The Genders

Every living, animate, sensate organism has a mother. Primordially lower organisms excepted. All human beings are born of a mother, critically aided by the sperm contribution of a father. Men and women couple, and of that coupling - recreation aside - the potential for another human being is created.

If we're to believe that human beings are born tabula rasa, with no knowledge other than what they will store in memory through personal experience, social interaction, observing and learning over a prolonged period representing their life span, then we must also believe that misanthropy and misandry and misogyny are learned attitudes.

This is an important distinction; we are not born to detest and abhor and to battle one another, although it is true that we are instinctively given to the herd instinct and take comfort in the company of those most like us. The corollary of which is that those who are unlike us, not of our tribe, those who don't share common practises of tradition and heritage and religion are recognized as outsiders, unworthy of equal consideration. Leaving few compunctions against oppressing those unlike ourselves.

But in a more individualistic view, take the phenomenon of misogyny where, for some reason, sometimes explicable, sometimes not, some males fear, dislike and exhibit aggressive tendencies toward women. These men will not necessarily eschew social contact with women, they will befriend individual women, marry them, have children with them, and through the course of their relationship, brutalize them, insist on controlling them, and oppress them for their own satisfaction.

Some societies encourage these practises through traditional behaviours that accept that women are inferior to men, that women will readily go astray, that women are basically evil creatures whose presence is meant to try men's patience, and that a stiff and steady male hand is required to control women's baser instincts. Women must obey men, and must place the man's interest foremost in their relationship, observing the social constraints that obligate them.

But what about societies which recognize equality of personhood and opportunities between the genders? Why is that recognition of equality so shallow in some men's perception that they constitute a brutal danger to the women who live closely with them? And how responsible for this situation are the mothers that bear these males who view women with violent distaste, and insist on being obeyed, using physical force to ensure the message has been absorbed?

Time and again women in separated situations, who have chosen for one reason or another - and most often because of physical abuse - to distance themselves from their former partners, ultimately become another unfortunate homicide statistic. The vast majority of men are respectful of women as equals, admire and support their female partners, and enjoy a balanced relationship of trust and affection. So what ails these other, aberrant males?

Simmering below the surface of every society is an undercurrent of male aggression toward women, practised by disturbed minds. In Ottawa last week a young man came to the rescue of a woman twice his age who was being repeatedly stabbed by her former common-law husband, in a back alley. The young man, in struggling to aid the woman who was bleeding profusely and crying for help, was himself stabbed, and then the attacker ran off.

A police search for the attacker whose identity was revealed by the critically wounded woman, was launched. The story of yet another dysfunctional relationship between a trusting woman and an abusive man was revealed in a few descriptive sentences by the attacked woman's sister. While the woman, Brenda Van Leyen, 47, was recovering in hospital, it was discovered that the house she owned outside Ottawa had been set on fire.

When firefighters responded, it was too late to save the structure. Shortly afterward the body of her attacker, 49-year-old Claude Legare, was discovered in the smouldering ruins of the house. One instance after another of women being battered, their children harmed and beaten, and ultimately yet another woman found dead at the hands of her former husband or partner, occurs. In this instance, the resulting tableau reversed the plot.

But there are ample other instances of psychotic male rage aimed at women, as when in 1989 the infamous 25-year-0ld Marc Lepine, convinced that his personal failures were the fault of women, strode the halls of Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique, armed and determined and, carefully separating men from women, opened fire on a classroom of engineering students screaming "I hate feminists", murdering 14 outright, wounding others.

What could possibly so contort a human mind with such unreasoning hatred? This man had a mother. Had she withheld from him the reassuring comfort and sensitivity that all children require? Would that be ample reason for the boy to evolve into a seething ball of hatred toward all women? Do not all women have a critical stake in such outcomes? In the recognition that not all neglected children become mass murderers to assuage their fury.

In any event, returning to the recently-enacted theatre of the disastrous dissolution of an abusive relationship, Brenda Van Leyen need have no further fears for her future, nor the young man who rescued her, 21-year-old George Rusu, imagining the demented Claude Legare hunting him down in revenge for his timely, life-saving intervention.