Spreading Misandry

The book I'm currently reading is called Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture by Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young (2001). As the title suggests, this book looks at how American culture seems to support attitudes of maleness as transgressive, dangerous, broken or worthless. It's been really challenging so far for me to keep an open mind, to try to listen to these arguments with empathy, compassion and genuine desire to know just what it is that men feel is oppressing them in our culture. Their basic premise is that with the advent of feminism (and here they seem to be referring mainly to the second-wave variety) our society has become increasingly more and more feminized and woman-centric that now it basically revolves around the needs and desires of women, pushing men into a marginal social role where while it is strictly taboo to make misogynist remarks, it is condoned and even encouraged that we should joke at the expense of men.

The chapters of the book are as follows:

1. Introduction: Misandry in Popular Culture

2. Laughing at Men: The Last of Vaudeville

3. Looking Down on Men: Separate but Unequal

4. Bypassing Men: Women Alone Together

5. Blaming Men: A History of Their Own

6. Dehumanizing Men: From Bad Boys to Beasts

7. Demonizing Men: The Devil Is a Man

8: Making the World Safe for Ideology: The Roots of Misandry

So far, one of the biggest arguments I've been able to distill from the book is that in order for men to develop and maintain a healthy identity, they must feel they are able to contribute something valuable and distinctive to society. And by distinctive, the authors mean separate from women. They claim that women have the distinctive ability to bear children on which to base their identities as women. So far, the basic strategy seems to be presenting movies and television shows, then unpacking them to demonstrate their misandric tendencies.

This is problematic for because after a hundred pages of text, they have yet to parse a movie or show that isn't in some major way influenced by men. For instance they deconstruct The Color Purple, which while written by Alice Walker was directed and produced by Steven Spielberg (a man), and the screenplay was written by Menno Meyjes (another man). Or in another section, they castigate the American version of the British vehicle "Men Behaving Badly", complaining about the way the sitcom portrays men--and yet five out of five writers on the show were men. Yet over and over they complain that these constructions of men amount to misandry, which they lay squarely at the feet of feminism. This gap in logic is writ large when they discuss men in warfare--how only men are expected to fight and die, how women may want to be allowed to fight but would resist being drafted. All this with no discussion about how the vast majority of decision-makers in the military are men, or whether women (as if we were a homogenous group) opposed the draft only for ourselves, or more generally for everyone.

Another issue I take is with the way that this seems mainly to be about white, heterosexual men. Sure, they mention the demonization of black men in passing (especially in their critique of The Color Purple), but in other places (their discussion of Fried Green Tomatoes) they regard black men as "oppressed men" which makes them "honorary women". Similarly, they privilege a traditional patriarchal family structure as well--there is a lengthy discussion of the whole Dan Quayle-on-Murphy Brown controversy, in which they argue that Quayle's lack of credibility as a public figure obscures the importance of the issue--that single motherhood is a problem that needs to be addressed, not a life-style choice that should be promoted in popular media. I find a lot of their rhetoric intellectually dishonest. They make some effort to say that not ALL feminists are like this or like that, but make it clear that they believe most feminists to be misandrists at heart. While they don't ignore third wave feminism completely, they make it sound like one of many fringe permutations, and not the massive, far-reaching response to the critiques of second-wave feminism it is widely regarded as being. They seem deliberately to ignore the changes in philosophy and focus that don't directly support their arguments.

Additionally, they completely refrain from discussing any of the ways in which the goals of feminism remain unfulfilled. I find myself thinking over and over again why, if our society is so focused on what women want and need, our reproductive rights are still under attack? Why, if we've arrived do we still number only about 20% of congress, and make less than 75 cents for every dollar our male counterparts make? If our brave new world is so gynocentric, why will big insurance companies cover Viagara but not birth control? The authors of this book claim that if women truly craved equality, more money would be spent researching ways to make it possible for men to give birth, but NO, that is a power we women selfishly want to hog all to ourselves.

This is hard for me to swallow ideologically. But as Dr. Perez advised me in the meeting where she suggested this blog, I need to learn to read between the lines to try to understand what these authors really want, what they fear, and why that fear becomes focused on the bogey(wo)man of feminism. And again and again what I hear is the fear of the loss of privilege, and even more profoundly, a loss of relevance in a changing world. They seem to believe that if there aren't any arenas to which they can lay exclusive claim (no women allowed), then there is no way for men to construct themselves as men. In order to maintain that healthy sense of self, their contributions have to be DISTINCTIVE. What that sounds like to me is that if women can also do it, it doesn't count. I just keep feeling like there has to be some other way to construct masculinity besides simply that-which-is-not-feminine.

On a more personal note, this project makes me despair for my love life. I keep wondering how I could ever form a relationship with someone who couldn't or wouldn't see how being a woman makes a huge difference in how I experience the world. How can I form a partnership with someone who doesn't recognize that the system is rigged in his favor, and how can I put my trust in someone who sees no problem in reproducing that system--at my expense? I know feminist men exist, but it's not like they're the norm.