Well said re. education!

I, too, recollect the engineering school massacre in Montréal, and that it was a small radar blip for U.S. news media. A recent movie, Polytechnique, dramatizing the event has renewed attention, some of it unwanted– in the past couple of months, the controversy has been discussed in Montréal, extending to the Toronto area as well as to the U.S., where former students and surviving family & friends have voiced their reactions to the movie.

“Case Study: The Montréal Massacre”
http://www.gendercide.org/case_montreal.html
Summary of the massacre & related news coverage. Many links e.g. to the Canadian Natl Film Board’s documentary, public awareness campaigns, commentaries.

“New Film About Montreal Massacre of Female Students Stirs Controversy”
The Chronicle of Higher Education
February 3, 2009
includes links to media coverage of reactions

“Montreal massacre film brings up ‘too many memories’”
Graeme Hamilton / National Post
http://www.nationalpost.com/ar.....id=1228750
focuses on the new film, has a couple of blog comments from people who don’t get it

we need to move past the idea that women have done something to deserve abuse. When I first went to college in the late 80′s, I went to a prestigious engineering school. While I was there, we heard on the news of a young man walking into an engineering classroom at another top school, telling everyone that he didn’t get accepted into the school because the girls “took his place”, then told all the boys in the class to leave, lined all the girls up and shot them. It was a blip on the radar in terms of news, but it hit all of the women on campus very hard, since we heard that kind of talk every day (“we took the place of a qualified man”).

So yes, educating both girls *and* boys about gender parity is part of the next step.

That is actually an anti-suffrage argument I read about yesterday for my research paper… things really haven’t changed all that much.

I was dismayed to see what YouTube is cueing with it. I only clicked on one, but I suspect the others are equally missing the point. Of course, YouTube is for the boys. The one I saw was a sex interview. The partnership of sex and violence; that’s the message P.Diddy and Chris Brown promulgate.

“I didn’t agree to this/ask for this” was the message of the video, was spoken by the character, and not just what comes from some few feminists on an internet discussion board amidst a deluge of the type of male posters who frequent Pandagon.

I kinda agree with the commenter’s explanation of abuse being the result of women’s employment, but explaining something does not excuse it nor make it justifiable.

Actually it works the opposite way. Levels of domestic violence track to the degree of male dominance in a society. The more women are dependent on and subservient to men, the more they get beaten up. The more women are independent — in other words, the more feminism in the society — the less violence against women.

It’s actually a lie of patriarchy that if women would just stay home and stop trying to be feminists, they wouldn’t get beaten/raped/whatever. In fact, countries like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and other extremely conservative patriarchal societies have the highest levels of abuse in the world. When men believe that they own women, they abuse them with impunity.

Ultimately, is the video any different from what kids see on television and in the movies, anyway? They see images of women abused by men all the time. Its presented as a regular, frequent event – a normal part of the condition of womanhood is being a victim. Does this video say anything different?

Rihanna has a big following too, and also with her, young women will “believe”. Too bad, but very interesting to make comparisons here and try to understand what’s going on with role models.

Michelle Obama is not Hillary Clinton (not even in her First Lady role) but I think she may change who is considered a role model for Black American youth. I sure hope so:

Domestic Violence is not a situation, it is VIOLENCE, in its most ugly form and re-labeling it doesn’t make it acceptable. I for one don’t intend to buy any product being promoted by P Diddy (Sean John Combs). He was after all saying he was scared of Palin, for what I call PR Misogyny:

Diddy Blog #24 – Sarah Palin Scares Me
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sean_Combs
On December 27, 1999, Combs and his then-girlfriend, Jennifer Lopez, were at Club New York, a midtown Manhattan nightclub, when gunfire broke out.[1] After a police investigation, Combs and fellow rapper Shyne were arrested for weapons violations and other charges. The New York County District Attorney’s Office, led by Assistant District Attorney Matthew Bogdanos, indicted Combs after his driver, Wardel Fenderson, claimed that Combs had tried to bribe him into taking the weapon after the shooting.[14]
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70wGnx_lZio