Fun and games for the start of a new year at St Mary’s University in Halifax: a chant about the joys of raping underage girls (“o is for oh so tight” is one stanza).
The questionable cheer is based on the word YOUNG – “Y is for your sister … U is for underage, N is for no consent … Saint Mary’s boys we like them young.”
O you already have; “G is for grab that ass” is the other redacted one.
The students didn’t notice anything wrong with it, but now they do. Not noticing seems rather inattentive.
In response, the university is calling in an expert on bullying. (Uh oh – let’s hope it’s not Kristina Hansen aka “the wooly bumblebee”!)
Wayne MacKay, the former chair of a provincial task force on bullying, was appointed by the school after a video surfaced of a chant during frosh week activities at the Halifax university.
…
He was also called upon frequently to comment on the death of Nova Scotia teenager Rehtaeh Parsons. The provincial government has been focusing on raising awareness around sex and bullying following the death of Ms. Parsons, who attempted suicide after she was allegedly sexually assaulted by several young men at a party in 2011. The 17-year-old had been the victim of bullying and cyberbullying after the incident, according to her family.
The CBC’s The National had a segment on it last night. The reporter talked to a girl, who said cheerfully, “I’m not a feminist sort of person, so it doesn’t affect me personally.”
I was unaware that it was only feminists who object to rape.
Well, Saint Mary’s is a bit of a football university (although they also have a really good humanities department) so I can see how these sorts of attitudes get traction there.
Personally, I went to the nearby Dalhousie, which never seemed to put the same degree of focus on sports, although they always tried to set up some sort of rivalry between the two that nobody I ever met cared about. I don’t recall any really significant issues at either university at the time, but that was a long time ago, and well before I really started to learn about the issues.
Funny, that’s one of my main take-home points of the past two years.
Bets on whether the “expert on bullying” will provide counselling for those poor boys who were harassed by feminazis?
Some days i just want to burn it all down.
Why the hell do they need an expert on bullying. What they need to do is suspend anyone saying that chant and then make the student work on getting back into school. the kind of expert they really need is someone who can tell them about the effects of child sexual abuse and rape. Someone to really show how devastating rape can be, especially if the person is a child.
You’re getting pretty good at ironic understatement. Of course, you have plenty of things to ironically understate…
And yeah, I’m with JenB, I’ve been noticing that only feminists object to rape for some time now. Well, feminists and Ally Fogg.
I heard about this through Rehtaeh Parsons’s mother’s site called Angel Rehtaeh. She’s become a great advocate against rapist culture.
Someone made this comment on her page, and I couldn’t agree more:
“Rape is a tool, it is used in war, to humble the enemy. Raping women in college takes women out of the competition for jobs. Rampant rape in the military, says to women, this is our turf, go home and make me a sandwich. Rape is a cult of men against the rights of women. That’s why the colleges, the military and the police do not care if a woman is raped. Evil feeds on fear.”
And threatening women with rape and constantly harassment is also a way of terrorizing women out of movements and fields and even actively pursuing interests and hobbies that are considered male turf. Then people look around and wonder “where are the women.” And conclude women just aren’t interested or it must be a “guy thing.”
So, an expert on bullying is needed in order to make a statement/response? I lose a little hope every day. I must be getting refills from somewhere, I guess. (I hope so.)
‘constant’ that is.
“The CBC’s The National had a segment on it last night. The reporter talked to a girl, who said cheerfully, “I’m not a feminist sort of person, so it doesn’t affect me personally.” ”
Oh yes, OP, let’s talk to “girls” for verification of our beliefs about feminism.
Oh yes, let’s agree that if you don’t identify yourself as a feminist, you’ll never be raped.
–pH
What a sickening report. I remember attending freshman orientations that were almost this horrifying. But not quite. My orientation included the “girls” lining up and the “boys” parading past and selecting the girl they wanted to sit with at dinner. There were far more “girls” than boys. I bailed out and skipped dinner for several days after that and feared for my future existence in a world that was set up in such a totally fucked way.
Wouldn’t a college named St Mary’s be an arm of the catholic church? I see statues of Mary crying tears of blood and packing heat. Although I guess she’s seen quite a bit of bullshit over the years. Again I ask what the hell ever happened to smiting?
