‘Gender is having a
moment’: How the wars over misogyny and feminism have finally reached a
fever pitch
Joseph Brean
|
May 30, 2014
An undated photo Elliot Rodger is seen at a
press conference by the Santa Barbara County Sheriff in Goleta,
California May 24, 2014.
Elliot Rodger one of the reasons gender is
having a 'moment'
Nothing the Canadian Association For Equality does, even a
picnic, is untouched by controversy and outrage in the modern
gender wars.
The men’s rights organization, newly granted charitable
status, has been on a roll, raising funds for a resource centre
in Toronto, and protesting its perceived unfair reception at
various university campuses.
This week, amid the runaway success of the feminist
#yesallwomen campaign and fierce debate of the role played by
misogyny in a California spree killing, CAFE once again played
the role of anti-feminist pantomime villain, as the host and
sponsors of their annual “Equality Day” picnic on the Toronto
Islands cancelled at the last minute, claiming they were unaware
of the political agenda, and thanking the many people who
informed them.
The picnic is of paltry consequence, but the frantic
attention paid to a small advocacy group reflects the heat
thrown by these latest flare-ups of the gender wars, in which
powerful ideologies are lined up against each other — one side
conceding theoretical equality on their own historically
privileged terms, the other seeking revolution, liberation, and
the overthrow of privilege.
As it grows and proliferates, gender conflict is starting to
look like the dominant theme of the age, in a way that, after
9/11, Islam and the West characterized the 2000s.
“Gender is, I believe, having a moment,” said Joan Simalchik,
professor of history and coordinator of the Women and Gender
Studies program at the University of Toronto Mississauga, citing
for example the stories of Malala Yousafzai, and the campaign to
save the kidnapped Nigerian girls.
Malala Yousafzai
“It’s really tricky to know how social change happens, and paradigms
shift. For instance, in South Africa, [activism against] apartheid was
an issue from the 1940s, but it was very small.… All of a sudden, it was
huge. How did that happen? I wish I knew.”
She contrasted the modern gender situation to LGBTQ rights, in which
“all of a sudden, it’s not really a big issue anymore.”
For gender, on the other hand, change is in the air. Everything about
it feels big. As with bullying — once seen as a regrettable fact of
life, but now denounced as a social scourge — so does sexism now face
the greatest and most powerful cultural opposition in memory.
The signs are abundant. From pitched discussion of “slut-shaming,”
“rape culture,” and the campaign to ban “bossy,” to the outrage that
former New York Times editor Jill Abramson was described with the loaded
term “pushy,” with its sexist connotations, gender conflicts seem to be
at the cutting edge of cultural change.
In opposition has risen a strange guerrilla force of men’s rights
activists, drawing flak, often deliberately, from hyper-empowered
feminist activists with itchy trigger fingers, as CAFE illustrates.
Both sides pose as progressives, but both often behave as
reactionaries.
“In many ways, [men's rights activists] want to be proactive and
progressive, in terms of viewing men in families, and domestic violence.
And they don’t want to be excluded from the discussion, and they want to
promote a good discussion about men’s involvement in fatherhood or
various gender issues. But it is reactionary, unfortunately, in terms of
what you see [on campuses] in terms of being excluded. There has been
quite a push back, and the universities have rethought security issues,”
said Robert A. Kenedy, who studies the men’s rights movement as an
associate professor of sociology at York University.
In Canada and the West, women are historically closer to equality
than ever before, with most policy and legislation long since caught up
to modern views of equality. But just as civil rights did not erase
racism, neither do equitable hiring polices make an equal workplace, nor
does strict prosecution of sexual assault make campuses safe.
To the feminist activist, then, there is more to be done, high ground
to be taken at home, at the office, at school, in government, and on the
streets. It seems the time has come to solidify gains, to assert what
the laws limply declare, and take a great leap forward. Progress is
satisfying, but revolution stirs the blood.
The fiery mood changes how people respond to the littlest things, as
illustrated for example by the two-day outrage this week, complete with
allusions to Willie Pickton, over an imagined link between six routine
missing person reports in Toronto, now immortalized as #torontowomen.
(All but one had been located by Friday.)
Police tape marks off the scene of a
drive-by shooting that left seven people dead, including the attacker,
and others wounded on Friday, May 23, 2014, in Isla Vista, Calif.
In this climate, Elliot Rodger’s massacre at Isla Vista near the
University of California, Santa Barbara, tragic as it was, presented as
an opportunity to prove a point, that misogyny kills. This was a modern
Ecole Polytechnique, women killed because they were women.
