Misandry: Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right

I get it: Misogyny is worse. That doesn't mean misandry is okay.

Last week, I logged onto Facebook to see a startling discussion on a friend’s page. The topic was the recent school shooting in Madison, Wisconsin that left two people dead and a number of others injured.

The post read something to the effect of, “I really hope the shooter didn’t harm any women or girls.”

The not-so-subtle anti-male subtext is what startled me, so I commented for clarity: “It’s no better if the victims were men/boys. Human lives are all precious.”

The backlash to my comment was both swift and thorough, and I’ve been stewing on it ever since. To a number of the feminists in the discussion, male lives were not anywhere close to as valuable as female lives. They didn’t care too terribly much if children were gunned down in their schools as long as said children were boys. Boys were dispensable. Only girls were worth saving. Never mind the pesky (and ironic) little fact that, in this particular scenario, the violent offender was a female.

For as many times as I’ve been falsely accused of hating men in my activism, here I was observing a group of women for whom the accusation actually rang true. They really hated men, and they were ready to bite the head off of anyone who got in the way of that hostility.

“How dare you tell women how to feel?” some lectured. “You don’t know what they’ve been through.”

I resisted the urge to defend my victim credentials by crafting a list of my own man-inflicted battle scars. I bit my tongue instead of reminding them that when men use their isolated experiences with one psychotic woman as an excuse to hate all women, we tend to call them names like “incels” because we easily recognize it as emotionally stunted, maladaptive behavior. Instead, I merely said I thought this kind of reasoning actually ended up hurting feminism rather than helping it.

My respectfully stated resistance was quickly dismissed as “rightwing handmaidenry.” The only reason I could possibly disagree with these women was because I had been brainwashed. It couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the fact that I’m the mother of beautiful sons, who, in their economy, could just as well die off in a school shooting. It couldn’t be that I felt defensive of the many virtuous men like my husband who actively make the world a better place, men who, rather than harming women, would literally take a bullet to protect us. It couldn’t be that I just think hatred is always toxic to everything it touches. Nope. I had been indoctrinated by my male overlords. There was nothing else to it.

“F*ck yourself,” one woman lashed out.

If this was the sisterhood feminism promised, I might as well make my camp with the transactivists. The contempt for any suggestion of reason was the same.

I had encountered similar sentiments before. One woman, enraged at my decision to gestate a boy (who, in her mind, should obviously have been aborted for the crime of being a male) referred to me as “a handmaid to a male fetus.”

I observed another group of women fantasizing about creating some sort of female-only utopia reminiscent of Queen Hippolyta’s Amazonian Themyscira. Except as I listened to them, I realized they were actually serious; they weren’t just joking or wistfully dreaming. They were actively strategizing. They truly envisioned a community where they would never again need to interact with a member of the male species for basically any reason. I didn’t have the heart or the social capital to risk raining on their parade. I just made a mental note that these ladies lived in a perpetual state of unhealed trauma and wished them well regardless.

But while I’ve definitely observed a degree of what might be accurately described as “misandry,” I would still have to categorize it as pretty fringe and ultimately not too comparatively consequential in the big scheme of things.

For one thing, much of what gets labeled “misandry” in today’s public discourse isn’t misandry at all—it’s just women speaking candidly about their terrible experiences with bad men and men not wanting to hear about it. The best men I’ve ever encountered care infinitely more about the defense of women than they do about the defense of their egos. And the stats don’t lie: women continue to suffer unimaginable harm at the hands of really bad men. We have to be able to talk about it.

For another thing, while the true misandrists may not give a fig about whether men live or die, they’re not out there inflicting even a fraction of the harm upon the universe that misogynists routinely inflict. Misandrists aren’t out there in droves committing genocide or launching political initiatives that target men. Misandrists aren’t responsible for rape gangs or sex trafficking rings or child marriage. They aren’t flooding the internet with humiliating revenge porn. They aren’t committing murder the minute men break their hearts. They’re not hunting down their rapists and exerting physical punishment on them. The worst thing misandrists tend to do is say a bunch of mean and hateful things on the worldwide web while resolving to order their personal lives in such a way as to limit interaction with the opposite sex as much as is physically possible.

I asked my brilliant best friend to name a widespread or socially sanctioned form of misandry, and she jokingly replied, “Um… Roosters getting killed because they don’t produce eggs. That’s all I’ve got. Anything specifically targeting males is also driven by males who don’t want rivals to their power.”

I don’t know that she’s wrong.

