Former CBC host Jian Ghomeshi leaving a Toronto courtroom with lawyer Marie Henein.
As I write this, the trial of former CBC Radio host Jian Ghomeshi is in recess until the judge hands down a verdict later this March. What was supposed to be an open and shut indictment of the onetime media darling turned out to be a hugely divisive legal train wreck, with insufficiently prepared witnesses having their testimony shredded by Ghomeshi’s lawyer, Marie Henein, and her high-priced team. If public reaction to the testimony and cross-examination can be summed up in a phrase, it would be “Well, that didn’t go well.”
When the expected slam dunk didn’t happen and the testimony of Ghomeshi’s three accusers fell apart under the onslaught of Henein’s cross-examination, reaction inside and outside the media began to fall into several camps. One expressed rage at the prosecution for being hasty and ill-prepared, another vilified Henein as a traitor to women, while another trumpeted the trial as another example of how men are “guilty until proven innocent” under a judicial system full of systemic bias and misandry.
But no matter how much they fought with each other online, few were willing to take Ghomeshi’s side. In spite of whatever the trial so far had proved about prosecutorial zeal and incompetence, the viciousness of lawyers or judicial bias, his status as Canada’s most unpopular man remained substantially intact.
In the interest of full disclosure, I should state that I was a guest on Q, Ghomeshi’s show, two or three times in its early years. We shared a small circle of mutual friends and acquaintances in the worlds of media and music, which isn’t surprising if you know how small those worlds really are here in Canada’s largest city. And like most people, apparently, I didn’t like him much either.
Much of the initial reaction to Ghomeshi’s story when it broke in fall of 2014 was focused on a dysfunctional management culture at the CBC – a story that was eagerly embraced by conservatives but proved to have resonance on both sides of the political divide when Maclean’s published a blockbuster feature on the corporation in December of that year. Finding a root cause for Ghomeshi’s apparent free pass to abuse co-workers and harass women in the heart of the most painfully PC corporate entity in the country seemed like an imperative.
For me that wasn’t enough, and as the case unwound very publicly over 14 very noisy months, I was forced to wonder about some deeper dysfunction that spread way beyond the self-righteous self-image of a public broadcaster into the culture in general, into which my own generation had a significant role.
Because the first thing that struck me wasn’t just that Ghomeshi was only three years younger than me, but how many of the people implicated in the trial, from his co-workers and accusers to his superiors, were members of Generation X – the “trough generation” or “baby bust” that followed the Boomers.
Demography can be overstated as a social phenomenon, but one thing I knew with certainty was that my generation had the privilege of being the first one to come of age in the aftermath of the ‘60s and its ‘70s hangover, into a world substantially altered in its moral certainties and presumptions. If I could be sure of one thing, it’s that Ghomeshi and his peers had shared experiences similar to my own.
Most indelible is the increasingly fraught relationship between young men and women in the ‘80s, the decade in which we came of age, and one that saw the popular debut of political correctness and the “sex-positive feminism” that emerged as a reaction to second wave feminism. The sexual revolution, once a battleground, was now a historical artifact and we got to live in its aftermath, like civilians rebuilding their bombed city from rubble; given what we had to work with, it was no surprise that nothing fit together the way it once did.
You get glimpses of this unease and anxiety in Ghomeshi’s memoir of his teen years, 1982, as he struggles with his crush on an assertive, slightly androgynous girl, one misfit trying to forge a bond with another. Gifted with too much knowledge about sex, we were children assuming we had to act like adults, our awkwardness amplified by expectations that would have been considered absurd a generation earlier.
By the time the rubber really hit the road in our 20s we had learned that none of the previous rules applied – male and female roles were subject to ridicule, deadlines for marriage or starting a family had been indefinitely suspended, and words like “date” or “relationship” or “love” were pronounced with ritual irony, as if their meaning was up for debate. And if you worked in worlds like the media they really were, if only because you spent so much or your time writing as if this was a bygone conclusion.
It has to be understood that this wasn’t a universal state of affairs. Elsewhere in the real world men and women could go about their emotional lives working from a rulebook that almost no one I knew could imagine any more. But the closer you got to the place where speculation about why gender didn’t matter or where sex was headed or whether love was real, the harder it was to imagine a place where people met and dated and got engaged and set wedding dates with the wholly fantastical expectation that it was a lifelong commitment. It was in this world that concepts like “starter marriages” and “friends with benefits” became universally understood.
Which is why, when I read news form the Ghomeshi trial where his accusers kept in touch with him after his alleged assaults – even sending him come-ons by e-mail, while the accused kept this correspondence almost like trophies – I didn’t shake my head in wonder at their poor judgment or his perverse mementos. An older generation, or someone who didn’t live their adult life in this dizzy-making demimonde, might have been amazed, but this sounded normal to me from the position of never knowing a time when men and women had reasonable – or even comprehensible – expectations of each other.
A lot of Ghomeshi’s detractors have made much about his minor in women’s studies from York University. A richly ironic item on his CV, they said, implying that it was something like a predator’s protective camouflage or a huckster studying his mark. His years of abusing women with impunity while protected by the hierarchy of an institution that made a great show of fighting just such abuse was proof that power protects its own, and that the worst kind of men were the real winners of the sexual revolution.
While I still can’t pretend to understand Jian Ghomeshi’s motivations in spite of all this speculation, I found it much easier to understand the self-defeating actions of the women who accused him and fell afoul of a legal system that requires proof beyond reasonable doubt. They grew up and lived in a world where men and women no longer know how to be with each other, and where whatever signposts and certainties they could have relied upon are being swept away as they congratulate themselves on being smarter than the people who once relied on those certainties.
It’s a world that’s grown in reach with every effort to redefine “marriage” or “family” or anatomize “love” as if it were some kind of genetic ailment. It’s the world our kids are living in, and only the cynical seem to know the way through its dark woods.
