men are dogs

on """"misandry"""", feminist reactionaries, and the point of "doing politics"

Because I write about feminism, substack likes to recommend to me a new essay about “misandry” every week or two. I have been trying to write something in conversation with these, if only because trying to talk to their authors is like banging my head against a brick wall, but this is a pretty difficult proposition if you want to actually do a good job of it. I think this is version 6? Ugh.

Part of the problem is that it is fairly straightforward to write a proposal of “misandry” as a sociological concept built on feminist theory, but effectively impossible to write about the complex malaise of metacommentary around it. Writing the word without scare quotes is a massive liability to whatever goodwill I have scraped up among people whose opinions matter to me. I mostly try to write around this by avoiding the language of “oppression” and “privilege” and what-have-you when I write about feminism and masculinity, because I know that when I see a landmine, it behooves me not to jump on it with both feet. If I was going to write a book about something, it would be this, and distilling that into a <4k essay forced me to focus only on the parts that I think are particularly relevant to the current moment online. I am inevitably going to be disappointed with my own efforts here, but so it goes.

I suppose if I’m not writing things that make me sweat, I’m not doing it right, so. Once more with feeling, I guess. For my own safety, I am going to wear a helmet.

Maybe this one.

MEN ARE DOGS

America has strong feelings about pitbulls. They get a bad rap in part because they are strong and can bite very hard, but that reputation has a self-reinforcing effect: little dogs are known for being nippy and bad-mannered, but you don’t see a lot of pomeranian dog-fighting rings, do you?¹ People who buy dogs specifically in order to abuse them into being as violent as possible tend to pick pitbulls, rottweilers, boxers, and german shepherds, so these are the dogs we see featuring in statistics about which breeds bite and kill most often.

I can sympathize with someone who is wary of dogs because they were injured (or just frightened!) by a dog in the past, even if their wariness manifests as the kind of disproportionate anxiety that leads them to have panic attacks at the sight of a chihuahua. Our brains are pattern-seeking machines, and we do not always get to decide how the wires get laid down, and it is not some kind of moral failure if your lingering fears get the better of you. (Or at least, I certainly hope not. I would be a hypocrite to judge people whose lives are strongly affected by fear, including “irrational” fear— I am certainly no better than they are.)

My sympathy for the traumatized does not mean that I am pleased with rhetoric about the inevitable danger of “bully breeds.” I am still going to kiss my aunt’s pitbull on her sweet baby forehead next time I see her, even though the last time I saw her she was so happy to see me she almost split my lip by punching me in the face with her little cinderblock doggie-noggin. I did not have a lot of patience for a supercilious old friend who described dog owners as fundamentally insecure people— a dog is attentive and eager-to-please, it will love you no matter what you do, but cats need you to earn their love, a kind of relationship which demands greater maturity from their human companions. (Oh, brother.) I would also not hope that anyone who is afraid of dogs should soak in their fear forever— America loves dogs, so they are kind of everywhere. I would prefer to figure out how to help them live a life in public where passing a dog-walker on the sidewalk does not derail their entire day, you know?

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The crux of every essay defending “misandry” is basically a “bully breed” argument. The premise is that it’s fine to be cruel to other people if you have suffered enough, even if it is the abstracted kind of suffering that comes from sympathy for other peoples’ pain. I am so disturbed by the plight of women, she says, how can I not hate men? And then she goes on to ruminate at length on on how bad it feels to fear/experience some of the most horrible, dehumanizing things a person can suffer— rape, domestic violence, murder, sexual coercion, etc. This is mostly to overwhelm you with such gruesome imagery that you do not notice that she is conflating a lot of very-different things at once.

“lol this is what you sound like” — everyone to everyone else

The Misandry Stan™ is trying to convince the average feminist sympathizer that when a sex worker tells her sisters “I fucking hate men” after getting a black eye from a john, this is the moral equivalent of every time a grad school girlie has ever gone on twitter to roast her last cringy tinder date, which is the moral equivalent of when Shelby so-and-so makes a career out of filming her boyfriend fake-abusing her for outrage-engagement on TikTok.² Since we know there is some correlation between power and cultural esteem, we are asked to agree that it is universally reasonable— and even a kind of political praxis— for every woman to take out her righteous rage about rapists and wife-beaters and the whole history of women’s oppression on every man who slightly annoys her.

This is effectively impossible to argue with, for many of the same reasons Ian Danskin outlined in his series The Alt-Right Playbook. She is ruminating on complex questions of who counts as a victim of society, and what sort of social contract anyone can reasonably hold them to as if this complicates what she is actually trying to persuade you of, which is that no one should criticize her penchant to be an asshole to men online or in class or at parties. It is like watching a dog-bite victim show you her scars and rattle off dog-bite statistics to explain why she kicked your chihuahua like a football. Like, okay, I get where you’re coming from, and I’m truly sorry that happened to you, but I really would rather you not do that. He’s fragile.

