a dominatrix bent on the subjugation of men (a righty one, complete with an illustration of me in leather boots and a whip), and of being an awful person who can annihilate—with her magic White Witch powers—anyone critical of her at Toronto dinner tables. I’m so scary! And now, it seems, I am conducting a War on Women, like the misogynistic, rape-enabling Bad Feminist that I am.

What would a Good Feminist look like, in the eyes of my accusers?

My fundamental position is that women are human beings, with the full range of saintly and demonic behaviours this entails, including criminal ones. They’re not angels, incapable of wrongdoing. If they were, we wouldn’t need a legal system for such accusations, since they would all be true.

Nor do I believe that women are children, incapable of agency or of making moral decisions. If they were, we’re back to the nineteenth century, and women should not own property, have credit cards, have access to higher education, control their own reproduction, or vote. There are powerful groups in North America pushing this agenda, but they are not usually considered feminists.

Furthermore, I believe that in order to have civil and human rights for women, there have to be civil and human rights, period, including the right to fundamental justice, just as for women to have the vote, there has to be a vote. Do Good Feminists believe that only women should have such rights? Surely not. That would be to flip the coin on the old state of affairs in which only men had such rights.

So let us suppose that my Good Feminist accusers, and the Bad Feminist that is me, agree on the above points. Where do we diverge? And how did I get into such hot water with the Good Feminists?

In November of 2016, I signed—as a matter of principle, as I have signed many petitions—an Open Letter called UBC Accountable, which calls for holding the University of British Columbia accountable for its failed process in its treatment of one of its former employees, Steven Galloway, the former chair of the department of creative writing, as well as its treatment of those who became ancillary complainants in the case. Specifically, several years ago, the university went public in national media before there was an inquiry, and even before the accused was allowed to know the details of the accusation. Before he could find them out, he had to sign a confidentiality agreement. The public—including me—was left with the impression that this man was a violent serial rapist, and everyone was free to attack him publicly, since under the agreement he had signed, he couldn’t say anything to defend himself. A barrage of invective followed.

But then, after an inquiry by a judge that went on for months, with multiple witnesses and interviews, the judge said there had been no sexual assault, according to a statement released by Mr. Galloway through his lawyer. The employee got fired anyway. Everyone was surprised, including me. His faculty association launched a grievance, which is continuing, and until it is over, the public still cannot have access to the judge’s report or her reasoning from the evidence presented. The not-guilty verdict displeased some people. They continued to attack. It was at this point that details of UBC’s flawed process began to circulate, and the UBC Accountable letter came into being.

A fair-minded person would now withhold judgment as to guilt until the report and the evidence are available for us to see. We are grown-ups: we can make up our own minds, one way or the other. The signatories of the UBC Accountable letter have always taken this position. My critics have not because they have already made up their minds. Are these Good Feminists fair-minded people? If not, they are just feeding into the very old narrative that holds women to be incapable of fairness or of considered judgment, and they are giving the opponents of women yet another reason to deny them positions of decision-making in the world.

A digression: Witch talk. Another point against me is that I compared the UBC proceedings to the Salem witchcraft trials, in which a person was guilty because accused, since the rules of evidence were such that you could not be found innocent. My Good Feminist accusers take exception to this comparison. They think I was comparing them to the teenage Salem witchfinders and calling them hysterical little girls. I was alluding instead to the structure in place at the trials themselves.

There are, at present, three kinds of ‘witch’ language. (1) Calling someone a witch, as applied lavishly to Hillary Clinton during the recent election. (2) ‘Witch hunt,’ used to imply that someone is looking for something that doesn’t exist. (3) The structure of the Salem witchcraft trials, in which you were guilty because accused. I was talking about the third use.

This structure—guilty because accused—has applied in many more episodes in human history than Salem. It tends to kick in during the ‘Terror and Virtue’ phase of revolutions—something has gone wrong, and there must be a purge, as in the French Revolution, Stalin’s purges in the U.S.S.R., the Red Guard period in China, the reign of the Generals in Argentina, and the early days of the Iranian Revolution. The list is long and Left and Right have both indulged. Before ‘Terror and Virtue’ is over, a great many have fallen by the wayside. Note that I am not saying that there are no traitors or whatever the target group may be; simply that in such times, the usual rules of evidence are bypassed.

Such things are always done in the name of ushering in a better world. Sometimes they do usher one in, for a time anyway. Sometimes they are used as an excuse for new forms of oppression. As for vigilante justice—condemnation without a trial—it begins as a response to a lack of justice—either the system is corrupt, as in pre-revolutionary France, or there isn’t one, as in the Wild West—so people take things into their own hands. But understandable and temporary vigilante justice can morph into a culturally solidified lynch-mob habit, in which the available mode of justice is thrown out the window, and extra-legal power structures are put into place and maintained. The Cosa Nostra, for instance, began as a resistance to political tyranny.

The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn’t get a fair hearing through institutions—including corporate structures—so they used a new tool: the Internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations, and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.

If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won’t be the Bad Feminists like me. We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic, or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated. Fiction writers are particularly suspect because they write about human beings, and people are morally ambiguous. The aim of ideology is to eliminate ambiguity.

The UBC Accountable letter is also a symptom—a symptom of the failure of the University of British Columbia and its flawed process. This should have been a matter addressed by Canadian Civil Liberties or B.C. Civil Liberties. Maybe these organizations will now put up their hands. Since the letter has now become a censorship issue—with calls being made to erase the site and the many thoughtful words of its writers—perhaps PEN Canada, PEN International, Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE), and Index on Censorship may also have a view.

The letter said from the beginning that UBC failed the accused and the complainants both. I would add that it failed the taxpaying public, who fund UBC to the tune of $600 million a year. We would like to know how our money was spent in this instance. Donors to UBC—and it receives billions of dollars in private donations—also have a right to know.

In this whole affair, writers have been set against one another, especially since the letter was distorted by its attackers and vilified as a War on Women. But at this time, I call upon all—both the Good Feminists and the Bad Feminists like me—to drop their unproductive squabbling, join forces, and direct the spotlight where it should have been all along—at UBC. Two of the ancillary complainants have now spoken out against UBC’s process in this affair. For that, they should be thanked.

Once UBC has begun an independent inquiry into its own actions—such as the one conducted recently at Wilfrid Laurier University—and has pledged to make that inquiry public, the UBC Accountable site will have served its purpose. That purpose was never to squash women. Why have accountability and transparency been framed as antithetical to women’s rights?”—Margaret Atwood, Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces, 2004 to 2021 (2022)