Male Studies: Do we need it, and can it happen?

Earlier this week the University of South Australia Male Studies program seemed at risk of cancellation after years of planning. This was in response to allegations made by Tory Shepherd, published on "Adelaide Now," that the organizers were tied to "hate groups."  

I had an excellent wide-ranging conversation with Dr. Janice Fiamengo, University of Ottawa, about Male Studies, Women's Studies, feminism, Canada's prostitution laws, police policy on prostitution, law professor Elizabeth Sheehy's battle to legalize husband-killing,

Ottawa Police stop arresting prostitutes, only male clients are now arrested

Why do we need the Supreme Court, or even Parliament, when the Police are happy to make up the law as they see fit?

The Ottawa Citizen reports that in 2009 the Ottawa police arrested 135 women and 56 men for prostitution offences. Then in 2010 the Canadian Women's Coalition was formed demanding decriminalization of female prostitutes and continued persecution of the men who seek them out. This is equivalent to the Swedish model pioneered in 1998, which was declared an abject failure. 

The Ottawa Police decided to

Canadian Women's Coalition: Impunity for Women, Jail for Men - Prostitution in Canada

The Supreme Court of Canada did the right thing. They struck down laws that endangered Canadian citizens.

The old laws made it illegal for sex-workers to communicate with clients in public, conduct business in private buildings, and for anyone to live off the avails of prostitution. Sex workers were therefore prohibited from paying for security, working indoors or negotiating and screening clients in a safe, open area. The law put these women in danger. 

The case was brought to court by the very women whose lives were put at risk: female sex-workers. But feminists from the Women's Coalition, which includes the Elizabeth Fry Society, are not impressed with the ruling, and make the bizarre claim that "it is now ok to buy and sell women and girls in this country."

The Coalition is trying to stir-up moral panic because

Censorship is always bad

Microsoft and Google have both announced that they will be blocking thousands of search terms in Bing, Yahoo and Google. They claim that it is to block the spread of child porn, certainly a noble cause, but is that really their motivation?

Search-term blocking is very crude. Not only will it block legitimate research and porn searches equally, it is also a broad net that will capture and block information completely unrelated to child porn. Worse, everyone knows that this censorship will have absolutely no effect on the distribution of child porn.

These companies know that child porn is distributed almost exclusively on the Dark Net. Child porn consumers don't search openly on Google or any popular search engine, nor do purveyors distribute their wares openly on these platforms. So why are these two US companies acclimating the populace to censorship? 

International Men's Day

I had no idea that today was International Men's Day (IMD). Honestly I didn't know there was an International Men's Day. I certainly knew of International Women's Day, which has been celebrated for over 100 years. 

Today, on IMD, I learned that Professor Thomas Oaster, University of Missouri, was bullied and harassed by students and administrators when he tried to celebrate IMD in the early 1990's. His career was in ruin by the vicious attacks of the University community until he sued and won compensation for the wrongs he suffered. 

International Men`s Day is a little known and largely ignored day, but it didn't escape the attention of Susie Boniface at "The Mirror", who decided to celebrate this day by writing a sarcastic, hate-filled article to ridicule men. A piece laced with self-aggrandization, and bitterness, belittling men and men's suffering at every opportunity.

In her orgy of self-pity she hints that ...