If I were to survey a hundred women about the worst things men have done to them, the answers would likely range from rape to intimidation to physical violence, and there would be a large number of responses in both categories.

If I were to survey a hundred men about the worst things women have done to them, there would certainly be some outliers with a handful of men experiencing physical or sexual violence at the hands of twisted women, but by and large, I think I could reasonably expect to see more answers in the realm of things like “manipulation” and “gold-digging” or “lying” or perhaps “parental alienation of children in the midst of divorce.”

When I ask men I trust to name their experiences of misandry, I usually hear something about how divorce court unfairly advantages women or about how men are shamed for any hint of stereotypical masculinity. And I might hear something about how the academic world is designed to make women succeed, though I’m still not entirely sure how this works or how misandry is to blame. To be clear, I think courts ought to be fair, and I think traditional masculinity should be applauded, not shamed. What I don’t hear in these responses, however, is a palpable fear of rape or death.

Comparing misogyny to misandry is just overall apples to oranges or mountains to molehills.

As one reader put it, it’s kind of like people who try to make a federal case about “reverse racism,” insisting it’s a national crisis when the nation hasn’t even begun to contend with the carnage or the scope of the racism people of color have endured since the inception of our country. How can you expect people to care about these seemingly minor infractions if they’ve repeatedly proven they don’t give a damn about the big ones?

So when it comes to quantifying or measuring the scope of the problem, it’s really pretty fraught. And yeah, I think global misogyny is a bigger fish to fry than misandry. That hardly means misandry should just get a free pass, though. I don’t think it should.

As a passionate advocate for women, the ultimate goal in my writing and advocacy is to help usher in healing and restoration, to bind wounds and bridge gaps between people whenever possible. Misandry is a conscientious choice NOT to heal. It’s a choice to project one’s bitterness and wounds onto an entire group of strangers, many of whom do not deserve it. It’s a choice to be dishonest and see the absolute worst in people. It’s a choice to kill hope. It’s a choice to pour fuel on an already blazing inferno between the sexes. In my opinion, it’s ultimately an act of cowardice reserved for those who’ve decided to quit because the work was just too scary to continue.

It’s like breaking a bone and ultimately deciding to live the rest of your life walking with a limp rather than sitting through the pain of having it reset. Only in this case, innocent people are also affected, and it makes you a liability to the cause you purport to champion.

Misandry hurts feminism; it doesn’t advance it. It makes the people engaged in it look unhinged because, let’s face it, it is a little unhinged. If you can sit on the internet talking about how you hope dead children are boys without ever once pausing to reflect on how messed up that is, you’ve absolutely lost your mooring. Don’t feminists want women to thrive? Misandry is the opposite of thriving. Once you embrace it as a way of being, you’re basically choosing to live our the rest of your days at the equivalent of a third grade emotional IQ. Don’t we want better for our sisters than that? Is the goal of feminism healing, or is the goal to watch everything burn?

It’s okay to be angry about injustice. It’s okay to fight systems that keep women oppressed. It’s okay to name the problem of male violence. But it’s not okay to punish innocent people for crimes they did not commit. It’s not okay to demonize all men for the misdeeds of the bad ones. It’s not okay to teach little boys that their lives are worth less. It’s not okay to throw the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. I want to see communities of healthy, healed women, not stunted irrational man-bashers who throw stones at every dog that barks.

At a certain point, if you are going to demand fairness from others, you have to be willing to be fair yourself. And it’s not inconsequential when little boys grow up hearing that they’re all scum. Good men lose their motivation to sacrificially use their power for good when they feel it’s never going to even be appreciated anyway. Women aren’t the only ones who struggle in this world, and regardless of where you want to place the blame, if we care about creating a healthy society, we have to care about helping men be healthy, too. We can’t do this if we’re busy demonizing them at every turn or dismissing their concerns or telling them they don’t matter because our wounds are worse.

The only way to bridge the gender gap is to model the behavior and the respect we hope to see others replicate.

I hate to burst anyone’s bubble, but the land of Themyscira is pure fantasy. There will never be a functional society on planet earth that excludes one sex or the other. It’s not the way the good Lord designed things to function. When He created humankind, He expressly said that it was “not good for man to be alone.” Women bring necessary balance to men and vice versa. There’s no getting around this. We do not know better than God Almighty.

So stop giving people a free pass to live stunted, bitter lives that mistreat others just because they’ve gone through some trauma. If you care about them, you’ll invite them to heal, not to remain in a permanent state of bitter, unyielding hatred. That’s not good for anyone, and it certainly doesn’t end up helping women at all. We can do better than this. And we must.