I know I shouldn’t get so worked up about what’s printed in the Georgia Straight. It is, after all, a freebie left coast newspaper, Vancouver’s version of NOW Magazine, with all the feminist, racialist, and socialist fringe theories fit to print.
After the opening ceremony of the Olympics, this was the paper that chose to run an op-ed that they were the “whitest” ever. Then I let them get to me again with an insidious piece entitled “Joannie Rochette won a medal due to racism, nationalism, pity, and politics.” In case you didn’t read that one, the theory being floated there is that the judges didn’t want an Asian “sweep” of the medal podium. For some people, I guess even one white person can be too many.
This time the Straight brings us the specious theory of a journalist and author, Laura Robinson, who believes that putting kids in ice hockey turns them into rapists.
“I would never let a boy I cared about be in hockey,” Laura Robinson told the Georgia Straight.
“It’s because we live in a rape culture, and within the subculture of male professional sport, it’s about defining who a man is through his sexual scoring,” she said.
Did you hear that? We live in a “rape culture”. We’d better immediately notify the thousands of women across Canada cheering for the Montreal Canadiens’ incredible playoff run, that they’re supporting a sport that churns out rapists.
The truth is that Canada has the third highest number of reported rapes in the world. If that’s shocking, it shouldn’t be. The reason that Canada and the United States have a high number of reported rapes isn’t necessarily because they are highest here, but because we have societies in which reporting rape is encouraged. One would also have to find out whether the numbers pertained to actual rapes, or were for all sexual assaults, a distinction that is not currently made in the criminal code.
In many cultures, it is considered shameful to even report a rape, and in some Muslim countries the victim can even be punished by the law for being unable to prove the accusation.
Ms.Robinson says that the number of reported sexual offences increased during the Olympics by 11 compared to the same period a year earlier. This isn’t entirely unpredictable, given that the population of Vancouver artificially increased by several hundreds of thousands and the consumption of alcohol was likely increased commensurately.
The article goes on to make the argument that “junior hockey players may be at a higher risk of perpetrating acts of sexual assault than their nonathlete counterparts.” But rather than speculate that sports creates aggressive, violent behaviour, wouldn’t it also be possible that naturally aggressive and violent individuals are attracted to such sports?
As for hypermasculinity, I’m not entirely convinced that’s such a bad thing. We’ve become a “crybaby culture” owing to an emasculation of male children from the earliest years. The kind of behaviour we want to reward these days are usually all of the traits found in girls. It sounds to me as though if Laura Robinson had her way, there would never be any outlet for natural male aggression, competition, and bravado.
“It won’t stop, because Canadians are blind to hockey. I will never back off, because they [hockey players] rape girls and they rape women, and the culture tells them that they should.”
