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We know we aren’t flashy. The world kind of forgets about us sometimes because we are next to the loudest kid in the class. We are proud generally of the co-operation we have with other places and groups. Our medical advances raise waters that lift all ships , we have a space program that primarily assists other nations space exploration. We have a military but we are primarily devoted to UN peacekeeping.

The Canadians were a pivotal force tasked with the Italian Campaign in WWII which had some of the most brutal on the ground city fighting of the war. My Grandfather was there from the beginning to the end of the Campaign… Yet I have heard Americans on here ask “Did Canada storm the beaches of Normandy?” as some kind of “gotcha” to shame us because they don’t know that we had our own beach operation but all they know is that Americans were there because Hollywood only shows American battles.

We are used to being kind of forgotten but we can be proud of ourselves for a job well done.

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A complete absence of funding isn’t the same as saying it isn’t an issue. At a government level there’s always more problems than money and manpower to solve them. Approaching it from that perspective is not a particularly healthy way to approach these situations. Realistically when you look at the the two cohorts you see very different behaviours. Funding for all shelters is currently massively declining across the board in Canada and no one pilots a new program when existing ones are failing.

Think of it like this. If you do not fear for your life but are escaping from an abusive relationship with child in tow what sounds like a better option : seeking help by going to a friend’s or relative’s place where there’s familiarity and seeking help from an authority for assistance OR going blindly into a shelter system with a lot of unknowns? While it’s true that men do need support seeking help from a formal shelter system is not a popular option.

The reason why women don’t tend to rely on their existing support systems is because it’s the first place abusive partners stalk if they intend a violent attack, not just an abusive encounter but an actual physical assult that puts other family members and friends lives at risk.

Hotel voucher programs and reserved open spots in pre-existing shelter systems do a similar solve to contemporary shelter programs but the reason mens shelters close isn’t always funding related. In part it’s because men don’t often choose that route because a restraining order is usually more than enough to deter a female abuser and it is more comfortable relying on people you know. In the cases of DV homicide women are way more likely to be killed if they leave, men tend to be killed if they stay. It’s not a matter of just dry DV stats. It’s in the nitty gritty details of how these scenarios play out by gender divide that cause these initiatives to fail… which means it needs dedicated grassroots support which by and large isn’t happening not because people won’t donate but because while straight men love to complain that there’s no mens shelters they are not coordinating dedicating their free time to make it happen. Queer specific initiatives are generally more successful because the organization structures are dedicated and they often do not rely on government but community support. What straight guys need to imbibe is you do not need a government stamp to start stuff.

I am not arguing for Gender specifc shelters what I am saying is that it’s not a matter of how many reports of DV, the motivating factor in funding is how often each statistical group end in a homicide. It’s a stumbling block which means that the priority often overshadows services for men that do exist when doing a casual search even online.

The main needs of men escaping DV are mental health support and police assisted extraction, temporary housing and childcare assistance. The first two are decently prioritized depending on Province. Here in BC there’s decent resources directly through Coastal Health and less great coverage the Fraser Health Authority but childcare assistance is across the board spotty and really 99. 9% of the time the elements of making someone physically untraceable are not nessisary if the offender is a woman which means that if we were to look into hotel voucher programs and relocation services instead of permanent brick and mortar shelters for those cases you could likely provide options that fill the requirements for communities in smaller towns with a quarter of the funding of a shelter. Straight men generally do not have to skip town so they can often rely on their previously made support structures more so the time spent in temporary housing is often stays of less than a week.

What a lot of advocates in the space keep pushing for is a replication of the system because of the idea that it’s not fair to give men a “lesser service” but the needs of the cohort are completely different and we should structure care to fit the needs based on an evidence based model instead of pointing to something else that is designed for a group with completly different needs.

That is a space that is more generally lacking. A lot of spaces prioritize women in part because there’s a real issue with abusive men hunting down and killing their partners when they try to leave so women require a spy-like bugout infrastructure to safely leave. Historically this trend motivated womens groups and queer centric undergrounds to go above and beyond and was reinforced later by government grant because establishing support while victims are still alive is cheaper than the apparatus of investigation for their murder. It’s a balance sheet game.

This hunting behaviour is something highly statistically unlikely for women to do which tends to mean support for straight men could look a lot different and be effective but also the monetary government incentive to provide it is not as lucrative for governments who are always triaging spending in sectors that don’t somehow save them money.

It’s absolutely correct that these resources should exist but it is going to take a much greater grassroots effort to maintain and structurally speaking expecting it to look exactly like the model in place for women is probably in part the enemy of progress because those models are prohibitively expensive.

