The Evil That (Wannabe Alpha) Men Do

We all get a little stressed out at this time of year. It’s natural.

The Dalhousie Dentistry scandal has opened up some deep and painful wounds that cut deep to the heart of our society. You need only browse the comments sections of articles about the scandal, or take a look at the diverse selection of people who showed up to the protest rally to realize that this isn’t just a ‘dentistry thing’, or even a ‘Dalhousie thing’.

This is a ‘human thing’.

I can’t speak for the women mentioned in those awful posts. I can’t speak for the other women in the class who now face the prospect of heading back to school knowing the terrible things posted in a group that included a majority of their male classmates. I can’t speak for the innocent men in the class who now face a potentially career- threatening stigmatization due to the university’s refusal to release the names of the individuals who took part in the posts.

What I can speak as is a member of the community— a participant in campus life, a former patient of the Dalhousie Dental Clinic, and a woman in the wider society in which these ‘Gentlemen’ will soon be working.

The scandal has left me feeling a multitude of emotions, but mainly I just feel tired. I’m in my early 30s and it feels like this dominant alpha-male bullshit has been following me my entire life. I understand that this has been around for a very long time, and the women who came before me had to deal with it as a regular part of their lives and they didn’t have the luxury of loudly speaking about it the way I do, but I still feel worn out by it.

When I was a child I witnessed that type of behavior in the actions and words of many men in my life. They wanted to dominate, to be able to do whatever they wanted with little resistance from women. Women were supposed to laugh off their demeaning jokes and disrespectful behavior, and unfortunately they did.

When I was a teenager, some of the young men I knew began to stew in their own testosterone and feel as though they had to be ‘the man’, making jokes and treating women with the same ill care as their predecessors. As a young lady, I laughed off their sexist jokes because I thought standing up for myself or other girls wasn’t worth the stigma of being labeled as lacking in a sense of humor. There was a time when I bought into the idea that you were a ‘cool chick’ if you allowed one of these wannabe bulls to do whatever they wanted with you, whether sexually or if they decided to be disrespectful in various ways. What can I say—I was a 15 year old who didn’t know any better.

By the time I was 20 I did know better, it became a badge of honor that these boys said I ‘acted like a stupid virgin’ because I didn’t laugh at the jokes they made about girls who did or didn’t fuck them, or I ignored their clumsy attempts at a come on. I fought back verbally and physically when they thought they could get away with their bullshit.

I continued with this empowered attitude throughout my twenties. A few years ago I noticed that I was seeing less of this alpha male behavior in real life and in the media; I thought that maybe society was evolving, that things were getting better. Of course, there have been examples that indicated such behaviour still existed, but I still felt that changes had taken place.

Then, in the middle of this past holiday season, the ‘Class of DDS 2015 Gentlemen’ gifted the world the bitter reminder that sexist, dehumanizing behaviour is still alive and well. I read everything that these punk dentistry students wrote, and I felt overwhelmingly tired. What these sad examples of human beings wrote was nothing I hadn’t seen before—I wasn’t really shocked, I just felt worn out and sad.

The ray of hope that I have found in this mess comes from the passionate, broad-based community efforts to see these students appropriately punished. I dearly hope that they are — and I define appropriate punishment as expulsion. I personally don’t see restorative justice as an answer in this situation. These men are training for public roles involving great responsibility. Beyond the specific harm to the victims of their posts, their actions have caused a more general harm to the public’s faith in the dental-care system. Is a closed-door restorative justice process going to restore our faith in the system? Can it address the wounds that their behaviour has opened throughout our community?

The more we call out this behavior and the more we punish, the more examples we set about what we won’t accept anymore. We have the opportunity here to send a powerful message that even people set to take positions of privilege and power are not above the responsibility to respect the basic human dignity of others — and that such individuals should actually be held to the highest standard of all.