Great piece with so many good turn of phrases, Jesse! (I might start saying "don't punt the chihuahua" IRL.) Honestly, I wonder how much of this flavor of rudderless misandry is an outgrown of online feminism/consumer feminism, where the goal is less about organizing for change and more about self expression. Feminist books (especially radical feminist ones, where getting to the root is the whole MO) are more serious about feminism as an actionable personal and political project. It has bigger aims for the movement than selling "male tears" mugs.
Thank you so much!! That's definitely where it comes from, but I'd be so curious to see someone with a better education than me do a really detailed exploration of how that happened. Sexist advertising has been a thing since at least the 50s (buy this instant coffee, even your stupid husband can make it!) so it definitely feels like capitalism has embraced feminism rather than the other way around, but that's about as deep of a thought as I can muster about it. Jessa Crispin recommended that I check out Jacqueline Rose, who wrote about the connection between psychology and misogyny-- I'd be curious to see anyone do a similar analysis of misandry in the context of consumerism + bell hooks' thoughts about the connection between culture and politics.
I've been feeling like cultural landscape around gender has been caught in a cyclical stagnation and something needs to change and/or evolve in order break out of the tumble-dryer of discourse so I really appreciate you broaching this subject so thoughtfully. Rendering men as dogs (I chuckled mostly because I do not like dogs all that much and am allergic to them) is perhaps a great way of making the topic of misandry more legible. Thank you for writing what I know must have been a very difficult essay.
Thank you!! It definitely feels like there's been a kind of acceleration going on-- there's been less and less time between new "waves" of feminism, and with the added complications of trans issues rising into public discourse + the buildup of reactionary misogynist movements, it feels like *something* is about to burst. Hopefully not fascism! Maybe it'll be a good thing instead! Maybe we are close to a saturation point of reactionaries and dull old stereotypes, and people will get bored of all that and start thinking in new directions. 🤞 I was hesitant about the dog metaphor since comparing people to animals is usually pretty demeaning, so I'm relieved I got the point across in a good way.
i think we are really struggling to engineer the social equipment necessary to meaningfully address these topics because public consciousness about them has populated so rapidly, so interpersonally and individually its creating this intense pressure. its at a point where i've been debating all day about whether to repost your essay despite the fact i agree with so much of it because i don't want you to be inundated with undue scrutiny.
so much effort, especially in online discourse, veers towards individualistic diagnosis to which the logical consequence becomes divestment (or isolation).
co-operation is far more complex, embarrassing, messy and in the case of the differing power dynamic between genders, risky. we can decide whether we want to do that work or not but it will requiring fostering a new way of literally speaking to one another.
also as someone with an interest in sensitive topics, the comparison to animals was effective on an analytical level but a tad unsettling on an emotional level but i'm able to keep the latter in check because of the context of the former, and i can see why you were hesitant. i think its apt vehicle, the right kind of shock value
this is a really well thought out piece thank you for sharing! whilst I have always been of the opinion that misandry doesn't operate on the scale of misogyny by any stretch, it's interesting to see how men recieve the "fuck men" messaging.
It did make me wonder if White people feel the way that you describe men to feel when communities of Colour make generalised statements about White people online, and whether we should care about that? some food for thought.
I guess it's all a curse of the online age of soundbites and quotables. distilling complex messages into a 3 word sentence is easy, and shareable, but also loses nuance when in the hands of those outside the community ("Black Lives Matter" is but one example of this)
I think sometimes those who participate in discourse about whether misandry exists forget or dismiss that the girl who vents about her tinder date... will book another date, with another man. idk it's missed sometimes that the person posting "men are trash" loves the men in their life so deeply. and not to minimise what happens in our virtual lives, but isn't it our real, interpersonal connections that make the difference?
Thank you!! To answer the second question-- you're right, the misandry stans are kind of just having a little heteropessimism moment, but I think that anyone would rightfully call me a hypocrite if I was very kind to individual women to their faces and then talked smack about women online all day. But I'm less interested in judging the moral fiber of misandry stans on their bad days so much as I'm concerned with how those comments affect the boys who see them a lot-- especially boys who know they have already flunked out of the patriarchal paradigm of masculinity, who are isolated and sometimes dependent on feminist communities for both personal and political support.
For the first question: I'm so glad you asked, I think about that a lot!! I think the first thing that made me think "hm, maybe this 'men are trash' stuff is uncool" years and years ago was a friend pointing out that white girls who say that kind of thing implicitly mean black men, too (or otherwise talk about the world as if black men don't count as men and don't need to be considered). Personally, it's very easy for me to see black folks' expressions of resentment as simple venting about racism and not internalize it as a genuine indictment of my worth as a person, but I'm still reading and thinking about all the possible reasons why.
