“It’s not strong women who make men weak, it’s weak men who make women strong.”—Anias Nin, Henry and June

  It’s frosh weeks around the city, and being home to four universities, Montreal has plenty of those chanting placard carrying annoyingly colorful T-shirt wearing gaggles of academic newbies roaming the streets. 

  Granted it’s not as bad as the year the Barbie Movie came out and they all wore pink in mindless emulation, boys and girls alike. 

  The other day I was standing on a subway platform beside a young mother and father and their two infants. While we waited a tumult could be heard from above and it wasn’t long before the platform filled to capacity with loud self-absorbed first yearers. “Now,” shouted a young woman pack leader, “when the doors open we all need to pile in to make sure we get on!” She took no notice of the mother and father and their two anxious children looking up at the surrounding mob. 

  I’d guess something like seventy percent of the throng were young women, and I’d have to say the remaining male representatives were not what I’d call impressive specimens. 

  Recently I read a piece in our CBC national news service touting the level of investment Canada’s government had committed to given the challenges of new tariff impositions from our main trading partner, the United States. The CBC article reported the establishment of 65 new academic chairs in Universities scattered across the land. It then went on to list ten of the research professors hired to chairs so far. Nine of them were women. 

  What are we doing? 

  In what world is this a good thing? 

  Harnessed, the male energy forges community and civilizations; unharnessed, scattered and unsocialized, it can tear down in years what it took centuries to build. 

  I remember a conversation I had shortly after the ‘Barbie Summer.’ It wasn’t my finest moment, but I found the young woman I had fallen into conversation with a tad strident and boastful in her youthful educated complacency. 

  “The problem with all this,” I told her, responding to her enthusiasm for women’s rights and the subversive genius of The Barbie Movie, “is that there will come a day sometime around your early to mid-thirties when you’ll look around and ask ‘where have all the good men gone?’ And the answer will be that you cut their nuts off frosh week of your first year University.” 

  Come on guys, it’s time to step up our game…

  Not against anything…

  But for…