Kelseigh (#1) –
When you say a football university, it should be noted that there are no sports scholarships in Canada, the same as Division II, III and NAIA in the US. Anyone on the team is paying his way through university. I would hope the team’s players are not involved, but I won’t be surprised if they are. Larry Uteck would have been embarrassed.
I also won’t be surprised to see the CIS (formerly the CIAU) or the university itself enact serious punishment on those involved. Unlike the NCAA which gives slaps on the wrist to most programs (except SMU and PSU), the CIS and universities have a history of cracking down. The University of Waterloo football team (2010) and Dalhousie women’s hockey team (2013) were suspended for an entire season. Some of Waterloo’s engineering students were suspended for a long period in 2011 after an unauthorized “bikini shoot” in the campus engineering department.
I heard a bit on CBC One this morning I think. Remember hearing the student rep working his awkward way through the interview, assuring the reporter, listen, we’ll change it, anyway…
Apparently it’s been some years, at least, the chant’s been around. So it’s kind of an inherited tradition.
There’s a comment somewhere in this on the value of tradition*.
And the other shoe on this is… umm…
I don’t even know what this is…
But anyway: same station, this evening, later the same day, a lovely little piece about a pretty much nuts ‘cross-examination’ of the victim in a US Navy rape case, and how the reality is there’s a crazy level of ‘filtering’ preventing convictions in such proceedings. See here for the Post‘s version; couldn’t find the CBC thing… Oh yes, dear, why didn’t you go to the proper authorities?
The good news, such as it is: the university student president has resigned, as of this hour.
(*/Tradition. It makes us what we are. If we’re so foolish as to permit this.)
AJ Milne: The CBC Radio One version was on The Current:
http://www.cbc.ca/thecurrent/episode/2013/09/06/frosh-week-gone-wrong/
Can’t for the life of me remember who said it, but one of my favorite quotes ever (that really changed the way I looked at things from a young age) is “Tradition is just an excuse to keep doing things the wrong way.”
“I’m not a feminist or anything” is an incredibly broad scope, unfortunately. Sometimes people mean, “Some guy told me feminists are all lesbian shrews once so I don’t use that term to apply to me.” Other times they mean, “I’m basically fine with treatment of women that borders on prehistoric.”
I know, but still, in that context it seemed incredibly bizarre. I don’t remember exactly what preceded her comment, but I think the setup was asking random people why the chant was seen as just fine by so many people. If that is the question she’s answering…
well shit, that’s all.
On that view, apparently the normal mainstream default view is that rape jokes are fine, and it’s only loonyleft extremists who think they aren’t.
…that’s pretty much the attitude that I meet up here in my part of canada. giving a damn about rape makes you “one of those special interest sorts”
basically if you run into a canadian who uses the term special interest with a straight face, understand that you are talking to someone who is perfectly happy with the way the system benefits him, but really doesn’t like how those others are a drain on society and have huge networks of power to steal his hard earned taxes and give it to brown people (though he’ll say Immigrants and Indians. Anyone who isn’t white is an immigrant.) he believes in flat rate taxes, abolishing the minimum wage, ending arts funding entirely, outlawing clinical abortion, and not telling kids about sex.
yeah, we have them too.
left0ver1under @11
There are sports scholarships in Canada. In 2011-2012, scholarships amounted to over $12.7 million, which is almost double what was disbursed 5 years ago. While that’s peanuts compared to the US, so is Canadian tuition compared to the US.
More importantly, you were responding to the claim that “Saint Mary’s is a bit of a football university”. Were you mentioning that because Americans might mistakenly think Canadian University football is the monster that college football in the US is? Even if there were no sports scholarships, even if we don’t revere football or other sports to the same extent, what does that have to do with a school cultivating jock culture and rape culture?
Jenora/#13, thanks, but I was referring to the Navy trial story.
It’s not just Saint Mary’s; it also happened at UBC’s Sauder School of Business.
theoreticalgrrrl @#6
Exactly right.
Well, the reporter probably talked to thirty or forty young women, but only one gave the desired quote. The others ended up on the cutting room floor.