Washington DV Press

By: Barbara Kay:

December 6, marking the 20th anniversary of the Polytechnique massacre of 14 Montreal women engineering students, is a date that normally sparks a print column from me. I decided to pass this year on print and post in the blog, as I have made my case against the sanctification of this event so many times before, and have nothing new to add to this column in December, 2007, where I laid out my complaints in full. But I am particularly glad I didn’t do a column on the massacre this year, because it would have looked like a crib of the December 7 column by Margaret Wente in the Globe and Mail, in which Wente pretty well reprises everything I have been saying about the misandry-driven, Polytechnique-fuelled White Ribbon campaign for years.

I am not accusing Wente of cribbing me, by the way. On the contrary, I am glad to know that Wente has independently come to the same conclusions as mine, and am very glad to have such a prestigious ally in debunking this unwholesome enterprise. As Wente notes, women are no more at risk from male violence today than they were before, as violent crime in general is going down, and men are far more at risk for violence from other men than women.

But they’re only men, so who cares. Not feminists. One of the great curiosities of the feminist movement is their indifference to male victimization by both male and female perpetrators. In cases of male-on-male violence, they pretty take the attitude that it doesn’t count as worthy of public sympathy (even though they ignore or make excuses for lesbian-on-lesbian violence, statistically higher than male-on-female violence in intimate partnerships). In cases where women really hurt men badly – and guns, knives or, say, golf clubs, for a random example, are a great leveller – they may find it “amusing” (this is how one Montreal radio station female guest characterized the image of Tiger Woods being chased around by an angry wife); or if they aren’t quite so heartless, they’ll still refuse to admit that women can administer violence to men unless provoked, even though all credible research, as well as the unforced admissions of many many female perpetrators of violence, tell a different story.

As a result of the White Ribbon campaign, a direct response to the massacre, just about every public institution in Canada – schools, health units, social service agencies – has signed on to the myth that the massacre is related to domestic violence – a nonsensical linkage, as Wente makes clear – and to the further canard that domestic violence is all one-sided.

Thus, on December 6, you get scenarios in schools like the one a reader sent me yesterday, an account related to him by a boy student who was present at the ceremony:

In the local high school this week each class got a ten minute seminar on Marc Lepine and violence against women. The girls were counted out in numbers from 1-3 and then the classes were sent to the gymnasium for the finishing touch of the seminar. When all of the classes were in the gym, a certain number was called and those girls were told to stand to show as an example of how violent men were towards women. [This exercise was meant to underline the "fact" that one in three women will be touched by sexual assault in their lifetime.] Then white ribbons were handed out and everyone was told to wear them.  I asked how many of the boys who were going to be abused by women got to stand up?-”None” [was the answer]. They made these boys put on their white ribbons and say, “I will never commit violence against women or excuse violence against women.”

This is a scandal. First of all, the persistent notion that one in three women will be violently assaulted in her lifetime is an egregious lie. Spousal homicides of approximately fifty women killed by men (and about 30 men killed by women)  a year in a nation of 35 million people is individually tragic, but statistically meaningless as a social trend. Secondly, in this Soviet-era show trial performance, the school is needlessly frightening girls – while assuring them they are incapable themselves of ever hurting a man, another egregious lie – and shamelessly denigrating boys by virtue of their sex, pretty well assuring them that they are monsters at heart, and need special indoctrination to make sure they don’t all turn out to be Jack the Rippers.

If hatred of women amongst men in our culture was as pandemic as the Montreal Massacre exploiters would have us believe, there would have been massacres of women before 1989 and there would have been massacres since. But although there have been massacres of other kinds – Fort Hood springs to mind – the Polytechnique was a one-off and therefore the exception that proves the rule.

The rule is that in our culture, a tiny minority of men are physically abusive to women without provocation and a tiny minority of women are violently abusive to men without provocation. In normative domestic violence in our culture, the motivating problems are psychological and individual. They have nothing to do with Marc Lepine. The vast majority of Canadian men are not only respectful of women, they are protective of them, and have no need of insulting browbeating by educators to control their alleged misogyny.

There are cultural traditions in which misogyny flourishes, but ours is not one of them. Yes, more men are violently abusive to women than women to men, but it seems particularly unfair of women to single men and boys out for public shaming on the basis of numbers, since we do not have pink/blue ribbon campaigns to “remember” that many children have been killed by their mothers – more than have been killed by fathers. We should no more permit men to take the rap for the demented Marc Lepine than we should ask women to take responsibility as a sex for the vile crimes of Karla Homolka.

Twenty years is more than long enough for a freak tragedy to stand in for licensed bigotry.  Let us end all zero-sum remembrance ceremonies in which an entire sex is made to pay for the crimes of a few.