Toxic masculinity is killing us
The frequency by which angry white men perpetrate violent acts is an undeniable problem
By now you’ve surely heard about the 51-year-old white man who — during a horrific global pandemic that’s already turned our whole world upside down — terrorized Nova Scotia, killing 22 innocent people and burning five or more family homes to the ground.
Too many of his victims were women. One was a pregnant nurse who’d been selflessly battling COVID-19 on the front lines. The youngest was just 17: a beautiful radiant light and gifted fiddler named Emily Tuck. You can watch Tuck’s last performance online, if you’ve got the emotional stamina. Each string her bow grazes stings the heart. Each note burns the soul.
Also among the dead is veteran RCMP Const. Heidi Stevenson: a loving wife, a mother to two young children, and a woman who dedicated her entire adult life to serving her country. The RCMP is yet to label this act “terrorism” but it is difficult to see such an act, with 16 active crime scenes in multiple districts, close to two dozen victims, and an entire province and country reeling, as anything less.
This man’s ex-girlfriend moving on from her violent partner is allegedly what triggered this horrific rampage. As if getting dumped could ever justify the deadliest, most horrific mass shooting in Canadian history.
The frequency by which angry white men perpetrate these acts — and often get away with them — in this country is an undeniable problem. From the Toronto van attack, to Ecole Polytechnique, to the countless missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls and Two-Spirited peoples: too many times we’ve seen what can happen when angry men get behind the wheel, behind the bottle, behind the gun.
Professor Myrna Dawson leads the Canadian Femicide Observatory for Justice and Accountability, and notes that impacts of mass killings like this — targeted, misogynistic, malicious and hateful — reverberate throughout the country and beyond.
“They impact women, men, children and communities and will for years and decades. We still feel the Montreal Massacre 30 years later. What perhaps many don’t realize — and particularly those who refer to these killings as ‘senseless’ — is that many of us knew that this was not likely a random act the moment we heard about it,” Dawson says.
Photos of late RCMP Const. Stevenson radiate compassion, peace, approachability and trustworthiness. All traits any civilian would want to see in someone whose top job comes down to keeping us safe.
But not all cops look or behave the way Stevenson did — particularly among Canada’s top police force. Just ask a woman of colour, or an Indigenous person. Or just ask any one of the women in non-policing roles involved in the classaction lawsuit they won against the RCMP: settling decades of gender- and sexual-orientation based harassment and discrimination.
Police violence in Canada is a massive problem. Even more disturbing is the glorification of violence and men’s easy access to, and infatuation with, guns.
If you’ve been watching any American headlines over the past few weeks, you might have seen some of the deeply disturbing images coming out of the bizarre “anti-isolation protests” largely led by supporters of U.S. President Donald Trump. Many of these images depict angry white men that could easily have walked right off the set of the movie “The Purge.”
They’re in fake army fatigues and behind cowardly masks — carrying enormous rifles and holding up signs saying things such as “Give me liberty or give me death.” Meanwhile, nearly one million Americans have contracted COVID-19 and — news flash! — one cannot conquer a deadly virus with a gun.
Thirty years ago, when another angry white man decided to “fight feminism” by storming a Montreal college campus and brutally murdering 14 young women, there were talks of reforming gun laws. Those talks culminated in the now-dead Canadian Long-Gun Registry: a bungled piece of legislation few rural Canadians could ever get behind.
Is it time to try again? Will a law like this only further enflame the blind partisan divisions of our deeply divided Parliament, led by such a minority government?
“We have to ask ourselves: do we know of any (other) country in which the majority of mass killings — outside of armed conflict — have included female victims exclusively or predominantly? I cannot think of one,” Prof. Dawson notes. “What does that say about Canada, about our responses to male violence against women and about the value we place on the lives of women and girls?
“It says that toxic masculinity is real. It says that misogyny is real.”
There’s no quick fix. But clearly, toxic masculinity is killing us.