Even teens deserve freedom of speech

“You might find this interesting,” wrote a reader, sending me a link. “In Toronto, no less.”

So I clicked on the link and found the story you may have read in the Toronto Star or the National Post about the student at Archbishop Denis O’Connor Catholic High School in Ajax, Ont., who wrote a speech about inner beauty to the girls of his high school.  Seventeen-year-old Paul Gomille had earlier spoken to his principal about his address, and she had thought it a good idea — if he made revisions. Apparently she wanted him to take the “judgmental” parts out. 

This Gomille neglected to do. Instead he distributed his version in the cafeteria. For this he was given a two-day suspension, media attention and a good chunk of fame. 

“I thought you might have an opinion on this story,” said my reader.

I clicked to the text of Gomille’s letter and I discovered I had several opinions. The first is that it is interesting to read what a 17-year-old boy thinks about girls. When I was 17, I often wondered what 17-year-old boys thought about girls. My math teacher had assured my class that boys didn’t think about us; they were too interested in their math homework. She seemed so convinced that even today I check with yet another male friend if this was true to his experience or  just a big fat lie.

“Math was easy,” said one. “Girls were complicated.”

Girls are indeed complicated, which is why it is so dangerous for teenage boys to write advice to teenage girls. Women may very well want to know what men think, but we will not always like it. And it seems as though Gomille’s principal did not enjoy discovering that he, like so many men, differentiates between girls “who don’t dress in in revealing clothing” and girls “who do dress in revealing clothing.”

But boys are complicated, too, which is why Gomille’s letter is funny. “Real attractiveness,” he asserts, “doesn’t come from…having a pretty face or a nice body.” But of course. And this is why, when I was 17, teenage boys fell all over themselves trying to meet bespectacled, fuzzy-haired me and not my gorgeous, curvy friend Natasha.

Give me a break.  

However, it wasn’t Gomille’s denial that teenage boys tend to find scantily clad, made-up, pretty, fit girls more attractive than dowdy, shiny-nosed, plain, out-of-shape girls that made columnists throw back their heads and howl. It was his assumption that the girls from his school would be heartened by what he had to say about their attractions. It was his attempt to speak for all men. And although I admit that this is amusing, I don’t see how it is a big crime. Men constantly speak on behalf of all men. The phrase “Any red-blooded Canadian male” has always amused me, for it usually prefaces the speaker’s most heart-felt beliefs. As for accusations that Gomille was “controlling” — say what? A 17-year-old boy with an essay?

I wrote some rather interesting stuff in high school, too. Prefiguring Seraphic Singles, I wrote a series of stories called “Man Shortage,” and one or two ended up in the school newspaper. They are intensely silly but prescient: the first one anticipates the invention of Internet dating when one character sighs that she wishes she could order a prom date from a catalogue. She described the sort of boy she’d order: blond and blue-eyed. And this feminine preference, so frank and unashamed in the pages of the school newspaper, caused dismay in the heart of a religion teacher, who worried it betrayed not Arianism, but Aryanism.

So we had a little chat in the school cafeteria, during which he fussed about white supremacists and I memorized the incident as fodder for some future controversial newspaper piece. And that is where the matter ended. I was certainly not suspended, but I did learn that some people are very sensitive. That said, freedom of speech should apply to teenagers too.

And that is my opinion of the Gomille suspension. I think it ridiculous that he was suspended for not editing his comparatively mild opinions about scantily dressed girls. However, I do have another memory that applies. It is of another of my teachers, in elementary school this time, sending me — and me alone — out of the classroom so that she could yell at every other student in the class. The effect this had on my social life was catastrophic. I was a pariah for years afterwards.

Thus by suspending the opinionated Gomille from school, his principal may have done him the favour of martyrdom. Any reasonable woman might giggle a bit at his letter; any reasonable woman might think a two-day suspension overkill.