Violent boys have been all over the news lately. Kevin Madden sentenced for first-degree murder for stabbing his 12-year-old brother 71 times in a quiet Toronto suburb. A 19-year-old in North Carolina killed his father and then randomly shot at students at a nearby high school last month. Early in September, Kimveer Gill shot 20 people at Dawson College, killing one innocent girl. A 15-year-old Wisconsin boy shot his school principal in cold blood last week. Two days before that Duane Morrison, a 53-year-old drifter, held six high school girls hostage for hours, sexually assaulting them before killing one (and then himself).

And now milk truck driver Charles Carl Roberts has shot 10 Amish girls in a one-room school house in Pennsylvania. He did the exact same thing that Morrison did he sent all the boys out of the classroom and focused his malice solely on the girls. Just like the infamous misogynist Marc Lépine did at the Ecole Polytechnique in 1989. And its apparent, based on the lube he was carrying and from what he told his wife, that Roberts was planning on molesting the girls (anybody surprised?).

There have been a lot of school shootings over the years. I remember coming home from school when I was 16 to see footage from Columbine on CNN, and crying. There have been a lot of shootings since then but I cant remember one single incident where the shooter was a girl. Not one. Ive looked all over the internet trying to find an example, and Ive come up empty handed. If you can name just one, just one, let me know.

When youre faced with horrific incidents like these and when the killer shoots girls, and only girls its really hard not to spend an afternoon thinking that there is something deeply, darkly twisted in the male psyche.

In an effort to do away with racial and sexual prejudice, progressive thinking people nowadays like to believe that everybody is really the same, that its just society and culture that make us different. But on days like today, its really hard to buy that.

There is no good evidence that racial differences have any real biological influence on your personality or intelligence. But the same cannot be said of gender - men and women are not the same. We arent. Not just in the shape of our bodies, but in the actual way our brains work. It would take many blog entries to go through all the differences, but this article lists a few. Suffice to say, men and women are equal, but we are not the same.

When I talk with friends about the prevalence of misogyny in our culture, I like to bring out this famous statistic: one in four women will be sexually assaulted in their lives. All my girlfriends silently nod we know from the intimate conversations we have when boys arent around that this is true. But all the guys in the room scoff and say it must be an exaggeration.

So I bring out another famous statistic. In 1990 sex researchers Randy and Nancy Thornhill asked the following question of a large number of men: If you could rape a woman, knowing with certainty that there would be no chance you would get caught and no one would ever find out, would you commit the act? In one of those surveys, 35 per cent of the men said yes. And as they say, rape is not about sex its about power, the same kind of power people who shoot innocent children are seeking.

When school shootings happen the media likes to blame video games, goth metal music, poor gun laws, and parents who just dont raise their kids right. Of course culture and society have a massive influence on what we think, feel, and do. But if you took all the video games and movies away, boys would still be more prone to violent behaviour than girls. Its that simple. Im not saying men are evil not at all. Nor am I saying girls dont ever murder or rape women can be sadistic too.

All Im saying is that theres a reason why whenever you hear about a school shooting on the news, you dont even have to look at the TV to know what the sex of the gunman is. And most of the time, you can probably guess the sex of the victims too.

In case you haven’t yet tried stencilling as per the instructions on pages 36-37 of the most recent issue of Shameless because you can’t find freezer paper, which is something we had trouble with when we did the photo shoot for the article (yes, those are my fingers tracing letters and using the stencil brush!), check out the Toronto Craft Alert’s Ask Crafty answers from September 8th.

PS - We’d love to hear how your stencilling turns out!

According to pitchforkmedia.com, Chicks on Speed’s Alex-Murray Leslie has put together a new 3CD compilation that “celebrates and reclaims music-by-women in several landmark ways”. I have mixed feelings about Chicks on Speed, and I know some of us were burned by the “Women and Songs” series (not to mention the dismal imitators that followed). But Girl Monsteras this compilation is calledlooks pretty stellar. It has an intriguing mix of musicians from a variety of genres and decades, and a bunch of previously unreleased tracks. I haven’t been this excited since the first volume of Alright, This Time Just the Girls!

Track listing, release date, and more information here

Feminists (and academics) have long had a reputation for being dry and humourless, which is why I love things like Cat and Girl.

Cat and Girl is a wordy, nerdy webcomic made by a grad student named Dorothy, who manages to transform complex academic theory into appealing panels and hilariously half-sensical dialogue. Imagine a Cultural Studies textbook acted out by a cartoon girl and a large anthropomorphic cat.

Check out Cat and Girls interpretation of Feminisms Supposed Victory in Mainstream Society

A lot of great things get posted on our comments pages, so I hope everyone follows the links to read the comments. (For example, Lauren Baratz-Logsted of This is Chick Lit fame herself posted in response to my blog about her new book. Heavens to Betsy! We’re famous!) Adele posted a particularly spectacular link in response to Allison’s post about the International Aids Conference.

