Ignored by the latest CAQ budget, more than 1600 community groups across Quebec will be on strike as of Monday.
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Kate
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Kate
I’ve been meaning to post this link for a few days.
Earlier this month we had a discussion about women’s rights and recent regression in men’s attitudes toward them.
One commenter claimed the stats were biased by being sampled worldwide and including cultures more patriarchal than ours.
Another even claimed it was “tough to wrap one’s head around” the math of averaging out attitudes in more patriarchal cultures with enlightened places like Sweden and Portugal.
Well, I had a complete brain crash even trying to think about that, it was such tough math, so when I saw the headline:
Young Canadian men more likely to say gender equality has gone ‘far enough’
I put it aside for a few days, but I wanted to come back to this:
Canadian adult men under the age of 35 are more likely to say gender equality has gone “far enough” and hold traditional views of gender roles than the general population, new polling data suggests.
More stats in the piece.
Meezly
I did not follow the previous thread, but it does astound me how if people can’t wrap their heads around statistical data, they dismiss it as biased, click-bait, etc. Data is only useful in how it’s been collected, aggregated, analyzed, etc. The data itself isn’t biased but can become biased depending on who’s interpreting them.
I was thinking about what we do with data because I was just reading about Ann Burgess and how she helped the FBI create the Behavoral Science Unit simply by showing them how to collect, aggregate and analyze their research data. The FBI simply didn’t know what to do their mountain of data which was rather chaotically gathered. Burgess helped them build a framework and methodology to make proper comparisons and analyses.
I believe the same can be applied to that survey. Collecting worldwide data is necessary to compare countries that are considered more progressive with less progressive countries. A “progressive” country could involve democratic governments, a separation of Church and State, etc. but can still have patriarchal ideology embedded within their culture and even their laws vs countries that are overtly patriarchal due to factors like theocracy, tyranny, etc.
You can use the data to compare that X country is still much more progressive compared to Y country because you need to determine what makes a country progressive in terms of factors like gender equality. So in X country, women can vote, earn money and own property, but they are still being paid less than men and are still being treated as lesser beings.
You also need to measure how X country is doing compared with other countries that are similar with X.
You also need to measure how X country is doing on its own compared to past data.Now if X country that is considered progressive has “dropped in points” and there is data to back it up, then that might be cause for concern. What could be the possible factors contributing to a decline in attitudes toward gender equality? Could it be the fact that more and more young men are being influenced by the manosphere? Could economic inflation and employment shrinkage be contributing to financial struggle which can result in the increase in xenophobia, sexism and a longing to return to “the way things were”, ie. when white men were the top of the heap?
Once the contributing factors are known, then ideally, society should try to address these issues because what’s the point of collecting data in the first place if it doesn’t serve the greater good? The past decade or so has made me realize how much the rights and freedoms people have fought for can be so easily taken away. Some things that should belong to a dystopian novel have been made a reality. We should be doing everything we can to protect our rights and freedoms of everyone because that’s where the powers that be start with, by chipping away at the most vulnerable groups and working their way up.
steph
The idea that gender equality is some kind of pie with only so many slices to go around—like if women get a bigger piece, men must be going hungry. But equality isn’t a zero-sum game. It’s not redistribution; it’s expansion. When more people are free to participate fully, everyone benefits. So when young boys say “feminism has gone far enough,” it doesn’t signal that the work is finished. It signals that somewhere along the way, equality got framed as a threat instead of an upgrade. That’s not a failure of feminism—it’s evidence of how incomplete the conversation still is. If equality felt like a win for everyone, we wouldn’t be having this debate. The fact that some people see fairness as loss tells us we still have a lot of work left to do.
Kate
steph, from things I’ve picked up online, some men feel that as women get a bigger piece of the action, it changes them, and deprives men of the wifely and motherly attentions to which they’re entitled. So it is indeed a kind of zero‑sum game from that perspective.
jeather
Yeah, look: when only white men could get jobs, it was easier for white men to get well-paying jobs. This IS a loss for them, even as it is overall a gain for society. I don’t think most men actually want to go back to that time, but there is an aspect of zero sum that is real.
SMD
This saddens me. The patriarchy hurts men, too! It keeps us from feeling and expressing a full range of emotions. Anything other than competition, violence and horniness (or a combination thereof) is off-limits to us. As bell hooks said: “Feminism is for everybody.”
MarcG
That 40% of all surveyed that “think Canada has done enough in giving women equal rights to men” is pretty straggering without any demographic slicing.
roberto
It’s only a zero sum game if you believe the capitalist propaganda. Using feminism as a scapegoat is just a variant of famous cartoon “Careful mate… that foreigner wants your cookie!”
jeather
It’s the corporations and extremely wealthy people setting up a game of “let’s you and him fight”.
patatrio
I don’t know why people get so defensive over this issue, sexism is present in all societies, even in the most equitable environments. What changed in my experience is how it is manifested, either structurally or informally as part of specific cultural environments. The regression here seems to be the difference between place and community based vs online culture, where fringe groups and oligarchs have increasing purchase on the minds of everyone, especially young men.
