A further problem I’m having with this book is the way they critically insist that the movies they’re parsing are unfair to men because of the ways they portray men, the ways they focus mainly on the plights of the women in the stories, and the way their analysis of the movies cherry-picks examples to make a point.
For instance their analysis of The Handmaid’s Tale, which they begin by saying the plot is unimportant so they won’t go into the details of recounting the movie. Then they claim that the movie is warning of what could happen if a fundamental religious group got control of our country, criticizing the storytelling for its unfair portrayal of the religious. By leaving out the critical driving point of the plot, that pandemic infertility motivated a power shift toward the religious leaders, the authors create a false argument that makes the story seem anti-religious for no good reason. It’s bad argumentation that’s heightened by their overuse of the word “probably” to describe the motives of authors, screenwriters, directors and a nebulous group of man-hating feminists.
The authors suggest again and again that the portrayal of men in so-called women’s movies is unfair, inadequate or non-existent. Their main complaint seems to be that these movies are being made that show men in a negative light, and sometimes don’t show men at all. They complain that while women are so busy criticizing pop media for fairness to women, they’re leaving out the men. And yet there is no discussion at all of the way that roles for men vastly outnumber those for women, especially important speaking or lead roles. They fail to address movies that feature no women at all, or that address no women’s issues, or that construct women as helpless, brainless sex objects whose only lines revolve around men. And they seem to want to impose a moral imperative on filmmakers who are supposedly spreading this misandry, without themselves making any attempt to address the still-rampant misogyny.
I also have trouble with the language that attempts to construct their arguments as common sense. Passive voice: “It can be concluded that...” asking and answering their own questions: “Why, then, do they do this? Probably because....” and getting derailed. The discussion of the misandry supposedly evident in The Handmaid’s Tale digresses into a critique of Handmaid’s negative portrayal of religious conservatives and religious fundamentals. It becomes an attack on liberals--and unless the authors are conflating conservatives/fundamentalists with men at large, I fail to see how this tangent is relevant to the purpose of the book. The authors seem to totally disregard movies as entertainment, as art, instead opting to hold them to the fact-reporting standards of news entities-- “To argue that danger lies only on one side does a disservice to the community.” Do the authors then suggest that each movie be presented as a double feature with all the details inverted, so that everyone gets a fair hearing? What exactly is it they wish to see?
Any negative portrayal of men is called out as misandric. Are the authors suggesting that men don’t do these things? Or that since not all men do it isn’t fair to produce media where some behave badly, as the uncritical viewer might extrapolate that to include all men? And yet, are there any behaviors or attitudes that can be said to represent every individual in a certain population? If not, how can anyone make a movie about anything, since they’ll be forced to make choices that won’t reflect everyone. And the fact is, SOME men DO behave badly--portraying that in media isn’t misandric, it’s a reflection of the experiences or imagination of the creators.
Too, the authors conflate terms and contradict themselves on nearly every page. In one part of the book they argue fervently that misandry is sexism perpetuated by women against men. Then later when discussing how feminists believe that racism, classism, ageism, etc. are byproducts of the hierarchical nature of sexism, they go on to say that by sexism, they mean men. What?! They suggest again and again that feminists believe in a vast conspiracy that spans all of history and involves all men trying to keep women down. This simplifies the reality, turning it into a dramatic hyperbole that sounds ridiculous because it is. Feminist discussions of patriarchy are more sensitive and nuanced, and most feminists, obviously, do not hold individual men responsible for history, nor believe they are having secret meetings to plan their strategy of how to keep women down. They critique the movie The Long Walk Home for addressing the intersectionality of sex and race, claiming that this furthers a movement toward polemical opposition between the sexes and the races. And yet, they criticize feminism (which they fail to keep up with past the second wave) as ignoring the issues of WOC or differently abled or any other intersectionality that compounds the effects of misogyny. Double-bind alert. See also: page 17 where they invoke the use of myths by Nazis in Germany to question how good of a myth The Color Purple is (or is not), then on page 59 caution that “Any analogy with the Nazis should be thought out very carefully. This one might be disturbing for many Jews, but it should be disturbing to anyone who values common sense.” Because it’s only common sense when they do it.
The basic strategy for this book so far is to claim that portrayals of men in these media is unfair, rather than considering that the portrayals reflect some of the lived experiences of the creators of the work. If they are so riled up about how bad men seem in these movies and screenplays, the immediate fault is with the attitudes--they don’t even consider that maybe these are fairly accurate descriptions of the behavior of some men. Because if they considered that, then they would have to think about what caused men to behave that way, and maybe have to consider that what feminists have been saying all along might be true. And the falsity of feminists’ point-of-view is the main assumption on which this whole book is predicated. Is any negative portrayal of men at all to be considered misandric, then?
Then they begin to analyze made-for-tv movies, and how ALMOST HALF of them feature women in trouble overcoming their obstacles. Then the authors go on to state that women are about 58% of the audience for evening programming. I was totally unsurprised--in fact, this brought up for me the argument that most movies in theaters seem to be geared toward young men, so it’s no big shock that made-for-tv movies should be geared more toward the stories of women. After all, tv makes money on advertising, and as women make the majority of purchasing decisions, it behooves the people who wish to advertise to them to make programming they would enjoy. They go on to complain that not only are the women the chief victims (but only in the beginning--the progression of the movies explicitly portrays the women’s struggle to overcome), and men the chief victimizers. Rather than being a reflection of misandric leanings by viewers and creators, it actually rather accurately reflects real-life crime statistics. It’s ironic to me that when faced with media that shows men behaving badly, the authors don’t call out the real-life behavior that inspires these portrayals, but calls out the creators for choosing those behaviors to portray.
