Dear Jian Ghomeshi: an open letter

I have never liked your show. The primary reason I have always found you insufferable is because you have consistently pandered to feminism. You softball any feminist guest--hell, you tend to not just softball, but softball slow and wide and soggy enough to give them a walk every damn time, instead of ever asking them any difficult questions, or demanding they provide empirical evidence for their assertions.

And while I know that asking the really hard questions isn't what The Q is about, I have no doubt that had you ever interviewed me, you'd have been asking those hard questions. You'd have been demanding I prove every single claim I made. You'd do it the way every mainstream interviewer, whether on the political left or the political right, who has dared to talk to me has.

You have been told all your life that the rape of women is not taken seriously enough, even in Western cultures. That women who claim they've been sexually violated are not believed, and even when they are believed, they're blamed or dismissed. You've been told that we live in a rape culture where the sexual terrorizing of women is normalized, and men are absolved through the toxically masculine "boys will be boys".

You have implicitly agreed with that, every time you've swallowed any given feminist assertion at face value, instead of telling that person to prove it to you, and to everyone. You are now reaping what a feminist culture sows. What it sows is an assumption of sexual malice and malfeasance on the part of all men, and the attitude, to paraphrase Alan Dershowitz, that rape is so heinous a crime, even innocence is not a defence. You said yourself, the CBC doesn't give two shits about whether what you did with your partner was consensual--it's only concerned with the fact that some women have impugned your sexuality and your integrity. Some woman somewhere says Jian Ghomeshi is a creep? Here comes your pink slip.

I've been surfing on mainstream websites, and the "goss" is that you're a scumbag and a predator, all based on a single blog post about an alleged ass-grab, written by a female "writer" that "Literotica" wouldn't lower themselves to publishing, a story so cloying and saturated with rape-fantasy narrative that I'd be surprised the author doesn't masturbate to it every night before bed.

I have to say, Jian, I'm not happy with you. I'm really not. You've contributed to a culture where a woman's pointed finger is equivalent to a conviction. A culture Theodore Roosevelt predicted would eventually emerge all the way back in 1904--a future dystopia where any man so much as accused of rape would be as subject to public lynching as the black man was in his own day.

You have consistently and repeatedly enabled the architects of your own undoing, almost certainly thinking they would never, ever turn on you, and almost certainly thinking no man was ever accused of sexual misconduct who didn't deserve it. You were willing to believe the worst of every man who was not you--an entire society of them!--while simultaneously believing that playing by the feminist rulebook would somehow inoculate you against persecution.

I am a public figure who has spoken at political conventions and gender issues conferences, an advocate for men and boys, and a philosophical opponent of ideological feminism. I'm a high school graduate whose writings are currently included in the curricula of more than one university sociology or psychology class. I'm a waitress who is a friend of Warren Farrell (best-selling author of several books on the male experience), and Anne Cools, the first black female to become a senator in North America, and a leading opponent of ideological feminism. I am unusual in background. Atypical in my opinions and my associates. Not your average Jane. People like me have been out here all this time, for the 8 years you have hosted your show, and yet not once have you found any of us interesting enough to interview. Not when there's another Rape Culture hysteric to pander to, for lulz and listens, anyway.

I find you smarmy, self-satisfied, repugnant and unctuous in your 8 years of asking easy questions and avoiding controversy. I detest your smug interview style, your moralizing, prerecorded intros to the show, and your lack of journalistic integrity when presenting the status quo as truth by journalistic fiat.

But as much as I detest the way you've enabled and abetted what I have come to believe are the most insidious organized fraudsters in living memory, I detest even more the way you have been treated by them, by your employer, and by the general public.

Again, I don't like you, and I don't like what you have stood for over my years of listening to your program. But that does not mean I will automatically believe what is being said about you, and given the propensity for feminists to lie about men and about sex, I want to offer you my support, such as it is. I wish you well in your lawsuit.

If it turns out you are a scumbag (as many prominent male feminists somehow magically turn out to be, almost as if they view feminism as a means to groom their victims), I will condemn you as wholeheartedly as anyone else. But until the evidence surfaces to convince me of that, I will be in your corner.

Good luck to you, and here's hoping the all the evidence is heard.

-Karen