Misandry

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Misandry is the hatred of men.^{[1][note 1]} It is a combination of the two Greek words miso, which means hatred, and andros, meaning man or male human.^[2] A neologism formed analogous to misogyny (hatred or contempt for women), it was first used widely in the 1970s in response to perceived hatreds within the feminist movement.

Today, the term is frequently misused by men's rights activists (MRAs), who use it to refer to anything even vaguely resembling feminism, and/or any time a woman hurts their feelings.^{[note 2]} As an imaginary structural bias in society as a whole, invented to counter accusations of misogyny, it is essentially identical to "reverse sexism", and analogous to reverse racism and other forms of reverse discrimination, which certainly do exist but only on an individual or otherwise subordinate level in society. Those feminists who say misandry isn't real also misuse the term, understanding it as systemic oppression of men by women, which indeed isn't real. Some femininsts weaponize this argument to justify their irrational hatred of all people who were assigned male at birth.

When focusing more on "institutionalized" (that is, malignant) hatreds, the term is not used that much, as unlike women, who are usually somewhat underprivileged in most societies, men are not actually denied their rights and freedoms on the basis of gender. Thus, some are suspicious about the existence and/or relevance of the word itself, even attributing its existence to an alleged conspiracy of male dictionary editors. It may help that they are themselves often accused of being misandrists, although to be fair, simply failing to acknowledge the existence of a privileged person’s hurt feelings is not actual sexism. It is, however, sexism if you truly resent them and don’t want them to exist. Of course, in the former case (in which many people use it as a snarl-word for anything that even vaguely resembles the dreaded 8-letter f-word), it is invalid, but if used in the latter case, it is, and it means what it actually means: nothing more than the hatred or dislike of men/boys. Misandry is only tangentially related to female supremacy, which is definitely more marginal, kooky and less common than MRAs would make it out to be.

In fact, not only angry White men use this word. The term anti-Black misandry is the commonly used term in Black Male Studies. According to Nathaniel Bryan and T. Hasan Johnson, the misandry directed towards Black men is not the same that hatred of men in general, but rather a specific social phenomenon.

A lot of men take for granted the fact that, apart from the most adamant of female power lifters, the average woman is typically a lot weaker than the average man, and from a lady's perspective, men can be quite terrifying. Being able to make quips and pot shots at people who could easily overpower you at any moment is probably reassuring, since it is a reminder of a man's gentle and forgiving nature. That a lot of men become nervous and defensive any time a woman is a bit cheeky about their gender speaks volumes about their insecurity.^[3]

History of the term[edit]

Although there were once isolated uses of the term as early as the mid-19th century,^[4] and it was being used enough to make an appearance in the uber-comprehensive Century Dictionary in 1914,^[5] it did not come into general usage until the 1970s,^{[citation needed]} when discussion of collective hatreds of all kinds was all the rage.

As a term, "misandry" is not a strict analogue of "misogyny," because the use of the term "misandry" is much more commonly restricted to concrete hatred or contempt held by individuals (cf., "man-hating feminists"), as distinct from the abstract "institutionalized" variety. This is because women have historically had little opportunity for direct influence on such institutions as the law, and thus no opportunity to build anything resembling "institutional misandry."

Trying to convince MRAs of that, however, is difficult, as most of them are (ironically) too quick to offend.

MRA use of the term[edit]

It has become the fashion for people to identify themselves as a "victimized" group in society, and then pretend that anyone who dares disagree with them is merely whaling on said victimized group. This falsehood is of course easier to spot when the group in question is not actually victimized, as we see when men's rights activists attempt to misinterpret historical facts in order to find examples of institutionalized "misandry."

Unlike misogyny, there are few asserted examples of misandry within the Abrahamic religions. Certain beliefs such as the Islamic idea of the rich being allowed four wives could and likely have been viewed as misandranistic towards males not in power, for this standard makes it more difficult for them to find mates. That particular standard almost certainly isn't actual misandry, as the cultural standards of Islam were (and are) generally decided by men to begin with, and the practice of allowing multiple wives seems to prioritize the husband's power and pleasure-not to mention how like Christianity, Islam is actually somewhat misogynistic. Also, when has polygamy ever led to the rich monopolizing all women?

The men's rights activist Warren Farrell argues that the view of men as being disposable is an example of misandry in history. He supports his argument with the fact that men have traditionally held more dangerous occupations such as serving in militaries or working in coal mines whereas women were largely protected from such dangers. However, this argument falls apart given the fact that men almost always held power historically, too. It is far more likely that men did the hard jobs simply because nobody expected women to be capable of them. In other words, it was an enforcement of gender roles. Women weren't valued because they were seen as being less disposable,^{[note 3]} they were valued for their wombs and their domestic services.

Men's rights activists also have the idea that there is a powerful cabal of feminists (an analogue of "the Patriarchy" in feminism, with the crucial difference that it does not have any basis in reality) out to oppress men and take away their beer and their couches. On this understanding, any claim by feminists that women are disadvantaged in society is treated with outright dismissal coupled with a cry of persecution, in this case "misandry."

Here, we respond to some common^[6] motivations for MRAs to make claims of misandry.

