That's What She Said: The Best and Worst of 2014
- Dawn Dumont | February 01, 2015
For news-watchers, 2014 was a horrifying year; a lot of crazy shit went down around the world. But some good stuff also happened. Here’s my list of stories that made the world a brighter or scarier place.
In the “Best of 2014” category, I’m putting BDSM, which stands for Bondage and Discipline and Sadism and Masochism. According to its practitioners (and there’s a very active group in Estevan according to the Interwebs), BDSM has lots of health benefits – and probably makes you very good at tying knots, which is great if you ever go sailing or get into kidnapping people. We heard a lot about BDSM in 2014, thanks to ex-CBC Host Jian Ghomeshi's disgusting and deliberate misunderstanding of what consensual BDSM consists of. He claimed that he was into BDSM, which requires careful planning and a gradual build up of trust among its participants, when really he just wanted to beat the shit out of women and sexually assault them. Jian, with his carefully sculpted facial hair, adolescent girl thighs and earnest liberal politics made women feel safe – but it turns out we could not have been in a more dangerous place.
In the “Worst of” category, we can safely put the Toronto’s Ford brothers. They doubled in size this year, adding the “less crazy” brother Doug to the mix, sort of like adding hillbilly heroin to your usual injection of crack cocaine. Basically what we can all learn from the Fords is that if you keep repeating a lie, then people will eventually believe it – like claiming that you saved a city “1 billion in taxes” even when taxpayers paid more in taxes under your administration than the previous one. So in the spirit of the blustery Ford brothers, here’s my unsubstantiated claim: “I’m 115 lbs with big breasts, I'm 115 lbs with big breasts…"
In 2014, the hashtag #MMIW rose to prominence, which goes into the Best of category. It refers to the over 1,000 Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women in Canada. MMIW advocates have called for an Inquiry and Stephen Harper’s last remark on the subject was, “It’s not on the radar,” as though he were talking about UFO’s instead of human beings. Of course, Harper is more likely to acknowledge the existence of extraterrestrials than missing and murdered Indigenous women.
In the “Best of,” Malala Yousafzai blows away the rest of the competition. The young Pakistani woman is just a teenager and she’s already won the Nobel Peace Prize; I’m an adult and I can barely find Pakistan on a map. In 2012 a member of the Taliban shot Malala because she was a female who blogged about wanting to go to school. But if they wanted to shut her up, they definitely chose the wrong girl. Now Malala travels all over the world advocating for the rights of all children to be educated. Remember her name and throw it in your kids’ faces when they won’t study: “After all Malala went through and now you’re just gonna waste her efforts so you can watch Youtube videos of a dog dressed in a spider costume.” (Although as far as Youtube videos go, that one was pretty epic.)
ISIS, of course, needs to be tossed like used toilet paper into the “Worst of” group. ISIS - just when you thought there were enough woman-hating, western-loathing groups out there, a brash newcomer jockeys to the forefront. ISIS is particularly powerful at branding - social that is, although they'd probably be into the other kind if someone told them about it. They were also fond of convincing the world’s disenchanted youth to jump on a plane to Syria and offer up their nuts on a platter.
CSIS estimates that more than 130 Canadians have left Canada to join terrorist groups and about 30 of them have heeded the call of ISIS, a group that al Qaeda denounces as too violent. Then we had some videos in November from a former hockey player turned ISIS spokesman - who had all the charisma of a fart I took after finishing off a box of Turtles. He encouraged Canadians to turn on Canadians because yes, we were all looking for leadership from a sunburned white guy with long greasy hair.
I don’t know why anyone would join a group like ISIS. If you must prove your “manhood” in useless and stupid ways – then chain yourself to an iceberg or perform CPR on a beached whale or heckle people who won’t get snow-tires. Also, if you’re into hating and abusing women, you can do that here as well as anywhere – just ask Jian.
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