“All of a sudden, his letter is everywhere across the world and
people can read it and it has a possibility of people responding
together quickly,” Prof. Simalchik said. “One of the problems with the
rapidity of social media is it doesn’t really give us time to reflect.
Only time will tell what exactly was happening here. So there is a
danger in people leaping to conclusions or easy solutions. Clearly there
was more to it than just misogyny.”
Because that opportunity was seized, however, almost gleefully in
some parts — a Globe and Mail column addressed to “moderate
men” lamented their silence and said: “By virtue of existence, you’re in
on it”— it was also a chance to call out opportunism, in which the role
of mental illness was sidelined, as was the gender of his victims, four
of whom were male.
Both sides succeeded in making their point.
Elliot Rodger might have killed more men than women, but the first
three men were his room-mates, a prelude to the purposeful carnage.
According to his own words, the women were more to the point. As such,
the Isla Vista killings feel more like an historical event, rich with
cultural significance, than a senseless tragedy.
“The fact is, misogyny is entrenched in our culture and has
been historically, cross-culturally, for centuries. It goes way
back,” said Prof. Simalchik. “So there does seem to be a
cultural shift. Because often in the past people would deny that
it was misogyny at the basis of it, and now they’re leaping to
it. They’ve sort of made this radical shift to thinking that’s
all it’s about.”
Gender, which crosses the borders between public and private
lives, “has always been a part of social change,” Prof.
Simalchik said, and that is likely to continue as its ascends
the ladder of cultural preoccupations.
“Feminists’ arguments have never historically stood only on
their own,” she said. “They’ve always been part of a social
ferment for change where gender becomes glaring, right back to
the first wave of women urging the vote. It was part of the
anti-slavery movement. It all came about combined. And then in
the Sixties, the second wave, with all kinds of liberations:
black power, gay liberation, flower power, it was part of that.
Now, you wonder if this is becoming the paradigm for equality
now.”
Like rules, however, paradigms are made to be broken. As
Germaine Greer, the leading feminist thinker, put it in a
lecture this month at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights in
Winnipeg, she is a “liberation feminist,” and liberation
feminism has not even begun. “We have only just begun to
understand what might be involved, and how hard we have to work
not to ride roughshod over concerns and identifications that we
barely understand,” she said. “We have a lot of growing up to
do.”
She rejects “equality feminism,” which “would have men and
women living together in a world unchanged.”
“You can say that it’s great, isn’t it, that women can have
equal pay.… All of that stuff is presented to us as if
struggles for women’s rights are over. You’ve won it all. You’ve
got what you wanted. Really? We never defined what we wanted. It
was always presented as if the lives lived by men are the lives
we wanted to lead,” Ms. Greer said. “You don’t want to be
allowed to vote for somebody else’s agenda. You want a new
agenda.”
National Post
Source
Commentary by the Ottawa Mens Centre
Extreme Feminism controls government, the selection of Judges and has
changed out law to what can only be called "Male Sharia Law" to the po
int that men have next to no legal rights while granting women,
unbelievable rights to be prosecutors, judges, criminals and terrorists
simply because of their gender war against those who by accident of
birth were born with testicles.
Take the Canadian Criminal Code, a man can be convicted of criminal
harassment simply if she can prove "she was afraid" , no evidence, just
her subjective view or more to the point, uncorroborated allegation that
requires NO proof what so ever.
Canadian Courts are riddled with cowardly gutless Corrupt Judges who
"Rubber Stamp" some 98% of custody decisions in favour of women.
If a male dares to state he was the victim of domestic violence, he
is likely to face endless litigation and criminal charges until he stops
committing "feminist heresy".
In Ottawa the Crown Attorneys VIKII BAIR, TARA DOBEC and VIVIAN LEE
operate a war on men, prosecuting male victims of domestic violence
while
STAYING Charges against any violent mother who is being supported by
"The Gestapo", that is the common name lawyers use for
The Children's Aid Society.
Feminist lawyers like CAS Lawyer Marguerite Isobel Lewis spend their
lives Fabricating Evidence against Fathers who dare to suggest that have
been victims of a violent woman. In their perverted views, its become
their role to promote hatred against fathers and to, commit any number
of Criminal Offenses in the process.
Such is the lawless state of Canada where Male Sharia Law Applies.
Check out the wanted pages at
Ottawa Mens Centre
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