First day of 9^th grade, Jayden 15-years-old, will be leaving school property in a critical situation. His injuries, including a fracture to the skull, a brain bleed and a fracture to the internal ear, are nothing compared to the psychological trauma caused by this event. Attacked in his blindside by one of his classmates, the 9^thgrader will not be returning to the same school after his convalescence. Jayden is not the only one facing this type of situation. Throughout the country, hundreds of teens spoke up about their experience with violence and aggression in schools. Being much more common than previously imagined, the results of a survey created by Mission Research studying the subject of school violence, reveal an eye-opening issue, denouncing school-related gender-based violence at a very serious level.

Canadian teens are more familiar than most with the subject of violence in our schools. for many of them, violence has made its way into their personal, daily lives. School-related gender-based violence can be noticed from a very young age and is an issue that touches both sides of the gender spectrum. Situations similar to the one Jayden faced are not uncommon. Actually, it is 40% of boys that face violence at least once throughout their academic journey. Often put under the umbrella of bullying, these violent behaviours are, in many cases, traumatising for teens, but no one really knows how to deal with them. After all, throughout the totality of school violence victims, only a mere 50% denunciate their aggressor to adults or trusted members of the school’s staff, and from this half, only a few are left satisfied by the measures taken. For young women, this culture of violence is primarily portrayed through unwanted sexual touches and sexual assaults. Cases of sexual assault related to school, mostly occurs between 7^th and 10^th grade confirms CBC news. For Brook, she was only 14 when an older student from her high school brought her to a parking lot, choked and sexually assaulted her. When Brook reported the situation and tried to get help, the school did not take the measure wanted and left her, as most girls going through similar situations, unsatisfied. 3 girls out of 5 did not get help needed after an incident of sexual assault. Only 1 out of 4 girls are satisfied with the measures taken by the school. Schools are facing these violent situations every day. In Ontario, the province faces in average more than 2100 cases a year, for a total that surpasses 10 incidents a day. Considering the statistics found in the Mission Research survey, we can, without a doubt, say that schools have a part of the blame to carry in this national shame that is school violence. 

What makes violence so popular amongst teens? Tracy Vaillancourt, professor studying violence prevention, acknowledges the possibility that, in our own cultural era, the smartphones along with the media could be negatively contributing to this nation-wide issue. In the documentary the mask you live in, we are confronted with the reality that boys will likely spend, in average, more than 40 hours a week watching television and more than 15 hours a week playing video games. Most of the heroes and characters portrayed in those movies, shows and games are not, in most cases, a correct or even passable representation of what a role model should be for the targeted age of these entertainments. Often surrounding the themes of misogyny, alcohol, drugs and violence, the entertainment industry is setting awful examples for our youth, not only in Canada, but around the globe. Furthermore, the hyper-sexualised world in which we live could be partially to blame for the rising cases of sexual assault seen in teens. the average age to which teens are first exposed to pornographic content reducing more and more every year, the hyper-sexualization of our teens could be resulting in these incredibly high numbers of sexual assaults. Being an issue on everyone’s lips in the last few years, directors and producers are welcoming this opportunity to open up and denunciate these problems through movies and tv shows. In HBO’s own Euphoria, director Sam Levinson denunciate many cultural issues faced by teens, including violence in a hyper-sexualised society. A prime example of the denunciation of said subject is the characterisation of Nate Jacobs, a violent, aggressive character of his show. Nate is focused on being the ultimate portrayal of masculinity, pressured by his family and the hyper-masculine football culture in which he flourishes, he will go to all ends to violently rejects everything that ties him to femininity.

Portraying staples of masculinity often being not enough to be proven a real man, boys will often recreate what they see in their heroes and role models, to engage violently against one another.  

            “I was told to toughen up”. This is how the school system have helped many boys in need over the years, not with a humane and comforting response to their situation but by playing with stereotypes. Being “tough”, is found in the same list (Kilmartin 2) as being, aggressive, unemotional, physical, dominant and above all, placed on the same page of initiate sex. When schools chose to solve boys’ issues through the use of stereotypical norms that are found at the same level as the actions they strive so much to eliminate, do we really expect other results than for boys to follow those stereotypical expectations set by society? School play a crucial role in the education of our youth; they shouldn’t be encouraging such behaviors. Furthermore, school being where most interactions between children, we could say it is the part of their environment that is most pressured by societal norms. Growing up, boys surrender their freedom to follow the stereotypical guidelines of what a man should be in society. Their ability to change and to be less or more influenced by those norms or guidelines, does not only reside in their age, it depends also of their environment. And what environment is more competitive than school? The competition between boys is often what is making them act violently, and that, just for the hope of not ending up at the bottom of the social ranking. After all, “A boy who fares poorly when competing with his male peers may find himself with low (social) status among this group as a result of his poor skills. In some sense he may be failing to prove his masculinity.”(Kilmartin 165) Masculinity is an endless competition like any other, but boys will often go to the extremes to prove their worth resulting in violent acts towards each other and towards women.