Contemporary liberal feminism is partially built on concepts from critical race theory, like privilege, right? But we have a tendency to treat racism and sexism as identical processes that just affect different types of people, rather than different processes which enmesh and bounce off of each other in all these complicated ways that can't be distilled down to just the psychology of "hate." So I try to be really careful when making those kinds of comparisons, and yeah, the short-form bombast of social media makes that kind of nuance extremely difficult!! I think #notallmen is a great example of anti-racist theory being re-translated through a feminist lens in a way that turned out pretty incoherent, but dissecting that alone would take a whole other essay.
"I think they are chasing that same reactionary impulse. They are getting a kick out of breaking a taboo"
I'm a man, but I was heavily involved in the feminist side of the reddit gender wars, frequenting SRS, KillAllMen, TheBluePill, etc. Debate-with-MRAs reddit. It may not surprise you to hear that as a boy on reddit, yes, this describes my motivations to a T. I was just a troll "for the other side" (I still am lbr).
My reading this year has made me really regret a lot of that stuff. I don't think we were directionally wrong, but I think in shirking empathy we drove a lot of people to a very bad place (or at least, held the door open for them).
I get it!! I was exactly the same way on Facebook like ten years ago, haha-- I picked a lot of fights with other peoples' conservative relatives, and at this point I'm off social media for the most part because I think the whole structure of it encourages that kind of impulse. I think the left lets ourselves get away with that kind of spitefulness because we do it out of a sense of injustice, but... well, I'm working on another piece about all that, too.
100% agree on social media. On the internet specifically, the dog piling of Lindsay Ellis is what sorta broke my willingness to try to find a way to 'use twitter well' - I just fundamentally think that short form algo sorted social media is an inherently broken way to talk to other people, now. On the ideological front... I just sorta ended up becoming a liberal, which I don't think was out of reaction to this stuff specifically but it did give me space to rethink things.
Reading the second piece right now btw, and it is a trip how much I'm relating to it. Thanks for posting these.
Okay, I lied in my response to you earlier, I was able to actually find the time to read this now. Really like this a lot and as I was reading it I kept thinking, MR. PRESIDENT, GET DOWN!! Your emphasis on needing SOLUTIONS is something that keeps pinging around in my head and motivates a lot of what I do nowadays. Obviously writing little theory posts on Substack (I'm vaguing myself here, not you) isn't "finding solutions" but having genuine conversations about things that we have knee-jerk reactions against talking about is how we get there.
I particularly like your distinction between the two kinds of misogyny and I think you hit the nail on the head with it. This is something I think a lot of different areas of the Left TM could internalize more -- people who are behaving the way we are just sort of conditioned to behave but could unlearn it and people who behaving that way because they want to make someone tick. There is also the third category of "people behaving that way because they are genuinely hateful" but that is much rarer than I think most people think and this is something I have to remind myself a lot too. Rhetoric that ignores the broader class oppression and encourages divisions instead is a rhetoric I strongly dislike and I wish people could understand that resolving some of the contradictions due to identity doesn't necessitate overthrowing a broader concept of solidarity and more nuanced understanding of human beings altogether. I'm just rambling now, haha. But I liked this a lot.
As a gay guy, does feminism and misandry hit differently for you? So much of the harsher feminist dialogue is about how straight men act (or fail to) in heterosexual relationships, how our sexuality is inherently dangerous to women…but none of that really applies to you. Thoughts?
That's a good question, thank you for asking!!! I kind of have a million thoughts that I touch on a lot in various essays here, but trying to make it short-ish for a comment:
I think what I've found is that, though people try to relate all of men's problems back to sexual obsession and violence, the fear and hatred of men day-to-day has a lot more to do with the threat of emotional harm rather than physical. Being gay (and also five foot three lol) doesn't stop people from treating me like I am incompetent, arrogant, entitled, intimidating, unfairly-empowered, etc. It doesn't stop people from treating me exactly the way they treat straight men: like a liability and a nuisance, a perpetual hurdle between them and their own success/wellbeing.
So a lot of shit-talk about men affects me in more-or-less identical ways as any other guy, but I have this additional social pressure to defend myself by drawing an ontological separation between myself and other men-- I'm good, I'm safe, I'm not like other boys! etc etc. But I wouldn't have transitioned if I didn't want to be alike to other men, and I wouldn't be gay if I didn't love men unironically, so I really resent this pressure and the alienation that springs from capitulating to it. I got into this a lot in my "ten years pt 2" & "trust no man" posts, if you feel like digging into what I've said about it long-form.
