85-year-old Hockey Scout Is Pilloried for Calling a Reporter “good-looking”

Nothing is more feminist than cruelty in the name of decency

Terry Bonner (right) in trouble for telling reporter Cami Kepke that she is a “good-lookin’ girl”

The story is now a common one: an older man disgraced and punished for a “sexist” offence. In an instant, his reputation is shattered. Previously respected in his work, he becomes a target of contempt and hatred. Few defend him in his hour of need, and abundant sympathy is expressed for his alleged victim(s), whose harms are often imaginary.

Last weekend, it was Canadian hockey scout Terry Bonner who was put in the stocks. Bonner is the head scout for the Vancouver Giants, a Canadian junior hockey team that is part of the Western Hockey League, with 23 member clubs that develop talent for the National Hockey League.

Bonner is 85 years old, with over two decades with the Giants. His offence was to tell a pretty young female reporter, Cami Kepke, that she was good-looking. His exact words were (as seen in the clip here, which has now been viewed over 2.5 million times), “Well thank you very much, you good-lookin’ girl.” After that, he chuckled and sat back in his chair, whether in embarrassment or satisfaction it was hard to say, and continued with his answer.

For that moment of indiscretion during an interview—Kepke was congratulating him on the Giants’ third-round draft pick and asking what the player in question, Eli Vickers, would bring to the team—The Giants have been fined $5000 by the Canadian Hockey League for “conduct detrimental to the League.” Meanwhile, unctuous apologies, statements of feminist rectitude, and exultant finger-pointing have broken out all around Bonner. This moment of humiliation may well be Bonner’s last public appearance.

Harsh Punishment

Cami Kepke, likely to survive the trauma of being called “good-lookin’” on air.

The reaction beggars belief.

Women are now being shoe-horned into every possible position in professional ice hockey, from commentating to coaching and from on-ice reporting to officiating. But their protected status as delicate (yet always valiant) victims can never, it seems, be surrendered, no matter how trivial the incident.

One commentator has called Bonner’s remark to Kepke “workplace harassment,” recommending that Kepke “sue him for every penny he has.” “Gas this dusty old dude,” wrote another, “and kudos to the young lady for keeping focused.”

Bonner’s compliment was deemed “grossly unprofessional and disrespectful,” “inappropriate and creepy,” “shameful” and “f---ing gross.” “What a sick f---. Time to dox this pedo,” enthused one observer, while another anticipated his and other old men’s deaths: “This generation needs to just kick the bucket already.”

Commenters also mocked Bonner’s name (with puns aplenty on boner) and gave free rein to insulting references to his age, allegedly ghoulish smile, and yellowing teeth.

SJW sports advocate Rick Strom spent some time displaying his exquisite moral sensitivities in a clip on the Bonner episode

While a few professional writers deplored the pile-on (two good examples are here and here), most seemed eager to sit in judgement. YouTuber Rick Strom put on a long face as he explained that Bonner’s comment was “toxic and wrong” in “objectifying” Kepke and proving that “hockey has a culture problem.” Hockey writer Jonathan Larivee explained primly that “many felt it was inappropriate for a man in Boner’s [sic] position to be making comments of that nature during an on-air segment.”

The Commissioner of the Western Hockey League, Dan Near, lost no time in putting out a press release claiming that “Accountability is a cornerstone value of our League” and brandishing his feminist compliance by asserting that “In this instance, regardless of intent, the remarks are not reflective of the organization’s standards of respect and inclusion.”

Fainting-Couch Victims

It was an exaggerated reaction to a goofy (not ghoulish, ghastly, or creepy) moment of male admiration for female beauty.

I doubt it’s the first time that Ms. Kepke has been made aware of her good looks, and it’s an experience she is sure to survive with self-confidence intact. Even squinting one’s eyes and putting on one’s feminist thinking cap, it is impossible to find anything “detrimental” in a compliment neither threatening nor harassing, by an elderly man with no power over the woman in question.

At age 85, Bonner is reportedly the longest serving scout in franchise history, recipient of a WHL Distinguished Service Award for 2014-15, and certainly entitled, one would have thought, to a modicum of tolerance.

But even in the he-man world of ice hockey, feminist domination of public opinion is now near-total, such that any remark at all, no matter how kindly or innocuous, can and will be used against a formerly well-regarded man.

