Misandry () is the hatred of men or boys.
Misandry comes from Greek misos (μῖσος, "hatred") and anēr, andros (ἀνήρ, gen. ἀνδρός; "man"). Misandry is the antonym of , the fondness towards men, love, or admiration of them.
Misandry in literature
Misandry in ancient Greek literature
Classics professor
Froma Zeitlin of
Princeton University discussed misandry in her article titled "Patterns of Gender in
Aeschylean Drama: Seven against Thebes and the Danaid Trilogy".}}
Misandry and literary criticism
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:
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.
Comparisons with other forms of bigotry
In 1999,
Masculist writer
Warren Farrell compared dehumanizing stereotyping of men to dehumanization of the
Vietnamese people as "
gooks".
Religious Studies professors Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young made similar comparisons in their 2001, three-book series Beyond the Fall of Man, which treats misandry as a form of prejudice and discrimination that has become institutionalized in North American society.
In the 2007 book, International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities, Marc A. Ouellette directly contrasted misandry and misogyny, arguing that "misandry lacks the systemic, transhistoric, institutionalized, and legislated antipathy of misogyny".
Notable instances of misandry
Academic
Alice Echols, in her 1989 book
Daring To Be Bad: Radical Feminism in America, 1967-1975, argued that
radical feminist Valerie Solanas displayed an extreme level of misandry compared to other radical feminists of the time in her
tract,
The SCUM Manifesto. Echols stated:
Some other researchers have argued that Solanas'
SCUM Manifesto was a
parody of
patriarchy and the Freudian theory of femininity, where the word
woman was replaced by
man. The text contains all the clichés of Freudian
psychoanalytical theory: the biological accident, the incomplete sex and "penis envy" which became "pussy envy".
In his 1997 book The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy, sociologist Allan G. Johnson stated that accusations of man-hating work to discredit feminism because people often confuse men as individuals with men as a dominant and privileged category of people. He wrote that 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' ".
Nathanson and Young argued that "ideological feminism" has imposed misandry on culture. Their 2001 book, Spreading Misandry, analyzed "pop cultural artifacts and productions from the 1990s" from movies to greeting cards for what they consider contained pervasive messages of hatred toward men. Legalizing Misandry (2005), the second in the series, gave similar attention to laws in North America.
In 2002, pundit Charlotte Hays wrote "that the anti-male philosophy of radical feminism has filtered into the culture at large is incontestable; indeed, this attitude has become so pervasive that we hardly notice it any longer".
Wendy McElroy
Wendy McElroy, an
individualist feminist and
Fox News commentator, wrote in 2001 that some feminists "have redefined the view of the movement of the opposite sex" as "a hot anger toward men seems to have turned into a cold hatred". She argued it was a misandryst position to consider men, as a class, to be irreformable or
rapists. McElroy stated "a new ideology has come to the forefront... radical or gender, feminism", one that has "joined hands with [the]
political correctness movement that condemns the panorama of
western civilization as sexist and racist: the product of '
dead white males' ".
Discrimination against men
An example of gender discrimination against men occurred with the
airline sex discrimination policy controversy.
British Airways,
Qantas, and
Air New Zealand all had policies prohibiting men from sitting next to unaccompanied children on commercial flights. This rule, which singled out gender as the most important quality of a group of people, was discriminatory. There has never been a documented case of in-flight child abuse. Many have spoken out against this discriminatory policy, including feminists.
Presumption of male guilt in criminal law
In criminal law, preventing
wrongful conviction takes precedence over ensuring that every guilty person is punished. The "
presumption of innocence" is the foundation of all Western legal systems. Human jurisprudence will always be subject to error; reducing the possibility of wrongful conviction means establishing the level of certainty that permits for a legal finding of guilt. While no modern jurisprudent would defend the biblical standard of "not a single innocent punished", there have been attempts to establish a balance between punishing the guilty and sparing the innocent. For example, English jurist William Blackstone wrote that it is “better that ten guilty persons escape than that one innocent suffer.” (Commentaries on the Laws of England, 1765.) The laws of the United States require proof "beyond a
reasonable doubt", meaning that guilt is established to the degree that innocence could only occur by the confluence of an unreasonable number or nature of events.
By ambiguously defining what constitutes a reasonable argument for innocence, the law leaves open the possibility of a lowered burden of proof and increased severity of punishment for groups of people who may reasonably be thought to be more likely to commit crime. Changing social perceptions of men and women have led to troubling statistics demonstrating judicial bias against men in convictions, severity of punishments, and subsequent exoneration due to new evidence (such as DNA profiling). For example, the US Bureau of Judice Statistics shows that women are 50% more likely than men to avoid a murder conviction for extrajudicial killings (women account for 12.0% of extrajudicial killings, but only 8.0% of all murder convictions). Once a murder conviction takes place, men are five times more likely to be sentenced to death (98.2% of all death row inmates are men, 3291 men compared to 59 women). Once on death row, women are 50% less likely to be executed compared to men (since 1970, 1099 men executed compared to 11 women).
While it is easy to point out statistical evidence of judicial bias, it is much more difficult to demonstrate unambiguous proof of judicial bias against individual men convicted of specific crimes, though this is true of other types of discrimination as well, whether against women, men, blacks, or whites. Those working against discrimination often have to deal with a large number of variables.
See also
Boys are stupid, throw rocks at them!
Female chauvinism
Men's movement
Men's rights
References
Footnotes
Bibliography
External links
article critical of the use of the term
Category:Gender
Category:Misandry
Category:Sexual and gender prejudices
