The day I watched a man insult his wife in front of 3000 people, and realized I was part of the problem

I watched a man insult his wife in front of a 3000-person audience.
I am ashamed.
I am ashamed because my inaction does not reflect the values that are most important to me.
My wife and I often talk about gender issues. We talk about it often because she works in Montreal’s movie and TV production industry, which was recently shaken up by the Weinstein sexual abuse allegations. After many years of witnessing misconduct in the workplace, the events have finally given people the courage to speak up and support the victims.
This is a great step forward.
However, during the rise of the #MeToo movement, whenever the subject was brought up, I kept wondering why these people had been allowed to commit such terrible acts for such a long period of time without anyone saying anything. I know I would have stood up for the victims, or so I thought…
Now I know that the issue is not as simple as I thought, because I witnessed a truly terrible event and to my surprise, I didn’t do or say anything. I feel even more ashamed of myself because I should have known what to do.
Earlier this week, I attended a conference for work.
The speakers up until then had been pretty good, and I had even taken some helpful notes. Right before lunch, this guy comes up on stage. He’s a salesperson, author of a few books, and he’s obviously made a decent amount of money, because he talks about money, a LOT.
I’m not entirely comfortable with some of the ideas he brings up, but as always, I try to keep an open mind. My first impression of him is that he reminds me of the lead character in The Wolf of Wall Street.
And then it happened. I watched the most embarrassing and horrifying public speech of my entire life. It lasted about 20 minutes (although it felt like eternity), and I’m sad to say that I didn’t fully realize what had just happened until after the fact.
In that short period of time, he had his wife stand-up in front of the whole crowd. He called her a “thing”. He bragged about a time before their marriage when he called her every two weeks for about a year without any answer until she finally picked up the phone (I remember looking at a colleague and saying “Dude, WTF, isn’t that harassment?”). He called her “stupid” for not wanting to marry him at the time. “Everyone knows stupid people like that”, he says. He bragged about how making her stand up and acting like this would get him sex five miles in the air on the plane back because she “likes that”.
And while this happened, everybody just listened.
A 3000-person audience let this guy speak to his wife like that uninterrupted for 20 minutes.
Like many other people in the room, I was slowly (way too slowly) processing what was going on. “Is this for real?”, “Is this a joke?”, “Is he really thinking what he’s saying?”, “Is this normal?”, “Should I be laughing?”. “Am I the only one who’s uncomfortable right now?”.
I look around at the audience to see that some attendees are laughing nervously, but nothing seems wrong, so I don’t say anything until after the talk. When everyone gets up, my first reaction is to seek confirmation for what I think I’ve just witnessed.
It all seems so obvious now.
It was not until after the talk, after people started talking about it, after people took the conversation to Twitter, and after the organiser of the conference made a public apology on stage that everyone actually realized how terrible the speaker’s behaviour had been.
I am part of the problem.
Today, I know a little bit more about the problems that we face as a society. This is a society that lets a man publicly humiliate his wife while we all watch as bystanders. A society where people deny and minimize these behaviours so much that they need confirmation from others before they realize how wrong these behaviours actually are.
I hope that writing about my experience can inspire someone to act, even when in doubt.
Finally, dear speaker, you are a terrible human being, and your wife doesn’t deserve the amount of disrespect you showed her that day. The only wish I have that’s greater than not having seen you speak at all (because I can never erase this memory), is that I had said it to your face when I had the chance. If not me, then who else?
