MISANDRY
“The automatic and virtually universal assumption is that the source of evil is male” – Lionel Tiger [1]
What with sperm banks and the near obsolescence of muscle labor, the acceptance of single motherhood, and what the media is presenting as the “lesbian chic,” it’s getting easier and easier these days to imagine a world without men—a world where men are subjugated or banished or never were. Beginning with the ancient myth of the Amazons, many such worlds have been imagined.[a]
“Leonard Sax, Ph.D. and M.D., asks of feminists: ‘What are they after? If you read what their leaders say, you get the impression that their paradise would be a world without men.”’[2] Quite a few literary feminists have devoted themselves to imagining just such worlds. Among the most prominent was 19th century feminist Charlotte Perkins Gilman who wrote of Herland, a female-only utopia “where women would lead placidly sexless lives and reproduce by parthenogenesis.” Joanna Russ imagined Whileaway, a colony supported by high technology, a female-only world and therefore “a serene garden paradise.”[3] Author Steve Moxon:
Mary E. Bradley in Mizora (1990) describes a world of blonde, powerful, Brunhildes whose discovery of “the Secret of Life” permitted them to eliminate all men. . . . In Joanna Russ’ The Female Man (1975), most men were killed by a mysterious disease that affected only their gender. The rest were dispatched by Jaël, a man-hating fury with retractable steel fingernails. Children were created by bringing ova together. In The Wanderground (1978), Sally Gearhart achieved the same feat by “implantment” and “egg merging.”[4]
Twenty-first century advances in reproductive technology (cloning) lend credibility to scenarios that envision a male-less paradise of peace and harmony, a world without violence, aggression, fear . . . or war?
Novels like Herland attempt to show readers how idyllic a world without men would be. To serve feminist ideological purposes, these “serene garden paradises” are imagined in depth and detail enough to linger in the mind as a kind of “proof” of paradise that could be if only there were no men. Such scenarios will also linger in the court of public opinion convicting men and masculinity as charged.
“Could it be that men are determined to be greedy, aggressive, and brutish?” ponders Sam Keen, author of Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man. “Does some selfish gene, some territorial imperative drive us blindly into hostile action?”[5] The prestigious American Psychological Association would seem to think so. It has officially declared “traditional masculinity” as “harmful.” A column by Laurie Fendrich in the highly influential Chronicle of Higher Education concludes: “The real problem is, very simply, the existence of men,” (emphasis in the original) and she dreams of a “wonderful new world” without men, “No more war, rape or pillage!”[6] Conviction of Man’s guilt creates a hard-heartedness toward men that has reached toxic and prejudicial levels such that what would otherwise be recognized as hate speech is instead tacitly accepted as “truth telling.”
Says author Andrew Kimbrell, “a little-known defective mythology about masculinity has been indelibly encoded into our social structures and psyches. Men live and breathe this myth on a daily basis. It is the basis for many of their dysfunctional daydreams and most of their nightmares. It has now led society into a dangerous ‘misandry,’ a belief that masculinity itself is responsible for most of the world’s woes.”[7] Indeed, we believe that hating men is so justified, that the word “misandry”—a word that would censure hostility toward men the same way the word “misogyny” censures hostility toward women—is deemed unnecessary. Past efforts to get the word added into dictionaries failed time and again. It remains a word shunned by the major media and, to this day, few people use the word or even know the word.
“Why Can’t We Hate Men?” asks Suzanna Danuta Walters of the Washington Post; “it seems logical to hate men.”[8] To censure it, man-hating would have to register as wrong. But what’s wrong with hating the sole source of evil? We will not empathize with men for the horrors men disproportionally experience in war if we believe that men alone are the cause of war—same goes for criminal punishments including incarceration, beatings, rape, solitary confinement, and capital punishment. Dealing with, exposure to, confronting, policing, and more often succumbing to the dark side of the world and human nature is built into the male role. We will not empathize with men until we realize that the dark side of the world and human nature is not male; it’s male burden.
Feminism has shown us all the ways in which women suffer along the Respect-Axis. Though it goes against the grain, by focusing on gender reality along the Love-Axis, we may see men as the brutalized, short-lived, homeless, emotionally suppressed, murdered, executed, denigrated, disposable, divorced, parentally alienated, suicide sex. Lack of love is behind all the above and it is for lack of love that these issues are rendered non-issues.
My book is titled Loving Men, Respecting Women because we desperately need to shift some love (empathy) toward men and some respect (accountability) toward women. Many will be up in arms saying: WE ALREADY RESPECT WOMEN MORE THAN MEN! Well, wrong. As a society, we fear women, but we don’t respect women enough to hold them accountable. We don’t respect women’s efficacy or weaponry. We fear women’s power but we don’t respect women’s power and so we don’t register women’s abuse of power.
As a society, we still view women as “powerless pawns under Patriarchy.” But women are not powerless pawns; women are powerful participants and ultimately equal partners in the human system, plying an equal overall force of influence and thus equally responsible for outcomes. Like every gender issue, misandy is co-created and a matter of shared responsibility. We desperately need for Woman to step up and own her human shadow, her power and her abuse of power. This does not demonize her; it humanizes her.
– Tim Goldich
Author of – Loving Men, Respecting Women: The Future of Gender Politics
[a] In many texts this sort of “female paradise” is even presented as having been an actual prehistoric reality destined to return in the feminist future.
[1] Tiger, Lionel, The Decline of Males: The First Look at an Unexpected New World for Men and Women (New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999) p.2.
[2] Hise, Dr. Richard T., The War Against Men: Why Women are Winning and What Men Must Do If America Is to Survive (Oakland, OR: Red Anvil Press, 2004) p.167
[3] Ehrenreich, Barbara, “Will Women Still Need Men?”, Time, February 21, 2000.
[4] Moxon, Steve, The Woman Racket: The new science explaining how the sexes relate at work, at play and in society (Charlottesville, VA: Imprint Academic Philosophy Documentation Center, 2008) p.33.
[5] Keen, Sam, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man (New York, NY: Bantum Books, 1992) p.36. Note: Keen’s question is intended to provoke thought, not to condemn men.
[6] Fendrich, Laurie, “Who Needs Men?”, The Chronicle of Higher Education, http://www.chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/who-needs-men/7034, July 16, 2009
[7] Kimbrell, Andrew, The Masculine Mystique: The Politics of Masculinity (New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1995) p.xiv
[8] Walter, Suzanna Danuta, The Washington Post, 06/08/18, Ms. Walters, “a professor of sociology and director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program at Northeastern University, is the editor of the gender studies journal Signs.”
