Spray-painted ‘joke’ shows casual misogyny is still with us

Of course he wrote it on a bedsheet.

“She Called You Daddy 4 18 Years. Now It’s Our Turn,” was the mocking message.

You couldn’t miss it, spraypainted in large black letters on a white sheet that hung on the front of a student house on Regina Street near Wilfrid Laurier University.

This display of sexual violence disguised as a joke seemed designed for maximum exposure as thousands gathered for Laurier’s annual Homecoming celebration on the weekend.

On that particular day, it seemed more intimidating than it otherwise would, as record-high crowds and heavy drinking lowered inhibitions and encouraged bad behaviour. Some people threw beer bottles from highrises. Thirty-seven people went to hospital. Police laid 462 charges, many related to being drunk.

“Now It’s Our Turn.” I can’t get that chilling phrase out of my mind.

It makes me think of gang rape. Of a young woman passed around like a box of chocolates.

Lots of people were shocked by the thinly veiled threat. Campus police were called. Waterloo Regional Police called it “inappropriate, demeaning and unacceptable.”

The university spoke out on social media, saying the sentiments were “extremely offensive” and don’t reflect its values or expectations.

One man told the media he was baffled by all the attention the sign was getting. He said “everybody knows” that the people living in the house are respectful. There was no intention to cause upset. He predicted there would be no repercussions because no “actual damage” was caused.

What breathtaking inattention to how other people might feel.

Yet in the end, he was proved right. Laurier can punish a student for breaking its code of conduct, but not all the students living there attend Laurier. No law was broken, so police can admonish, but they can’t lay charges.

This banner wasn’t even the only one of its kind. Another, seen at another off-campus residence, read: “The only thing easier than Guelph girls is their football team.”

What’s next? Panty raids, 1950s style?

Cultures change very slowly. Women still don’t have full status as equals.

It all resonates with the latest showdown south of the border. There, would-be U.S. Supreme Court justice Brett Kavanaugh has been grilled by a Senate committee about the accusations of three women that he sexually assaulted them or others many decades ago.

The investigation has led to some dark places. Those of us who remember the late 1970s and early 1980s are chilled, but not surprised, to learn from Kavanaugh’s high school yearbook that he and his friends boasted about being “Renate alumni,” which is thought to mean they had claimed to have had sex with a young woman of that name, whom they knew.

That woman, Renate Dolphin, spoke a few days ago of the “horrible, hurtful, and simply untrue” insinuation.

“I pray their daughters are never treated this way,” she said.

It’s all so familiar. The casual misogyny masked as boys-willbe-boys hijinks. The deep pain of the women who are treated as less than fully human.

Why, all these decades later, haven’t we done better than this?