ACCEPTING BLAME

Men always get a pass, even when they hunt down and kill 14 women, as Marc Lépine did in 1989 at the École Polytechnique de Montréal. The fact that it was a man hunting women was given little importance.

The media — taking its cue from the police — ignored the explicit message in Lépine's suicide letter. The media in English and French Canada insisted Lépine could be dismissed as “a crazy man” with no specific agenda. The fact that he, himself, said otherwise, and that the 14 murder victims were women, did not disrupt the accepted narrative.

Francine Pelletier, for one, took a different view. Pelletier was then, and is now, a prominent Quebec journalist. Her name was on Lépine's “hit list.”

Pelletier wrote at the time that Lépine's act was highly political and that he knew exactly what he was doing that day. “I always felt those women died in my name.

Some of them probably weren't even feminist,” Pelletier said, “they just had the nerve to believe they were peers, not subordinates of their male classmates.”

If we want to actually reduce, never mind eliminate, violence against women, it is long past time for men to own up to the in-your-face reality that it is men who bring that violence. It does not fall from some unknowable source in the sky. It is men who do it to women.

Enough men already get a pass when accused of such violence. We owe it to women, and ourselves as human beings, to at least admit it is men doing it.

Skip Hambling, Delhaven