MISANDRY

'Misandry' (IPA ) is the hatred of men as a sex. It is considered a type of sexism, and those holding misandric beliefs can be of either sex. Misandry is not discussed very often compared to misogyny, an issue feminist writer Judith Levine has drawn attention to in calling misandry "the hate that dares not speak its name".^[1]

Contents

Political form of misandry

Analogies to other forms of bigotry

Misandry and misogyny

Nathanson and Young

Judith Levine's views on misandry

See also

References

Bibliography

External links

Political form of misandry

Wendy McElroy believes that some feminists "have redefined the view of the movement of the opposite sex" as "a hot anger toward men seems to have turned into a cold hatred".^[2] Men as a class are considered irreformable, all men are considered rapists, and marriage, rape and prostitution are seen as the same. She says "a new ideology has come to the forefront... radical or gender, feminism", one that has "joined hands with [the] political correctness movement that condemns the panorama of western civilization as sexist and racist: the product of 'dead white males.'"^[3]

Analogies to other forms of bigotry

Several authors draw analogies between misandry and other forms of prejudice such as misogyny, racism, anti-semitism, and homophobia. They argue that men are stereotyped in various ways that dehumanize them, and that would be considered unacceptable if applied to other groups such as women and minorities. The purported cause of the public acceptance of misandry as opposed to misogyny is that while some women espouse belief in the existence of misogyny and use it as a "proof" of the beliefs of feminism, men do not usually acknowledge themselves as victims of misandry. This difference in perception thus creates a climate in which it is socially acceptable for feminists to issue charges of gender-based hatred and prejudice against men, and once having done so to treat these charges as fact, while discounting similar charges against women as further proof of their claims.
Masculist writer Warren Farrell argues: "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." Farrell compares dehumanizing stereotyping of men to dehumanization of the Vietnamese as "gooks."
Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say, , Warren, Farrell, , , ISBN 087477988X

Misandry and misogyny

Christina Hoff Sommers notes what she considers a 'corrosive paradox' of feminism: "that no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men". She says "it is just not possible to incriminate men without implying that large numbers of women are fools or worse". To Hoff Sommers, women who respect men are seen (by what she has coined "gender feminists") as being in the camp of the enemy. Therefore, misandry becomes misogyny, perpetrated by feminists whom Hoff Sommers sees as a radical minority representative neither of women nor of feminists.^[4]

Nathanson and Young

Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young treat misandry as a form of prejudice and discrimination that has become institutionalized in North American society, causing real harm to men. They assert in their 2001 book ''Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture'' that misandry primarily stems from the gynocentric use of gender, and is used to blame all men as responsible for imposing gender. To Nathanson and Young this assumption makes men the official scapegoats for the existence of all evil, while women, responsible for all good, are their official victims. The logical outcome of this gynocentric world-view would be men paying reparations to women for their crimes against them throughout history. Nathanson and Young criticize the feminist idea of gender being a social construct containing the underlying assumption that male-determined societal imperatives should trump individual rights.
Nathanson and Young assert that feminists strategically use political correctness, academic deconstructionism, and "fronts" to promote their misandric worldview. They posit an "ideological" feminism, which they say is derived from Marxism and romanticism, with class and nation replaced by gender identification to foster the hatred of men as a group.
Some respectable academic journals have criticized Nathanson and Young's ideas.^[5][6]

Judith Levine's views on misandry

Judith Levine alternatively focuses on private manifestations of misandry in her 1992 book, ''My Enemy, My Love: Man-hating and Ambivalence in Woman's Lives''. She explicates what she considers as the "intellectually and emotionally rich, little explored, often subterranean world of women's hatred of men" and ambivalence toward men. This she addresses "in a unique examination of the family, trac(ing) the role of man-hating in the unfolding of contemporary feminism".
Levine classifies the following stereotypical men as targets of women's misandry within intimate relationships:

★ Infants: the Mama's Boy, the Babbler, the Bumbler and the Invalid;

★ Betrayers: the Seducer, the Slave, the Abandoner and the Abductor; and

★ Beasts: the Brute, the Pet, the Pervert, the Prick and the Killer.
Within the family, she asserts that father-abandonment of daughters, familial gender standards that discriminate against daughters and paternal neglect of daughters are a root cause of misandry in women. She also says fathers, brothers and husbands are targeted by modern feminism, elaborating that feminism has disrupted the traditional family unit so that a "politically conscious battalion of daughters" could replace male familial roles "by banding together as sisters" to "run everything" by themselves.

See also

★ Antifeminism

★ Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them!

★ Equalism

★ Masculism

★ Men's movement

★ SCUM manifesto

★ Misanthropy

References

1. Levine ''My Enemy, My Love: Man-hating and Ambivalence in Women's Lives''
2. Wendy McElroy, ''Sexual Correctness'', p. 5.
3. Wendy McElroy, ''Sexual Correctness'', pp. 4 & 6
4. Who Stole Feminism, , Christina, Hoff Sommers, Simon and Schuster, 1994,
5. Book Review PAUL NATHANSON and KATHERINE K. YOUNG, Spreading Misandry
6. Book Review: Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young, ''Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men'', , Dorothy E., Chunn, Canadian Journal of Family Law, 2007

Bibliography

★ ''Who Stole Feminism: How Women Have Betrayed Women'', Christina Hoff Sommers, 1994

★ ''Sexual Correctness: The Gender-Feminist Attack on Women'', Wendy McElroy,

★ ''Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture''; Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal, 2001; ISBN 0-7735-2272-7

★ ''Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination against Men''; Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young, McGill-Queen's University Press, Montreal, 2006; ISBN 0-7735-2862-8

★ ''My Enemy, my Love: Man-hating and ambivalence in women's lives'', Judith Levine, 1992.

★ ''The Myth of Male Power'', Warren Farrell, Berkley Trade, 2001, ISBN 0-425-18144-8

External links

★ Androphobia: The Only Respectable Bigotry by Robert Anton Wilson

★ Misandry: From the Dictionary of Fools by Richard Leader (article critical of the use of the term)

★ Anti Misandry Web Site