From Call It in the Air
The Obscene Woman
By: Gregory Light - Sep 24, 2026
(Toronto 1972)
Joey flopped down on his bed in residence. Joanna’s words prowled in his head; uncomfortably so, like sharp thorns every so often making him wince to temper the sting of their indictment. He knew that she was right. He did make scenes. He was impulsive. He did shout. He was crazy. 'I can't help it,' he had said multiple times in the long debate that circled and cawed in his head like a murder of crows. ‘Murder’. Good word, he thought. It was murder. Some things just set him off. ‘Fred’ things: sheer stupidity, astrology, alchemy, naturopathy, but also big things like social injustice and inequality and oppression and prejudice and cruelty … and a guy in a Ford Transit trying to pass you in the intersection, and an assistant manager breaking your arm, and a graduate student doing God knows what, and? Joey knew he was thrashing desperately. ‘And flat earthers,’ he suddenly shouted. ‘What the hell is that?’ They all irritated him. Why? Why did he care?
Then, to punctuate the point, his phone rang. Wrong number. He slammed the receiver back down, ‘eat shit you wrong number.’ He collapsed back onto his bed and looked at the ceiling. 'Eat shit,' he repeated quietly, the words now recalling Amina Fleming. He still had no idea of his pivotal role in her stupendous rise to fame. He believed, as did most of the country, that it had been McDougal. 'Eat shit,' he murmured again, wondering how that got into his or anyone’s lexicon?
Eat shit. On the strength of these two words, Amina Fleming had been hurtled into stardom; had become a personality, a name, a name once splashed over every newspaper and magazine in Canada. At her height, she'd even pushed Margaret Trudeau off the cover of Time Magazine. Most of that sort of high-profile celebrity deserted her within a year, but she was still popping up in the odd gossip column and earning bits and pieces from interviews and talks.
On the day Amina had anonymously called Joey, it was her promise to work her friend Cathy's shift in the college cafeteria that had persuaded her to put off her suicide. But there wasn't the slightest doubt in her mind that she would kill herself later. Consequently, as she walked to the cafeteria that morning, she found herself flushed with a wonderful sense of freedom: freedom which now pried loose the silent hostility she had been harbouring for months.
'Okay, they know,' she said aloud to herself, 'They all know! (Joey's "eat shit!" was proof enough for her.) ‘It's over. I'm glad.' But minutes later she murmured 'Damn them! Damn them!' and her face grew red, and tears raked her cheeks. 'I ha-ate themm!!' The mute cry grabbed her violently. She might have collapsed on the sidewalk if a woman pushing a small child in a stroller had not caught her by the shoulder.
Are you all right?' the woman inquired, concerned.
'Yes ... yes. Fine. It's just?' she turned her face to conceal the tears. In doing so, she caught the child's eyes looking at her; almost sympathetically. 'You have a pretty little girl.'
'He's a boy, actually.'
'Of course. I'm sorry,' she said and hurried away.
An hour later, behind the counter in the cafeteria, Amina noticed McDougal saunter up to the end of the lunch line. She was preparing a new batch of chicken sandwiches on brown bread; cutting them, wrapping them, and putting them into their respective slots in the large plastic shelving that ran halfway along the counter. McDougal was alone and appeared rather subdued. Out of the corner of her eye, she warily followed his progression. He picked up a tray and brushed a few crumbs from it. Then a fork and a spoon were taken from their stainless-steel containers. And a napkin. He decided on a bowl of mushroom soup, picking up a package of Premium crackers and a small square of cheddar cheese to go with it. And two half-pint cartons of homogenized milk. He paused over his choice of sandwich, lingering; to Amina it looked as if he was stalling. She stood still, head down, her muscles tense, waiting for him to pass.
'Oh, hi Amina,' McDougal said as if he'd just seen her. 'How's business?' He smiled. But Amina didn't see it. She kept her eyes focused downward. She wondered what he had meant by the last remark, assuming the worst. I hate him, she thought. All of them. 'What do you suggest?' he asked after a few seconds.
'Go away,' she mumbled.
'What?'
'Leave me alone,' she answered coldly. 'I know you know. I know it so don’t pretend otherwise.'
