Misandry

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Misandry (IPA [mɪ.ˈsæn.dri]) is the hatred of men or boys, as opposed to misogyny, the hatred of women; or misanthropy, hatred of the human species. Misandry comes from misos (Greek μῖσος, "hatred") + andr-ia (Greek anér-andros, "man"). Those holding misandric beliefs can be of either sex.

Contents

Misandry in literature

Misandry in ancient Greek literature

Classics professor Froma Zeitlin of Princeton University discussed misandry in her article titled "Patterns of Gender in Aeschylean Drama: Seven against Thebes and the Danaid Trilogy."[1] She writes:

The most significant point of contact, however, between Eteocles and the suppliant Danaids is, in fact, their extreme positions with regard to the opposite sex: the misogyny of Eteocles’ outburst against all women of whatever variety (Se. 181-202) has its counterpart in the seeming misandry of the Danaids, who although opposed to their Egyptian cousins in particular (marriage with them is incestuous, they are violent men) often extend their objections to include the race of males as a whole and view their cause as a passionate contest between the sexes(cf. Su. 29, 393, 487, 818, 951).[1]

Contemporary literary criticism

In his book, Gender and Judaism: The transformation of tradition, Harry Brod, a Professor of Philosophy and Humanities in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Northern Iowa, writes:

In the introduction to The Great Comic Book Heroes, Jules Feiffer writes that this is Superman's joke on the rest of us. Clark is Superman's vision of what other men are really like. We are scared, incompetent, and powerless, particularly around women. Though Feiffer took the joke good-naturedly, his misandry embodied the Clark and his misogyny in his wish that Lois be enamored of Clark (much like Oberon takes out hostility toward Titania by having her fall in love with an ass in Shakespeare's Midsummer-Night's Dream).[2]

Misandry in theoretical discourse

Kate Millet (1970) sees a charge of misandry against girls in Sigmund Freud's theory of female sexual development. Freud (1908) proposes a stage of development he calls penis envy. Millet proposes a much broader social envy, that involves the penis only by association. "Confronted with so much concrete evidence of the male's superior status, sensing on all sides the depreciation in which they are held, girls envy not the penis, but only what the penis gives one social pretensions to."[3] Millet's work is usually cited as the basis of modern theory of misogyny (and is implicit in the quote provided). Julie Thompson (2002), defending Millet's theory, provides a list of near synonymous phrases used in criticisms, which include "penis envy" and "overt misandry".[4] If Millet and the writers Thompson alludes to are correct, Freud's theory of penis envy would be the first modern theoretical treatment of a form of misandry.

Millet's theory of misogyny interprets a range of historical references to women in a similar fashion. She reads them as perceiving women to be fundamentally enimical to men (evil, malicious and dirty), and charges the authors with misogyny. Again, if Millet is correct, theories of misandry are ancient and pervasive (and constitute evidence of misogyny equally ancient and pervasive).

SCUM Manifesto

Valerie Solanas, the radical feminist who shot Andy Warhol in 1968,[5] provides a famous example of misandry in her self-published SCUM Manifesto.

Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, which she wrote in 1967, was one of the earliest, wittiest, and most eccentric expressions of second-wave feminism. Solanas’s unabashed misandry—especially her belief in men’s biological inferiority—her endorsement of relationships between ‘independent women,’ and her dismissal of sex as ‘the refuge of the mindless’ contravened the sort of radical feminism which prevailed in most women’s groups across the country.

—Alice Echols, University of Southern California, Department of Gender Studies, [6]

As for the issue of whether or not to continue to reproduce males, it doesn't follow that because the male, like disease, has always existed among us that he should continue to exist. When genetic control is possible -- and soon it will be -- it goes without saying that we should produce only whole, complete beings, not physical defects of deficiencies, including emotional deficiencies, such as maleness. Just as the deliberate production of blind people would be highly immoral, so would be the deliberate production of emotional cripples.

