On Thurs., Oct 7, Theresa Sgambato, principal of Waterdown District High School just outside of Hamilton, Ont., advised the female members of the student body that they needed to be discreet in their clothing choices so as to reduce the risk of being the target of inappropriate or even violent sexual advances from their male counterparts. At no point did she exonerate the boys guilty of such advances. The outrage caused by her comments, however, led her to apologize later that same day, stating she had in no way meant to engage in “victim blaming.”
While her advice would seem to have been simple common sense, 200 students, mostly girls, led a protest on Friday outside the school’s main entrance, many of them, according to a front page story in the Hamilton Spectator, screaming and crying while insisting her apology was not enough. Their demand, apparently, was that the policy of “appropriate dress” be replaced by one tolerant of current styles including crop tops and tank tops entailing bare shoulders and midriffs among the school’s pubescent female population.
While the Spectator article, written by a woman, was not overt in its sympathies, it implied that the protesting students had every right to be outraged. This is to say that a rational, responsible approach to Reality, one which takes into account the simple biological fact that pubescent heterosexual Males are in the grips of perhaps the most powerful urge to which Men are subject, the urge to couple with those they see as the most enchanting creatures in existence, has been replaced by the “principle” that Self-Indulgence preempts the pragmatic demands of Reality. It is the “principle” at the heart of “wokeness” and it is absurd. Like Sgambato, I am in no way exonerating inexcusable male behavior, but surely dressing in a way that invites male advances, an invitation that for many Women not given to the radical Feminist agenda is quite intentional, renders the reaction of both the “woke” students of the Waterdown school as well as that of their journalist advocate, morally simplistic if not hypocritical, comparable perhaps to the reaction of one outraged that his Mercedes had been stolen from his driveway while parked unlocked with the keys in its ignition.
The relentlessly exploited narrative of Victim and Oppressor is a gross violation of the complexities of human behavior, yet one that has come to dominate our “progressive” culture. In the bizarre world of Ibram X. Kendi, the so-called Protestant Work Ethic is a White thing as opposed to a necessary existential requirement, thereby granting Blacks who have failed to prosper due to their very own lack of initiative, the luxury of denouncing their critics as Racists, indeed of accusing them of “victim blaming.” Fortunately there are dozens of Black “conservative” commentators and millions of their own people who see through the inanity of such “logic.” Yet there was Principle Sgambato, who was clearly concerned with the welfare of her girls, succumbing to the moral nullity of Identity Politics and apologizing for having asked them to behave [i.e., dress] responsibly!
The inevitable political destination of the Woke, of course, is Socialism……free stuff without the burdens of hard work and personal responsibility, free stuff at other people’s expense! Isn’t that the point of silencing those who still believe in moral accountability as agents of “blame” and “shame”? I can do whatever I want and you have no right to tell me otherwise! What better illustrates the juvenile nature of contemporary political discourse than the fact that Greta Thunberg is now seen by many as an irrefutable expert on the subject of climate change?