I'm completely mystified by why this merits Broadsheet coverage. Does Broadsheet not have actual issues to deal with, like inequality facing women or the ongoing progress of initiatives that attempt to address that inequality?

The above is a silly argument. It's just as silly as arguing that a blog which purports to be about one thing and yet features items completely unrelated to it is "hijacked" by people who want to comment on all of the content on that site. And yes, to some people, buying a dog when you have no specialized need for a custom-bred one and when you are choosing to economically support one of the causes of the animal overpopulation crisis is criticism-worthy.

The long and short of it is that anything placed on a blog is fair game -- particularly since it is within the blogger's ability to control what appears on their own blog.

Seconding the comments about reading comprehension and the bathroom issue. I work at a place that is among few universities with a single-occupancy, non-gender-designated bathroom. It was already single-occupancy. So there's absolutely no difference in how it functions except that more people can now use it.

I don't recall anyone claiming that prostitution is fundamentally about dominating and degrading women. However, I get really annoyed with "sex-positive feminists," because their nomenclature of choice suggests that anyone who doesn't agree with them is sex negative, and also because they tend to convey the positions of women who have relatively good self-esteem, are employed in relatively good jobs, and are relatively educated and affluent. In other words, I don't think they represent sex workers so much as the upper echelon of sex workers. Just as comments regarding the degradation of women might more accurately refer to the degradation of certain marginalized women.

It is these women who I do not want to see forgotten. I have worked with local police and social workers extensively on a prostitution issue in my neighborhood. I also knew one of the affected street workers in her previous life, when she was an intelligent, employed, relatively healthy person parenting a daughter. She lost her child, her job, her self-esteem, about 50 pounds, many of her teeth, and her mental health, and I don't think it profits us at all as a society to talk about sex work as an inidvidual choice made by mentally-well people, when individual street workers rarely fit that profile. They aren't the same, and they have very different needs.

As a female who watches hockey, I take exception to the characterization of beating someone to a pulp as a) characteristic of hockey in general and b) desirable.

Fighting in hockey is fairly important. Yes there are referees, and in theory this might mean that the officials could eliminate dangerous play. But they don't, and at such high speeds injury is pretty common. Hockey goes well beyond its rules and official play in general -- the mental game, team composition, and so on are incredibly important. And it's not unusual for a team to intentionally take a penalty in exchange for injuring a key player on the opposite team or sending a message to the opposite team that the team may not attack its players with impunity. Which is where fighting becomes essential.

A cursory exploration of hockeyfights.com, a site devoted entirely to fighting, shows that most fights are by mutual agreement, by two combatants who are allowed to fight until the fight becomes unfair (generally when someone falls). Beating someone to a pulp, however, is not acceptable at any level, and isn't generally tolerated. Both Roy and his son should get major penalties, fines, and suspensions. Because what occurred was not a fight, but a cowardly attack.

The mothers are both victims themselves and abusers. If we were talking about any individual who was known to have provided sexual access to her child, then she would be separated from her child and allowed only supervised visitation until such time as the child services system could ascertain that the children would be safe going forward. Why should it be different when there are 400 children?