  |
8 February 2010
Another sickening case of young male callousness and cowardice
It is difficult to read and listen to the media reports of the case that concluded yesterday against four young men who bullied a fellow worker to death without feeling one's hair standing on end. It is hard to comprehend that anyone outside a high security prison or a lunatic asylum could be so cavalierly cruel and callous. After months of unrelenting bullying and humiliation, Brodie Panlock, 19, threw herself to her death from the roof of a car park. Part of yesterday's Herald-Sum report reads:
...Nicholas Smallwood, 26, now of Queensland, Rhys MacAlpine, 28, of Kooyong, and Gabriel Toomey, 23, of Melbourne, all pleaded guilty in the Melbourne Magistrates' Court to failing to take reasonable care for the health and safety of persons...
Prosecutor Gary Livermore told a pre-sentence hearing on Friday that witnesses had seen Smallwood and MacAlpine pour fish oil into Ms Panlock's kitbag and then pour it over her hair and clothes, reducing her to tears.
He said they had also engaged in indirect bullying, such as calling her fat and ugly, spitting on her, gossiping, exclusion and failing to intervene when she was being bullied...
Mr Lauritsen [Magistrate] was told that Ms Panlock had tried to commit suicide in May 2006 by ingesting rat poison with beer after being rejected by Smallwood, with whom she'd had an intimate relationship.
Mr Livermore said that after that incident Smallwood put rat poison in her bag, and MacAlpine urged her to take it, while her tormenters had taunted her about her attempted suicide.
How could any man, let alone a foursome of men, do this to a defenceless nineteen-year-old girl? One is reminded of the Dianne Brimble and the Werribee cases, both involving gangs of cowards brutalising a defenceless female. These are young men where manliness is absent. They are examples of the extreme corruption of manliness and maleness, as these qualities were understood in traditional society, and not in the society of feminists and homosexuals. Fifty years ago the majority of men would have held these young men in utter contempt. That was a time when most men understood what it was to be a man.
People all over Australia really have to ask themselves what in our society is producing young men such as this. This is not barbaric behaviour; it is the sort of uncivilised behaviour that results from moral and social decay. The media is full of it week in week out. Readers of this site would know who and what processes I hold responsible (see comments 1 2). There is no point in repeating it here.
Whatever answers I propose, the question has to asked. Questions have to be put to the Brumby government in Victoria, the latest Labor government to preside over the ever-increasing violent behaviour of young men. They have to explain themselves - explain why they either support or are not able to control educational and moral views that prevail in government, legislation, and education, particularly school education, that have resulted in several generations of lost boys. (One should not forget the stark manifestations of the feral male recently in Mill Park.) They have to explain why they either support or cannot do anything about the vice-like grip the teachers' unions have on schools. Nothing can be done in schools to deal with the poisonous education of young males unless the teachers' unions are broken and teachers made accountable to the wider community and their elected representatives, and not to the untouchable chiefs of their ideological factions.
Many years ago when I observed a campaign underway to make all-boys schools co-educational while all-girls schools were not only protected, but strengthened and encouraged, I foresaw grave problems ahead. And I said so, causing a great deal of bitterness among some of my colleagues and peers. The idea was (and still is) that all-girls schools were beneficial for the education of girls - girls do better without the grubby brute-like influence of the male - and boys would do better with the presence of peace-loving, non-aggressive, compassionate, nurturing females.
This was a massive corrupting victory for feminists and feminism, a victory completed outside the democratic process. It was a good example of the manoeuvring that unrepresentative ideological groups engage in and in some cases bring about dramatic change in society.
The last thing boys and young men need is to be subjected to feminist theory, particularly gender theory that now has scriptural strength in most government organisations, not only schools. I leave aside the growing literature about the special form of bullying girls engage in and the books written by women about female-on-female persecution who some claim is far more devastating than the physical violence of male bullying.
Boys need an education presided over by men who know what manliness and being a male are all about. They need strong discipline and strong structure in their lives. They need an exemplary authority figure whom they can trust and admire. They need to understand that the first duty of maleness is to protect the weak and subordinate from bullying and persecution. They need a concrete set of circumstances they can touch and feel, and not the high-minded rationalistic theories that excite seminar rooms and make snooty and cloudy reputations in academia.
Secondary schools need to be resegregated and boys' schools governed by men, not by feminist and homosexualist ideology. It is important to understand that the resegregation of schools cannot happen without the authority and governance of principled men in boys' schools. It would pointless otherwise.
Comment: gerard@gerardcharleswilson.com
  |