Man the barricades: SFU students up in arms over men’s centre

In April, the Simon Fraser University student society voted to devote $ 30,000 of its budget toward the development of a men’s resource centre. The battle began soon after.

Resident feminists scoffed. Men? Needing a place to discuss their “issues?” Ridiculous. Men were the issue. Meanwhile, the SFU Women’s Centre had been fighting the good fight since 1974, and offering its small campus office as a haven.

As for a men’s centre? Declared the Women’s Centre’s website — which, curiously, offers a “Male Allies” link, as if to enlist them — well, “the men’s centre is everywhere else.”

In other words, it’s still a man’s world, even if female university students significantly outnumber male students across the country, including at SFU.

The Women’s Centre would, however, support a men’s centre on one condition, and I paraphrase: if the men used the centre to admit to their gender crimes.

“Our support,” it stated on the website, “would be contingent on that centre’s mission statement, vision, and mandate. If the centre were about challenging popular conceptions about masculinity, confronting homophobia, sexism, racism, classism, and ability issues then we would definitely be the first to promote and fundraise for such a group.”

More followed. A female student posted a Youtube video criticizing the idea of a men’s centre, in which one critic fretted that it might become “a highly masculinized space” — where, one supposes, there would be much arm- punching and farting — while another said there was the danger of it becoming “heteronormative.” ( You can look it up.) Both critics were men. Or as they are known at the Women’s Centre, Male Allies.

The media then entered the fray. Jeff Mccann, former president of the SFU student society and one of the originators of the idea for a men’s centre, told of how he was besieged with media calls from around North America, “including one from Texas!”

He was surprised by the virulence of some of the reactions to the idea, he said, and by the interest from the media.

“But the fact that it’s an international controversy is evidence enough for me that we need [ a men’s centre].”

Mccann needn’t have been surprised.

He was proposing a men’s centre in feminism’s stronghold — academia — and it was the men’s centre’s intellectual presence that was causing all the fuss, not its intent. It was as if the balance of power was being challenged, which, to Mccann’s mind, it was not.

Yet none of this is new. Out in the real world, a scattering of men’s resource centres have existed for some time, mostly without anyone noticing.

The Nanaimo Men’s Resource Centre has been offering men counselling and a place to talk for a decade. Its executive director, Theo Boere, said the centre last year had more than 5,000 calls and clients, with issues that included divorce, separation from children, depression, suicide and physical and sexual abuse.

“To tell you the truth,” Boere said, “I’m shaking my head that there’s any kind of an issue [ at SFU] at all. Men, just as much as women, have unique issues that need to be dealt with. Just the fact that the suicide rate is so much higher among men than women tells you there is a need.”

Funding is a struggle. Depending on the source, women’s organizations in B. C. receive between $ 80 million and $ 100 million from the provincial government. Men’s organizations, Boere said, receive $ 500,000. A couple of years ago, the Nanaimo centre’s funding was slashed, and last year it received $ 110,000 in gambling grants. It let two- thirds of its staff go and cut its programs.

“We have women’s centres all over the province, and that is a good thing,” Boere said. “The need is there. But there’s a need there for men, too.”

If it does create a men’s centre, SFU will not have been the only university to sponsor one. For a time, the University of Manitoba funded one until 2010, though the centre was not on campus but in downtown Winnipeg. The men’s resource centre there is now run by the Laurel Centre, which also operates a women’s centre and shelter at another site.

Its clientele is not, typically, drawn from the ranks of university students. Almost half of the cases deal with the trauma caused by childhood sexual abuse. There is also a shelter component, and Suhad Bisharat, the centre’s executive director, said five men and eight children were being sheltered this week.

“Is there a need for men’s centres? There’s no question about this,” Bisharat said.

“Men, as well as women, need a place to feel safe from the problems in their lives.”