            In conclusion, the societal context that pressures our children, the hyper-sexualized world in which teens grow up and the culture of mass media and entertainment all play a part in this nation-wide problem. This violence was not formed out of thin air, the stereotypes of masculinity and societal norms that we enforce upon our teens are what created the situation as we know it today. In the light of what has been discussed in this text, Tracy Vaillancourt assures that it is only by acknowledging the presence of this problem that we will be able to provide a safe, less violent future for our youth.

Bibliography:

• https://gem.cbc.ca/media/marketplace/season-47/episode-4/38e815a-011d8f47088
• https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/school-violence-editors-note-1.5331402
• https://en.unesco.org/themes/school-violence-and-bullying/school-related-gender-based-violence
• https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/marketplace-school-violence-sexual-violence-1.5329520
• https://www.netnanny.com/blog/the-detrimental-effects-of-pornography-on-small-children/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RuGoLCZ03eo&t=12s
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oyi4ZrphRUw
• Kilmartin, Christopher, and Andrew P. Smiler. “Defining Men’s Studies.” The MasculineSelf, Cornwall On Hudson, NY, Sloan Publishing, 2019, pp. 1–7. 
• Kimmel, Michael.“Masculinity.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Ed. William A. Darity, Jr. 2nd ed. Vol. 5. Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2008. 1-5. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 9 June 2014. 1-5. Print. 
• Christopher Kilmartin and Andrew P. Smiler. “No Man Is an Island: Men in Relationships.” The Masculine Self, Cornwall On Hudson, NY, Sloan Publishing, 2019,pp.161–171. 
• http://therepresentationproject.org/film/the-mask-you-live-in-film/
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6fh_ZPc29ks

During the international women’s week, we had the chance to see the presentations from Indigenous and Muslims women vis a vis their experience with gendered problems. These presentations were really eye opening for me –a man coming from a white Canadian family. We are sometimes too caught up in our routines to noticed what is happening to others, and I’m very thankful to have had the chance to sit in those presentations and hear more about these women’s experiences . 

Firstly, the first presentation on Monday was really interesting because a lot of the information presented was unknown to me. For example, I learned that indigenous women are more likely to get murdered, more likely to get sexually assaulted and more likely to be reported as missing than women from other ethnicities. It also talked about how big Canadian projects like the pipeline Energy-Est and others are perceived by indigenous communities. It is really unrespectful and despicable for the Canadian government to step on the land of these nations and act like it is theirs without even acknowledging the fact that it is not. Women and children are, often in those cases, the first ones to suffer. The protest with the red dresses on the bridge is, yes without a doubt, to protest the disappearance of women from their nation, but also to protest of a nation losing their ways to the menacing giant that is Canada.

Secondly, the first presentation on Wednesday really helped me to understand the law 21 and his impacts on teachers practicing their religion, especially for women wearing the hijab. It is easy for a Muslim man to appear unnoticed or labelled as non-religious, but for a woman wearing the hijab it is not so easy. This has been an issue throughout the life of Nadia Naqvi. To live with the racism, suppression and injustice to be different is a thing, as she mentioned in her presentation, but to be professionally stuck because your own government does not approve your portrayal of your own religion is another thing. With the law presently in order miss Naqvi, as a practicing Muslim woman, doesn’t have any chance of going forward in her professional life she is stuck because the government does not see a future where educators and teachers are in a position to practice their religion during class hours.

thirdly, the contrast between the life of two Muslim women, when they are not portraying their religion the same way. This was the statement of miss Ndiaye, sociologist and community organizer during her presentation on Wednesday. She was telling us her experiences facing gendered problems when it comes to religion and especially the Muslim religion. Being a Muslim black woman not choosing to not wear the hijab, she sometimes faces situation that are unknown to other Muslim women. For example, it is not rare for her to witness people misspeaking about the Muslim religion in her presence because most people don’t know that miss Ndiaye is Muslim herself. She also mentioned that People of black skin color are not well represented in the Muslim religion even though they are forming a big part of its population. The lack of representation in your own religion is regretful when it’s concerning something that make up for a big part of your identity.

In conclusion, Vanier’s international women’s week, was a really good eye-opening week for me. Showcasing problems and issues that I, personally don’t experience or even see in my day to day life. As humans it is always good to put ourselves in someone else’s shoes for a moment, it allows us to empathize and to further understand other’s lives and problems. And in today’s world, we should do it far more often. 

