Tag: MRAs

  • Potential participants

    CAFE is in the news again – the Canadian Association for Equality, you know, founded by Justin “not THAT Justin” Trottier, formerly the ED of CFI-Canada. Why is it in the news again? Because it’s been discovered that it cited women’s rights organizations on its application to the Canada Revenue Agency for charitable status, which it got.

    …when the Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE), a self-described “men’s issues” organization, applied to the Canada Revenue Agency for charitable status last year, it listed the Women’s Legal Education and Action Fund (LEAF), Egale Canada, and Status of Women Canada as potential participants in its “regular panel discussion series” on women’s and men’s issues. The CRA granted CAFE charitable status in March, 2014.

    There’s just one problem: none of the groups listed has ever been involved with CAFE.

    The executive directors of Egale and LEAF said they had no knowledge of ever being approached by the organization, and said they would not work with CAFE if they were asked. Before NOW contacted them, neither organization had any knowledge that CAFE had listed them on its application.

    A spokesperson for Status of Women Canada, the federal agency, told NOW in an email that none of its representatives had ever been involved in a CAFE event.

    Sneaky, eh? Deceptive? Sly? Less than forthright?

    LEAF’s executive director Diane O’Reggio was shocked to learn CAFE had associated itself with her organization, which has been defending women’s legal rights for almost thirty years.

    “We’re concerned that this organization has used our name in this manner,” said O’Reggio. “We absolutely are not associated with this group and what they stand for.”

    “We’re obviously a feminist equality organization and we think the beliefs that they espouse are absolutely in contradiction and opposite to the work of what our organization does.”

    O’Reggio said it was “very disingenuous” for CAFE to suggest to the CRA it had a working relationship with LEAF, and she’s concerned the men’s group used her organization in order to gain charitable status.

    Helen Kennedy of Egale Canada suggests that CAFE is trying to paper over the nature of the group by using these names.

    The group also claimed it was planning to work with university scholars from women’s studies departments, and specifically named Professor Sarita Srivastava, an associate sociology professor at Queen’s who studies anti-racist challenges to Canadian feminist groups. On its application CAFE said it was “currently” setting up a panel discussion to include Srivastava.

    Reached by email, Srivastava told NOW that she was “stunned” to learn her name was on the form, which was date-stamped in a National Capital Region mailroom on July 26, 2013. According to Srivastava, more than four months before that she turned down an invitation from the group to speak about misogyny as part of a panel discussion on “misandry,” the highly disputed term men’s rights activists use to describe systemic anti-male discrimination.

    On the other hand she also says she didn’t actually spell out that she would never work with the group, so it’s possible that they could have intended to invite her to future events.

    Yes it is, and that’s where the slyness comes in.

    CAFE also listed only more benign lectures and books on its application, leaving off the overtly anti-feminist items. That looks perilously close to lying by omission.

    NOW emailed a list of questions about this story to several of CAFE’s email accounts and to its founder, Justin Trottier. Trottier isn’t included among the members of CAFE’s leadership on the group’s website, but his signature appears on the CRA application’s supporting documents and he is named in the application as the organization’s chair. Despite repeated attempts, NOW did not receive a response.

    It has proven difficult to get Trottier to speak on the record about the group he created. In a strange phone interview with CAFE last month, a man who would only give his name as “Justin” refused to reveal his full identity to NOW and claimed he was merely “working behind the scenes as a volunteer.” He could then be heard feeding answers to CAFE spokesperson Denise Fong, who is Trottier’s fiancée.

    During that interview Fong and “Justin” also denied CAFE had any association with a Voice for Men (AVFM), an online U.S. misogyny group, even though the CAFE website was promoting an AVFM conference at the time.

    Justin Trottier is the gift that keeps on giving.

  • That pendulum is WAY over there on the wrong side

    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.

  • What’s so wrong with men beating up women, really?

    I’d never heard of “GirlWritesWhat” until a few days ago when I saw a video of hers in which she accused “FTB” – on the basis of absolutely nothing – of filing a fake DMCA complaint on her in order to force her to reveal her address. A couple of days later I saw a second video of hers in which she again blamed FTB for a DMCA complaint on the basis of nothing whatever.

