Dec. 6
I went to school in Montreal (in the Engineering building of McGill) from 1997. Dec. 6 has long been in my thoughts. The sheer UNFAIRNESS of male violence against women, in Canada and abroad (thinking of recent articles I've read on rape as a crime of war in the DRC), continues to strike me year after year.

audrawilliams pointed out an galling article today. The National Post managed to drag up a woman to run through the usual Men's Rights canards this year -- get over it already, women commit violence against men too, misandry, this continued ceremony is divisive, etc.

You can read the article here, if you want. By Barbara Kay.

The really frustrating part about the article (and that it got published in a major media outlet, no matter how right wing) is that Kay's stupid. I mean, the article is poorly written and has several faults of logic, and it's just dumb.

But the gratifying part is that Kay quoted pretty much wholesale a Men's Rights author's fantastical version of an already sad crime -- a woman, Laurie Dann, shot and killed a young boy at a school as part of a rampage that ended with her killing herself. I was interested by the crime, never having heard of Ms. Dann before, and by Kay's version of her crimes: "A year before the Montreal massacre, this equally psychotic Chicago woman shot five elementary-school boys, poisoned two fraternity kitchens, torched the Young Men's Jewish council, burned two boys in their homes, shot her own son, and murdered an eight-year old boy, claiming he had raped her." Wow, what a man hater!

Turns out that's not the story at all, as you might expect. If it interests you, you can read about Dann here. Dann sounds like a pretty horrible person to know and I'm glad I never crossed her path, but they got it all wrong. So I got to write a condescending letter to the National Post this afternoon, and that pretty much made my day.

Shame on Barbara Kay for perpetrating outright lies in her piece 'The last white ribbon' (Dec. 6, 07). Kay must be a devotee of male rights advocate Warren Farrell. His oft-quoted false statements regarding the extent of Laurie Dann's crimes do not stand up to even the most elementary fact checking (cf. NYT " Police Still Unraveling Trail Left by Woman in Rampage" May 22, 1988 -- although Dann's Wikipedia entry may be more Kay's speed).

Contrary to Farrell's assertions (which appear to have been taken from thin air) Laurie Dann did not solely target males In reality, no child was raped, one male child was killed, no frats or Jewish Councils were burned down, and two male and two female children along with one adult man were injured during Dann's spree, before her suicide. Dann was clearly insane in the years leading up to her crimes, as a pattern of harassment toward both males and females shows, but she was not solely a man-hater.

Sarah Curry
Halifax NS

The lack of fact checking is outright embarrassing, both for Kay and the paper. So it makes me happy.