Misandry ( /mɪˈsændri/) is the hatred or dislike of men or boys. A recently coined word,[1] misandry was formed from Greek misos (μῖσος, "hatred") and anēr, andros (ἀνήρ, gen. ἀνδρός; "man"). Misandry is the antonym of philandry, the fondness towards men, love, or admiration of them. Misogyny is the equivalent term for women.
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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."[2] 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).[2]
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, a more cynical response would see here the Kryptonian's misanthropy, his misandry embodied in 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).[3]
Julie M. Thompson, a feminist author, connects misandry with envy of men, in particular "penis envy," a term coined by Sigmund Freud in 1908, in his theory of female sexual development.[4]
In 1999, masculist writer Warren Farrell compared the dehumanizing stereotyping of men to the dehumanization of the Vietnamese people as "gooks."[5]
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 made similar comparisons in their 2001, three-book series Beyond the Fall of Man,[6] which treats misandry as a form of prejudice and discrimination that has become institutionalized in North American society.
In the 2007 book International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities, Marc A. Ouellette directly contrasted misandry and misogyny, arguing that "misandry lacks the systemic, transhistoric, institutionalized, and legislated antipathy of misogyny."[7] Anthropologist David D. Gilmore argues that while misogyny is a "near-universal phenomenon" there is no female equivalent to misogyny. He writes:
Man hating among women has no popular name because it has never (at least not until recently) achieved apotheosis as a social fact, that is, it has never been ratified into public, culturally recognized and approved institutions (...) As a cultural institution, misogyny therefore seems to stand alone as a gender-based phobia, unreciprocated.[8]
Gilmore also states that neologisms like misandry refer "not to the hatred of men as men, but to the hatred of men's traditional male role" and a "culture of machismo". Therefore, he argues, misandry is "different from the intensely ad feminam aspect of misogyny that targets women no matter what they believe or do".[8]
Academic Alice Echols, in her 1989 book Daring To Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967–1975, argued that radical feminist Valerie Solanas, best known for her attempted murder of Andy Warhol in 1968, displayed an extreme level of misandry compared to other radical feminists of the time in her tract, The SCUM Manifesto. Echols stated,
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.[9]
Some other researchers have argued that Solanas' SCUM Manifesto was a parody of patriarchy and the Freudian theory of femininity, where the word woman was replaced by man. The text contains all the clichés of Freudian psychoanalytical theory: the biological accident, the incomplete sex and "penis envy" which became "pussy envy."[10][11] She was later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and depression; some observers think she was suffering from these illnesses at the time of her writing.[12][13][14]
Nathanson and Young argued that "ideological feminism" has imposed misandry on culture.[15] Their 2001 book, Spreading Misandry, analyzed "pop cultural artifacts and productions from the 1990s" from movies to greeting cards for what they considered to be pervasive messages of hatred toward men. Legalizing Misandry (2005), the second in the series, gave similar attention to laws in North America.
In 2002, pundit Charlotte Hays wrote "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".[16]
Wendy McElroy, an individualist feminist and Fox News commentator,[17] wrote in 2001 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."[18] She argued it was a misandrist position to consider men, as a class, to be irreformable or rapists. McElroy stated "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'."[19]
In his 1997 book The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, sociologist Allan G. Johnson stated that accusations of man-hating have been used to put down feminists. Johnson notes that the word misandry did not appear in dictionaries until recently, but the concept of the hatred of men is long established. The accusation of misandry is often effective against feminists because "people often confuse men as individuals with men as a dominant and privileged category of people."[1] He wrote that given the "reality of women's oppression, male privilege, and men's enforcement of both, it's hardly surprising that every woman should have moments where she resents or even hates 'men'."[1]
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