So I did a lot of research trying to write this essay, to try and figure out how to engage honestly with such a touchy subject. I could give a laborious summary of some feminist theory and history (which would be very boring to everyone, especially people who already know what I’m talking about) or I could gloss over it for the sake of brevity (which would be confusing to the uninitiated), and I don’t really want to do either of those things. I will probably one day write about misandry as a load-bearing pillar of transphobia and the ideological lineage of transphobic feminisms, but it would take another month for me to figure out how to say that without capitulating to the “oppression olympics” bullshit that entreats people to care about men’s problems only because they feel a moral obligation to not be transphobic.

So this is all far too much to summarize in one essay, and besides, it’s a waste of time to try. Misandry stans do not care about the nuances of feminist theory or political organizing or any kind of humanist moral code, and they are the ones I am talking about.

REACTIONARY TENDENCIES

For a long time, I found it deeply confusing that there are any genuine misogynists left in the world, because it seems like a worldview which would take a lot of effort to maintain. If you really think that women are some kind of inferior species to you, you must not have gotten to know any, and you must certainly have never read any of their writing. People who wax poetic about ~women’s nature~ are mostly just showing me how narrow their experience is. When I see examples of some “alpha” jag talking evo-psych nonsense, I often wonder: does this guy live under a rock, or is he just lying?

And yeah, maybe! Maybe both. But there is also third option: his beliefs are sincerely held, it’s just that he builds his entire understanding of the world based on what he thinks will upset the people he doesn’t like, even if he winds up talking nonsense. Lucky for him, some hundreds-of-years-worth of patriarchal slander and cultural baggage is there for the taking, and it’s just the right tool for the job.

This is still misogyny, of course, but “misogyny” is used every day to refer to a lot of different things, and I want to draw distinction between misogyny which is motivated by men taking for granted an ingrained, ancient patriarchal paradigm vs misogyny which is motivated by a simple reactionary impulse to make women angry (maybe because you are seeking some kind of displaced revenge on your mother or your ex-wife or whatever). One of these misogynies is passively learned and habituated; the other is knowing and intentional. I think these differing misogynies require slightly different handling, but again, I’m not trying to keep you here all day. Another time, maybe.

Anyway. A huge portion of the manosphere’s fanbase are teenagers, who parrot misogynist cruelty not because they even really understand or believe it, but because they get a kick out of breaking a taboo. The main difference between creator and fan is that the adults have entrenched and repeated and intellectualized their taboo rhetoric so many times that now, they really do believe it. When self-declared “radical feminists” talk shit about men like their lives depend on it, I think they are chasing that same reactionary impulse. They are getting a kick out of breaking a taboo, even though no one they care about really thinks it is a taboo or is going to stop them. They will fight tooth and nail to cling to a narrative of reality not because it is accurate or moral or politically useful, but because it makes men angry, which is emotionally useful.

I relate! Righteous anger against a worthy target is maybe one of the most satisfying feelings in the world. I am not above that kind of thing— it is a lot of what made me re-write this essay so many times, to make sure I was not losing my head— and righteous rage has been a useful tool for political movements of all sorts. Likewise, displacing anger or fear is an extremely human foible, one we are all baited into a million times a day by social media, most advertising, and the entire news cycle.³

But I do not think misandry stans have really lived lives where they have seen zero evidence that men bleed as red as anyone else, or that patriarchy cherishes and empowers men as a matter of course, or that they really think saying “men who aren’t trash know we don’t mean them when we say ‘men are trash’” is convincing to anyone. That’s not the point.

Matty Lubchansky

The point is to drive boys like me insane. If there is any politics in it, their goal is to make any man who already takes feminism even half-seriously to never ask them for anything they don’t want to give, no matter how trivial the request or how deep the need. They want to ensure that any feminist conversation about men’s problems occurs in the context of opposition and competition. They are like that kid in school who follows you around mocking you and pulling your hair until you retaliate, so they can run screaming, “teacher, teacher, look what he did!!”

But I don’t really think any of this is politics— it’s just bullying. Hating men is not a feminist political act because it serves no feminist political goal. It does not reduce the incidence of bad men who do bad things, nor does it provide any help to the people who have had their lives upended by them. The radical part of radical feminism means radical acts towards radical change, not merely indulging in piecemeal vengeance by saying whatever out-of-pocket shit will piss off the people you think of as your enemy.⁴ Rage for the pain of your people will put gas in the tank, but you still have to drive the fucking car— ideally, somewhere other than directly into the nearest brick wall.

ORGANIZING STRATEGY

Today, this reactionary tendency seems to motivate pretty much everything in American politics and what we are calling “the culture war.” Nobody seems to have any principles or aspirations for a brighter future so much as they have a series of hot takes designed to get under the skin of whoever they think needs to be taken down a peg.

