There’s a kind of man universally unpopular with women. He is Controlling Man. Just say “he’s kind of controlling” to your women friends and they hiss and draw back as if they’d been sprayed with lemon juice. From whence do controlling men come? I always wondered and now I know. Paul Gomille, a 17-year-old student at Archbishop Denis O’Connor Catholic High School in Ajax, wrote a message to the girls and women at his school, a declaration that he claimed “strikes at the very core of humanity itself, in an attempt to make a revelation of truth apparent to all of you, with awe inspiring certainty.”

Paul Gomille was suspended from school for two days after handing out copies of his speech 'A Love Letter To All Women.' (Feb. 27, 2012) ( Ryan Pfeiffer / Metroland )

Really, Martin Luther could take lessons from this guy. Who taught him this nonsense? This is a school with a trustee who recently complained that female students were wearing their uniform skirts too short, a news story that earned me much emailed agreement from creepy middle-aged men who ride the subway in search of thighs to deplore. So Principal Donna Modeste was initially open to a nice speech about inner, as opposed to outer, beauty. But some bits were troubling. Modeste told him to skip the section where he appears to target girls he dislikes by praising the ones who win his approval: “the silent ones, the intelligent ones, the ones that don’t talk about people behind their backs, the ones that guys don’t flock to in droves, the ones that don’t dress in revealing clothing (italics mine). . . ”

Article Continued Below

Amazingly, she was said to be okay with this little SlutWalk Starter in Miniature sentence: “Attractiveness doesn’t come from wearing the latest fashion, and it doesn’t come from being scantily clad in public, or putting on makeup, or having a pretty face, or a nice body. No. Real attractiveness comes from having a certain dignity.” In the event, Gomille refused to obey Modeste, passed out what sounded like “Dress Down to Win Me as a Boyfriend” in the cafeteria and was suspended for two days because — and this is what I admire about the Catholic system — they don’t worry about popularity. Students will obey. High praise to Modeste. Gomille, dressed in dark pants, a grey hoodie and navy jacket, dresses like all teenage boys, nondescriptly. In his Star photo against a grey Ajax sky, he looks like a disembodied head. He seems perfectly pleasant. At 17, I would have gone out with him, right up till he told me my dress was too revealing, at which point I would have run away, as girls will, and this well-intentioned young man will learn that. Gomille’s older sister, Alexandra, says he is quiet, enjoys video games and as far as she knows has no girlfriend. But suddenly he’s the editor of Vogue? Females from age 2 to 92 speak as one: We do not care to hear male opinions on our clothes unless it’s “You look fabulous in that. Radiant. Wow.” When we ask you if the sweater works with the scarf, the word we want to hear is “yes.” And then, frankly, we’ll change the sweater. If he’s a Controlling Man who says it’s too tight or uses the phrases “no wife of mine will . . . ” we detach.

Women often shop for men, and I shudder to think how men would dress if they didn’t. Most men can’t even enter shops to buy their own pants. So why judge women’s clothing? “It’s the great misogynist trick,” says Linda Grant, whose 2009 book The Thoughtful Dresser analyzes women’s love of fashion. “I won’t take it from those men who judge and condemn women for the various failures of our appearance while simultaneously barking that only feeble shallow creatures such as women would pay any attention to how they look.”

Article Continued Below

Gomille may be 17 but he sounds 102 and we hear from males like him all our lives. They’re correctors, judges, buzzkills. Mothers sound like this too, for different reasons. “You’re going out in that, Cyndi Ahmadinejad? Over my dead body!” There’s a worrying prescriptiveness in Gomille’s unasked-for definition of how his fellow students should dress. We women are half the world. In the workplace men and women stand side-by-side and are gradually learning how to accommodate each other’s differences. Keep your advice to yourself, preacher. Trust me, girls like that in a boy. Paul Gomille’s letter to young women hmallick@thestar.ca