- Friday, December 14. 1990 ~ North Shore News Gender bashing doesn’t solve violence problem in our society IT’S NOW obvious that Marc Lepine has done for feminism what Joseph Mc- Carthy did for communism. He’s provided the necessary devil-figure. And, like McCarthy, the symbol that he’s so swiftly become is of priceless service to his enemies. Lepine has been bloated into a huge and nasty fame. As the first anniversary of his slaughter of 14 women students at I’Ecole Polytechnique in Montreal ap- proached, the media practically fell over each other in their eagerness to publish and broadcast retrospectives. Freelance pieces rained down on editors. In turn, editors flushed out psychologists, psychiatrists, every modern shaman they could find, to ponder what it all meant. Columnists tortured themselves and their readers — aren‘t t myself handing you a fresh hair shirt, just when you thought that the media’s wardrobe of them had been put back in the closet for another year? — with deep and troubled ruminations. The vigils and commemorative services were revealing. Ina secular age in which few of the supposedly progressive hold any religious faith, the services took ona fantastic para-religious tone — as if the non-believers who dominate the opinion-shaping and opinion-transmitting classes had found a socially respectable release for their repressed spiritual needs. Candles; cameras framing faces almost beatific with a kind of pie- ty; sermons by any name, touching or defiant, the lattcr promising earthfire rather than hellfire, one might say — the ministers of most conventional churches could only envy the way the congregants’ hearts were so visibly moved. My own thoughts were rather different. The ceremonies and the preaching — the social gospel that, to cite a very common theme, Lepine was the product of a society that condones violence toward women — approached the status of orgy. The slain women were diminished into symbols,too, as was Lepine. All were leeched of their humanity. Although it’s an admission that nobody who lives by the word should lightly make, what hap- pened to the 14 seems to me to be ficerally unspeakable. The slaughter was so awful, so sickening, that | wonder if the on- ly appropriate response to it would be a terrible and agonized silence. More practically, the repeated hammer blows of the accusation by the gender radicals that the Trevor Lautens GARDEN OF BIASES male sex as a whole creates the atmosphere that makes a Lepine possible has two bad effects. First, it alienates men who very much uncondone male violence against women — and, for that matter, male violence against other men. A father who beats his son — a son clinging to his father while the blows rain down on him, actually causing bleeding from the mouth and ears, if the reports of Lepine’s childhood are correct — can only be described in high-Victorian terms, The man’s a scoundrel. A monster. Second, it sends a destructive signal to the half-formed young males, often disturbed by wrench- ed family backgrounds and deeply confused about how they should ‘“behave’’ toward females at a time when the rules are changing or are too bewildering to assimilate — if, indeed, any of the ardent feminists can in fact precisely define what the ap- propriate behavior should be. Aud, other than insisting on a vague respect, all the stronger for being unfocused, of course they can't. There are too many subtleties in the man-woman relationship for any book of etiquette, however trendy or by any name, to cover. The signal the disturbed young (and not-so-young) males receive is therefore: You're guilty. You're convicted. As a male, you are part of this violence-condoning male conspiracy. The point is simple: the con- victed have nothing to lose. They’ ve already lost their reputa- tions. Thus, even those males who are puzzied by the gender wars are persuaded by the rhetoric that in fact violence toward women is ex- pected of them. The bullying, disgusting Senator McCarthy exposed no Commu- nists and instead gave the real and undoubted Communists a smear word that they used to discredit anyone who criticized them: Mc- Carthyism. Is the invention of the term Lepinism really so far away? a Pedestrian struck in N. Van A NORTH Vancouver man_ has been charged with failing to yield the right of way to a pedestrian following an accident at 11th Street and Lonsdale Avenue on Tuesday evening. Penniu Esplen, a 48-year-old North Vancouver woman, was struck by a car at approximately 5 BE IN THE “NO” p.m. while she was crossing 11th Street in a crosswalk zone. 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