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For 31 years, Canadians have played a grim word-association game: any mention of women in STEM evokes memories of a violent massacre. An ideologically-motivated killer set out to link these concepts in the collective imagination, and he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.
It’s an odd ritual, ours. Violence against women is mostly a banal sort of evil, occurring in private homes behind closed doors at the hands of respectable men who go on to lead respectable lives. This Canadian massacre of female strangers, thank God, is unmatched 31 years hence.
Respectable men, though, make inconvenient faces of violence against women. Best to go with a monster: one who made his misogyny so clear and so ugly that only another monster would hesitate to condemn him.
But do we? We do not even name him, let alone share his reflections on the murder he committed. Because while only a monster would justify a mass murder, plenty of respectable people might read his suicide note and find his thoughts relatable. And we cannot have that.
And since we refuse to name the monster’s specific and targeted grievances, they are sublimated into a condemnation of gender-based violence in general – not just the kind that affects the female people he considered to be feminists. All gender-based violence matters.
Of course it does. But if one monster is going to become a symbol, then let us at least have the courage to confront his actions as they were.
His name was Marc Lepine and this is what he wrote on the day that he killed 14 women at an engineering school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_L%C3%A9pine#Rationale
His name was Marc Lepine and this is what he wrote on the day that he killed 14 women at an engineering school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_L%C3%A9pine#Rationale
“the feminists have always enraged me. They want to keep the advantages of women (e.g. cheaper insurance, extended maternity leave preceded by a preventative leave, etc.) while seizing for themselves those of men…
…Thus it is an obvious truth that if the Olympic Games removed the Men-Women distinction, there would be women only in the graceful events.”
This was a very specific grievance: Lepine took issue not only with women who had the temerity to seek participation in fields dominated by men, but with those who did so without suppressing or denying what it meant to be female. You can be an engineer or a woman, but not both.
He was willing, it seems, to strike a deal. You can be female and have a career, until you become pregnant. You can be a female athlete, as long as you stick to the graceful events or to amateur pursuit of your sport. A female body, or a full participant in society: pick one.
We have turned a mass murderer into a symbol. Let us at least do so in explicit rejection of this bargain, this notion that female participation in society cannot coexist with policy that recognizes what it is about being female that limited such participation for so long.
It can and it should and it must. Because if it doesn’t, then violence against women will flourish in private, in silence, and at the hands of men who understand this very well, and who quietly offer women the same choice that Marc Lepine proposed in his letter.
