What constitutes manhood in sports culture is archaic. As if the sports world has been frozen in time – Neanderthal time
What former New York Mets general manager Jared Porter did to a female reporter is despicable. He certainly deserved to be fired after admitting to sending dozens of explicit text messages and photos to the reporter in 2016. The sad part is almost everyone inside baseball – most notably women in baseball – know this…
Tipping promotes age, race and gender bias, and make servers more vulnerable to sexual harassment from customers
In North America, the tipping culture has always been a source of pride, giving customers the last word when human interaction is involved. Good service deserves a good tip, while an unsatisfactory experience results in no reward for the server. In some European and Asian countries, the tip is included in the price at the…
Gillette has stepped boldly into the socio-political minefields of #MeToo, bullying, spousal abuse and male self-absorption
It’s tempting to take the recent’s ‘controversy’ over the Gillette shaving company’s new advertising campaign at something less than face value. For starters, controversy itself is no longer the conversational cutting edge it once was. In this era of fake-versus-false news, universal short attention spans and ludicrous overstatement as the entry price for even being…
We’re supposed to be standard-bearers for traditional family values in western society. What happened?
When the #MeToo movement began to pick up steam last October, most of the men accused of sexual harassment and/or sexual assault were on the political left. As time goes by, more men on the political right are getting caught in this web, too. In particular, Canada’s right has faced a few recent instances of…
How are emotions mobilized in politics, for whom and by whom? And what normalizes the expression of these emotions?
The fallout from the confirmation of President Donald Trump’s U.S. Supreme Court pick, Brett Kavanaugh, riveted people on both sides of the border and provides ample evidence that feelings can become weaponized in politics to uphold white male privilege. In his blistering, scripted opening statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee, Kavanaugh performed the role of…
If we’re to rid the world of this horrendous theft of innocence, we need to approach it the same way we approached the Holocaust
In the song Sympathy for the Devil, the Rolling Stones repeat several times, “Pleased to meet you. Hope you guessed my name. But what’s puzzling you is the nature of my game.” In essence, the Stones are talking about the nature of evil and our relation to it. We see it but we often don’t…
The feminist war against men isn't only against bad men. It’s a war is against all men
It’s become a regular experience in Canada and the United States for a man to be accused of sexual misconduct and for an almost immediate pile-on of haters adding every accusation the mind can imagine. Contemporary feminists have done a brilliant job in their war against men. Unsubstantiated accusations are treated as proven guilt. Due…
Allegations of a groping incident 18 years ago won't go away. The prime minister needs to be more definitive in his response
Is Justin Trudeau telling the truth about an alleged groping incident with a female reporter 18 years ago, or is the prime minister lying through his teeth? Yes, that’s a harsh way of laying it out. But there’s no point in sugarcoating this unusual story any longer, as some media organizations were doing up until…
A new survey says people are looking at journalism with new respect in these troubled times
It’s true. The 2018 survey by Cision of 1,355 journalists from across six countries discovered that perceived trust in professional journalists improved by 20 per cent this year. Cision is a global provider of media software. Yes, sadly, journalists felt underappreciated by 91 per cent of the general public up until last year. And fake…
The focus on consent has made men all over the world stop and think. Am I one of those men?
Strangely, this weird moment in history is a good time to be alive. I've been a feminist most of my adult life, at least since I realized power imbalances were rampant in present and past societies. After dedicating most of the 1990s and 2000s to fighting the good fight in the trenches, I burned out and left…