If she had wanted to, the reporter at the center of the controversy might have issued a public statement on social media, making clear that she held no grudge against Bonner, was not bothered by his remark, and did not think that a formal sanction was appropriate. This would, at least, have been some comfort to Bonner and might have influenced the Canadian Hockey League. Instead, she has maintained silence. At least she hasn’t (yet) played the victim.

In a case I covered years ago, a 28-year-old female graduate student at the University of California at Berkeley claimed that she struggled to get out of bed for a year after a professor in her department confessed that he found her attractive. She claimed that after Professor Blake Wentworth grabbed her hand and said “I’m so attracted to you,” she experienced “extreme fatigue, unexpected body aches and debilitating anxiety.” Wentworth was eventually fired for sexual harassment.

Francisco Ayala, award-winning biologist and benefactor of UC Irvine, permanently barred from campus at age 84 for complimenting female colleagues

In another extraordinary case, a biology professor who had endowed buildings and scholarships at UC Irvine, giving over ten million dollars of his own money to help the school, was barred from campus and had his name removed from all the research facilities and fellowships he had funded after a group of women complained that his Old World style of kissing them on both cheeks and giving them lavish and sexually-tinged compliments had made them feel disrespected and demeaned.

“I just learned that women don’t like to be told they’re beautiful,” he was reported to have said to one of his victims, “But I know you don’t mind.” He was 84 years old when he was informed that he was no longer welcome at the university he had supported.

Shaming Older Men

Harvey Weinstein’s trials featured graphic descriptions of his deformed genitals and sexual inadequacies designed to drive home his status as a disgusting old creep

Sexual shaming is practiced with particular fury against older men, and not only because men like Bonner, born around the time of Pearl Harbor, raised in the pre-feminist 1950s, and working in the relatively sheltered world of high-level ice hockey, may not have been aware of rapidly hardening feminist orthodoxies.

Older men make satisfying targets. They are hated for having lived at a time when men were not as cowed before women as they are today; and they sometimes, as in Bonner’s case, speak out of that older tradition when men complimented women and women accepted with good grace. The good grace can no longer be depended on, and the men’s obliviousness maddens some ideologues, who can hardly believe that such dinosaurs still roam the earth.

Moreover, the evident physical frailty of older men arouses the killer instinct in some men and women, perhaps not unlike the manner in which wolves will turn on a wounded or ailing pack leader. For women, the feeling is exacerbated by a conviction that the man deserves his come-down, that there is poetic justice in seeing a once-mighty patriarch brought low.

Simone De Beauvoir wrote extensively, in The Second Sex, of women’s contempt for aging men, noting that women who hold stereotyped views of men do not forgive signs of male vulnerability. “A fallen god,” she declared, “is not a man; it is an imposture” (p. 695). A persecuted weak man becomes a stand-in for the woman’s vengeance against all men, against the world, and against herself. Speaking of women’s dislike of their often older husbands, Beauvoir noted how “[the wife] witnesses his decline with silent complacency: it is her revenge” (p. 637).

At least some of the bitter vindictiveness expended on Harvey Weinstein (with admittedly more serious accusations) may be related to the scorn heaped on Bonner and other aging men. Women who had once been eager to hang on Weinstein’s arm and shower him with affection, whether real or feigned, later lined up to denounce him when they perceived weakness. In interviews and in court, they were merciless in detailing his physical deformities and sexual inadequacy.

Many #MeToo casualties (Matt Lauer, Garrison Keillor, Al Franken, Leon Wieseltier, and Michael Oreskes, to name only a few) were in their 60s or 70s when, though not charged or investigated by police for any crime, they were publicly denounced and ousted from prestigious positions on the basis of years- or decades-old claims of sexual misconduct. Disgust at masculine weakness is a feature of anti-male bigotry that is almost never acknowledged, but the results are often remarkably cruel.

Feminism is nowhere uglier than in its blithe dehumanization of those it deems oppressors, especially at the moment when the once powerful and respected are recognized as vulnerable. Advocates on both the political Left and Right are often easily summoned to assist in their destruction.

Cases like Terry Bonner’s show that the more assiduously feminists’ complaints and demands are complied with, the more pitiless and maniacal they become.