Margaret Atwood, having climbed the peaks of fame and cultural relevance over the past year to become as celebrated as she’s ever been in her 50-year career, is now facing a backlash in America.
In her home country of Canada, Atwood has been a figure of controversy since November 2016, when she signed an open letter condemning the University of British Columbia for firing the novelist Steven Galloway after allegations of sexual assault. The case attracted far less interest in the US — until this Saturday, when Atwood wrote an op-ed for the Globe and Mail lamenting the idea that she’s become known as a “Bad Feminist” because of her stance.
In an atmosphere hypercharged by the #MeToo movement — and with Atwood’s work made newly relevant again by TV adaptations of The Handmaid’s Tale and Alias Grace — the controversy spread across the Canadian border and into the US. And Atwood abruptly fell from her status as one of the feminist heroes of 2017 to the realm of “problematic fave.”
Taking a break from being Supreme Being Goddess, omniscient, omnipotent, and responsible for all ills. Sorry I have failed the world so far on gender equality. Maybe stop trying? Will be back later. (Next incarnation maybe.)
— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) January 14, 2018
The response to Atwood’s op-ed rapidly became interwoven into a separate argument: the growing concern among some feminists that the #MeToo movement has developed into a “witch hunt,” and among others that their critics don’t fully understand the battle they’re fighting.
To understand how Margaret Atwood, author of beloved feminist classics, came to be considered a “bad feminist” — and not in the Roxane Gay sense of the term — you have to understand exactly how the Galloway case became so inflammatory, and how the timing of Atwood’s op-ed exacerbated everything.
No one came out of the Steven Galloway case looking good
The Steven Galloway case, which rocked the Canadian literary world, is deeply murky and complex, with very little concrete information about the broader strokes of the case on the public record but many, many small details available to debate and discuss ad nauseam. (The Globe and Mail and the Walrus both have detailed accounts if you’d like a step-by-step timeline.) It’s all very slippery, but it’s important to have a grasp on the basics to understand why Atwood’s involvement became so inflammatory.
Galloway was the chair of the University of British Columbia’s creative writing program — one of the most prestigious writing programs in Canada — from 2013 to 2015. By all accounts, he was both a charismatic leader and a vindictive one; he once reportedly slapped a former student at her graduation party. (It was apparently a joke; reports differ as to how comfortable the slapped former student was with said joke.)
In November 2015, the university suspended Galloway, citing “serious allegations.” The next June, following an investigation by retired BC Supreme Court Judge Mary Ellen Boyd, UBC fired Galloway, due to “a record of misconduct that resulted in an irreparable breach of the trust placed in faculty members.”
While the university refused to comment on Galloway’s firing, and Boyd’s report was never published, rumors quickly leaked to the press that Galloway had been accused of bullying and sexual assault. And when Galloway was fired, a faculty association made a statement on his behalf: “We wish to clarify that all but one of the allegations, including the most serious allegation, investigated by the Honourable Mary Ellen Boyd were not substantiated.” The Walrus, which obtained a copy of the Boyd report, confirms this claim.
That single allegation reportedly substantiated by Boyd’s investigation was an affair Galloway had for several years with one of his grad students. Both Galloway and the student were married, and both were around the same age. According to Galloway’s former teaching assistant, their relationship began when the student was in the process of applying to the program. “The power dynamics were there from the start,” the teaching assistant said: “getting in was contingent on him liking her.”
It is the student and former girlfriend — known as MC in the Canadian press, for “main complainant” — who is said to have accused Galloway of sexual assault. Through her lawyer, MC has said that her complaint did not revolve around a consensual relationship.
After MC entered her complaint with the university in 2015, UBC graduates Chelsea Rooney and Sierra Skye Gemma came forward to act as witnesses for her. They didn’t want to make their own complaints, but they thought their testimony might help substantiate that of MC. Instead, they say, they were told that they would be treated as ancillary complainants, a position they had no desire to fill.
Rooney and Gemma both say that in the (heavily redacted) copies of Boyd’s report they have seen, their testimony is distorted, inaccurately summarized, and outright dismissed in places. At one point, Boyd reportedly implied that Rooney was a biased witness because she supported the Believe Women movement.
Rooney says that as her interactions with Boyd grew tenser, she suggested the university hire a sexual assault and harassment expert to act as a consultant to Boyd. The university declined. The complainants’ names, which were supposed to be kept confidential, leaked to the public, and both ancillary complainants say that their budding careers as novelists have been destroyed.
“I haven’t written since this happened; I haven’t written a single word,” Gemma said. “The core of your identity as a writer is writing. I feel like the core of my identity has been altered in a permanent way.”