It’s more like the definition used by Right leaning government to cast Progressive social agendas as the downfall of society because in their case you slap “Neo” on something to mean “Untested and scary”. This isn’t so much a “Tankie” thing so much as a Fox News thing.

They get away with it because people aren’t taught or don’t absorb the actual technical meanings of different labels for subtypes of political philosophy. Hence why “liberal” has become buzz word to mean “civil rights and social emancipation enthusiasts”, “conservative” is abandoned to be this wishy-washy ground that evokes both a retaliatory resistance to social movements and/or a sort of nebulous (often false) vision of fiscal austerity and “communist” a brush to tar a variety of social movements with that handily has an implicit conspiracy aspect.

None of these definitions are accurate but they serve to muddy the water. That’s really the point of it. To rob us all of accurate ways to discuss political matters and to create team sport like voting blocks.

Neoliberal doesn’t actually mean " The newest Brand of liberal" NeoLibralist regimes historically have also been exceedingly anti-queer. The term was coined in the 80’s to describe a burgeoning different brand of liberal government that focused on cutting spending by privatizing swaths of the government. Think Thatcher, Regan and the modern Republican party… See also the early Nazis who historically privatized huge amounts of government to pad the wallets of their supporters but the label was applied retroactively.

If they are getting rid of government services and outsourcing them to a private company that’s “Neoliberal politics”. You are right that they are effective as an empty soda can at stopping facism but that’s because they are usually better positioned to assume power, give up on democracy and go fascist but they aren’t the group you’re calling out here.

Really the bar for what “liberal” means is a system with a basic set of rights of the person that cannot be infringed upon by the government, universal rights of the person to own stuff (though not all stuff) and a dedication to some kind of democratic system. Basically it’s become democracy’s basic format and practically everyone in government who isn’t a fascist is some variation of liberal or at least playing by Libralism’s rules. It’s not a statement on socially progressive or socially conservative rhetoric. You’re probably better off specifying " Social Progressives" if you want to be accurate to whom you’re talking about.

It’s kind of the same rules as “NeoClassisism” which isn’t constantly updated to mean the newest thing. That term got coined to specifically refer to an art style that is now 300 years old. Neo these days practically never refers to anything cutting edge.

“Toxic” has a wide range of uses outside just toxic masculinity or just describing men. One of the side effects of a very therapized society is wider recognizing that some people in your life are dragging you down because their behaviour is unhealthy for all parties. Before the reaction groomed mostly into women but men to a lesser degree was to shut up, take the abuse, take the hit to the psyche, self doctor yourself using coping mechanisms that don’t address the problem directly and endure because the pressure was on being a dutiful, selfless sibling, child, partner, parent, friend etc.

Describing people as “toxic”, while like any tool can be used wrongly or hurtfully gives people a tool to shake themselves out of that cycle. When used properly it empowers people to take their own status and wellbeing seriously when they are being taken for granted, abused or bullied so that they can source the problem and engage with people in a way that wins them their agency back. When we talk about “Toxic men” isn’t effectively any different than talking about “toxic siblings” or “toxic friends” or “toxic parents” or “toxic narcissists” The only ways it differs is in the behaviour dynamics of the group in question. These people are all uniquely “toxic” but in each of those cases you probably gain a different picture of what that toxicity looks like. Those are not individuals, they are groups within our cultures the reclassification of which is systemic. What needs to be emphasized is that in all cases nobody should be forced into a relationship of any kind, friend, family or romantic. There is a society wide push for true emancipation of the individual free to establish and demolish social ties based on the merit of the tie.

In some ways this loneliness epidemic we’re experiencing may in part be due to this renegotiation of relationships in a bid to make things better overall. One could argue the development of an expectation for too perfect boundaries is maybe a contributing factor but overall the attitude across the board is “enough is enough” and that isn’t nessisarily a bad thing. If people are not forced into connections at a systemic level they can apply consent and engineer for everyone the understanding that people either must act at the very least decently if not kindly and with respect if they want deep connection.

So much of the discussion around the subject of toxic masculinity devolves into either the idea the people critiquing the behaviour are being mean towards and victimizing men but all discussions of toxic behaviours are not about victimizing the perpetrators, it’s about advocating for better conditions for the targets.

… Are you talking like a men’s specific clinic?Here in BC there’s all gender options which include men through the Fraser Health Forensic Nursing program which is available through emergency rooms. Or the SVPRO Program at UBC (https://svpro.ubc.ca/) or the AMS Sexual Assault Support Center.

