Reclaiming Misandry: I Hate Men.

 

 

“I feel that ‘man-hating’ is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them.”

Robin Morgan, Ms Magazine

 

I’m not supposed to do this.

There is a Feminist Rookie Errors manual that was penned somewhere post the 1980s, and though no one has ever really read it and no-one exactly knows who wrote it – its  status and poignancy hangs in the air like  an aptly timed fart. It contains some received wisdoms that are essential good practice for any shiny happy feminist, who has Buddhist levels of anger and intolerance and is great fun at wet t-shirt parties. They are…

Don’t mention the Patriarchy. Even though the concept simply means the ‘male head of the family’ and relates to the simple fact that all systems of governance have been created, adapted and are still largely manifested by a small minority men, we are to pretend its some theistic concept, up there in the blue speckled sky with its mate The Spaghetti Monster. The fact that it is objective and demonstrable must remain under your shirt like a stolen aubergine. It will upset men.

Don’t ever say you hate sex, or you find it tiring, or boring, or overrated, or too fraught with brazen objectification. Or that you’d sooner muck about with  crochet, or brownie baking or gluing plastic spoons to your kitchen wall. It will upset men.

And don’t ever, ever – even for a slender second – suggest that you hate men. This is fucking paramount.

But for some of us – hate them, we do. Now, I am not implying that misandry is some ideal state of affairs, that it is something to be cultivated, galvanised or improved upon. That it should be a section in the feminist manifesto. Hating men, is not ideal. However, sometimes, it is a fact. And for some women, their experiences with men have been so traumatic that it is an understandable one.

“Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release.”

Germaine Greer

Now, there are women who go through life who escape some of the worst excesses of masculinized or sexualised brutality. They have reasonable encounters with pretty decent fathers, brothers, and boyfriends. But one of the huge errors evident in websites like Women Against Feminism, however, is a stunning lack of awareness about the relative privilege of anyone who escapes rape, battery and prostitution.  An attitude permeates this site, that implies that because they themselves have had a reasonable time of it, that other women, who have not, should hush the hell the up. Because their terrible experiences blight the image some people have of the rosy little landscape that they like to imagine we are all equally privy to. Indeed, of course,  this is more true of men, and the MRA movement in particular.

I Don’t Need Feminism B/C I Love Men! All Of My Friends Are Men, They’re Way Nicer & Less Dramatic Then Most Women, Especially Feminists!!!

A Misogynist Woman Against Feminism

In order to not inflame their hatred of feminists, we have avoided playing into their worst fears about – on the surface, feminists  – but in reality  themselves, men of their acquaintance and the world in general.

I worked in the sex business for many years, and hatred of men was not an uncommon surprise; it was fairly endemic. What was key to understanding it, it seems to me, was that for many of the women I met, trauma and brutality had been neither minor, nor a one off. It had coloured their lives from its early stages. Sometimes, unimaginable brutality. I encountered women who had been beaten to the fringes of death, women whose ‘boyfriends’ had forced them to tolerate being pissed on as an erotic act, who had been regularly walloped by cold and narcissistic fathers and brothers. Not to mention the sexual abuse.

These were the horror stories. But there were also the daily rituals of discomfort that men bought to us. Like sharpened gifts. All apart from the emotional labour of having to pretend we loved sexual encounters that we were, at best, only tolerating, we encountered men pulling off the condoms to ejaculate inside of us,  pulling our hair and slapping our backsides too hard, calling us sluts and looking us up and down as though they were architects assessing their work. And then there were the endless wedding rings; a daily reminder that not only was this man happy to have sex with someone who probably wasn’t enjoying it, and maybe even hated it, but that he was also happy to spend family money doing it.

All these things – from the grievous to the miserable – distilled in us cynicism, apathy, even hatred for men. If we had histories of male violence or neglect in our childhoods, prostitution further curved out the indents. I don’t know how many times I heard women I worked with say, “I fucking hate men.”

So many women around the world are victims of violence. To hate men as a result – or perhaps to mistrust or avoid them – is not irrational, its a logical reaction. Behaviourist studies shows us that many people eventually avoid situations that have proven to be dangerous to them in the past. When men pompously tell raped or beaten women that it is ‘not all men’ or that their hatred is destructive, they are concerning themselves more with their own PR, than the lives and dignities of women.

Women who have suffered at a man’s (or men’s) hands are not the ones primarily responsible for their bad feelings. If every man who whimpered ‘not all men’, actually turned their fingers at the men who rape, beat, pimp or prostitute women and said with precision, it is YOU who is at fault for her misandry, then we might actually start fucking getting somewhere.

We have learnt to keep our hurt and our pain and our trauma under our vests so as to make feminism more palatable to men. To remove bitterness (I care not what you think, a Noble emotion) and anger and intolerance from our vernaculars, from our prose and our protests. And it hasn’t worked. The MRA culture is growing, rape justice stats are still pathetic and feminists keep having to trade away even more of ourselves in order to be tolerable. Even though as a political movement we have not the violent history of others.

As a human, I don’t want to hate men forever, but as a feminist, I will not be further enfeebled by a patriarchal culture that would rather I just smiled and kept it on the inside. Often, when the memories coming spilling back like an oil slick, I do find I hate men. And until men, en masse, are actually willing to accept that this might actually not be my fault and that feeling that way does not make me mad, then it will remain so. And I shan’t apologise for it any more.