'I haven't the faintest idea what you're talking about. But if you're free this evening, I wouldn't mind finding out.' McDougal launched into a spontaneous "come on". It was instinctive. Amina remembered that he had been the only guy to encourage her obscene telephone call.
'Fuck off!!!' The intense sorrow of this blast was enough, even, to impact McDougal. He knew when not to push a situation.
'Hey, I'm sorry,' he said with as much assumed charm and sympathy as he could muster. He stepped closer and affably leaned towards her.
'Don't!' she said.
‘Honest to God, I didn't mean anything,' he said, reaching over to pat her hand which lay trembling on the cutting board.
'I said don't!!!' and with a sudden movement, she slammed her knife down on his hand, slicing deeply into three of his fingers. Two came off the instant he pulled his hand back and the other flopped downward, dangling on a strip of flayed flesh. For a paralyzed moment, they both took in what had happened and then McDougal went crazy.
'Aaaaahhhhh!!!!! My hand, my fingers, my fucking fingers! My hand! Aaaaahhhhh!!!' he crashed through the few people next to him in line and bulldozed into a table. 'She's cut my- she's cut my fucking hand off!! My fingers! They're gone!' He was hopping around chaotically, chairs flying, when he suddenly realized he'd left two of his fingers back on the cutting board. He raced back to the counter, elbowing people aside, keeping his hand wrapped tightly in a napkin he had plucked from one of the tables, leaving the startled diners a gush of blood in payment. 'My fingers,' he shouted to Amina, 'give them to me. They can sew them back on. Put them in ice. Ice! Call an ambulance!' He turned and shouted to the lunching students. 'An ambulance! Quick!'
'It's too late,' Amina said.
'No-o-o!! It isn't!' McDougal cried back to her. 'They can do it. I've read about it. Please. Hurry. In ice. They must be in ice.' He pleaded with Amina while hopping up and down from leg to leg as if desperately waiting outside an occupied toilet.'
'No, they can't,' Amina replied quietly. 'It's too late.' She calmly picked up her knife and in a deliberate sequence of vigorous chopping movements, swiftly reduced McDougal's two fingers into minced mush. Pausing to look up at his frozen face, she slowly swept the remains into the plastic garbage pail at her feet. McDougal immediately succumbed to a virulent, shapeless, twitching, pathetic form of insanity
'Aaaaaaaahhhhhh .... noooooo!!!!' and then, mercifully, he fainted.
'Amina Fleming,' Joey said to himself when he heard about the incident the next day, 'A psycho. Who would have believed it?' If Amina's attack had taken place in almost any other location, he might have accepted the argument of exceptional provocation. After all, it was McDougal's fingers that had been lopped off. But even McDougal would not stoop to such blatant provocation in the college cafeteria. Amina Fleming, he reckoned, had to be an asylum case. She could have exploded on anyone.
Two days later, The Varsity ran a front-page story reporting that the woman who had been making obscene phone calls to the men's residence and the woman who had cut two fingers from the hand of a student in the Victoria College cafeteria, were the same person. The story had been objective and factual in content, tone and style. It was, in fact, by Joanna, then a first-year English student, still six months away from meeting Joey.
Unfortunately for Joanna, the local press picked up her story and had a field day with it. The Toronto Sun, a new tabloid trying to make a name for itself, headlined its article:
LESBIAN CO-ED TEASED HER MALE VICTIMS
WITH OBSCENITIES
The "lesbian" angle they took from a comment McDougal had made in the hospital while recovering from surgery to save his third finger.
'If you're asking me whether I've ever had sex with the woman,' McDougal had begun in response to the reporter's question "Have you ever dated Miss Fleming?", 'The answer is ...' and here he paused. Was his reputation on the line if he said "No"? Would they think he had provoked her because she had spurned his advances? '... well, let me say, it is extremely unlikely that she has had sex with any man.' He paused while his answer was scribbled down. 'Am I making myself clear?' The reporter nodded. It wasn't clear, but assuming Amina had to be either a virgin or a lesbian, he went with the stronger association. Later, Joey asked McDougal why he told the press Amina was a lesbian.
'Come off it, Edwards. You can't believe everything you read. Not that I'm saying she isn't. She ain't normal.'
'But you don't know.'
'I know, man. I can smell it on a woman.’
Joey winced. ‘Fuck you, George!’
‘Anyway, what difference does it make?
