For all the brow-beating and wailing and self-righteous pieties about the horrible scandal of the St. Mary’s University in Halifax Frosh Week ditty, I have yet to read or hear a single rumination on the essential nature of the evil song: it’s transgressiveness.
I suspect that the reason for that is that to acknowledge the essential thrill of the song experienced by the student representatives would be to acknowledge that they didn’t mean it. It was a joke. It was a joke in very bad taste, but it was, nevertheless, a joke.
That would emasculate the thrill of the self-righteous: how dare they! We are good, decent people who don’t approve of rape and non-consensual sex, therefore we ring out our condemnations. Let us issue a collective gasp of astonishment: our young people are perverted.
It was one of those things that I watched with contempt and then, just as I was ready to form a categorical opinion of the incident, I encountered the chorus of disapproval and denunciation. Both the CBC and CTV, for a time, made it their top story. The CBC, as usual, tried to make you feel like your friends were reporting the story: “so Tara Goodtan is in Halifax; Tara, how are students reacting to the sudden onslaught of vindictive hysteria? And how do you feel about it? What are your thoughts? Where are you now? Are you concerned? How can parents make sure their children never attend St. Mary’s University? Is there some way we protect our noses from the smell? Let me stroll over to another desk in our studio here so it looks like I am actually involved and absorbed by this feat of journalism.”
The students responsible are now to be administered a corrective session of sensitivity training, as if sensitivity was something you could train into a person, and as if we could somehow make the transgressive less appealing to young people on their own for the first time in their lives. While we’re at it, could we teach them not to drink and drive, and to do their homework?
Does anyone seriously believe that any sexual assaults that actually take place on campus will have anything do with the notorious frosh week chant? We think some macho male student is going to say, well, we chanted about doing it during Frosh Week, so I thought it would be okay. Do we think he wouldn’t know that it wasn’t okay, that it was not allowed, that it was abhorrent behavior?
This is acute scandal management. A few years ago, in 2010, the entire football program at the University of Waterloo was cancelled because a few players were caught using steroids. There. Are you convinced that the management of the university is in the hands of righteous people? They are so righteous, and so incompetent, and so incapable of making reasoned, intelligent judgments, that they had to swat the entire athletic division– 65 players– into temporary oblivion because three of them were caught using steroids, to be sure that you got their point: we do not countenance cheating!
Do they countenance unfairness and arbitrariness and loud, incoherent, pointless gestures? You bet. Most of the 2010 team transferred to other universities and continued to play.