4.5 stars

In 2005, the author Kate finished university with a social science degree and had student loans to pay off. She was from Cape Breton Island (off the coast of Nova Scotia) and there weren’t a lot of good paying jobs there, so she (like many men do) headed to Alberta to work in the oil sands (which I will, going forward, call the tar sands… yes, that’s what environmentalists call it, but after having read “Fire Weather” by John Vaillant, I do feel like it’s a more accurate description), so she could make a lot of money and pay off those loans. Unfortunately, it is a place where the men outnumber women 50 to 1. There was (likely still is) a lot of sexual harassment (and worse) going on, and Kate had to just deal with it. Complaining did nothing.

It’s disheartening to see this is still so prevalent. It reminded me of the “Class Action” book about the woman in Minnesota(?) working in a mine in the 70s and everything she went through (the movie made from the book was called “North Country”). I used the word disheartening; maybe frustrating or enraging are better words. By the time Kate went to Alberta, it had been three decades since that case (or at least when it all happened), and things haven’t changed!? Ugh! Of course, with the way things appear to be (politically) now and how people talk, etc, it seems another two decades probably still haven’t changed much (if at all).

Though that was the main focus of the book, toward the end there was some mention of the environmental impacts to animals and the other Indigenous communities living nearby. ( )

Kate Beaton describes her time working in the Alberta oil sands and the miasma of misogyny that surrounded it. She faced ambient borderline harrassment from the 50-1 male-female workforce that made up the various 'camps' and industrial installations, which she renders skillfully in blue and grey tones. The book demonstrates through its episodic structure the daily toil and relentless and unwelcome male attention. It also touches on economic inequalities within Canada, corporate culture, the environmental hazards of the oil industry and its effects on first nations people. ( )

***SPOILERS HIDDEN***

In 2005 cartoonist Kate Beaton found herself in a dilemma as a recent college graduate with large student loans to pay off. Her double degree in history and anthropology wasn’t opening doors career-wise, so she headed to Alberta, Canada, to work in the oil sands, a job that paid handsomely. Ducks is a sequential-art memoir about her two years working there.

Extremely male-dominated—roughly fifty men to every one woman—oil sands are far from ideal workplaces for women, especially for a young woman making this her first job out of college. This memoir is 450 pages, and stunningly, the majority of it is a chronicling of constant sexual harassment and more: Beaton was raped on two different occasions. It appears that not a day went by without some kind of harassment, whether that be quiet leering, objectifying comments to Beaton herself, or objectifying and misogynistic comments about women in general—yet Beaton soldiered her way through what would, understandably, break many people. It was a soul-crushing existence, and her fortitude, and work ethic, stand out as much as the outrageous depictions of harassment.

She wasn’t a robot, though. The panels portraying her rapes show her in a dissociated state during and hollowed out afterward. Making matters worse was that she had no recourse. Complaining would not only change nothing but could mean consequences for her, and she couldn’t afford to have the job get any worse than it already was, or to lose it altogether. In moments of introspection, Beaton pondered her dilemma and went further to examine how loneliness, isolation, and boredom can bring out another side of a person. She struggled with the reality that most of the men toiling away at this job were husbands, boyfriends, and dads, yet in addition to the sexual harassment and assault, cheating was a way of life at the work camps, expected and even encouraged. She never used the term “toxic masculinity,” but her memoir shows that the oil sands are the very embodiment of the mindset and behavior. In an environment so rough and intimidating, any man who didn’t follow the “male code” would be swiftly mocked and ostracized. She and her sister, who eventually joined her as a co-worker, wondered whether their own loving father could change for the worse if put in such an environment. Is anyone immune?:

"The worst part for me about being harassed here isn’t that people say shitty things. It’s when they say them and they sound like me, in the accent that I dropped when I went to university. That they look like my cousins and uncle, you know, even though they’re from all over the country…that they are familiar. And that this place creates that where it didn’t exist before. This place. It’s not an excuse, it’s just…The worst thing is that your heart breaks."

But Beaton also acknowledged that many men ignored her (not that they weren’t harassing anyone, cheating, or both, however); it’s just that the abusive men so dominated her life that it was easy to forget about the ones who didn’t abuse her.

She also made the best of her situation. She was friendly with many of the (better) men she worked with. All the while, some of these men addressed her as “Doll” and variations on that, but she let it pass. The impression isn’t that she approved of such belittling monikers, just that she recognized the limits of her miserable situation: Complaining wouldn’t be good for her, and her paycheck would. Ducks is Beaton’s reclaiming of some of the power she lost when she was forced to shut up to get what she needed.

People shouldn’t read this book if they can’t tolerate depictions of men behaving at their worst around women. The memoir is basically a series of these incidents. It doesn’t tell a story, and chronology is nonexistent, but that disorganization works somewhat to show that every day was the same—both the soulless, ugly work setting and the atrocious behavior:

" . . . work camps are a uniquely capsuled-off society, a liminal space, and analogue for so many other male-dominated spaces. Gendered violence does happen when men outnumber women by as much as fifty to one, as they can in the camps or [at] work sites. Of course it does. Of course this happens when men are in isolation for long stretches of time, away from their families and relationships and communities, and completely resocialized in a camp and work environment like that of the oil sands."

That’s recognition of a disturbing reality, not an excuse. Beaton’s memoir won’t allow dysfunction to be swept under the rug. ( )

It was an odd thing to realise that when I was reading Kate Beaton's cartoons back in the day on LiveJournal, she was living through the experiences she describes in Ducks: working in the oil sands in Alberta to pay off student loans, a place where the grinding repetition of the labour and the long hours are accompanied by isolation, loneliness, sexual harassment, drug addiction, and employers more interested in the appearance of safety than the reality of it. And then, around the edges of Beaton's experiences at first, but something that gradually impinges on her awareness, are the issues of racism and colonialism and environmental destruction.

I did find the structure and some of the transitions between scenes/moments to a bit choppy—perhaps the use of different colour washes for different scenes could have helped—but overall a powerful read. ( )

A lot more depressing that I thought it would be. (I should have expected it.) Definitely a great look at what goes on in the oil sands, probably still to this day. ( )