Who Is Afraid of Virgin Wolves ?

     Just in case you have been wondering who informs the Washington elites of the unfolding events north of the border, I have found out that one of the wise women is Melissa J. Gismondi.  Her clippings.me website tells us that Melissa uses her training as a historian to inform her analysis of contemporary issues. She has over seven years of experience writing and editing digital and print content for diverse audiences.  There might be a problem with the first sentence of her intro, but what the heck, who cares about syntax these days. No, it is not important;  it only adds colour to the mental efforts of Melissa who holds a PhD in American history.  But, if you are curious, just a handful of clippings of her contributions to major media outlets will give you a good idea just where her head is at: Are Canadians really less racist than Americans?, Can students who engage in sexual or romantic relationships with their professors avoid being exploited?, When it comes to white supremacy, historians can't stand on the sidelines, Why media obsession with male charisma has to stop.  I don't know how you but I feel assured after perusing a few of her journalistic creations that they are not really meant for  "diverse audiences" unless of course she means that her politics are what is required for all genders, races, and altars worshipped.

       Melissa's take on the last month's Toronto sidewalk terror incident has been sold to The Washington Post.  She believes she knows what drove Alek Minassian's anger and a rented van to plow a busy metropolitan boulevard that Monday. She writes...until very recently white men in patriarchal societies such as Canada and the United States didn't have "incel" complaints, because they enjoyed relatively free access to women's bodies. Indeed, the seething rage that allegedly fueled Minassian's terror comes from women gaining more control of their bodies, thanks to decades of activism. In the process, they're denying white men an old privilege to which many still feel entitled: sex whenever they want it. From there, Melissa goes on to say that if in the past rape was prosecuted it was to protect women as men's property, and that white slave owners and "Euro-American colonizers" saw the slave and indigenous women as their prize to take.

       In other words, Melissa asserts that there are large, historical wrongs behind the horrific but, as police indicated, isolated, attack, motivated by a very personal sort rage against the world. However, was no indication in the only artifact fact by Minassian available that he was raging against women - exclusively. His Facebook note prior to the attack names both sexually active sides, the Chads and Stacys, as the object of his wrath.  Nor is there any indication that he, or most "incels" for that matter, have a beef with feminism as such. They appear to be climbing walls simply because they don't get laid and are scorned by their peers as social retards. This poses no problem for the social justice warrior, though.  If social justice complaint does not exist, it can be manufactured. Since this is a terrorist attack story that is not Islamic it can be easily be converted into an illustration of alt-right white male supremacy/privilege, slavery and oppression of native women in North America.  And of course it is not just Melissa Gismondi.  There were several commentators in the mainstream media with a matching narrative.  The Southern Poverty Law Center immediately latched onto the "Incel Ideology" idea. 

     It is really a sad commentary on the state of the Western academia to see someone with a PhD in history to be grossly ignorant on the basics of the subject matter she expounds on.  Melissa Gismondi apparently does not understand anything about the English Common Law and its development. She says that the crime of rape was occasionally prosecuted [in most of American history] so long as the woman was white and behaved as women were expected to behave. That is not true as is not true that the woman's body was not hers to violate (since it was a chattel of her husband or property of her male guardian).  This is an unbelievable libel not just on the sense of law, order and fairness (or good morals, if you want) but on the whole "white" Western civilization.  It would take Ms. Gismondi not more than a quick look into the Blackstone's Laws of England (1765-69) to educate herself that rape, raptus mulierum was a "public wrong" , not a private one. She would learn in a few seconds that the outrage was not perpetrated against the woman's guardians but against the female part of his majesty's subjects.  Unlike the old Roman or the Mosaic laws, the law of England has recognized the inviolability of a person (habeas corpus) for eight hundred years. To have carnal knowledge of a woman forcibly and against her will, violated her body and no one else's!  This principle has been universal in Anglo-Saxon legal history. Ms Gismondi and the left-wing academic lunatics she speaks for are clueless.  Blackstone cited Henry of Bratton, a thirteen-century jurist who ruled on the King's Bench that violating even a prostitute (!!!) was a crime. His brilliant and clever argument refuted the notion that since a prostitute sold her body for money she had no regard for it. Bratton ruled that the state of mind of the woman could not be known to the assailant - beyond her protest that is - and therefore she could be in fact on her way to rehabilitation. Besides, said the just man, the law of England does not judge so hardly of offenders, as to deny them retreat even from common strumpets. I marvel at the idea that  the best among the white supremacists knew that no meant no, even if she was a hooker, as early as the thirteenth century.

      No, the "incel" social media phenomenon does not relate to anything in the cultural mainstream of the West. The involuntary celibate men (and some women), are simply a new label and form of communication for social and sexual marginals. They are not as a rule violent; it has been argued by competent psychologists that the rare outbursts of violence within that group points to issues other that their sexual frustration. Most likely, it is serious mental health issues (beyond, say, spectrum autism) that account for murderous assaults like those of Elliot Rodger and Alek Minassian.  The latter's Facebook post recalls the first known intentional vehicular mass murder by a young Czech woman, Olga Hepnarová in 1973, who like the two men transparently suffered from persecutory delusions.  If there is a larger social issue behind the Toronto tragedy then it is the all-too-real decline of the traditional masculine virtues in our society, such as honour, self-control, courage, thoughtfulness and compassion. These would naturally act as a potent inhibitor of gross antisocial oubursts.  But even if we managed to recapture a positive male self-image, even we had male leaders who would show character and integrity, even then we would see extreme cases of marginal behaviours. They will be with us always. The only difference is that we would be confident in the goodness of men, and see the nastiness and poverty of spirit of those who would take a terrible but isolated tragedy as an excuse to malign the whole gender of one race.