MR-E hosting lecture on boys in education.
Men’s Rights Edmonton has arranged a lecture event to be held on July 29th at 7pm at the Edmonton Public Library (Stanley A. Milner branch) with Dr. James Brown, author of Rescuing our Underachieving Sons.
The Stanley A. Milner Library is located downtown at 7 Sir Winston Churchill Square.
Dr. Brown, a career educator with a doctorate in education and post doctoral diplomas in Educational Administration and in Curriculum and Instructional Leadership, will be discussing the challenge of improving boys’ education.
Due to opposition by local feminists, promoting the event has been a challenge.
According to Eric Duckman, posters advertising the event have been vandalized with paint or torn down almost instantly after being put up.
This leads to the question, why would feminists be so opposed to a lecture by a highly respected and credentialed educator on improving boys’ performance in school?
There may be an opportunity to get an answer to that question at the event, as *a counter-event has been organized to take place at the site. The event, titled “Feministing at ‘Rescuing Our Underachieving Sons’” is described by its organizer Brittany Kustra as a chance to confront attending men’s rights activists over their “Don’t be that girl” poster campaign, and to “see who is behind the group.”
In other words, she plans to protest a scheduled lecture on an unquestionably positive topic with demands to discuss another, unrelated topic, and she will be mining for group member identities.
MREdmonton and AVoiceforMen invited live debate on blog talk radio following news coverage of the posters, and feminists everywhere, including the most vehement critics of the campaign, lined up to not take them up on it. In light of that, it’s odd that Brittany should think it necessary to disrupt an unrelated event to revisit the controversy.
Rather than take the offered chance to have all of their questions answered, this feminist group has decided to disrupt an event held for the benefit of boys who are underserved by their education system. One cannot reasonably argue that after disregarding such an open opportunity, the goal of feminists planning to converge on Dr. Brown’s lecture is merely to ask questions. Without that as a possible motive for the protest, that leaves their other goal of identity mining.
However, a group with that goal in mind would have been more sneaky than to alert the very people they seek to identify. The Facebook event page for Feministing at “Rescuing Our Underachieving Sons” is public, and they’ve made sure that the MREdmonton group would be aware ahead of time that they were planning to crash the lecture. That seems counterproductive, unless there is a different goal.
Could it be that Brittany and her friends just absolutely hate little boys, and want to deny them any effort that might be made to improve their circumstance within the education system, or are they maybe planning to hijack Dr. Brown’s lecture and distract from its intended purpose just to draw attention to themselves?
*Update – the facebook page for the planned counter-event has been removed. Link updated to show the google cache of the page.
