Misandry

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Misandry (/mɪsˈændri/) is the hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against men or boys.^[1][2]

Men's rights activists (MRAs) and other masculinist groups have characterized modern laws concerning divorce, domestic violence, conscription, circumcision (known as male genital mutilation by opponents), and treatment of male rape victims as examples of institutional misandry. However, in virtually all societies, misandry lacks institutional and systemic support comparable to misogyny, the hatred of women.^[3][4][5]

In the Internet Age, users posting on manosphere internet forums such as 4chan and subreddits addressing men's rights activism have claimed that misandry is widespread, established in preferential treatment of women, and shown by discrimination against men.^[4][6]

Many scholars criticize MRAs for promoting a false equivalence between misandry and misogyny,^{[7]: 132 [8][9]} arguing that modern activism around misandry represents an antifeminist backlash, promoted by marginalized^{[citation needed]} men.^{[8][10][11][12][13]} The false idea that misandry is commonplace among feminists is so widespread that it has been called the "misandry myth" by 40 topic experts.^[14]

Misandry is formed from the Greek misos (μῖσος 'hatred') and anēr, andros (ἀνήρ, gen. ἀνδρός 'man').^[15] "Misandrous" or "misandrist" can be used as adjectival forms of the word.^[16] Use of the word can be found as far back as the 19th century, including an 1871 use in The Spectator magazine.^[17] It appeared in Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (11th ed.) in 1952. Translation of the French misandrie to the German Männerhass (Hatred of Men)^[18] is recorded in 1803.^[19]

A term with a similar but distinct meaning is androphobia, which describes a fear, but not necessarily hatred, of men.^{[20][better source needed]} Anthropologist David D. Gilmore coined the term "viriphobia" in line with his view that misandry typically targets machismo, "the obnoxious manly pose", along with the oppressive male roles of patriarchy. Gilmore says that misandry is not the hatred of men as men; this kind of loathing is present only in misogyny, which is the hatred of women as women.^[3]

The term misandry originated in the late 19th century. According to information policy scholars Alice Marwick and Robyn Caplan, the term was used as a synonym for feminism from its inception, drawing an equivalence between misandry ('man-hating') and misogyny ('woman-hating').^[12][21] Newspapers in the 1890s occasionally referred to feminist "new women" as "man haters", and a 1928 article in Harper's Monthly said that misandry "distorts the more querulous of [modern] feminist arguments."^[22] The term re-emerged in men's rights literature and academic literature on structural sexism in the 1980s. It was in use on Usenet since at least 1989, and on websites and blogs dedicated to men's rights issues in the late 1990s and early 2000s.^[23] Marwick and Caplan argue that usage of the term misandry in the internet age is an outgrowth of misogyny and antifeminism.^{[8][further explanation needed]} The term is commonly used in the manosphere, such as on men's rights discussion forums on websites such as 4chan and Reddit, to counter feminist accusations of misogyny.^[9][6][24] The critique and parody of the concept of misandry by feminist bloggers has been reported on in periodicals such as The Guardian, Slate and Time.^[25]

Men's rights activists (MRAs) invoke the idea of misandry in warning against what they see as the advance of a female-dominated society.^[26] The idea of feminism as threatening towards men, encapsulated in the term misandry, forms a core part of the vocabulary of the manosphere^[27] and is used within the men's rights movement (MRM) to counter feminist accusations of misogyny.^[24] The idea of feminism as a misandrist movement has provided justification for harassment of people espousing feminist ideas, one example being the Gamergate harassment campaign against women in the video games industry.^[28] MRAs and other masculinist groups have criticized modern laws concerning divorce, domestic violence, the draft, circumcision (known as genital mutilation by opponents), and treatment of male rape victims as examples of institutional misandry.^[4] Other proposed examples include social problems that lead to men's shorter lifespans, higher suicide rates, requirements to participate in military drafts, and lack of tax benefits afforded to widowers compared to widows.^[4][29]