Feminist theory hits me in the good way most of the time, but feminist culture is another story. Even theory which is specifically fixated on hetero gender dynamics usually has some useful and meaningful things to say about the human condition, the kind of care and respect we owe each other, etc even if it doesn't have much imagination about what is up with [queer] men or queer masculinity. (bell hooks is a great example of this-- she didn't have great takes on queer stuff, but she was openly critical of man-hating styles of feminism and brought a lot of racial awareness to the table in a way that I think is overall merciful, nuanced, and under-considered among the mainstream.) The culture of TV shows and tiktok influencers and twitter arguments and what-have-you is mostly braindead, presumptive nonsense from people who don't consider that I exist, that I am a man as much as any other and love men unironically, that I have a demonstrably worse life than a lot of the people who shit-talk men as privileged and entitled, and that I can read and internalize what they're saying about us even when they do half-hearted and self-conscious caveats that they totally only mean straight/cis/white/etc men.
So that's pretty frustrating, and winds up being a lot of what I write about on here, even though I don't really like focusing on "post-feminist" critique as my like raison d'etre. I think its more interesting and useful to actively refuse that kind of separation-from-other-men along lines of orientation or what-have-you in favor of looking at what strife I have in common with other men who aren't exactly like me, so as to complicate the cultural-feminist idea that maleness affords a kind of unilateral power or ingrained patriarchal ego, and that you can talk shit about men all you like without considering the actual experiences of men who are listening.
I appreciate the long response, if you’re ever in Colorado I’ll buy you a beer and give you a hug for what I’m sure would be a fascinating conversation.
Many thanks!!!! 🙇♂️ I rewrote it so many times I was really sure I was just fully huffing my own farts by the end, so I'm relieved that I landed on something that resonates.
i don't monetize/paywall my substack so i'm not sure what you mean. i wrote the headline as kind of bait-and-switch because i assumed it would attract a type of "radical" feminist who thinks men are dogs in a derogatory way, when my point was to invoke the way that people love animals as an example for how we ought to love each other. i think it's pretty clear to everyone else who has liked or responded that my point is that men are human beings who deserve to not be treated like trash even by women who are mad at them for sympathetic political reasons, so i think you are really tilting at windmills here-- we probably agree with each other that the way women tend to talk about men is inappropriate and cruel.
i'm sorry to have upset you with the headline but i really think you'd likely agree with my whole point, so if you can't see past the superficial to the meat of it then i suppose you are just not my target audience! that's not your fault, you have just kind of proven my point about how the way people talk about men makes us all feel very bad and reactive, and that the internet especially exacerbates this problem, so thank you for that. for what it's worth if i could buy you a beer and give you an hour to vent about the whole mess, i absolutely would!
This was a really interesting read. I found myself resistant to your ideas at some points, but you were so thoughtful in your writing. I struggle with trying not to direct my anger at the patriarchy at all men, despite my awareness it is unhelpful/harmful. I think I am open to being more sympathetic, but I also can be overly sensitive to any perceived slight or misrepresentation made about feminists even if it is insightful and well meaning. Obviously it is not helpful to any meaningful change if feminists are easily detracted by such insignificant details as it stifles any kind of discussion and keeps everyone walking on eggshells.
I do agree social media and the greater exposure to the horrors and injustices of today has worsened the problem. It is an attempt at control or power at an individual level when faced with much larger social structures that we feel so helpless in. I think this is what makes it feel so justified when it is the opposite.
I do think the line drawn between active misogynists and violent men with men who more passively operate as part of patriarchal system is a bit too distinct. Violent misogyny is important to the maintenance of patriarchy and so has an effect on most men socialised in this system. I think that while most do not enact these violent ideas to such an extreme, they do perpetrate it and endorse it in smaller ways, which means they cannot wholly be separated and seen as distinct from those other men. That doesn’t mean men can’t unlearn these ideas or that women should be unsympathetic to these men, the framing just seems a little off.
Haha, I relate!! Thank you so much for reading with an open heart. I know my tone is pretty abrasive and sarcastic, so I really appreciate the patience.
I definitely didn't mean to imply that guys who pick up patriarchal messaging as a tool (rather than following it as a genuine belief system from childhood on) are somehow doing less damage or not contributing to the same problems, or anything like that. Those guys are total jags no matter where they got their ideas.
I think that the connection between social esteem and political oppression has been so heavily emphasized since the 70s-90s that today, we have a lot of social habits where the powerful pay lip service to the problems of minorities while refusing to change the systems that have a stronger impact those minorities' wellbeing. Like, a doctor's office can ask for pronouns on their forms, but that doesn't mean they're going to let me get surgery without $10k and a paternalistic therapist signing off on my sanity. Of course I would rather have that acknowledgement than not, but it's not a sufficient *alternative* to, say, removing the therapy letter requirement and establishing free public healthcare in America. Putting a line on a form is easy, so the easy thing is the thing that gets done, and our awareness that Respect Matters winds up being an excuse for why institutions can do little else.
