Above: Jonathan Taylor presenting the keynote address at KSU. Conference hosted by KSU Men. Photo courtesy of Studio Brule.

It’s been an incredible last week, culminating in the Male Students in Peril conference on November 1st, hosted by KSU Men (KSUM). After having taken care of some necessary things at my job and sleeping for about 12 hours, I am just now getting back into the swing of things to the point that I can begin posting regularly again.

The conference was a success. I am glad and honored to have spoken alongside Dr. Janice Fiamengo (whose travails at the University of Ottawa I had written about here), Karen Straughan (her update regarding the conference is here), Paul Elam, and Sage Gerard. I was also glad to meet a lot of the people who read and comment online, as also occurred in the June conference earlier this year.

I have received numerous emails from people who enjoyed my presentation and found it illuminating (thank you!), as well as requests for the info presented in my presentation. I will upload my entire PowerPoint presentation here before too long, but may delay it until I am able to put together a proper video. In the meantime if anyone would like to see a lot of the sources and graphs I used in the presentation, they may do so by going here.

These were the topics of the presentations:

• Mine covered the broad spectrum of educational equity issues, divided into three sections as I do on this website: educational attainment, rights & protections, and institutional and cultural bias.
• Karen Straughan’s was a critique of feminist politics.
• Dr. Janice Fiamengo’s covered due process issues at Queen’s University
• And Paul’s covered the toxic anti-male attitudes pervasive in the ideology of “rape culture” constantly spread throughout higher education

We should have full videos of each presentation up before too long, but I actually have little control over that.

I was particularly impressed by the security at the event. The police apparently knew the kind of opposition that gathers at such events, and conferred with me (and other speakers as well, I presume) before the event started about how to resolve attendees who might try to illegally shut down the event, as had happened at other universities in the recent past.

There were several media interviews, but most of them were from student media this time (example: the KSU Sentinel). Stephen Cheek, a KSU student who wrote an article for The Talon, showed me his article in print, which I thought was excellent.

All the speakers, I believe, were interviewed by Steve Brule of Studio Brule, who had expertly filmed the disastrous feminist protest at the University of Toronto in 2012, and who also filmed this conference. I look forward to the excellent work I know he’ll produce regarding this event.

It was nice to meet KSUM members such as Robert Nibbs, who showed me his second-semester composition textbook (which had gender bias written all over it). And it was nice to see them gather together to represent the cause publicly.

When we checked in to the hotel upon arriving in Kennesaw we had about a half hour of downtime, so for a bit of camaraderie we decided to read the bogus police reports recently filed against the conference organizer Sage Gerard. It was quite humorous reading such statements as “I feel Sage Gerard has fantasies of violently murdering women, and I believe he sent a threatening email to me” followed by an officer’s comment that “I observed the email and found no threatening messages.” And so on.

The only thing I was disappointed in was the likes of Scott Ritchie (professor of Gender Studies) and the other faculty from the Interdisciplinary Studies department, all of whom failed to show up and challenge anything the speakers said, despite the relentless campaign of harassment and intimidation they have waged against Sage behind closed doors. Paul was correct, however, in his assessment of their character: “all bullies are cowards at heart, and cowards eventually run.”

As has been reported elsewhere, we had some “extra” fun at the conference. But then again, we always have extra fun. As it just so happened, the feminist mother of Sage Gerard (the conference organizer) decided to stand up at the end during Paul Elam’s Q&A and express her disapproval of nearly every speaker there, with the exception of myself. Here’s the fun event:

I daresay, after all that Sage has been through, that he has earned his moment to stand up and say his peace. Which he did rather well. Here’s an update from Sage himself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp9a3TtrLak

And here is a lengthier discussion of the matter by the AVFM Intelligence Report team:

I also have a fun story of my own to tell if Paul doesn’t beat me to it. I’ll see if I can get around to making a video about it soon.

All in all, this was a remarkable event. This is the first actual men’s human rights conference held on a university campus, and hopefully the first of many to come – which is entirely possible, so long as these events continue to receive the support from the community.

I will be posting more info about the conference in the near future. Stay tuned!