The Text ‘’Masculinity’’ by Kimmel brings up many issues regarding gender and how differently we view them in our society. “Institutions accomplish the creation of gender difference and the reproduction of gender order through several gendered processes.”(Kimmel 3) Through this statement Kimmel makes us realised that, often, institutions do not only display falsely jobs as genderless but also that our system  is often mistakenly considering genderless jobs as jobs only achievable my men, men who are not interested or fully involved in parenting. As Kimmel explains on page 3 of his article, the field of medicine, even if half its applicants are women, does not really succeed in accommodating women wishing to start a family. ‘’ Many doctors complete college by age twenty-one or twenty-two, and medical school by age twenty-five to twenty-seven, and then face three more years of internship and residency, during which time they are occasionally on call for long stretches of time, sometimes for even two or three days straight. They thus complete their residencies by their late twenties or early thirties. Such a program is designed for a male doctor’’ (Kimmel 3) they don’t allow any time for pregnancy, childbirth and early motherhood. Therefore, we can study Gender as an Institution in the case of medicine and in many other fields just as education at the university level, that are falsely genderless.

In this text it is also question, just as the title indicates, of masculinity but even more than that, it is question of masculinities. Just as stated in the following: ‘’Understanding how we do masculinities…opens up the unimaginable possibilities of social change’’. (Kimmel 4) Kimmel does not only talk of masculinity, but of masculinities. He does so because there is no such thing as a singular masculinity in the world, we live in. He argues in his text that there is multiple factor to define masculinities. His factors include data as basic as our culture and religion but also the period of our life, because we are beings constantly moving forward, our sense of gender should be evolving as well. Just as the men are discussing around the table of Man Enough, we hear them talking about the way they saw themselves going through situations making their sense of gender grow. Talking how about men belittle women way to often just because of the fact that they are afraid that the simple act of caring for them is going to hurt their sense of masculinity. Talking about how men are to afraid to step out of the man box because that is the definition of a man that they are told is perfect, but a perfect masculinity does not exist. There is as much masculinities as there is people considering themselves as men on this planet. After all that’s the beauty of it.

Be strong, be tough, be cold, be rich, be muscular, be sportive… Be a man. Those words, boys are continually told growing up shape the men that form today’s society. In the documentary “the mask you live in”, many statistics are unveiled to showcase the problems that boys and men have to face in our society. One of those statistics describes that 50% of boys are physically abused throughout their lives. This statistic really surprised me because in today’s world in which, yes, abuse is still a taboo subject, but also in which people are becoming a lot more open about their experiences with this horrible word, boys are a bit left out of the subject. Don’t get me wrong, In this world every kind of abuse is terribly wrong and horrible, but for me this issue facing boys was less heard of than other groups. In this documentary we are also told that rapists in our society don’t surge out of nowhere, they are created by our own society, our own rape culture. This really jumped at me and made me think that it is because of everything we teach boys, all those words that they are continually told growing up, all those things they are told to be and not to be. All of this creates a sort of hatred embedded deep down in people’s personality, hatred that they have to hide beneath a mask, hatred that creates this rape culture. 

       We can contrast those two pieces of information to the book written by Carlos Andres Gomez, especially the part where he talks about his time in Zambia and how the men there have a completely different way of interacting with one another, a way that, we, men from western societies are not familiar with. We can contrast this part from his book with what is told in the documentary to better understand Carlos’ experiences in Zambia. For a man that comes from this overly masculine society, from this culture where boys shout names at each other to prove to one another who is the manliest, in this world where men are not allowed to engage in any physical act of friendship in the fear of being called a “faggot”. For a man from this world, we can understand that Zambia was an incredible eye-opening experience.

Alan Turing was a mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst and philosopher that lived from 1912 to 1954. Turing is most known for the work he accomplished during the Second World War as a researcher of the English army and the allied forces mandated to break the “Enigma machine”— a machine created by the German forces to send encrypted messages to the entire German army. With his machine created to destroy “enigma”, Turing is estimated to have saved more than 14 million lives and shorten the war by more than 2 years in Europe. He is considered to be the father of artificial intelligence. Despite all of his accomplishments and sacrifices for his nation, Turing was never fully recognized by his country during his lifetime because of his homosexuality. Today, Turing’s work is recognized all over the world. In fact an academy award movie was made in remembrance of his work on cryptanalysis of “Enigma”. His work is really inspiring to me because it tells me that it doesn’t matter who or what you are to society, what matters is what you decide to create with your life.

Sushi:))