Wow. For such a "shy" dude, he sure has some balls to request a waiver of participation and to change his grade despite never coming to class. Too bad he couldn't summon them to actually attend.

My take? She didn't discriminate against him because he's male, but because his a wuss.

Give him extra credit (or maybe it should go to his lawyers?) for such creativity to come up with this excuse.

Of course, if he truly is shy around women and his lawyer is a woman, then he loses big time.

All kidding aside, I'd fail him for being surprised that he signed up for a Women and Gender Studies class and the class was all women. What did he expect?

Further, if this truly is his reason for not attending class he doesn't need a lawyer he needs a psychiatrist to help him deal with his anxiety.

I don't see that frivolous lawsuits - or a failure to accept adult standards and responsibilities - are heavily the fault of feminism. One could just as easily blame it on the American sense of entitlement. One could even go way back and blame it on manifest destiny (a well-known historic example of the toddler's creed: "If I want it, it's mine and only a horrible, uncivilized person would disagree") - and while we're at it, we could blame all materialism and greed for instant gratification, including casual sex, on that too.

What an idiot. All he had to do was drop the class. I don't think I really understood that I SHOULD be dropping classes that I had no chance of doing well in (because the professor was difficult to understand,etc) until I was in my second year, but it's always an option... especially when you've only been to one class. And usually, you DO know right away- Mr. Kim certainly did, and admits it.

I still have a recurring dream that I never really got my degree because there was a (required) class I forgot to attend the entire semester, thus failed. I finished school in 2003 and I still have that dream at least once a year.

not a wuss, a weasel. Trying to game the system. :shrug: Amusing that it was a turnabout on the gender studies dynamic [See: the femme freakout at Wellesly http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2014/02/06/statue-sleepwalking-man-triggers-controversy-wellesley-college/cTvPcGKDnExMs1bp0mnrzJ/story.html}

but ultimately all the different things that could have been done, including talking to the professor directly... not done.

I have a kid that did a similar thing in a class, though not for that kind of reaso. It's just, once he was having a problem, he simply shut down and avoided it... and was heading towards an F. I made him withdraw, and we shall see what happens. Sometimes people have a freakout, but what bubbles this up to be anyone else's problem, is the aggressiveness of passivity.

Weasel.

Canada 'Human Rights' commissions are a joke. They ruled its a violation of human rights to force food prepares to wash their hands.

If his smart he'd have his lawyer comb the commissions decisions on gender discrimination for any cases where a woman won with a similar argument - cause I'm willing to bet had he been a woman and his teacher a man and the class full of guys this lawsuit would have won - and then sue the commission itself for gender discrimination.

There is nothing I love better than irony, I hope this guy continues his legal battle for that reason alone

It is a contradiction in terms to blame feminism for one's lack of manhood.

It is a contradiction in terms to blame feminism for one's lack of manhood.

On the face of it, you might right.

But if you look deeper, one may come to the conclusion that telling boys for most if not all of their lives that they're worthless danglers and they'd be much better if they were women damages a man's self-worth in ways we can't even begin to imagine.

Personally, I would have suggested to him the option of dropping the course and trying again next semester.

Or, to blame another scapegoat, we could blame the gay rights movement - especially the influence of those gay men under 40 who can't be called nearly as "brave" as older men (you could even call them coddled) because so many of them never really had to live in the closet. Not to mention that they never had to fight for AIDS research dollars and are too used to the idea of safer sex, so maybe they helped to push the idea that EVERYTHING should be safe and comfortable?

IRA, that sounds like atrocious parenting.

"IRA, that sounds like atrocious parenting." Michelle.

It's prolly not parents that do that, rather all the times in school they were told to sit down and shut up, and pay attention... etc ad infinitum. But... we don't know all the factors in this guys case, nor the kid's ancestry, and certainly, what the local schools are like in Toronto.

Even back in my day long ago they asked why all us little boys couldn't be quiet and learn the way the girls did...

So my mom pulled me from public, and put me in a private school. Since the majority of the teachers were men, you didna mess around, and a trip to the principal often meant a paddling. But, rambunctiousness of a sort was tolerated, and we often had demos of things, not just book learning. It was a good balance.

The could never get away with that now.

I remember feminism is school, one year I was part of a group of men being brought up to respect women as equals.

Next year after my growth spurt and puberty kicked in I was basically a proto rapist for every disagreeing with anything any woman said

He should have claimed Muslimhood as the reason. Then it probably would have gone his way. ;-)

Swiss, I'm glad you found a good fit.

