{"id":44541,"date":"2018-08-16T05:00:44","date_gmt":"2018-08-16T09:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=44541"},"modified":"2018-08-15T12:29:30","modified_gmt":"2018-08-15T16:29:30","slug":"mainstreaming-misandry","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2018\/08\/16\/mainstreaming-misandry\/","title":{"rendered":"Mainstreaming misandry"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Somehow the notion that it&#8217;s totally okay &mdash; even praiseworthy &mdash; to preach hatred of men has re-entered the mainstream and, worse, is being <a href=\"https:\/\/quillette.com\/2018\/08\/15\/why-its-not-ok-to-hate-men\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">taken seriously by people who should know much, much better<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\u201cYou can\u2019t hate all men can you? Actually I can,\u201d writes Suzanne Moore, a British feminist, in the <em>New Statesman<\/em> in 2016. \u201cAs a class, I hate men.\u201d Men are not a class but this doesn\u2019t deter Moore from continuing her peroration. \u201cI think any intelligent woman hates men,\u201d she continues. She even comes up with a hash tag in the hope that this blanket condemnation will catch on \u2013 #yesallmen.<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, in \u2018The Cut\u2019 section of the <em>New York<\/em> magazine, a member of the public writing in complains to the \u2018agony aunt\u2019 \u2013 the journalist Heather Havrilesky \u2013 that she \u201chates men\u201d and is in danger of becoming a \u201ccranky old bitch\u201d. Heather suggests in reply that she simply embrace her inner bitch. \u201cMost men are terrible,\u201d she says. \u201cMost men are shit.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In addition, two articles on <em>Medium<\/em> \u2013 not quite as mainstream as <em>New York<\/em> magazine, the <em>Washington Post<\/em>, and the <em>New Statesman<\/em>, but certainly not fringe \u2013 echo the theme. Turns out, it\u2019s not only (self-defined) man-hating women who have turned towards hate as a response to gender inequality. So have some men \u2013 like Anthony James Williams who writes in <em>Medium<\/em> that, \u201cWomen don\u2019t have to like us, and history shows us that they have a right to hate us.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In the charmingly titled \u2018When You Can\u2019t Throw All Men Into The Ocean And Start Over, What CAN You Do? Ijeoma Oluo \u2013 the mother of two boys, God help them \u2013 writes,<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>This society is doing everything it can to create rapists, to enable rapists, and to protect rapists. This society is broken, abusive, patriarchal (and white supremacist, ableist, hetero-cisnormative) trash. This entire patriarchal society is responsible for every single sexual assault that occurs.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If reading such hatred is exhausting, actually generating it must be even more so. I suspect hate is a young person\u2019s game (although Danuta Walkers and Moore are not exactly spring chickens). It is tempting to shrug off this new misandry as just silly and something of a sideshow, but it\u2019s possible that it represents a real strand of rising consciousness. If that is the case, it is not merely silly \u2013 it is dangerous. I have occasionally indulged in group hatred \u2013 ISIS in their racist, faithist, head-hacking, innocent-slaughtering prime, the Conservative Party in the 1980s, anyone involved in Prog Rock \u2013 but it\u2019s not a very healthy principle to base your life around.<\/p>\n<p>What does it mean to hate an otherwise random and unrelated group of people, as opposed to a specific individual? We can all enjoy hating, say, Nazis, pedophiles, and ISIS executioners beheading an aid worker. Hate can be reassuring, which is why it is so seductive. But when one is hating Nazis, one is hating people who subscribe to an ideology, an idea. Pedophiles and ISIS executioners are historically smaller groups, but they are also defined by a particular idea \u2013 sexual attraction to children and the cult of death. At some level, they\u2019ve made a choice. No one is born a Nazi or an Islamist murderer, and even if Pedophilia is genetically influenced, that doesn\u2019t absolve its perpetrators of guilt. However, hating men is not hating an idea or an abhorrent form of behaviour. It is hating half the world\u2019s population, rich and poor, kind and cruel, black and white, gay and straight, just because they happen to have a Y chromosome.<\/p>\n<p>To hate such a disparate group seems \u2013 is \u2013 demented. However, there is a prism through which it makes perfect sense, the prism constructed by the odd and contradictory fusion of neo-Marxism and post-modernism.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Somehow the notion that it&#8217;s totally okay &mdash; even praiseworthy &mdash; to preach hatred of men has re-entered the mainstream and, worse, is being taken seriously by people who should know much, much better: \u201cYou can\u2019t hate all men can you? Actually I can,\u201d writes Suzanne Moore, a British feminist, in the New Statesman in [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,53,13],"tags":[477,213,1020,593,43],"class_list":["post-44541","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-politics","category-usa","tag-magazines","tag-newspapers","tag-progressives","tag-socialmedia","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-bAp","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44541","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44541"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44541\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":44542,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44541\/revisions\/44542"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44541"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44541"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44541"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}