The Real Shame

I was reading in the Freeps today about the annual National Never Hear The End Of It Day Montreal Massacre Memorial Antipenis Rally in Victoria Park yesterday and I got to thinking — which, my ex-wife will tell you, is always a rocky road for me — about the evolution (or should I say, devolution) of the male role in our society. Every sixth of December, women all over the country gather together to read out the names of 14 women, bemoan the “epidemic” of male violence against women and generally dump the sins of Marc Lepine and all the world’s other ills at the door of each and every Canadian that happened to win the Y chromosome lottery and end up born with a pecker. And, to be blunt, I’m getting God damned sick and tired of listening to my whole gender get badmouthed every year.

After reading the names of the 14 Montreal women, members of the vigil’s organizing committee also listed the names of women and children who have been killed by their intimate partners in Ontario.

I can’t help but wonder if Rebbecca Haney’s name ever got read out? You remember little Rebbecca, right? She was murdered by her mother’s abusive (what the hell’s the latest newspeak again?) “live-in partner,” on Christmas Eve almost three years ago. Did any of the “Take Back the Night” crowd howl their outrage and wail their grief over her? Of course not.

And do you know just why not? It’s because these little shindigs and the “women’s groups” that drive them have precious little to do with violence against women or children and a great deal to do with the anti-male animosity that has been so carefully cultivated by the rabid acolytes of the feminist Left for decades and now seemingly permeates everything from our courts to popular culture. Don’t believe me? Well, then, just why are these events surrounded by so many misconceptions, omissions and even outright lies?

Let’s start with the omissions. Why was there so little feminist outrage over the death of little Rebbecca? you’d think it would be a no-brainer: innocent child killed by her mother’s vicious “live-in partner;” classic feminazi propaganda ammo. There’s just one little fly in the ointment of outrage: Rebecca wasn’t killed by a man. She was killed by her mother’s lesbian lover, Melissa Babineau, not a man. Oops. Babineau, it is interesting to note, didn’t even spend two years in max for killing Rebbecca. But the important thing is that the bad guy isn’t, well, a guy — so move along, folks; nothing to see here.

Then there’s the sack of crap that set off this annual December 6 propaganda extravaganza in the first place: Gamil Gharbi. What do you mean, you’ve never heard of him?? Of course you have; he killed 14 young women and wounded 13 more with a Ruger Mini-14 at L’Ecole Polytechnic in Montreal in 1989. But you never hear that, do you? After all, a name like “Gamil Gharbi” might make it sound like the Montreal Massacre was done by the Algerian-born son of a Muslim wife-beater; and that would be very politically incorrect to point out, not to mention rather unwieldy as a PR tool. No, a much better name is the one that he took in 1977: Marc Lepine.

With a pur laine moniker like that, Lepine could be held up as the epitome of everything that was evil about the Canadian male. Besides not rolling off the tongue particularly easily, flinging the name “Gamil Gharbi” around might raise questions about Islam, Algerian culture, his ancestry and upbringing, etc etc etc, and all kinds of other potentially politically incorrect implications that could prove pretty problematic for the malingering malcontents in the man-hater menagerie.

But “Marc Lepine?” Aaahh, that’s perfect: it just sounds soooo… so Canadian; so white; so safe to demonize. And for ten long years, that was the only name that we knew him by. It wasn’t until the TO Star published it that anybody knew. And so, every year, the sixth of December becomes a day not so much about honouring the dead as dishonouring the living, as Marc Lepine is held up as the symbol of the murderous misogyny that lurks within all men. He was held up as the perfect example of the evil — and, we were told, typical — Canadian male.

Hardly. After decades of grinding criticism and condemnation of all things masculine (you’re too aggressive; you’re not sensitive enough; you should get in touch with your feminine side; ad nauseum), the men at L’Ecole Polytechnic showed themselves to me the masterpieces of feminazi craftsmanship that day. As Mark Steyn put it:

[Lepine] shouldn’t be representative of anything – least of all, the best efforts of women’s groups and the convenient gloss of that pur laine name notwithstanding, Canadian manhood. If anything, the defining image of contemporary maleness is not M Lepine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, meekly did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate – an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The “men” stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone..

We do have something to be ashamed of, but it’s not what we’ve been told it is. Too many of us have spent too many years trying to warp ourselves into something that we’re not. We’ve been handed a bill of goods that says that there is somehow something definitely wrong with our natural maleness…

and we bought it.