This originally appeared on Ally Fogg’s blog. Republished here with permission.
As I have written many times before, I believe people who are concerned about women’s human rights and well-being and about men’s human rights and well-being should be natural allies. That’s pretty much the core of my philosophy on gender issues. I’ve made clear my disdain for men’s activists who lay blame for most of men’s problems at the door of feminism. I also despair of the logic which says any and all feminist activism is, by definition, misandrist.
So all things considered, I should have been applauding Lindy West’s recent blog on Jezebel, where she basically made those precise same points. Truth is, I hated it. Partly that was down to the tone, which I found painfully patronizing. In lecturing men on the male experience and the extent and nature of men’s problems, she provided a rare example of what we might call “womansplaining.” (Incidentally, a word to male readers—if you want to know why many women get so annoyed by us guys explaining to them what feminism is and should be, read the article, flip the genders and empathize.)
I’d add that in her “Part 4: A list of Men’s Rights issues that feminism is already working on,” she paints a rosy portrait of feminism, which ducks most of the more credible complaints. To take just one example, she says: “Feminists do not want women to escape prosecution on legitimate domestic violence charges” which, firstly, is not entirely true—there are a few feminists who argue that women accused of domestic abuse are almost invariably acting in self-defense. More significantly, it dodges the point that very many feminists have actively and furiously resisted attempts to highlight male victimization and argue and lobby strongly against gender-neutral approaches to the problem.
In amongst all that, one of her arguments in particular raised an issue that I’ve wanted to address for a while, and that is the meme “misandry isn’t a thing” (or in Lindy’s version, “misandry isn’t real”). This is a common refrain within modern feminism, often used as a throwaway dismissal of a (perceived) male troll or heckler. Here it is explained and used as a central basis to the argument, which gives us something to get our teeth into.
Dictionaries define misandry as hatred of men. A more detailed working definition might be something like “an extreme or irrational hatred, fear, demonization or contempt for men.” Lindy West readily admits that there are some radical feminists or wounded women who really do hate men, and that our culture produces many derogatory and unfair portrayals of men, but insists that “misandry is not a genuine, systemic, oppressive force on par with misogyny.”
What feminists mean when they say “misandry isn’t a thing” is that because our society systematically privileges men and disempowers women, misogyny serves a different cultural purpose, has different and more damaging impacts and grows from different roots to misandry. To a certain extent I agree with that, but saying misandry is not the mirror image of misogyny does not mean that misandry does not exist at all. I believe that arguing that misandry isn’t real is damaging to men, damaging to women, and damaging to the struggle for social justice.
I would distinguish three common varieties of misandry that are most definitely real. The first is a personal prejudice, which may often arise from damaging or hurtful experiences at the hands of men, creating a negative stereotype heuristic. This may not be admirable, but it is often understandable. The second is an ideological misandry arising from certain strains of radical feminism, roughly caricatured as the “all men are rapists” tendency. I think such ideas are wrong and harmful, but I’m also far from convinced that these people are anywhere close to being numerous or powerful enough to cause any real damage, except perhaps to feminism itself.
The third variety of misandry is the one that seriously concerns me, and it is worth looking in detail at what it is and what it does. Cultural misandry is a significant force in policing and constraining the roles of men, and indeed women in society. Our capitalist hegemonic culture (or patriarchy, if you prefer) considers it acceptable to routinely mock and denigrate men’s domestic and child-caring abilities because this acts strongly to discourage deviations from the gender status quo, from which vested interests profit. Our culture systematically devalues male deaths (in news reports specifying numbers of deaths of women and children, for instance) because economic interests require a degree of male disposability in the workplace and military interests may require the mass dispatch of young men to die on battlefields at a moment’s notice. When society mocks and reviles male victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse, the subtext is that it is women’s place to be victimized and oppressed, not men’s.
When feminists say that misandry isn’t a thing, what I hear is that these issues are so minor, so marginal that they are insignificant. It is not just that they are unworthy of attention, they are not even worthy of a word to describe them. If Lindy West really wants more men to be allies to the feminist movement and wants us to believe that feminism really is on our side, then I struggle to see how this type of rhetoric is in any way helpful.
I’m not for a moment suggesting that feminism should suddenly drop its struggles for women’s equality, autonomy, safety, and welfare in favor of challenging male-only military conscription or setting up hostels for male abuse victims, I don’t think that is or should be feminism’s job. Nor do I think that all allegations of misandry should be considered reasonable or accurate. But I would suggest that if we want to end what Lindy calls the “endless, fruitless turd-pong” between men’s activists and feminists online, some rhetorical habits might need to change on both sides.
Ally Fogg is a writer and journalist based in Manchester, UK. He writes weekly at Comment is Free for the Guardian, blogs about gender issues at Heteronormative Patriarchy for Men and tweets angrily from @AllyFogg
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