I get what the authors are saying--feminism makes them feel like men are being demonized. The reality is that feminism has a problem with the behavior of some men, with the system that encourages this behavior--we do not hate, or even dislike men themselves. Feminists aren’t saying men are bad or evil, just that their behavior is systematically unfair to women (and POC, and LGBTQ folks, etc.). And we don’t hold them individually responsible for this system, what we hold them responsible for is uncritically reproducing this rigged system because they like their privilege too much to give it up, so their reflex is to deny that there’s a problem. But time and again these authors construct movie men as either irrevocably bad or...inadequate. Inadequate because they are either unable to prevent troubles from befalling the women or saving them from them or inadequate because they’re dead.
First of all, death is a thing that befalls both men and women alike. If the father in Disney’s Beauty and the Beast is inadequate because he’s an eccentric old inventor who accidentally promises Belle to Beast, what of her mother? Dead, presumably, and so...inadequate. This suggests that women hold men responsible for saving them or protecting them from harm and when they don’t they’re less than full men. But these movies they analyze are often specifically about women being able to deal with trouble on their own. Why is this a zero sum game? Why, if a woman can save herself, are all the men in a movie inadequate for not doing it for her? If she doesn’t need saving, then the men don’t fail to meet her needs, they’re just not necessary. But that, according to Nathanson and Young, is another huge problem (and I think it’s the real one--if women don’t need us to save them, why WILL they need us for?).
But that’s just the thing--these authors argue that feminism exacerbates the polemity of our society, but in my experience of feminism, women are largely trying to find out who they are, and create the lives they want, independently of men. They want to be whole people on their own, who then have the autonomy and agency to choose to have men in their lives (in whatever capacity) because they love them and enjoy their company--not because they NEED them to provide some kind of service or fill some kind of hole. And men have equal access to this kind of self-creation, and arguably have had more access for most of history. Is it a basic form of insecurity--do men feel that women won’t be interested in them unless they can PERFORM some sort of FUNCTION? Do they think it isn’t enough for us that they simply are, simply are other human beings whom we can love? Why does the rise of women’s agency necessarily undermine the agency of men? There is enough agency to go around, because it is not an object to be bought, sold, traded or sold, but a tool that one can activate, choose not to, or be prevented from activating. Is the model of economic scarcity at the heart of all of this?
Page 148, the discussion of Kids. “For one thing, at lest some of the girls imply that they do not really enjoy sexual intercourse for its own sake; they demand the fantasy of romance in the form of lengthy foreplay.” Or maybe they demand lengthy foreplay, because that is the way they enjoy sex--because sex is not JUST PIV!
Another thing that keeps bothering me about this book is how ethnocentric it is. There is reference after reference to Christianity and the Bible, the devil, etc. At one point, analyzing a movie called Deceived, they bring up the fact that the artifact that the movie revolves around is an Egyptian necklace, then go on to say that the most powerful images our culture has about Egypt come from the Bible, or movies about the Bible, like The Ten Commandments. I’m sorry, what?! Then they associate men with Egyptian symbols like statues of pharaohs and the silent, staring sphinx--except, hey guys, a sphinx is a lion with the head and breasts of...a WOMAN? But the over-arching problem is that they only focus on this one way of being a man in America--as if all men are white, middle class, and Christian.
I also have a problem with the assumption that any movie that reflects women’s interests and points-of-view is making a POLITICAL POINT while apparently movies that don’t can go unmarked, politically. Where is the discussion of how movies are movies until they focus on women, and then they become “chick flicks” or as the authors call them “women’s pictures?” Not including women’s voices and interests should be considered just as much a political choice as including them, right? But why is that? Why should movies that reflect women’s experiences always bear the burden of making a point? Are women living their lives trying to make a point? This smacks of the male gaze--these authors are asking women to consider how men will feel about movies they make for and about themselves (according to the authors). At what point can being a woman in public stop being a Thing?
And what about considering that anyone shown in any media being damaged by “the patriarchy” is thus “an honorary woman?” They use this to refer to any man who is black, gay, poor, or in any other way not an upper-middle class white man. Being anything other than that means they are “feminized”. But that’s backwards--there is nothing about these people that makes them inherently more feminine, the reference seems to be to a lack of agency--anyone without the full autonomy of those at the top of the patriarchal hierarchy suffer from a lack of total agency...and are thus feminized into being honorary women. Maybe it is this attitude that is part of the problem. Maybe writers of “women’s pictures” and directors, and producers and actors, don’t consider these other groups as “less than” anyone. Maybe the authors of Spreading Misandry are just projecting, or maybe they’re misreading the ways in which these characters are constructed in opposition to those classic stereotypes. Besides which, upper-middle class white men are damaged by patriarchy as well! Nathanson and Young spend half the book complaining of the results of this oppression, blaming feminists for it, no less! They invoke the draft, the higher job mortality rate of men, their social and emotional isolation, etc. to demonstrate how things aren’t so great for men either--apparently unaware that feminism has already noticed and commented on those things, and includes them in its list of concerns.
And now they argue that feminism is all about dualism, in spite of the fact that we’re always arguing against this. Le sigh. This is so dispiriting. It is they, and not we who conflate “the institutions of patriarchy” with all men, all the time. It is the system that women object to, most of us like men...a LOT.
