My parents are liberal Torontonians. They raised me to believe that everyone deserves a shot at a decent life, and that each of us has to chip in a little to make sure this is the case, both through taxes and through not behaving like a jerk.
The high school I went to was a liberal utopia. Students wore pashminas and listened to Saul Williams in the hallway. On the day the US invaded Iraq, half the student body filtered out to attend the protest downtown. Protests were social events, to varying degrees: some socialized at protests, some went to protests to socialize, and some socialized by protesting. After the protest, if you were lucky, you would get a free plate of cous-cous or a spelt muffin.
I joined a radical cheerleading squad, which made pom-poms out of garbage bags and rhymed “bop-she-bop” with “oppression we will stop.” I joined a group called Riot Grrrl Toronto, which made zines and once organized a concert at the Kathedral. My parents came to see me perform “I Wanna Be Yr Joey Ramone” on the acoustic guitar, but got freaked out by the spoken word poet who talked about crushing globular objects. It was supposed to be a benefit show for a woman’s shelter, but it wasn’t, because we didn’t break even.
Riot Grrrl Toronto, we thought, was founded on notions of justice and equality. But the problem with groups founded on notions of justice and equality is that everyone has a different idea of what justice and equality are. For example, half of us believed that justice and equality include Le Tigre. The other half believed that justice and equality mean condemning Le Tigre for playing the Michigan Womyn’s Festival, whose door policy excludes transwomen. Although we all supported trans rights, some of us believed that you couldn’t support trans rights if you liked a band that played a festival whose door policy excluded transwomen. When Le Tigre played the Opera House, some went to picket, while others went to dance. And that was the end of Riot Grrrl Toronto.
For me, that was the beginning of a long slide into cynicism. When I got to university, I realized that feminism was not just a matter of common sense but also a critical disposition from which to riff endlessly on any text, regardless of what the text was actually about. The U of T I knew was an even bigger liberal utopia than my high school: you had student activists who likened rising tuition fees to the rise of fascism. You had the poster for Israeli Apartheid Week featuring an Israeli helicopter attacking a Palestinian kid with a teddy bear. And you had people who wouldn’t tolerate disagreement, even from those who basically agreed, because there are such things as moral bullies, in liberal utopias as in religious congregations.
I got very sick of all this. I started to re-evaluate the activists I had known: the girls who listened to Erykah Badu and lectured us all on maquiladoras while wearing jeans made in Bangladesh; the OCAP members who took the anarchist course at SEED and smelled like mildew; the vegan ex-boyfriend who once lectured me for drinking a Yop. They had once seemed unquestionably Right About Everything–the more vehement, the right-er–but I started to resent them for their self-righteousness.
Bad memories became bad stereotypes: I began to think of traditional feminists as fun-haters who thought jokes were tools of the patriarchy and who drew up contracts to negotiate sexual contact. The idea of social justice called to mind people in hemp hoodies who ate garbage by choice. The archetypal lefty became a woman in a potato sack and baggy wool tights, screaming at me with the nagging power of three dozen angry moms.
In short, I became a self-hating lefty. I cringed at words like “patriarchal” and “post-colonial,” not because of what they meant, but because I was sick to death of hearing them. I made fun of my friends for going to protests–protests, to me, amounted to a whole lot of duh with a chest thump. And when my friends challenged me, I made a few limp-dick arguments in response before ceding the whole debate with some variation of “I dunno. It’s just lame.” I couldn’t argue with them, because I agreed with them. I just didn’t want to be one of them.
Really, agreeing with them would have meant accepting that I had become completely apathetic. When Harper prorogued parliament two years in a row, I wanted to protest, but I didn’t, because I was too lazy and too comfortable in the peanut gallery. All around me was proof of my friends’ convictions: the looming Harper majority, the fallout from the financial crisis, the human suffering I contribute to every day for the sake of convenience, as the vegan ex-boyfriend put it, smugly but correctly. I realized that behind my own smugness was a whole lot of guilt.
Furthermore, the more I met people without the good fortune to grow up in liberal utopias–people from pretty much anywhere outside of Toronto–the more I realized I was an entitled asshole. There are loonies who believe that enjoying the music of Le Tigre is transphobic, and then there are loonies who beat the shit out of trans people. The latter may not attend Etobicoke School of the Arts, but they still vastly outnumber the former.
I was incredibly lucky to be raised liberal because liberal values sound like common sense to me. I was incredibly lucky to grow up in liberal utopias, because a lot of people grow up in conservative dystopias. I can laugh at all the grandstanding and sanctimony and bullshit rhetoric that liberal kids–myself included–sometimes dish out. But I’m lucky to be able to do that. It’s like laughing at your family: just because you whine about them doesn’t mean they aren’t your people.
Alexandra Molotkow writes Toronto Standard’s Minutiae column. Follow her on Twitter at @alexmolotkow.
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