    So now there’s David Futrelle pointing out where she says a good word for domestic violence.

    Oy.

    Yesterday, we took a look at Ferdinand Bardamu’s manosphere manifesto “The Necessity of Domestic Violence,” a thoroughly despicable piece of writing that concludes:

    Women should be terrorized by their men; it’s the only thing that makes them behave better than chimps.

    I was a little surprised to see GirlWritesWhat, the blabby FeMRA video blogger who’s captured the hearts of Reddit’s Men’s Rights crowd, step into the conversation with something of a defense of Bardamu’s noxious views. After reading Bardamu’s manifesto – the one advocating that men “terrorize” their women to make them behave – GWW blithely concluded:

    I don’t really find too much in the article that strikes me as seriously ethically questionable.

    Oy.

  • Frivolous law suit dismissed

    Remember Tom Martin, the MRA who was suing LSE for sexism? The one who likes to call women “whores!” when they disagree with him? His case has been dismissed; he has to pay LSE’s costs.

    Representing himself at his application for a trial at the Central London County Court on Tuesday, Mr Martin complained of a lack of men-only sessions in the university’s gym and the preponderance of posters in the corridors advertis­ing services for women without the presence of similar materials geared towards men.

    Mr Martin, who describes himself as a feminist, said “hard” chairs in the library were uncomfortable for men and that a “male blaming culture” was evident in course materials, which “ignored men’s issues” and focused on wrongs done by them.

    Hard chairs. I never knew hard chairs were a feminist invention. So in patriarchal societies chairs are always cushioned? The norm is thick upholstery, and it’s only in decadent egalitarian societies that the hard chair becomes possible? I did not know this.

    However, barrister Nick Armstrong, for the LSE, successfully argued that there were no grounds for moving to what would have been likely to be a long trial.

    He said Mr Martin’s claim lacked legal coherence, adding that the bar claimants in discrimination cases had to cross to be successful had been set “fairly high” because of the subjective aspects of these cases.

    He said Mr Martin would have had to prove that he experienced a “bullying-type scenario” at the LSE, adding: “Whatever Mr Martin says about all this, no objectively reasonable person would feel degraded or humiliated by posters on the wall or course content.”

    The whoriarchy wins again. Tragic.

  • Tom Martin on “whoriarchy”

    Remember our friend Tom Martin, the MRA who is suing LSE for being unfair to men? He just sent me a message to let me know he’s done an interview with two other MRAs so that I could listen to it if I wanted to. Nah, I don’t. But I looked around a little and found that after his chatting at my place he did some chatting at Cath Elliott’s place. Oh boy; treats.

    I’ll give you some highlights.

    Sunday at 4:21 pm:

    So ‘male-dominant’ cultures, are more likely female-powerful.

    It’s a skanky, whorish, back seat-driving type of power which leads to economic and cultural ruin and war –  a whoriarchy.

    We know for instance, that women tell men what to do in marriages 90% of time – that is the same everywhere in the world.

    Monday at 2:30 am:

    Right out of the gate, you assume that women just pick the colour of the curtains, but ask any estate agent, and they’ll tell you its the woman of the couple who has the final say on whether to buy the house or not.

    Women make 90% of couple decisions big and small, according to a 2007 Harvard Study I can’t find, but is out there somewhere.

    The next thing you’re doing, is presenting the domestic sphere as separate from the political sphere.

    Women in the home have access to more political debate than men do in the workforce, as women at home have more access to media.

    …

    But yep, restricted movement and the veil are the price some women think is worth paying, as long as they don’t need to get a job.

    Women can’t drive in Saudi, but they do have chauffeurs.

    And most of those who can afford it, choose a chauffeur.

    Muslim women are really the boss in the home, and fascism starts in the home.

    In a whoriarchy, in the same way you don’t need to drive to control where the car goes, you don’t particularly need an education either, as long as you know how to steer a man, but these whores don’t, which is why their countries and cultures are failing.

