Wednesday, February 03, 2010

Meanwhile, in Canada



The National Post, a conservative newspaper, posted a most hilarious editorial a few days ago. It's about the death of Women's Studies programs in Canada and sounds exactly like the worst MRA site. An example:

The radical feminism behind these courses has done untold damage to families, our court systems, labour laws, constitutional freedoms and even the ordinary relations between men and women.

Women's Studies courses have taught that all women--or nearlyall-- are victims and nearly all men are victimizers. Their professors have argued, with some success, that rights should be granted not to individuals alone, but to whole classes of people, too. This has led to employment equity -- hiring quotas based on one's gender or race rather than on an objective assessment of individual talents.

Executives, judges and university students must now sit through mandatory diversity training. Divorcing men find they lose their homes and access to their children, and must pay much of their income to their former spouses (then pay tax on the income they no longer have) largely because Women's Studies activists convinced politicians that family law was too forgiving of men. So now a man entering court against a woman finds the deck stacked against him, thanks mostly to the radical feminist jurisprudence that found it roots and nurture in Women's Studies.

It gets even funnier, and the people commenting on it at the paper agree.

I'm shocked by this humongous power Canadian Women's Studies programs have had and the weirdest principles they have taught. But then of course I'm also rather shocked by the idea that there was no reason whatsoever to ever start such programs: The world was an absolutely fair place for women and had always been so, never mind laws which used to ban women from certain jobs and places of education and so on.

In any case, I got interested in this National Post thingy and went rummaging in its archives for more fun stuff. As I suspected, they have their own little female misogynist penning away stuff about how the world is all run by feminists. Those jobs are the plum ones for women who are of course not hardwired to actually write anything but must be used because the same message from a man's pen would look...contemptuous towards women.

Here is an example of that well-known genre. It is a piece which argues that we value women's suffering more than men's suffering and that this must change. The steps to take for that are these:

-We will see the return of the traditional family unit as a phenomenon worthy of concern and respect. The needs of children will come first;

-Equal parenting will become the default custody arrangement as the optimal situation for children; the resultant decline in adversarial legal battles will diminish false allegations of abuse by women and punitive support-withholding by men, both of which punish children more than parents;

-The specific needs of boys and men will be accorded the same pedagogical, social and legal rights and respect as girls: We will see funding for shelters for abused men and children, or ungendered family shelters for whoever needs it;

-Domestic violence will be acknowledged as a serious but bilateral problem that is unacceptable, whether perpetrated by men or women. But we will also acknowledge that systemic misogyny of the kind made manifest in honour crimes against women is a culturally-derived phenomenon that is alien to Canadian values, and that it is wrong to assign collective guilt for such crimes to Canadian men.

If the pendulum in the gender wars really is swinging back to the middle, it should become received wisdom that men and women are genetically hard-wired for different strengths, weaknesses and psychological needs.

So, having agreed that intact families are by far the greatest predictors of success for children than anything else, we will jettison the power struggle paradigm feminism has been pushing for decades. We will move toward a collaborative model in which men and women are equal in value but, guided by nature and common sense, separate in their parental roles and influence. The result will be a happier, more productive generation of Canadian children.

How very odd that men and women should be treated exactly the same with respect to violence but that otherwise we must respect "hardwired" sex differences. And how very odd to argue that men and women must have separate parenting roles while at the same time insisting on equal parenting as the default custody arrangement. It makes no logical sense at all. But it certainly sounds a lot like something you can read on some MRA sites, including the emphasis on the idea that women always lie when they allege abuse or rape.
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I was listening to the news while writing this post. This is what I just heard.