The Toronto Star recently published Heather Mallick’s misandric piece “Men’s rights groups are a waste of time: Mallick.”
This article—a “response” to the November 16 opening of the new Canadian Centre for Men and Families in Toronto—is so wrong on so many levels that I don’t know where to start. Here is Mallick’s description of Justin Trottier, the centre’s director:
It will be run by a thin pale wary-looking male-victimhood guy who I always get mixed up with another scrawny depressed-looking men-imist, mainly because they tend to pose for photos against walls, cement and brick respectively, and glower at the camera.
My question is: “Would the Star stand by if a male journalist posted a similar derogatory description of a female starting up a women’s centre?” No, I’m sure the man would be given his walking papers, and his career in journalism would be over! That any journalist would attack someone based on his or her appearance should be enough to raise eyebrows, but it gets way worse.
Mallick goes on to diminish the reality of the problems men face, including suicide, the seventh most common cause of death among Canadian males. Instead of applauding the formation of a group to look at the root causes of suicide and attempt to fix it before it becomes an issue, Mallick suggests “gun control,” even though suicide by hanging is still the most common method, followed by poisoning. Suicide by firearm constitutes only 16% of cases.
With respect to education, boys have been statistically trending downward for the past two decades. Boys are more likely to drop out of school, and only 40% of students entering college are boys. This is a trend that is getting worse. Yet Mallick finds that boys don’t really matter:
I do think worrying about boys doing less well in school than girls is a lot of tosh, since no one ever worried that girls did less well in school.
Really? Could you imagine if girls were trending poorly and the genders were reversed? We would definitely be hearing about it in the news. Instead of fleshing out the reality of the issue and looking to find concrete ways to help our sons, we get Mallick to diminish the impact. Again, let’s flip the genders and have a man say this—he’d be out of work, and his career would be over. Period.
Parents with sons reading this should be outraged that a major publication like the Star would stoop low enough to post this. By publishing this garbage, the Star is effectively saying that “boys are not that important” and that we, as a society, should shun any attempt to help them—simply because they have a penis. And we aren’t talking about a small newspaper stand out in an armpit city. We’re talking about the second largest newspaper in Canada, one of the top news outlets in North America.
But this isn’t the first time Heather Mallick has openly expressed her hatred of men. A Google search showed no end to the lengths this woman has gone to bash them. Here are just a few:
In a 2010 article on Russell Williams (woman killer), Mallick began by suggesting that ALL men are like Williams:
Men should weep. They bruise women’s bodies, they humiliate us in the House of Commons, they expend great effort in keeping us pregnant, booting us away from the bigger salaries, they are tireless in their attempts at control and resent our efforts to advance. Frequently, they kill women. Russell Williams is a monster but there will be other monsters in the years to come.
We know this to be true. I am a feminist but all women know what I mean because they live it every day.
In 2012, in an attack article on a 17-year-old boy, she wrote:
Women often shop for men, and I shudder to think how men would dress if they didn’t. Most men can’t even enter shops to buy their own pants.
Earlier this year, she wrote a column criticizing the Canadian government’s prostitution bill:
The online reactions were almost entirely from men, which is true of all commenting and opinion-writing….
Here’s a tip. “Hi, can I buy ya a drink? I don’t have access to mainstream sexual outlets” is not a great line. It is known in the mainstream women’s crowd as a “red flag” and will result in loneliness and possible late-night weeping into a little corral of crème de menthe glasses at the bar….
The “need” to buy women is not a “law of nature,” as he wrote, presumably with a straight face. Me? Arrested? The overall level of male entitlement was striking.
Sorry, Heather, it may not be what you want to hear or believe, but men and boys have issues and society’s role in addressing these issues is failing us badly. Men still make up 95% of workplace fatalities, suicide is four times higher in boys and men, parental rights for divorced dads is non-existent, men are still sentenced to longer sentences than women are (for equal crimes and circumstances), and male genital mutilation (circumcision) is an issue that must be reviewed (but no one is tackling it)—circumcised skin is sold to cosmetic companies in Canada despite it being against Canadian regulations to do so (but no one bats an eye).
I could go on … As I said, sorry, Heather, it’s not what you want to hear, but yes, we do need a men’s centre, and you’re partly the reason.
