Matthew DeCoursey

Cross-posted from my own blog, here.

 Since writing about misandry in marywollstonecraft a couple of months ago, I’ve been watching the news on the Internet, and, you know, the situation is worse than I thought.

Consider the flap over Sandra Bullock and the supposed Oscar curse. If by some insane chance you missed it, the general idea is that women who win Oscars supposedly lose their husbands very soon. There was commentary on this saying, appropriately enough, that this looks like a way of discouraging women from trying to be successful. But consider how it portrays men! Apparently, we have no consideration or loyalty, but respond to women’s successes as if we were four years old, jealous because the other kid got the red crayon. I suppose we do have irrational envy sometimes–we are men, after all, and not angels–but nothing obliges us to act on such feelings. Feelings like that enter into a complex, existing structure of feeling and thought. We are not rats in a maze.

One Amy Jenkins, writing in The Independent, comments on a new film about a female assassin. Under the heading “The Fantasy that is Violent Women,” she writes, “women really don't go around murdering people.” It is certainly true that a huge majority of women never murder anybody–but the same is actually true of men. She remarks at the end of the article that “only 5 to 15 per cent of violent crimes against the person are committed by women. That's a tiny proportion.” All right, if .01 percent of men commit a murder, and .001 percent of women, what conclusions can we draw about the sexes?  Well, none, really. The male figure may be ten times the female figure, but both are so small that no generalizations about the sexes can be drawn from them. Ms. Jenkins seems to be objecting to an image that conflicts with her self-image as a woman. This would be fine, except that she is implicitly slandering men to make her point.

The stereotype of men as violent depends considerably on the view of testosterone as simply, always and forever promoting aggressive behaviour. There’s a problem, though. This is only problematically true even of rats.  With human beings, it is not clear that it is true at all. Some men, and some women, will say, “Men just are that way, because of the testosterone, so live with it.” But that is not an answer. If we are reduced to the supposed aggression in our blood, we are not human beings. The men who use this defence must, I think, be self-hating, defeatist people, willing to destroy social respect for them as human beings in the name of a freedom which, in the real world, would be lonely and destructive. They are living a life of appalling fantasy. They feed into women’s fears and gain nothing worthwhile from it. Women who say the same are living in a world of fantasy too, potentially condemning themselves to isolation from half the human race.

Once again prominent in the US blogosphere is a perennial image: A girl gets drunk at a frat house party and is raped, or claims she has been raped. There always seem to be endless discussions about the girl’s responsibility or otherwise for what happened to her. This is true even when the point is raised as hypothetical, as in a recent article in the student newspaper of American University. A now-famous Alex Knepper writes,

"Let’s get this straight: any woman who heads to an EI party as an anonymous onlooker, drinks five cups of the jungle juice, and walks back to a boy’s room with him is indicating that she wants sex, OK? To cry “date rape” after you sober up the next morning and regret the incident is the equivalent of pulling a gun to someone’s head and then later claiming that you didn’t ever actually intend to pull the trigger."

(I gather EI must be a fraternity.) The portrayal of men in this anecdote, as in all versions of the frat-house-date-rape thing, is problematic. The man appears as driven by his nature (testosterone?) to want sex with a girl who is apparently barely coherent, on the point of passing out at any moment, and who might throw up on you during the act. This also is defended–even by men!–as just arising from male nature. This is the same direct nature-to-act link that makes it seem as if men have no conscious decision-making power.

So men want sex with women, regardless of the circumstances. They respond aggressively at slight provocation. They have tantrums if their women are more successful than they are. And, though I haven’t got into the examples here, it appears that men are driven by evolutionary psychology to have sex with as many women as possible, and men who stick to one woman are just eunuchs.

All of these things have in common a direct link from the supposed “animal drives” to action, and in effect an assertion that men are unable to make decisions for themselves.

That is hatred of men.