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The notion that men don’t need their own campus group or centre is one of the chief refrains that come up time and time again in resistance to these clubs. The belief is that since men enjoy a position of power, they don’t need a place to discuss issues that might disproportionately affect them: such as watching their fathers lose custody after a nasty divorce, or discussing how Aboriginal men go missing and murdered far more than Aboriginal women, though the issue is often treated as a gender-specific phenomenon, or the added stigma of seeking help for mental illness in a society that seems to champion male stoicism.

To these points, the response is often that men can find resources in other, existing support groups on campus: that they shouldn’t have a club of their own. But imagine being a 19-year-old male university student who’s struggling socially, academically and/or financially, and hearing you don’t need a space to discuss issues with other men — with whom you might be more comfortable sharing than with women — because people who have never met you decided you are too privileged to merit a certain type of support. The irony here is that feminists often see red when detractors say that the fight for women’s rights is over; how do they square that with telling men their troubles aren’t “real” enough to warrant their own campus club?

These clubs should be assessed for what they are, not for what some people assume them to be

Still, as Ryerson laid out in its recent rejection letter, there are other commonly recycled reasons why student groups and activists routinely dismiss men’s clubs on campus. There’s the claim that a group for male students will champion men’s rights over women’s rights and try to silence prominent feminists on campus, the idea that a men’s centre will compromise the physical and emotional safety of women on campus and the suggestion that these clubs are associated with groups whose members have made objectionable comments in the past. But all of these objections, laden with rhetoric as they are, do not offer a cogent defence of what is — let’s face it — obvious discrimination.