By Esther Tung
In the last issue of the spring semester, The Peak’s cover story was on the approval of $30,000 by the SFSS to create a men’s centre. The men’s centre has whipped up a maelstrom of outrage from the Rotunda groups, as well as the student body. There is little value to the structure and mandate of the proposed men’s centre, and it’s baffling that the working group of Jeff McCann, Keenan Midgely, and Danielle Hornstein got anybody else in on the idea, let alone funding. A Youtube video consolidates angry responses towards the men’s centre and reiterations of why the Women’s Centre, on the other hand, is necessary. Patriarchy and hegemony and stuff. But the men’s centre’s critics have not questioned the continued existence of the Women’s Centre, or its annual budget of about $80,000, mostly accepting at face value that women’s safe spaces are a tenet of feminism, unequivocally justifying its presence on a progressive, left-leaning university campus.
Creating a literal girl’s club in response to a men’s world made sense back in 1968, when women were rare as both students and faculty, and the space functioned as an opportunity for mutual support and recognition, as well as feminist activism. However, the SFU Women’s Centre’s mandate has become antiquated. It bills itself first and foremost as a safe space on campus, a relic of the ‘60s and ‘70s movement, a time when women were considered the appendixes of the student body. In the grander scheme of things, women are certainly marginalized to this day, and safe spaces are still relevant, but a modern university campus is a setting in which women are the furthest thing from marginalized. We make up a slight majority of students, earn three degrees for every two by men, are less likely to drop out, and as urbanite graduates, we will start off earning more than our male peers. We no longer need a space for women to be women, but for feminists to be feminists — and safe space and referrals should not be the main services of what was once a powerful feminist collective, then called the Women’s Caucus. The Abortion Caravan began at the Vancouver Women’s Caucus in 1970, which saw hundreds of women driving to Ottawa to participate in a peaceful protest for the legalization of abortion that would come to shut down the House of Commons for about half an hour. Now, the Women’s Centre takes on pet projects like campus childcare facilities, and offering yoga and self-defense classes. Again, there’s an $80,000 budget here. Maybe their next focus could be on making an active effort to disrupt the creation of a men’s centre.
It is a great thing that the women’s movement has evolved to a point where there are less of these things to be outraged about. Feminism succeeded, and we have raised an entire generation of North American women on feminist values, or at least they’ve learned by way of osmosis. Now we need to teach the boys.
We’ve come to a point in time where we can’t do much more damage to patriarchy by shutting out the very half of the population who is supposed to be the root of our problems. The Women’s Centre does exactly that by using language that is already beginning to become outdated, by segregating men and women into ‘feminists’ and ‘male feminists’ (or rather, as the Women’s Centre puts it, ‘male allies’), the latter of whom can look forward to volunteer duties that range from poster boy to pancake flipper.
Feminism is supposed to be the affirmation of women (versus privileging women), not the rejection of men. It’s gender parity, not role reversal or male tokenism. On that count, both the gender-based safe spaces that we have (or are about to have) failed us, if we are indeed as progressive as we want to believe we are.