The result is that you wind up seeing a lot of feminist rhetoric and communities which are (at least as much as anyone else) intellectually dishonest, ethically inconsistent, and politically self-defeating. You see feminists capitulating to right-wing attitudes that feminism is so fragile that any critique amounts to an all-out attack, that it is impossible to improve life for women without making life worse for men, and that men have nothing to gain by understanding feminism or pursuing feminist political goals. (I don’t think any of this is true.) You see feminists affirming the patriarchal masculine ideal that men can find purpose only through labor and suffering on behalf of others, that men who are frail or need things are effectively worthless, and that men should really keep their pathetic baby feelings to themselves. You see women defending the bad behavior of the wealthiest people on earth, in service of claiming that men— yes, all men, including the marginalized ones— and their stupid pathetic egos are the root of all evil in the world, to the detriment of men whose lives are demonstrably, significantly worse than whatever pretty-straight-white-educated-etc women have to deal with. You see this constant stupid, pointless re-entrenchment of the battle of the sexes via pissing contests about who are the real victims of patriarchy rather than discussion of how any of us might actually solve our problems or live harmoniously next door to people we don’t love hanging out with.

I frankly find all of this so distressing to engage with that it makes my entire body shake. Everyone who slags off men like it’s their day job is a hair away from calling me a gender traitor the instant I annoy them, and I’m sorry, but my delicate faggot heart can’t take it. They are so busy soapboxing about how “misandry” is a trivial problem compared to rape and domestic violence (or even just the trivial slights traded among the rich-and-famous) that they have forgotten that organizing to actually solve these systemic problems is only possible with relationships built on a foundation of trust and respect. I would have to be stupid to organize with people who say that I do not have real problems, that my problems are actually theirs and they feel no duty of reciprocity to their allies— they are already throwing me under the bus over what they consider a trivial win on behalf of women. God knows what they would let happen to me if they really thought the stakes were any higher.

GOOD BOY

It is hard to guess what the stats about people hurt by dogs would look like if every dog was raised in a loving home— that is not the world we live in, and so it is hard to say anything about any animal’s natural inclinations regarding violence. Different breeds have fairly-predictable quirks, of course, and every dog has its own unique personality, but the difference between a good dog and a bad dog remains largely environmental. A good dog is one with a sense of purpose, who lives a low-stress life and has been given good reason to trust people; a bad dog is one that has been traumatized or neglected. It isn’t always possible to turn a bad dog into a good dog once the damage has been done— it is a lot of hard work, and you may need to mediate your expectations a bit— but that is not a good reason not to try, and if we really did try, we would certainly see less maulings every year. So then am I talking about women or men, here?

Trick question! My point with the stupid dog metaphor is just to say that human emotions are about as predictable as any other mammal’s. I am not interested in arguing about whether men or women deserve to be angry (or whether it’s reasonable for that anger to manifest as petty cruelty) on the scale of whether they have privilege or don’t— that is just a fucked up yardstick to measure by, and I can’t believe anyone who makes the case is taken seriously. We do not live in a world which allows any of us to get by without some level of hardship and tragedy. We already know how to care for the wounded, and every one of us is wounded. Arguing about the scale of one’s hurt is always going to be a losing game for everyone involved because it is an argument which considers care and dignity finite resources in short supply. We are all the victims of patriarchy, and we have a lot of bigger fish to fry.

I consider myself a leftist because I do not think we should take for granted that society must always have an alpha class while everyone else begs for table scraps. When it comes to actually achieving this goal, I am pretty tired of hearing about misogyny as “the root of the problem” of patriarchy— what are the roots of our solutions? Feminist and progressive politics have always made their case from an empathetic core: the idea that society ought to actually live up to its professed ideals about a universal human dignity. There is a lot of work to do there, and there will always be more to do.

1. You should not do this in real life, but I think I would kill to see a shounen anime or something about queer men running a purse-dog fighting ring. The camera would linger over their cute little faces while a voiceover conveys their internal monologues— about their need to succeed, their strategies for psyching out their opponents, their feelings about being a purse dog— and they would all look exactly like their owners, as pets tend to do. A dachsund whose heroes are all dobermans is a perfect transmasc allagory, it really writes itself. We could get the JJBA artist, maybe, or the folks who did Ping Pong. I would watch the shit out of that.

2. From Helena Aeberli’s essay, Dating In The Digital Panopticon:

So much of the relationship content I come across takes the form of a joke but plays into age old assumptions about gender — women are needy gossips and men are inattentive slobs, for example. Whilst the odd TikTok poking fun at one’s romantic partner seems innocuous and even feminist-minded, this trend coexists with an insidious rise in bio-essentialist rhetoric, from the disturbing rise in transphobia to the ‘girl phrenology’ propagated by young women (which I wrote about last year) to the popularity of misogynist pick-up artists like Andrew Tate.

3. I would hazard a guess that the popularity of indignant rage on social media is at least partially a displacement of the feeling that we are all watching horrible injustices every day and can do basically nothing to stop it. The government is going to keep ignoring the needs of the people in favor of funding forever-wars, the rich are going to keep profiteering off of poisoning the planet and using slave labor, everyone is broke and sick and stressed out— our indignity about it all has to go somewhere.

4. I am not particularly a fan of Shulamith Firestone, but I think she would spin in her grave if she knew how often self-declared “radical feminists” waste their energy whining about men on social media instead of, I don’t know, starting local chapters of Jane’s Revenge, or at least bailing their members out of jail. At this point, I don’t know that I can take seriously any self-declared “radical” writing about any political act legal enough to attach their full name to.