All single-sex arrangements go wrong
Why all boys? That’s was my instant reaction to the news that at least one boy was filmed being allegedly gangraped by a broomhandle by other boys at St. Michael’s College School, a singlesex Catholic private school in Toronto. There’s video shared online to prove it.
Luckily, St. Michael’s asked itself the same question on its own website. “Why all boys?” The lengthy answer was, in retrospect, quite sinister. “The all-boy setting at St. Michael’s creates a space for boys to be boys.
“Students develop strong bonds of friendship and camaraderie with their peers that will last a lifetime. Friendships thrive in an all-male environment where they are not competing with one another for girls’ attention.”
The board of directors has seven men, mostly priests, and one woman. Nearly half the teaching faculty are St. Michael’s graduates, which is worrying, as is the school’s ungrammatical and misspelled statement about the rape and the bomb threat that followed.
And the fumbling response of principal Greg Reeves when asked why he didn’t immediately call police as the law requires — “I filed the report because the police showed up. I was always going to call the police” — reveal that victims might well not trust the school to help them.
Did they believe their parents would take their side? Many parents interviewed at the school were furious that media, who uncovered the crime, were giving the school a bad name. It was chilling to hear them, and no sympathetic mention of the victim. Six boys expelled and charged with gang sexual assault among other charges are now out on bail. So far, police say there are at least three other victims.
Our students graduate as “St. Michael’s Men,” the school promises. If they re-enacted Lord of the Flies at school, turning on their own Simons and Piggys, I wonder what St. Michael’s Men will do to young women when they finally meet them after graduation.
All single-sex arrangements go wrong. Private girls’ schools have their own kind of bullying, cruelly mocking and shunning selected victims. Many book clubs exist just to enable wine alcoholism, but there’s always one woman liked by no one.
Industries once packed with men, like the RCMP, police, military, journalism, engineering, academia, politics, firefighting, medicine and many other sectors, were accustomed to male supremacy. Now that they’re forced to let a few women in, the bullying has become intense and the brutality horrifying.
Equally, women determined to break into the male world sometimes emulate male tactics and bully subordinates. It will take a long time for women and men to learn to work well together.
When the St. Michael’s Men get to university, let’s hope they don’t regress. Was the school rape done for hazing purposes or for sexual pleasure that hazing entails? I remember staged acts of student humiliation by other students at Western, but it did not happen at the University of Toronto.
It happened in fraternities though. The actor Jon Hamm of HBO’s Mad Men is a case study. In 1990, he was charged after a University of Texas Sigma Nu hazing of a young pledge. It was torture.
Hamm and his buddies beat the young man so severely that he had a fractured spine and nearly lost a kidney. Hamm dragged him by a hammer hooked under the boy’s genitals and set him on fire. There were charges, Hamm got probation, dropped out and settled a lawsuit by his victim. He now dismisses the crime, unconvincingly. “It was a bummer of a thing that happened. I was essentially acquitted. I wasn’t convicted,” he tells Esquire. Then he says, unprompted, “This week was a nutcrusher.”
Hazing isn’t dead. It flourishes. But why do young men torture each other, often to the point of death? It is cultlike, and reciprocal in that men who were tortured will torture, but it is also homoerotic.
D’Arcy McKeown, a St. Michael’s graduate who was later assaulted at McGill with a broomhandle worries “that these kids came up with that as a hazing initiation because of my ties to St. Mike’s and the fact that I went there and went through that and because it was public knowledge.”
They were inspired.