Marc A. Ouellette argues in International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities that "misandry lacks the systemic, transhistoric, institutionalized, and legislated antipathy of misogyny"; in his view, assuming a parallel between misogyny and misandry overly simplifies relations of gender and power.^[4] Anthropologist David Gilmore argues that misogyny is a "near-universal phenomenon" and that there is no male equivalent.^[3] He states that misandry is "different from the intensely ad feminam aspect of misogyny that targets women no matter what they believe or do".^[3] Marwick and Caplan have examined the use of the term misandry within the manosphere as a weapon against feminist language and ideas.^[12] They characterize men's rights activists' use of the term—as a gender-reversed counterpart to misogyny—as an appropriation of leftist identity politics.^[30] Marwick and Caplan also argue that coverage of the discourse of misandry by mainstream journalists serves to reinforce the MRM's framing of feminist activism as oppressive toward men, along with its denial of institutionalized sexism against women.^[31]

Misandry can be racialized.^[4] According to some researchers in Black male studies such as Tommy J. Curry, Black men and boys face anti-Black misandry.^{[32][33][34][35]} E. C. Krell, a gender researcher, uses the term racialized transmisandry describing the experience of Black transmasculine people.^[36][37]

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Glick and Fiske developed psychometric constructs to measure the attitudes of individuals towards men in their Ambivalence toward Men Inventory, AMI, which includes a factor Hostility toward Men. These metrics were based on a small group discussion with women which identified factors, these number of questions were then reduced using statistical methods. Hostility toward Men was split into three factors: Resentment of Paternalism, the belief men supported male power; Compensatory Gender Differentiation, the belief that men were supported by women; and Heterosexual Hostility, which looked at beliefs that men were likely to engage in hostile actions.^[38] The combined construct, Hostility toward Men, was found to be inversely correlated with measures of gender equality when comparing difference countries^[39] and in a study with university students, self-describing feminists were found to have a lower score.^[40]

In the United States, men tend to receive longer sentences than women for committing the same crimes, although the disparity is more pronounced for minor offenses, and is also dependent on the race of the perpetrator.^[41] Criminologist Nathan A. Kruis of Pennsylvania State University and colleagues write that a body of research suggests the presence of "potential institutional misandry" in the U.S. criminal justice system.^[41]

Classicist Froma Zeitlin writes:

The most significant point of contact, however, between Eteocles and the suppliant Danaids is, in fact, their extreme positions with regard to the opposite sex: the misogyny of Eteocles' outburst against all women of whatever variety has its counterpart in the seeming misandry of the Danaids, who although opposed to their Egyptian cousins in particular (marriage with them is incestuous, they are violent men) often extend their objections to include the race of males as a whole and view their cause as a passionate contest between the sexes.^[42]

Literary critic Harold Bloom argued that even though the word misandry is relatively unheard of in literature, it is not hard to find implicit, even explicit, misandry. In reference to the works of Shakespeare, Bloom argued:^[43]

I cannot think of one instance of misogyny whereas I would argue that misandry is a strong element. Shakespeare makes perfectly clear that women in general have to marry down and that men are narcissistic and not to be trusted and so forth. On the whole, he gives us a darker vision of human males than human females.

Sociologist Anthony Synnott argues that there is a tendency in literature to represent men as villains and women as victims and argues that there is a market for "anti-male" novels with no corresponding "anti-female" market, citing The Women's Room, by Marilyn French, and The Color Purple, by Alice Walker. He gives examples of comparisons of men to Nazi prison guards as a common theme in literature.^[44]: 156

Racialized misandry occurs in both "high" and "low" culture and literature. For instance, African-American men have often been disparagingly portrayed as either infantile or as eroticized and hyper-masculine, depending on prevailing cultural stereotypes.^[4]

Julie M. Thompson, a feminist author, connects misandry with envy of men, in particular "penis envy", a term coined by Sigmund Freud in 1908, in his theory of female sexual development.^[45] Nancy Kang has discussed "the misandric impulse" in relation to the works of Toni Morrison.^[46]

In his book, Gender and Judaism: The Transformation of Tradition, Harry Brod, a Professor of Philosophy and Humanities in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Northern Iowa, writes:^[47]

In the introduction to The Great Comic Book Heroes, Jules Feiffer writes that this is Superman's joke on the rest of us. Clark is Superman's vision of what other men are really like. We are scared, incompetent, and powerless, particularly around women. Though Feiffer took the joke good-naturedly, a more cynical response would see here the Kryptonian's misanthropy, his misandry embodied in Clark and his misogyny in his wish that Lois be enamored of Clark (much like Oberon takes out hostility toward Titania by having her fall in love with an ass in Shakespeare's Midsummer-Night's Dream).