    Yesterday at 5:14 pm:

    Feminists sometimes tell the truth, in which case, no court case.

    As soon as people lie, in order to make women look like bigger victims than they are, or men bigger perpetrators than they are, then that is no longer feminism, but anti-male victim-femalism.

    It is a negative stereotype, which is harassment.

    It is bias, which is not protected under the academic immunity principle.

    It is a breach of university regulations, which makes it a breach of contract.

    It is misleading advertising, if this agenda wasn’t made clear in the prospectus.

    You cannot reason, with the unreasonable. Those addicted to the unreasonable assertions that men are bad and women are good – who refuse to acknowledge any new positions, even in light of overwhelming evidence, should not call themselves feminists.

    Furthermore, I did not sign up for a degree in feminism, but one in gender – which LSE personnel acknowledge should be about men and women – but which behind the scenes, they try to make all about women.

    LSE legal team please note.

  • Attack of the male-blaming biases

    Tom Martin tells us about the tragic misandrist sexism at LSE and in feminism generally.

    …a close analysis of the core texts shows all the old, male-blaming biases are still there.

    Patriarchy theory – the idea that men typically “dominate” women – is omnipresent, when research shows women tend to boss men interpersonally.

    That’s an idiosyncratic and wrong definition of patriarchy. Patriarchy is a system, not a description. It’s a system by which men have authority by right and women are subordinate. It’s not about what happens “typically”; it’s about what it supposed to happen: it’s a web of laws, customs and traditions.

    Texts highlight misogyny but never misandry, its anti-male equivalent – despite research finding that women verbalise four times more misandry than men do misogyny. And the core texts highlight violence against women only, despite decades of research showing that women are more likely to initiate domestic violence.

    Again: misogyny is not just about what happens in conversation (what women “verbalise” more than men do), it’s about systems, culture, norms, laws, hiring patterns, the media. As for violence…please. Whatever women initiate, men are not the gender most at risk from domestic violence.

    …discussions about actual men’s issues are generally absent across curricula.

    Except for the fact that human issues have always been taken to be men’s issues and men play a vastly disproportionate part in dealing with them, so that discussions about those issues are male-dominated by a huge margin. It’s fatuous to pretend otherwise.

    In a world which verbalises four times more sexism against men than it does against women, it’s high time gender studies set a better example, so we all might emulate it.

    I call bullshit on that particular “statistic.”

  • Men are being silenced

    A guy is suing LSE for sexism.

    The man, 39-year-old Tom Martin, based in London, began pursuing an MSc degree in gender, media and culture at the LSE’s Gender Institute in October 2009. He withdrew six weeks later, citing “anti-male discrimination” in the coursework.

    “Its programs actively block men’s discourse and perpetuate the men-bad, women-good dialogue,” Martin told me by phone yesterday. “I want gender studies to be more inclusive for men.”

    Its programs block men’s discourse?! Oh.my.god. That’s so terrible, when men have been silenced for so long. What’s that men-bad, women-good dialogue though? I’ve never heard of that. It sounds like a hell of a boring dialogue, as well as kind of stupid.

    Martin, who calls himself a “feminist” and a “men’s rights activist,” said he did a line-by-line analysis of the core texts taught in the gender classes and decided they were “overwhelmingly negative on men, blamed men for women’s perceived inequalities, and complained about misogyny but never spoke about misandry [which is defined as the hatred of men].” Martin declined to provide me with a list of the texts.

    Ohhhhh that. Right. Now I know where we are. (I spent a fair amount of time there myself recently. Funny what a malodorous place it turned out to be.) He calls himself a feminist MRA and he thinks women have gone past equality into privilege and that “misandry” is comparable to misogyny (and he keeps his list of texts a secret).

    While Martin claims he’s after egalitarianism only, some of his views may raise eyebrows. “I don’t buy that women were oppressed by men historically,” he said. “There’s a perverse incentive in gender studies to preserve the inequalities that women face.” He also believes that men are the “victims” of prostitution, that women “volunteer” into sex trafficking and that women’s “hysterical” fear of rape damages equality.

    Check check check. He’s learned his lines well.