Joey was stopped in his tracks. George was right. It didn’t make any difference. But he was convinced George didn’t know why. Most people didn’t know why. Until that moment Joey hadn’t known why either.
Unfortunately, a crueller sequence of events followed. In a dismal attempt to come to her rescue, two of Amina's old boyfriends announced that they would testify she was not a lesbian. At the same time to piss off McDougal, someone began a rumour that most of the men's residence had slept with her. If McDougal hadn't, it was not because she was gay, but because he was not up to it. These two items were picked up and so distorted that when Amina's trial date was set (McDougal had insisted on pressing charges), The Sun ran an article headlined:
NYMPHOMANIAC BUTCHER TO STAND TRIAL
In the next issue of The Varsity, Joanna wrote an impassioned article attacking the attitude of the press. She accused them of trying to cover up the real issues of the case. The male assessment of every event is so dominant in this society, she wrote, it is impossible for a woman to get a fair hearing; whether in a court of law or the media. The editor agreed to publish it on condition that he be allowed to insert an editorial comment at the end stating that the paper was in no way implying that what Amina had done was justifiable.
The morning her article appeared, Joanna resigned. A week after Joanna resigned, the 5,000-word paper Amina had written explaining why she had made her rash of obscene telephone calls, plus the edited texts of two of those calls, were published in a feminist journal in New York. An academic member of the journal's editorial board had been in Toronto giving a lecture when she chanced across Joanna's article in a partially torn copy of The Varsity lying on the seat next to her in a subway car. She had researched the effect of obscene telephone calls on New York women for over a year but had never spoken to a woman who made them.
Amina was ill at ease when she met the woman for lunch. Her confident, New York academic tone was intimidating. It wasn't until she had finished her salad that she realized this woman was sympathetic. When Amina confessed, she was still seriously contemplating suicide, the woman glared at her angrily and demanded to know why?
'Shame, I guess,' Amina said meekly.
'Shame?' the woman roared. 'For what? You've nothing to be ashamed of. You fought back. You're a hero!'
Amina did not feel like a hero. The bulk of her post accused her of being a menace, a slut, or a dike, but there were supportive letters as well. Meanwhile, linking Amina’s arrest to Germaine Greer’s conviction for obscenity earlier in the year, the American academic devoted her remaining lectures and energy to promoting Amina's cause. Within weeks, Canadian feminists made Amina into a cause célèbre coast to coast. For over a month, her photograph and story popped up in the major newspapers; reinforced nightly, by interviews and short features on network television.
The most controversial of Amina's achievements was a book entitled The Obscene Woman, which was published in New York. Introduced by her 5,000-word essay, it consisted of the unabridged texts of all the telephone calls she had taped. Each text was followed by a detailed commentary, parts of an interview with Amina or papers from a symposium on obscenity. The Obscene Woman was subtitled with the text of her last call. "Eat shit, Fleming!" ("Clements" was garbled on the tape.) It served as the book's theme.
Published in time for the trial, to enlighten public opinion, the book backfired. It alienated many women and gave Amina's opposition the public leverage they felt the case needed. Amina was found guilty of aggravated assault, narrowly missing a stint in prison because the judge decided that "the exceptional circumstances of the case did not warrant a custodial sentence". Such a sentence, he said, would "prolong the public uproar which neither the shabbiness of the incident nor the psychology of the defendant merited".
Twenty-four hours after the decision, McDougal filed his first lawsuit against her. He had been awarded damages, paid for by Amina's defence committee, but it was not enough. He wanted to squeeze out a percentage of the earnings Amina would make from her name and "my fucking fingers". Abruptly denied by the court, however, McDougal defiantly announced he would take his claims to the Supreme Court if he had to. Joey persuaded him that even if he won, his name would be "shit" with every woman in Canada.
George understood. The last thing he wanted to be was a sexual leper.
For Joey's part, he was happy to get a bootlegged copy of The Obscene Woman for his "junk" collection, although he was beginning to wonder about the distinguishing criteria of "junk". Some years later when he read the subtitle "Eat shit Fleming!" a second time, he had to admit there was something deeply offensive about it. He was especially offended on behalf of his grandmother. That someone might say such a thing to Sarah infuriated him. That someone had said it to Amina was disturbing enough.