It’s an ad Gwyneth Patrol did for an AIDS campaign. Advance warning: it may inspire a choking fit. Or projectile vomit. Please go look at this horrifying schlock.

Thanks Adele!

The always spot-on Feministing has a post linking to an incredible piece by Claire Hoffman in the Los Angeles Times that you and your friends should read. She spend some time with Joe Francis, the creator of the Girls Gone Wild videos that see young, drunk women take off their clothes for Francis’ cameras. Hoffman wants to know why the girls do it, but finds out a lot more about Francis and his motives than she bargained for. That’s all I can say about it, for now. Go forth and read and let me know what you think.

Here are two great pieces for some weekend reading.

1. Over at Alternet, Lakshmi Chaudhry tears into makeover reality TV shows. Almost every young feminist I know has a love/hate relationship to reality shows that are, more often than not, degrading, demeaning or insulting to women. We don’t agree with anything being done on Canada’s Next Top Model (especially the parts where the ultra-thin models wear a layer of saran wrap under their jeans so they can sweat off extra weight they frankly don’t have), but we tune in nonetheless, often using the excuse that we’re “doing research.” Chaudry provides an excellent reality-check: though we may think makover shows are just about giving some nice woman a total makeover so that she can feel good about herself, these shows have extremely classist elements to them and rely on the complete and utter humiliation of women.

2. At CBC.ca, one of my favourite Canadian columnists, Heather Mallick, stands up for feminism in a column that exposes REAL Women for what they are: professional anti-feminists (and anti-womanists, in my opinion) who want to see the end of abortion, a ban (is that even the right word?) on homosexuality, the demise of federal agencies like Status of Women and the closure of women’s shelter’s across the county, to name a few examples. Mallick takes particular issue with the group’s objection to feminist concerns (and aid) for women overseas. She raises the disturbing example of “breast ironing,” which is happening in Cameroon, West Africa. Mothers are trying to repress their daughters’ sexual attractiveness (to prevent harassment and rape) by ironing their breasts with hot stones. This is a painful and damaging procedure that is being addressed through campaigns by Cameroon’s government and other women’s groups. As Mallick writes, “Mothers are so frightened for their daughters at puberty that they pound the developing breasts with pestles, and bananas and coconut shells heated in a fire. The breasts are beaten to destroy the connective tissue, as you would tenderize a chicken breast for dinner, and they are burned. Some girls iron their own breasts so as not to be married off.” I wonder what REAL Women would say to that?

Hi everyone,

Pride Weekend is fully underway in Toronto and there is the usual corporate mess of advertisements. But at yesterday’s Dyke March, our queer community continued to make the march a political event. Everywhere I saw shirts that read “rosovaya” - which is “pink” in Russian and slang for lesbian. The back of the shirts read “Marching for those who can’t - Moscow 2006.”

At the end of May 2006 Moscow struggled to hold its first-ever Pride Parade. Although homosexuality was decriminalized in 1993 in Russia, there continues to be significant opposition to queer visibility and the queer community is largely underground. The city of Moscow banned the parade arguing that it would provoke violence and division in the city. Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said homosexual parades “may be acceptable for some kind of progressive, in some sense, countries in the West but it is absolutely unacceptable for Moscow, for Russia.”

Activists went ahead with their plans and attempted to lay flowers near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier outside the Kremlin. They were met by a nasty group of skinheads, Orthodox Christians and radical nationalists. Of course riot police busted everything up by targeting prominent gay and lesbian activists.

It was a powerful statement to see so many women walking yesterday in solidarity with Russian queers. All week I have been explaining to my heterosexual friends that the Dyke March is not a “parade” for me. (I was trying to convince them to attend parts of the Pride Week events other than the corporate Sunday march!) The Dyke March is not a show of pageantry and pomp for the world to see how glamorous and fantastic and over the top us homos can be (although of course we are ALL THOSE THINGS, but so, so much more.) For me, the Dyke March is an opportunity to be me, to be so totally me, to put my voice and my issues front and centre, and while it is empowering to have people stand aside for us, and watch us march by, the passion of this march is to be with so many different women, to take up a voice, and take up space - together.

In solidarity, p

Salon.com currently features an article about straight girls making out with each other to impress (and seduce) guys. The mostly-critical article points out the obvious problems with this trend, yet oddly enough, still glorifies it as a right-of-passage for the coolest of American high school students. The article is worth a read, especially because it gets inside the head of some sexually-uninhibited, heteroflexible girls.

(Annoyingly, to read the article, you first have to watch a little commercial. The one I was subject to instructed you on how to trick your husband into taking you to Las Vegas to go shopping. What joy.)