Delani, umm…feminism is on a continuum, right?

And like all movements has a historical context.

I embraced egalitarian feminism, lost wages while I marched against the Alliance Church when it took over the local hospital and tried to ban abortions in the 80's.

I chose to teach Margaret Laurence’s ‘Lives of Girls and Women’, Atwood’s ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’, ‘The Hite Report’ and brought in guest speakers like Kim Soo Goodtrack, a Lakota medicine woman: all at a boy’s school.

I also introduced Boyden’s ’Three Day Road’ wherein the female protagonist is a northern Cree shaman.

I know the difference between egalitarian feminism and the toxic kind, which has replaced its antecedent and which is why I chose to quote Margaret Atwood.

It’s why I mentioned the writers of those books, who tried to fight the kind of simplistic misandric beliefs, which often lacked scholastic credibility, which are being inculcated in many Universities, social services and current New Wave Feminism: that only men create problems for the world.

I was fortune enough to provide lectures to parents and colleagues on the importance of allowing boys to explore the vast richness of their emotional landscape without blaming masculinity nor by applying a negative appellate like toxic to their gender.

I often quoted Michael Gurian’s books, A Fine Young Man and the Wonder of Boys to supplement my talks. This was all in the 90’s for God’s sake.

My point is that memes like Toxic Masculinity are, while purporting to be about liberating men and boys from the limiting roles of patriarchal sexism, are doing the opposite and inculcating misandry while at the same time further enabling cancel culture.

And that doesn’t help anyone — male or female.

Your writing, which is BTW stellar, is all about egalitarianism: therefore, you don’t need to use a loaded phrase like toxic masculinity.

And perhaps I shouldn’t be as triggered as I was when it was used.

It’s just that all those boys and the horrible way they died had me shaking my head…and my childhood hometown of Nelson BC was ‘blessed’ with Father John Monaghan, a RC priest who sexually abused hundreds if not thousands of girls and some boys, for generations. And Dr. Masuru Fujibayashi, who preyed upon thousands of boys and some girls from the 1960’s to 1982: some of whom were my friends.

You want a topic to write about?