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About the Author
Sophie Kohn is a creative nonfiction and humour writer in Nelson, British Columbia. She teaches satire writing for The Second City and runs a therapeutic writing workshop called Brave New Word. Her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Outpost Magazine, McSweeney's, the Globe and Mail, Reader's Digest, on CBC Radio, and on NPR. She has been a finalist for a National Magazine Award as well as the runner-up for the International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir. She is happiest in the forest with hot chocolate, a campfire, some stringed instruments, and good friends.
Boys and consent culture
By Sophie Kohn
Included in the 29 Nov, 2024 issue
One of my earliest memories is being thoroughly embarrassed by my mum in a playground.
It was the ‘80s. Feminism was, well, not as unapologetically woven through the mainstream consciousness as it is now. I was maybe six, and I was climbing up the slide. The perimeter of the playground was lined with mums rocking pastel cardigans and blonde bobs, chatting, hanging out. Out of nowhere, a boy around my age leaped onto the slide with a giant stick and pretended to repeatedly shoot me dead, yelling that his stick was a gun. Pew pew pew. The whole thing. I froze. The Mums On The Edges (my new band name) all started gushing and laughing and exclaiming things like, “aww he LIKES you!” And at that moment, my mum charged directly into the woodchips, took the stick out of the boy’s hand, and firmly and VERY loudly said, “little boys do NOT point guns at little girls.” My face heated up instantly and I did the thing where you turn the word “mom” into a 14-syllable word: “Mooooo-OOOOOOO-oooooOOOOOOMM!” The Mums on the Edges all fell into a silent shock. As a kid, I thought it was exceptionally humiliating. As a boy-mom now, I think it’s pretty damn cool.
Earlier this week, November 25th kicked off the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence, a government initiative that encourages Canadians to commit to 16 days of concrete actions to help address male violence against women. Next month, December 6th will mark the 35th anniversary of the day anti-feminist student Marc Lépine murdered 14 women and injured many others at L’École Polytechnique de Montréal – a day now known as the National Day of Remembrance and Action on Violence Against Women. When I think about men who hurt women in these unforgivable ways, I find myself wondering where and why it starts. How it escalates to that point. And I think the answer is the dozens and dozens of quietly toxic ideas of masculinity that get normalized and even encouraged among boys and men and go completely unchecked until they’ve snowballed into something desperate and dangerous.
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