Justin Trottier belongs to (or for all I know is the ED of) a men’s rights organization called the Canadian Association for Equality, aka Café (geddit?). It has a Facebook page, which is currently full of Karen Straughan’s talk. It also has a website, which triggered a virus warning, so don’t go there.
The Toronto Star ran an article on it last August.
Adam McPhee is a man. In his eyes, that puts him at a great disadvantage.
“Women have the ‘Walk a Mile in Her Shoes’ campaign,” says the 32-year-old. “But I don’t see a campaign for women to walk around in steel-toed boots. Men have hard shoes, too.”
McPhee is one of a small but swelling group who believe men have become the new underclass. He hopes to open a mancave that will serve as a refuge for his downtrodden brethren. The Canadian Association for Equality, a men’s rights group of which he is a board member, has launched a campaign to establish the first “Centre for Men and Families” in Toronto.
The new underclass. Right, that’s why women dominate business and the law and movies and music and corporations and finance and government and the military and STEM subjects and…
Local women’s rights advocates agree today’s males face many hardships, but disagree with CAFÉ’s methods of solving them.
“They tend to be more frustrated about women’s rights being protected and women’s equality being promoted, rather than men’s rights being violated,” says Sarah Blackstock, director of advocacy and communications at YWCA Toronto. “If we’re trying to build a society marked by compassion and equality, this centre won’t help us do that.”
CAFE has attempted to open chapters at several campuses across Canada in the past year, only to be met with heated protests. In June, the Canadian Federation of Students put forth a motion to oppose “men’s rights awareness groups” like CAFE, alleging they “provide environments of sexism, patriarchy and misogyny to manifest and be perpetuated on campus.”
Last November, CAFE came under fire when several women who protested at one of their University of Toronto events, featuring guest lecturer Dr. Warren Farrell, were later profiled on the website register-her.com. The site is run by U.S.-based men’s rights website A Voice for Men and is dedicated to exposing females they allege are “false rape accusers” and bigots.
A Voice for Men…I was on their front page once. I did not like that.
SlutWalk organizer Colleen Westendorf agrees spaces are needed to discuss men’s issues, but questions CAFE’s motives.
“Their approach seems to blame feminism for the suffering of men,” she says. “They say they’re interested in gender equality, yet they deny the ways women are still hugely over-represented in experiencing violence and highly under-represented in positions of power.”
But McPhee argues feminists have swung the gender pendulum too far in their own direction.
Thus validating Westendorf’s claim. If the status quo now is swinging the pendulum too far in our direction…yes, that guy is decidedly opposed to equality for women.