In 2020, the explicitly misandric essay Moi les hommes, je les déteste (I Hate Men) by the French writer Pauline Harmange caused controversy in France after a government official threatened its publisher with criminal prosecution.^[48]

Opponents of feminism often argue that feminism is misandrist; citing examples such as opposition to shared parenting by NOW, or opposition to equal rape and domestic violence laws. The validity of these perceptions and of the concept has been claimed^{[by whom?]} as promoting a false equivalence between misandry and misogyny.^[7] Radical feminism has often been associated with misandry in the public consciousness. However, radical feminist arguments have also been misinterpreted, and individual radical feminists such as Valerie Solanas, best known for her attempted assassination of artist Andy Warhol in 1968, have historically had a higher profile in popular culture than within feminist scholarship.^{[50][51][failed verification]}

Historian Alice Echols argues that the misandry displayed by Solanas in her tract the SCUM Manifesto was not typical for radical feminists of the time: "Solanas's unabashed misandry—especially her belief in men's biological inferiority—her endorsement of relationships between 'independent women,' and her dismissal of sex as 'the refuge of the mindless' contravened the sort of radical feminism which prevailed in most women's groups across the country."^[52] Radical feminist Andrea Dworkin criticized what she called a biological determinist strand that she found "with increasing frequency in feminist circles"; according to Dworkin, this included the view that males are biologically inferior to women and violent by nature, requiring a gendercide to allow for the emergence of a "new Übermensch Womon".^{[53][non-primary source needed]}

Melinda Kanner and Kristin J. Anderson argue that "man-hater feminist" represents the popular antifeminist myth which has no any scientific evidences, and it's rather the antifeminists who perhaps hate men.^{[54][further explanation needed]}

The feminist author bell hooks writes that the contemporary feminist movement was from its beginnings portrayed in the mass media as man-hating, even though anti-male factions were a small minority of women's liberation advocates.^[55][56] Hooks argues that liberal feminists' demonization of men as all-powerful misogynist oppressors was a product of bourgeois white women's envy of the privileges held by upper-class white men, and that such anti-male sentiments "alienated many poor and working class women, particularly non-white women" from the movement.^[57] She writes that anti-male factions received outsized attention from the mass media, leading the men's movement to take an anti-female stance which "mirrored the most negative aspects" of the women's movement.^[56]

Sociologist Anthony Synnott argues that certain forms of feminism present misandristic view of gender. He argues that men are presented as having power over others regardless of the actual power they possess^[44]: 161 and that some feminists define the experience of being male inaccurately through writing on masculinity. He further argues that some forms of feminism create an in-group of women, simplifies the nuances of gender issues, demonizes those who are not feminists and legimitizes victimization by way of retributive justice.^[44]: 162 Reviewing Synnott, Roman Kuhar argues that Synnott might not accurately represent the views of feminism, commenting that "whether it re-thinks men in a manner in which men have not been thought of in feminist theory, is another question."^[58]

Sociologist Allan G. Johnson argues in The Gender Knot: Unraveling our Patriarchal Legacy that accusations of man-hating have been used to put down feminists and to shift attention onto men, reinforcing a male-centered culture.^[59] Johnson posits that culture offers no comparable anti-male ideology to misogyny and that "people often confuse men as individuals with men as a dominant and privileged category of people. Given the reality of women's oppression, male privilege, and men's enforcement of both, it's hardly surprising that every woman should have moments where she resents or even hates 'men.'"^[59] [emphasis in original]

A meta-analysis in 2023 published in the journal Psychology of Women Quarterly investigated the stereotype of feminists' attitudes to men and concluded that feminist views of men were no different than that of non-feminists or men towards men, and titled the phenomenon the misandry myth: "We term the focal stereotype the misandry myth in light of the evidence that it is false and widespread, and discuss its implications for the movement."^[14]

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