In general, most of these claims of misandry relate to feelings of being ignored or feelings of being marginalized. While many claims of misogyny also relate to such feelings (e.g., a major theme among a whole generation of feminists was women's feelings of being stifled in the role of the middle-class suburban housewife^[9]), there are also a fair number coming from women who report being raped, beaten, or forcibly silenced, often with the perpetrator going unpunished. Parallels of these on the MRA side are not impossible to find—Andy Warhol being the most obvious example—but remain conspicuously rarer.^[10]

Misandry and feminism[edit]

Despite MRA claims to the contrary, misandry is a fringe phenomenon in feminism, largely confined to radical feminist looney-tunes, who hold to an adaptation of Marxism in which women take the role of oppressed workers and men take the role of fat capitalist pigs, and of course one cannot help but hate a fat capitalist pig.

Such misandry as does exist within feminism can be placed into three categories, the "gendercidal," the matriarchal, and the class-based.

Gendercidal[edit]

When the term began to be used in the 1970s, among the people using it were feminists involved in the infighting then beginning to rip through their movement, with no less a feminist personage than Betty Friedan condemning misandry.^[11]

Part of the reason for the increasing discussion of man-hatred were the antics of Valerie Solanas. Solanas, who is best known for shooting Andy Warhol (and art critic Mario Amaya) in 1968 during a psychotic episode, had written a missive entitled The SCUM Manifesto in which she argued that men were biologically inferior to women and needed to be exterminated.

About ten years later, in 1977, the radical feminist Andrea Dworkin stated that this kind of attitude was growing within her sect, describing a panel discussion at which the 200-odd attendees greeted calls for "gendercide" with enthusiastic applause.^[12] However, it speaks volumes that Dworkin, herself a fringe figure who has been accused of misandry, observed these developments with considerable alarm and spoke out against them at the same panel discussion; these attitudes have stayed safely in the extreme fringe.

Matriarchal[edit]

There are also a small number of feminists who believe in matriarchy or "female supremacy", thinking that women are better fit to rule than men. Mary Daly, the radical feminist theologian who resigned her professorship rather than accept men in her classes, was one of these.

Class-based[edit]

Finally, there is a group who explicitly defend misandry, as many other hatreds have been defended, by characterizing it as "hatred of the oppressor."^[11] In the 1970s, a few radical feminists of this group voiced disapproval of feminists entering relationships with men, on the grounds that it could cause them to develop a positive opinion of their mate, which would decrease their utility to the feminist movement.^[13]

However, it was against this group that Betty Friedan's remark was directed, and many more feminists tend to stand with her on this question than with the radicals, especially today.

Power-hungry pigs by nurture?[edit]

There are also those who accept the criticisms of men made by the misandrists (e.g., that they are power-hungry or misogynistic in the main), but deny that they are this way by their nature as Solanas claimed, arguing instead that society conditions them to be that way. Although this reads as a condemnation of a social system rather than contempt for a group of people within it, it is instructive to note that it does not seem to make a difference to many of the same people whether someone said that Black Americans were unable to escape poverty on account of their "racial nature," or whether, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan argued, White racism was poisoning their culture and making them like that — either way it was deemed to be blaming the victim.

Appropriation as parody[edit]

Finally, there are those feminists who are not actually misandrists, but who have appropriated the term in order to lampoon MRAs' beliefs in a gigantic feminist conspiracy.^[14] It is important to remember that these women are only joking, similar to a metrosexual man joking about misogyny to highlight the denial of it by most whiny MRAs.

Criticism[edit]

The term has come under some criticism from those who see concrete hatreds held by individuals as of little or no significance compared to the abstract "institutionalized" or "systemic" variety. In this view, an "ism," like racism or sexism, requires two components: first, a prejudice or hatred against some group; second, and more importantly, the collective power to put it into action significant enough as to produce a blip on sociologists' radars. Hence, one has formulae such as "Sexism = Prejudice plus power."^{[note 4]}

Hatred for men, it is argued, has the first of these two components, but not the second. Admittedly though in some legal cases, such as custody, men do have a disadvantage. However, men compared to women, globally, are not disadvantaged in paychecks, employment rates, government positions, education, language, and in history in general. Therefore, the formula is incomplete.

It is also argued that using a term like "misandry" for the hatred of men implicitly places that hatred on the same level with "racism" or "sexism," when it is not. It would thus follow that "misandry" is a loaded snarl word that can only be used in the fallacious way that the MRAs use it.

Another criticism is based on how the more sophisticated MRAs — some of whom have training in women's studies and were themselves once part of the feminist movement — have adopted certain ideas, tropes, and rhetorical devices used by feminists and turned them to their own purposes. This routine causes varying reactions, causing some to believe that there is a feminist conspiracy such as MRAs postulate, others to get hopping mad that the feminists' patent on the ideas, tropes, and rhetorical devices in question has been infringed upon; and still others to dismiss them as nonsense, as evidenced by the MRAs' ability to use them to argue against women's rights (which, by the way, are human rights).

Quotes about misandry[edit]

“”There are two kinds of women who never hate men: the very lucky and the very blind.

—Joanna Russ, satirist[11]

“”In the past quarter century, we exposed biases against other races and called it racism, and we exposed biases against women and called it sexism. Biases against men we call humor.

—Warren Farrell[15]

See also[edit]

• Lee Jun-seok
• Manosphere glossary
• Men's rights activism
• Misogyny
• Political lesbianism

Notes[edit]

References[edit]