A lot of the services on the West Coast are available to all genders and a lot of effort is being made to make services unilaterally available but you won’t find a lot of services strictly for men. There’s a push to make care more diverse which accounts for different cultural groups including men.

It’s definitely true that some options are confusing. The BC Women’s Hospital doesn’t have boundaries for whom they treat for sexual assault and rape related care. You could go there, but they don’t do the greatest job of creating an environment automatically comfortable for men. There’s also a lot of outside care groups that specialize on specific populations with special needs such as trans, indigenous and non-neurotypical people and people with disabilities that don’t specifically list men (though provide services for men who are part of the group) because they are focused on folks who have very particular hurdles to accessing care so they aren’t put in a position to educate their caregivers on their basic needs while in distress. Those groups are usually funded and created by advocates specifically from those communities.

Bit of a funny insult calling someone a bulk cardboard box for shipping (ie Gaylord).

If a large cardboard box is a Gaylord does that mean regular boxes are gay peasantry?

If you look at the history of the word “man” from it’s origin it was originally a gender neutral term. You had to append a modifier (were or wif) on it to specify gender. Over time this eroded and people stopped using “wereman” to mean masculine people and just started using the default phrase that meant everybody but sorta kept “wifman” and changed the pronunciation.

So if you peel back the history women are indeed 100% man because everyone is a man.

Also in the category of gender neutral once : “Girl” used to just meant “child” and “boy” meant something along the line of “young ruffian”.

Everyone is blaming the Dems for being everything. For pandering to the left or to the middle or to their courting of Republican voters… It’s worthless effort. The Democrat playbook has been to play by the rules which systemically support the crony capitalism status quo. The only benefit of them is that they play by the rules which means if you pressure them enough to change the rules they can be manipulated.

Realistically speaking voting them in was one point on a checklist of multiple things that needed to happen to progress and as long as the rest of the checklist is happening then it’s an ethical win. It’s not a matter of “debasing one’s morals” so long as you are doing the other things on the list. This idea of cooing over people’s reluctance to hold one’s nose and swallow the nasty pill is one I truly believe people need to get over. People should learn from their mistakes so they don’t repeat them and the pat on the head with the “You only did what you thought was right” routine is in the end not a kindness. People need to learn how the levers of power work and what is effective tactics and what are the traps that the system baits to stop people from effectively participating.

Hands need to get dirty to make change happen and not every step is a feelgood exercise in feeling righteous. It’s a boring slog of a group project. That feeling of refusal to compromise on values for any reason is the easiest thing in the world to exploit and divide people and we collectively should up the social cost of that action and teach that collectivism has it’s costs. No effective movement in the history of mankind has checked every box for every member who propelled it to success. We can all afford to swallow a few nasty pills and bank on the delayed gratification of setting up a future win because the alternative is violence which doesn’t have historically great outcomes… And yes that sometimes means somebody you don’t like gets some kickback out of it.

Inaction by deadlock of a bunch of actors refusing to properly collaborate unless their demands are met are enemies of making change. It’s just really hard to chisel past he messaging that they are not actually a noble group because so often we’re taught that absolute rigidity of every stage of praxis is the virtue by which change is made. The people who sowed that narrative were knowingly or not imparting weakness. We don’t need paragons or heroes we need people who can take tactical advantage of the natural cupidity of the powers that be and be willing to shake with one hand and hold a knife in the other.

I find this an issue when I hear people discuss this point. In the previous US election you had two candidates who were effectively capable of taking the spot. Both of them were Pro-Israel because US interests abroad have always been genocide apathetic in the face of economic gains. So you were not voting for Israel / Palistine. You were voting for which regime you would have an easier time to pressure into Palistinian support and which one could be compelled to do the least amount of damage in the meantime.

If you chose abstention then yeah, people are gunna be angry because we’re all fucking scared.

Abstention from voting as a protest measure has never worked but besides all that - It is too late now. Now instead of having space to fight against genocide abroad there’s not much space because now Americans have to direct their energies to stopping everything else from going to shit. You won’t be able to fight at all if this regime gets its way. It is time to move on and deal with the problems American’s collective choices have wrought not defend the good intentions that got us here.

Hey can we not do this?

While there is an endemic issue with toxic variations of masculinity that looks at sex as a tool of domination erasing the experience of people who have been assaulted by women and other gender minorities isn’t the way to go about this. There are lots of ways to get this point across without turning around and being gross towards other groups affected by abuse.

Sloganizing these issues in this way doesn’t make the allies needed to combat abuse.