Somebody called Robert Cribb wrote a silly piece for the National Post in 2011 about men being the new underclass. (Jesus christ, people. Really? Are you serious?) He talked to Justin Trottier. There is a picture of Justin Trottier on it. Justin Trottier is front and center.
First for a sense of the careful thinking and research behind the article:
Proposition: In the shifting modern narrative of gender politics, men are the new women.
The once fortified white male empire, bowed and beaten by generations of women scorned by its bloated superciliousness, has born sons they barely recognize.
We, the offspring of assured, confident, self-realized men, are emerging as a new underclass.
Statistics Canada has gathered the data.
About 60 per cent of university grads today are women.
Following graduation ceremonies that have the feel of sorority house parties, the professional outlooks for women are on the distinct upswing compared to men, national data shows.
Right, and little things like goverments and the military and religious institutions and corporations and popular culture and a few other things being firmly dominated by men – those don’t count, because university graduation ceremonies “have the feel of sorority house parties.”
Oy.
So then Justin Trottier comes in.
There is another side to the gender shift: A growing revolutionary man-power backlash.
Toronto’s Men’s Issues Awareness Campaign, for example, is a fledgling pushback to the male feminization trend that seeks a realignment of the gender power scales.
“In gender issues, it’s not as simple as women are always victims and men are always the victimizers,” says Justin Trottier, the 28-year-old leader of the campaign. “There’s a far more nuanced debate that we should be having.”
Listen to Trottier for a while and you’ll start to recognize some of the same language uttered by feminists a generation ago.
“We’re about equality and equalism,” says Trottier, who recently ran unsuccessfully in the provincial election as a Green Party candidate. “Look at the landscape and for all our talk of equality, it’s ironic that our societal investments have really been on women’s issues. We should be equally open to appreciating men’s issues.”
Compare, for example, public and private donations for male versus female health programs such as gender-specific cancer research, he says.
Or consider the array of publicly funded programs for immigrants to Canada.
“We see plenty of services for women but we don’t see them available for men,” he says. “These are stark differences.”
Then, to stretch the point, he raises the issue of public investment in shelters for domestic abuse victims.
“They are almost entirely set up for women victims but if you look at the statistics, there are a surprising percentage of cases where men are being victimized.”
Well just push the women out then, and take the shelters for men. It’s only fair.