It’s difficult to grapple with or understand what are the real consequences of gender inequalities when you have these thoughts mapped out for you by unaccountable platforms. I do hope and believe though that we are raising better feminists post-pandemic and on the whole societies are championing and celebrating female perspectives and contributions to society, but the impacts take generations.
Domestic violence and systemic exclusion are issues that span generations also, so combatting gender inequality is so embedded in patriarchal societies that we have to work with boys and men on many fronts simoultaneously.
Kate
The concern is for the “red-pilling” trend that persuades young men into feeling that women are fundamentally different, men’s needs are paramount, and society must channel women into pre‑set subservient roles that put men first. Plenty of important males in our world already hold these views, which leak out and taint everything from women’s perceived value at work to how families treat daughters differently from sons.
It isn’t a question of being defensive, it’s a question of noticing social trends.
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Kate
Environment Canada says the snow will continue till about 5 pm.
Beautiful weather for a parade.
(Has anyone recorded the weather conditions for the Patrick’s parade over the years? This isn’t the first time it will have been held under snowfall.)
…TVA has some images from the parade as does Le Devoir. Report from Radio‑Canada.
Quebec took the moment to promise some funding for the long‑discussed park meant to house the Black Rock in Goose Village.
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Kate
Ygreck enjoys emphasizing Canada’s pathetic military scale next to U.S. forces, as he did this week and a couple of weeks ago.Other aspects of the U.S.-Israel-Iran war struck Chapleau and Chloé, and Mark Carney’s political situation inspired a joke from Côté, who also had a comment on war’s effect on the global economy.
Closer to home, it was the Quebec budget that inspired two japes from Côté, one from Godin, and two jabs at Legault from Chapleau and Ygreck.
The possibility of reviving shale gas drilling was also noted.
The annual angst over the post‑winter filth of the city was noted by Godin, and Chapleau gave Fréchette and Drainville a little makeover.
And of course the weather is always a timely subject.
MarcG
Hot tip: Your browser probably has a key that if you hold it down when you click it will open links in new tabs and not focus on them, handy if you want to open all of these and then browse them. (Ubuntu with Firefox it’s the control key).
Kate
MarcG, I have several tab sets in my browser toolbar which open all the windows I want for specific purposes. But I will keep your tip in mind.
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Kate
Some UQAM professors are pressing to change the name of Berri‑UQAM station to UQAM‑Quartier latin, but the STM is saying no.
Nicholas
Interesting that the square that is now named after the nun Émilie Gamelin used to be Place du Quartier Latin. If we want the neighbourhood to reflect that name more and also to conform to our état laïque, maybe we could start there rather than changing the most well known and used part of the name of one of the most important metro stations in the city.
Kate
Was it? I always thought of it as Berri Square.
CE
I’ve never heard anyone ever call it Place Émilie Gamelin (when speaking). Only Berri Square or Square Berri.
Nicholas
The old name is in the toponymy commission’s entry (scroll to the bottom), and if you search for quartier latin that’s the only hit. Nothing comes up for Berri referring to the square (which incidentally was originally spelled Berry, which sounds English (probably why it was changed) but it’s a French name from 1659).
Longtime Montreal anglos may say Berri Square (even though it was Place du Quartier Latin until 1995), but lots of my friends, many from elsewhere, use the official name, probably because that’s what it says on Google Maps or an official event page so when they say to meet somewhere that’s the name that’s used.
Normally this would be the kind of name change I’d support, as it does refer to the area, but it’s so well known as Berri and it’ll cost a bunch of money to change everything. Berri is also a street name of some importance (unlike de Montigny), and was at one point going to be a highway. (Though Berri the street was named after a person which I don’t love.) So probably best to leave it as is. But props to UQAM for trying to get themselves as the first name of the station, over half a century of work. Maybe they’ll beat Concordia and University of Sherbrooke.
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Kate
Some of us may have been woken roughly at 4 Sunday morning by an Amber Alert concerning two kids in Trois‑Rivières. I’m seeing angry comments about this unnecessary alarm all over social media. Anyway, the kids have been found.
EmilyG
Perhaps relevant Beaverton article. https://www.thebeaverton.com/2019/07/children-agree-not-to-get-abducted-after-8-pm-so-amber-alert-doesnt-wake-anyone-up/
MarcG
I just got the alert now.
Kate
Well, get out there and start looking for those kids!
I was fortunate that I had gone DND and turned off sound for the night, but the alert lit my phone up anyway so that I woke up, although with less fright.
Clee
I will sleep better knowing the kids are safe.
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