—Valeris Solanas, SCUM Manifesto[7]

Judith Levine on misandry

Man-hating is an emotional problem inasmuch as it creates pain and hostility between women and men. But it is not an individual neurosis à la 'Women Who Hate Men and the Men Who...' Man-hating is a collective, cultural problem — or to refrain from diagnosing it at all, a cultural phenomenon — and men, as the object of man-hating, are part of it too.

—Judith Levine, My Enemy, My Love[8]

In My Enemy, My Love (1992), Levine classifies these stereotypes of 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
  • Beasts: the Brute, the Pet, the Pervert, the Prick and the Killer

Conservative discourse on misandry

Christina Hoff Sommers, a conservative commentator, argues that feminism has a 'corrosive paradox' and that no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men."[9]

Wendy McElroy, a Fox News commentator,[10] argues 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."[11] She argues that 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.'"[12] Conservative pundit Charlotte Hays argues "that the anti-male philosophy of radical feminism has filtered into the culture at large — is incontestable; indeed, this attitude has become so pervasive that we hardly notice it any longer."[13]

Analogies to other forms of bigotry

Masculinist writer and frequent speaker at the Cato Institute[14] Warren Farrell compares dehumanizing stereotyping of men to dehumanization of the Vietnamese as "gooks."[15]

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, Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say

Religious Studies professors, Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young make similar comparisons in their ambitious three-book series Beyond The Fall Of Man,[16] which treats misandry as a form of prejudice and discrimination that has become institutionalized in North American society, causing real harm to men. Nathanson and Young credit "ideological feminism" for imposing misandry on culture.[17] Their book Spreading Misandry (2001) analyzes "pop cultural artifacts and productions from the 1990s" from movies to greeting cards for what they consider contains pervasive messages of hatred toward men. Legalizing Misandry (2005) the second in the series, gives similar attention to laws in North America.

See also

References

Footnotes

  1. ^ a b Zeitlin, Froma I.. "Patterns of Gender in Aeschylean Drama: Seven against Thebes and the Danaid Trilogy" (PDF). Retrieved on 2007-12-21. Princeton University, paper given at the Department of Classics, University of California, Berkeley
  2. ^ Gender and Judaism: The transformation of tradition, Harry Brod
  3. ^ Kate Millet, Sexual Politics, (New York: Doubleday, 1970), p. 187.
  4. ^ "False masculinity, an extreme case of penis envy, mimicry of maleness, a usurpation of fatherhood, or overt misandry." Julie M. Thompson, Mommy Queerest: Contemporary Rhetorics of Lesbian Maternal Identity, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002).
  5. ^ Valerie Jean Solanas (1936-88). Guardian Unlimited. Guardian News and Media (2005-03-08). Retrieved on 2008-01-28.
  6. ^ Echols, Alice (January 1990). Daring to Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-75, American Culture Series. University of Minnesota Press. ISBN 9780816617876. 
  7. ^ Solanas, Valerie (1967). The S.C.U.M. Manifesto. Gifts of Speech: Women's Speeches from Around the World. Retrieved on 2007-12-28.
  8. ^ Levine, Judith (1992). My Enemy, My Love. Doubleday. ISBN 0385410794. 
  9. ^ Hoff Sommers, Christina (1994). Who Stole Feminism. Simon and Schuster, p. 256. ISBN 978-0684801568. 
  10. ^ The Independent Institute
  11. ^ (McElroy 2001, p. 5)
  12. ^ (McElroy 2001, p. 4-6)
  13. ^ Hays, Charlotte. 'The Worse Half'. National Review 11 March, 2002.
  14. ^ find.cato.org
  15. ^ Farrell, Warren. Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say. ISBN 087477988X. 
  16. ^ (Nathanson & Young 2001, p. 4-6) "The same problem that long prevented mutual respect between Jews and Christians, the teaching of contempt, now prevents mutual respect between men and women."
  17. ^ (Nathanson & Young 2001, p. xiv) "[ideological feminism,] one form of feminism—one that has had a great deal of influence, whether directly or indirectly, on both popular culture and elite culture—is profoundly misandric."

Bibliography

External links