Rooney says she’s been blacklisted by the Canadian literary community. “I thought I was going to be a novelist and that I was going to go to literary festivals and then this happened,” she said. “And that’s not my life any more.”
Galloway, meanwhile, was committed to a psychiatric unit against his will. Observers thought he might take his own life.
In late April 2016, Boyd submitted her report to dean of arts Gage Averill. It found that Galloway had most likely had an affair with his student, and that he most likely had not sexually assaulted her, sexually harassed anyone else, or bullied students or faculty members. In May, Averill recommended to UBC’s then-interim president Martha Piper that Galloway should be fired, citing not just Boyd’s report but “other allegations” as well. In June, Galloway was fired.
The whole affair was widely condemned as a mess, one handled so poorly that it succeeded in screwing over the main complainant (unvindicated), the ancillary complainants (dismissed and smeared in public before they ever had a chance to establish their careers), and the accused (fired, with his reputation and mental health in tatters, even though an outside investigator had dismissed all but one of the charges against him). No one involved was pleased with how UBC handled the situation.
That’s where Atwood comes in.
Atwood signed an open letter denouncing UBC. It had some issues.
In November 2016, a group of prominent Canadian authors — Atwood among them — signed an open letter addressed to UBC that decried Galloway’s firing, one hosted by a group called UBC Accountable.
UBC, the letter said, had “cast a cloud of suspicion over Professor Galloway and created the impression that he was in some way a danger to the university community. This impression has been amplified in the public sphere, severely damaging Professor Galloway’s reputation and affecting his health.”
“The ‘allegations,’” the letter maintained, with pointed quote marks, “were unsubstantiated and unexamined.”
It went on to demand that UBC establish an independent investigation into Galloway’s firing.
“We are not requesting that privacy be violated and understand that there are grievance proceedings in process,” the letter concluded. “Justice, however, requires due process and fair treatment for all, which the University appears to have denied Professor Galloway.”
To many observers, the letter appeared callous at best. Opinions varied as to whether Galloway got his due process — but couldn’t the letter spare a word for the ancillary complainants who got smeared in the course of the investigation? Couldn’t it acknowledge MC’s case? Some argued that the letter would succeed only in making young sexual assault victims feel less safe coming forward.
“We are angered by this letter of ‘support,’” said another open letter with 500 signatures from members of the Canadian literary world, “because no support was expressed for the female complainant or for the other female students who felt it was safe to make complaints after Steven Galloway was suspended. We are furious that there is only support for Galloway himself because he is a fellow writer, and because he is friends with many who signed the letter.”
“It reads like a loud and sustained mourning for his damaged reputation,” wrote Vice, “and does not acknowledge how courts fail assault victims.”
“A request for more transparency is completely reasonable,” said Bitch magazine. “What is disturbing about the letter is how dismissive and even downright accusatory it is towards the complainants.”
In the face of the backlash, some authors (including Sheila Heti, Miriam Toews, and Camilla Gibb) removed their names from the open letter. UBC Accountable added a section to its website acknowledging “that our original open letter did not express explicitly our concern for all victims of sexual assault and harassment.” Multiple signers, including Atwood, appended individual statements to the letter expressing their solidarity with victims of sexual violence. “We’re sorry we hurt any survivor people out there by seeming lacking in empathy for your experiences,” Atwood wrote.
In a follow-up piece on the Walrus, Atwood briefly allowed that the complainants were hurt by UBC too, but overall staunchly defended her position. “My position is that the UBC process was flawed and failed both sides,” she wrote, “and the rest of my position is that the model of the Salem Witchcraft Trials is not a good one.”
“To take the position that the members of a group called ‘women’ are always right and never lie — demonstrably not true — and that members of a group called ‘accused men’ are always guilty — Steven Truscott, anyone? — would do a great disservice to accusing women and abuse survivors, since it discredits any accusations immediately,” Atwood wrote.
It was an argument that seemed to position Galloway — a celebrated novelist with many famous writer friends willing to put their own reputations on the line defending him — as analogous to one of the persecuted women of the Salem witch trials, or a 14-year-old boy wrongly imprisoned under false evidence. The harm suffered by the complainants, meanwhile — both allegedly at Galloway’s hands and then later, over the course of the investigation and its aftermath — was brushed aside as unimportant. Coming from the author of The Handmaid’s Tale, it was a disappointing response at best.
On Twitter, Atwood continued to defend her position, and that’s where we get into the twistiest part of this whole controversy.
Lord knows Twitter can bring out the worst in all of us, but even that cannot explain why, for some reason, multi-award-winning author and certified very smart person Margaret Atwood decided that noting that Galloway was of indigenous heritage would be relevant to the debate regarding whether both sides of a sexual misconduct investigation received their fair treatment.
