Unpublished Op-Ed submitted to the Toronto Star
The lurid details of the sexual assaults at St. Michael’s College private boy’s school in Toronto are only the tip of the iceberg. They reflect an antiquated “boys will be boys” mentality of roughhousing and hazing that used to be the norm but are now are out of touch with modern society. In our high-tech world of instant news an incident that formerly wouldn’t have even been noticed is now headline news.
This is not just the behaviour of eight students who were expelled but a reflection of the entire school culture that everyone must take responsibility for. It is a deep-seated and widespread problem across society. Like most other initiation rites that have been abandoned, the ones at St. Mike’s are archaic male rights of passage that need to go the way of the dodo bird. There have been enough public outings of men from the sexualized frosh chants to the numerous #MeToo movement events for any school not to know that this kind of testosterone fuelled behaviour is unacceptable – whether directed at men or women. And yet it keeps happening.
It is a culture of patriarchal dominance and arrogance that pervades the school and society from top to bottom. Whether in our worshipping of male sports figures, to our romanticization of police, doctors and lawyers on T.V. dramas or our idolization of major military figures, the culture of patriarchy is reinforced again and again.
Behind the exclusive, private doors of male educational clubs with a high price of admission to weed out the riff raff and keep the prying eyes of the media away, normal social restrictions appear not to apply. Private boys schools are training grounds for the future elites of society. Students are schooled in a patriarchal hothouse of male ego and heroic traditions and attitudes by Basilian fathers without anything to temper their authority and control. The videos demonstrate this pack mentality and dominance. There is a hierarchy that must be observed. Only the fittest survive and only the greatest succeed. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. They cloak this behind a patriarchal Catholic mystique and privacy. It is a closed, incestuous. cloistered male mentality that students exist in. The elite schools of society like St. Mike’s and others continue to educate in a patriarchal tradition that is still pervasive, powerful and prevalent yet invisible across our modern globe. This social culture is also responsible for virtually every problem in the world today.
Women are resisting this male impress – but only in western celebrity societies. Globally, the values of the Islamic crown princes of Saudi Arabia are more often dominant and desired as they are at St. Mike’s. Every time we see another #MeToo movement incident, or a woman is assaulted or killed in a domestic violence or blasphemy situation, or our capitalist economy destroying our climate or another war breaks out in our militarized and weaponized warrior culture we are exposed to the phenomenon of patriarchy, a male values structure that permeates our world. It exists in Donald Trump, Doug Ford, the Saudi princes, Vladimir Putin, Bashar Al Assad and ISIL. It knows no boundaries of geography, race, ethnicity, religion or politics. It saturates our sports, music, art, literature, science and education to name only a few.
If we only focus our energies on each incident without realizing that the larger system of patriarchy is the real problem we cannot see the forest for the trees nor will we ever create a more humane world. 3`The forest is in need of immediate, radical pruning before a wildfire breaks out and destroys the world but the world has yet to wake up to the fact that all these incidents when collected together make it the major social problem of our modern times causing a litany of issues. St. Mike’s and all other male bastions of these values are incubators for this way of life where a few superior men rule everything and the rest just serve. Rather than fighting every single issue we need to bring attention to patriarchy and begin to raise and educate our male children in an entirely different way to be compassionate, loving, sensitive and caring in opposition to being aggressive, dominant males. As much as we tout the advances of our civilization, we are still animals at heart.
If we don’t the St. Mike’s of the world will continue to churn out their graduates.