Gentle Reader, you will never believe the horrible news I just read in today`s Globe and Mail, but before I proceed let me mention again that the question mark still reads as É. Thanks for nothing Microsoft and you can stick Windows 10 up where the sun don`t shine!
Now on with the show. I have just read about a brutal gang rape in Rio. Yes, in that Rio. Carnival, Samba, Summer Olympics in a couple of short months, drugs, gangs and crime, and widespread political and social corruption. A sixteen year old girl was drugged unconscious and gang-raped by thirty-three young men who then videotaped her naked and unconscious and posted it on YouTube where they gloated shamelessly about what they had done. These were not thugs or criminals. They were just regular guys with regular jobs and regular lives. Oh, the Banality of Evil! One of these disgusting man-boys was her boyfriend. And now the vile little cowards have all run away into hiding. A particularly loathsome article was published in one of the Brazilian dailies, blaming the victim: she had tattoos and piercings, wore skimpy clothing, at sixteen the mother of a three year old. Oh, the hypocrisy.
As though men, falling back on that older than time pathetic excuse that it`s the woman`s fault for being attractive, cannot control their carnal urges. Who raised these imbeciles anyway?
(Yes, Gentle Reader, you just heard me retching.)
Anyone who doesn't believe that there exists such a thing as rape culture or specific male violence against women ought to be forced to read this and other articles. I think it was only in 2012 or so that a series of brutal gang rapes were reported also in India. Such crimes against woman, against humanity don't only exist in developing countries. Can you say Jian Ghomeshi? Those of you who don't live in Canada can be excused for not knowing about this (does anything that happens in my country ever get noticed anywhere in the world?) but it's been all over our local news for the last year or so. He was the charismatic aging pretty boy host of the CBC Radio One culture program "Q". A wannabe rock star with a seductive come-hither voice who violently assaulted any woman unfortunate enough to get caught in his web of desire. There was a court case, and he was defended by a particularly astute lawyer, ironically a woman, and acquitted. Of course this will be for Mr. Ghomeshi career suicide so it isn't as if he will go unpunished which will still be scant satisfaction for the many women harmed by him.
What is wrong with us anyway? With men, I mean. Here we are in the Twenty-First Century and there are still way too many males of our species who would like to believe that genitalia is destiny. I think that many factors could be blamed, starting with patriarchy, the traditional male dominance of culture that still has an iron grip on too many societies and still whacks at times a most severe kind of phantom pain here in our own progressive and lovely liberal Canada. The sad news is that it doesn't appear ready to go away any time soon. We still have competitive sports, police and military cultures (pardon the oxymoron, GR) where male hierarchical dominance is still shamelessly entrenched and accepted. Even with the huge incursion that women have made into these three institutions. I believe there is a reason for this. The patriarchal culture of violence that dominates these spheres is in itself, not simply masculine, but something ugly, brutal and destructive. It is a culture of death. Women being admitted into these areas, while providing a useful sop to feminism, themselves become corrupted by the same disease that affects and dehumanizes their male colleagues.
What I am saying here Gentle Reader is that the social evils of dominance, power and brutality are not necessarily defined by gender but by hierarchy. A woman entering into a traditional male sphere of power does nothing to soften or feminize the zeitgeist and instead becomes rather like a man with a vagina. She subscribes to the same insidious process of dehumanization. This also happens in politics. I have heard various second wave feminists opine fatuously that with more women governing and leading the nations the world would become a more gentle, just and peaceful place. To this fatuous nonsense I will reply with but two words, both proper nouns (though there was really very little that was proper about the person so named): Margaret Thatcher.
Stay tuned for part three.
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