Confirmed @josephboyden that Steven Galloway is #indigenous + was adopted. @ubcaccountable Well known but not so far mentioned in the convo
— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) November 24, 2016
“I found that tweet to be literally, shout-at-the-screen enraging,” wrote First Nations writer and activist Robert Jago on Canadaland. (Jago’s piece goes on to repudiate claims made by Canadian novelist Joseph Boyden — the source Atwood cites in her tweet, who signed the open letter to UBC alongside her — that he is himself of indigenous heritage.)
The indigenous heritage tweet was the last major development in the Atwood/Galloway controversy. Four months later, Hulu’s TV adaptation of The Handmaid’s Tale premiered, and the controversy surrounding Atwood was washed away by an outpouring of appreciation and respect for her position as the creator of a feminist classic.
Until this January, when Atwood dredged up the controversy again with her op-ed.
Atwood’s op-ed feeds into a larger debate over the efficacy of #MeToo
The op-ed’s reach probably would have been confined to Canada if it hadn’t been for two factors: its #MeToo peg, and the timing of its release.
Atwood argues in the piece that the UBC controversy and the #MeToo moment are both cases of vigilante justice taking the place of a broken legal system that is incapable of giving justice to victims of sexual violence. “But understandable and temporary vigilante justice can morph into a culturally solidified lynch-mob habit,” she warns, “in which the available mode of justice is thrown out the window, and extralegal power structures are put into place and maintained.”
Atwood fears the worst: “In times of extremes, extremists win,” she writes. “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.” If the #MeToo movement is not properly channeled, she suggests, it will end in a system of kangaroo courts and excommunications.
For many of those active in the #MeToo movement, Atwood’s argument felt like a betrayal. She seemed to be trashing a movement for hypothetical crimes it might perhaps commit in the future while ignoring what it was doing in the present — and in the same piece, she failed to engage in good faith with the criticism against her for her support of UBC Accountable.
In which @margaretatwood likens #MeToo to the Reign of Terror, Stalinism, the Dirty War, the Mafia, and a few more. It's about how she's a good feminist. https://t.co/wyPhnVNxhc
— Jesse Brown (@JesseBrown) January 13, 2018
Would like to know who @globeandmail gave Margaret Atwood a national platform to misrepresent the very real criticisms against her while failing to publish the young women writers and activists who stood up to her.
— Leah MacLean-Evans (@PenAndDragon) January 13, 2018
Yes when you prioritize your powerful male friend over sexual assault/harassment victims you are in fact a bad feminist.
— Alison Jean (@Jalison100) January 13, 2018
Atwood’s fears — and the response to those fears from other feminists — can be loosely linked to those of Caitlin Flanagan and Bari Weiss, two other prominent writers who have written about the dangers of #MeToo in the wake of comedian Aziz Ansari being accused of sexual assault. Flanagan fears that #MeToo, while “in many ways so good and so important,” has begun “to sweep up all sorts of people into its conflagration: the monstrous, the cruel, and the simply unlucky.” Weiss argues that “what ought to be a movement for women’s empowerment” is becoming “an emblem for female helplessness.”
And all three op-eds emerged after a series of arguments against #MeToo from fellow feminists, which culminated in Stassa Edwards arguing at Jezebel that “the backlash to #MeToo is indeed here and it’s liberal second-wave feminism.” (Here, Edwards is referring to participants in the feminist movements of the 1960s, and specifically to those who were uninterested in radical destructions of systemic misogyny.)
“Liberal second-wave feminists have been a prominent voice in bringing the reckoning to a premature conclusion, suffocating this deeply-needed cultural moment,” Edwards writes. “Armed with a self-identified feminist conviction, they are often quick to deem the criminality of brutal physical attacks as the barometer for abuse — dismissing the precariousness of women rendered by institutional discrimination as self-imposed victimhood.”
The idea that second-wave feminists are reacting against #MeToo doesn’t quite apply here. For one thing, Weiss is fairly young to be lumped in with second-wavers; for another, Atwood herself would most likely resist being called a second-wave feminist: She tends to object to being considered part of any movement she hasn’t defined to her own satisfaction, and she only recently began calling herself a feminist at all, albeit with all kinds of qualifiers appended. But her op-ed fits into this emerging narrative that as #MeToo moves away from bringing to light strictly criminal forms of sexual misconduct, it is moving into places that some feminists will not fully embrace.
This sort of splintering, Atwood writes, is dangerous to the movement, and will create vulnerabilities: “A war among women, as opposed to a war on women, is always pleasing to those who do not wish women well.”
But right now, both sides seem convinced that it’s the other side that will need to budge.