I never did. I was always an avid reader and writer but never a fit for linear thinking or standardized testing. I was crushed when I found out there was no recess in middle school - no break from the rigidity and boredom and cacophony. I had a haven in high school through experiential learning opportunities, but my QPA was in the toilet untill graduate school.

I get that the assembly line factory approach to education is a more readily apparent clash with most boys.

I think sometimes people blame patriarchy or feminism, where the problem is one of chafing against a model that offers efficiency at the expense of personal responsiveness.

Whether the figure placed in power in a particular environment is a man or a woman may determine the flavor of the indignity or the misuse of power for private gain, but I think that is incidental. And that is my sweeping overbroad statement for the evening.

He's the problem, not the women in his class. He gives the rest of us males a bad name by his capricious behavior. He was probably scared to attend class because he has no intellect to use in the first place, except the sneaky disingenuous kind to try and sue to cover up his impotence.

Seriously? I was the only girl in several drafting classes in junior high and high school, and I was as shy as they came. He ought to just man up, take the F and get it together next time he doesn't like an elective.

In what degree program do you take only classes that suit you?

Dude, you signed up for a women's studies class. What the hell did you thing was going to happen? And yes, the University of Toronto is a hotbed of radical post-modern feminism, so it's possible that this was a setup by a men's-rights group. But if it was, it was poorly executed -- not attending class is a slam-dunk win for the university. If the guy had attended class, made well-reasoned arguments against the professor's points, and then gotten a failing grade, he'd have a case.

And a minor point: "One could just as easily blame it on the American sense of entitlement." That may be true in the general case, but last I checked, Toronto is in Canada.

but last I checked, Toronto is in Canada.

Posted by: Cousin Dave at February 7, 2014 7:00 AM
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All right, so I was careless.

But then, there ARE quite a few similarities between Americans and Canadians. If the comic strip "For Better or For Worse" is any indication, an awful lot of Canadian kids in the 1980s - and maybe even earlier - were growing up with an alarming, self-spoiled attitude of entitlement that (in the strip) they miraculously shed by adulthood. In real life, I doubt kids necessarily did.

And I don't know what they called it in Canada in past centuries, but the outcome sure looks like manifest destiny.

Oh yes - if it's OK to step away from the subject of women's studies for a moment, here's Katha Pollitt on the gender gap in colleges (btw, her daughter was born in 1987):

http://www.thenation.com/article/girls-against-boys

"....Other pundits--Michael Gurian, Kate O'Beirne, Christina Hoff Sommers--blame the culture of elementary school and high school: too many female teachers, too much sitting quietly, not enough sports and a feminist-friendly curriculum that forces boys to read--oh no!--books by women. Worse--books ABOUT women.

"For the record, in middle school my daughter was assigned exactly one book by a woman: Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God. In high school she read three, Mrs. Dalloway, Beloved and Uncle Tom's Cabin, while required reading included male authors from Shakespeare and Fitzgerald and Sophocles to (I kid you not) James Michener and Richard Adams, author of Watership Down. Four books in seven years: Is that what we're arguing about here? Furthermore, I don't know where those pundits went to school, but education has always involved a lot of sitting, a lot of organizing, a lot of deadlines and a lot of work you didn't necessarily feel like doing. It's always been heavily verbal--in fact, today's textbooks are unbelievably dumbed down and visually hyped compared with fifty years ago. Conservatives talk as if boys should be taught in some kind of cross between boot camp and Treasure Island--but what kind of preparation for modern life would that be? As for the decline of gym and teams and band--activities that keep academically struggling kids, especially boys, coming to school--whose idea was it to cut those 'frills' in the first place if not conservatives?...."

(snip)

And, if you like, there's one long response at the bottom - you have to click on Web Letter, just below the Tweet button.

"As for the decline of gym and teams and band--activities that keep academically struggling kids, especially boys, coming to school--whose idea was it to cut those 'frills' in the first place if not conservatives?...."

Those things didn't disappear because of conservatives. They couldn't have because conservatives have near-zero influence over public education. Those things disappeared becuase the Left reappropriated the money for huge expansions in administration, consultants, and other non-teaching expenses.

Those things didn't disappear because of conservatives. They couldn't have because conservatives have near-zero influence over public education.
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How about proving that? Why should I believe you when, offhand, I don't recall any conservative politicians making that argument? Direct quotes, please - preferably not from those who are considered embarrassments to conservatives.