So that's the sort of thing I have in mind when I push back against it. Cultural attitudes and political oppression are definitely correlated, but that correlation can be kind of mushy, right? Feminism made great strides in the last 100-odd years for women's legal and economic rights, but obviously, just because women can vote and have their own credit cards does not mean that cultural misogyny has gone away or is less of a big deal than it was back then. At the same time, I think if I want to say that I am doing something serious re: dismantling the patriarchy, I probably should do a bit more than simply love my mother and not tell rape jokes.
I think it's good that we do not praise men overmuch for simply not being overt misogynists, but when men's good social behavior is seen as achieving nothing while their bad behavior is seen as *enabling literal violence,* it makes men-who-care feel like they can do nothing but evil, because they are men. Whether or not we think that tying male identity to evil this way amounts to a political sort of problem, it certainly doesn't make decent dudes eager to do anything more than stay home and try not to make things *worse.*
That's what I'm working with so far, at least, but maybe you can see something I don't! If so I'd be interested to hear about it. I'm working on another piece about "misandry" that gets more into the weeds of feminist theory and the history of patriarchal culture, and I really want it to be Good, haha.
"misandry as a load-bearing pillar of transphobia and the ideological lineage of transphobic feminisms"
That sounds odd given how often TERFs have partnered with men, even anti-feminist men, in attacking trans people. I mean, classic example of TERFs in action: MichFest - they let men in & perform as along as they were trans. But they wouldn't allow trans women.
Considering MichFest's famous "for womyn-born womyn" policy, I don't think they had any sincere belief that they were including "real" men when they allowed entry to trans men. It's not particularly trans-affirming to include trans men only by framing us as a type of women.
But yes, transphobia and misogyny/misandry are more complex than hard-line separatism. I know it seems backwards, but there is some mutual benefit when bigots ally with token members of the groups they target, so long as those tokens agree with the bigoted point of view.
For instance, Blaire White and Buck Angel are popular among right-wingers because they make concessions about the "realness" of their genders and like to frame other trans people as mentally ill. This serves as cover for the 'phobes to say that their viewpoint is not ~really~ hateful, and also allows the tokenized person to individually separate themself from the targeted group in a "I'm one of the Good Ones" kind of way. Those two probably think they will be safe from the encroaching criminalization of trans healthcare, but they have made so much money already off this grift that the problems of the collective are not really their concern. So even though this uneasy alliance benefits them personally, it does not make the grift any less transphobic.
I think the same process is at play when men frame themselves as protecting women from the "other," dangerous men. Or when women buy into misogynist Christian attitudes about how a woman's place is as her husband's obedient helper. Or when nonwhite people hang out on white supremacist forums. etc etc-- All these ideologies are still bigoted towards the people they employ as supportive tokens.
Imagine if you added "wo" right before the beginning of the title. Oh, wait, one gender is allowed to be endlessly criticized and the other not so much. So does feminism mean "equality of treatment" anymore or did you schizo-lunatic factions of the XX-chromosomed half of humanity redefine the word *AGAIN* to mean something even more insane?
ah ok. i promise if you really read the thing you will find out that my whole point is to dissect the arguments feminists make which i think are dehumanizing to men, because i think that feminism is built on the basis of the idea of a fundamental human dignity which applies to men as much as it applies to women, it's just that a lot of people who write about men and feminism seem to have convinced themselves otherwise.
i get why the title set you off! that kind of thing triggers me, too, but i am doing a little thing they call "subversion" here. please read what i am actually saying, because we probably are already on the same page.
"Sure." Your overdressed salad managed to miss the simple fact that the natural trajectory of modern "feminism" as we know it culminates in the "radical" tendencies you profess to criticize, not to mention that this entire culture war is the product of a dialectically controlled clash as part of a self-accelerating whirlpool.
> "i am doing a little thing they call 'subversion'"
Ah yes, "the ends justify the means." Very Jesuitic.
So it turns out I was wrong about exactly *what* your problem is. At first I was naive enough to assume you were consistently honest in implied meaning between headlines and article content. It actually turns out you're no better than typical "news" article writers who post baity headlines only to indicate something completely different in the article body.
Something like that? It's not easy to dissect tbh! I was mostly thinking of the way that I have heard from a lot of feminist women that American patriarchy teaches men to hate women as a kind of cultural norm, which is reinforced more-or-less-subtly throughout our day through advertising, TV shows, comedy, social interactions, etc etc. There is a lot of emphasis on resisting patriarchy by "checking your privilege" and noticing these things and resisting what they are trying to tell you about how women think, what they are for, what they are worth, etc. (Or at least there was when I first started paying attention like ten years ago, I think that phrase has kind of a cringe-stink on it now.)
A lot of trans guys I know are very paranoid about internalizing this messaging and becoming misogynists on accident, but honestly I think it's pretty easy to resist if you like, respect your mom at all, or notice that some of your classmates are smarter than you, or really have ANY interactions with women you care about where they demonstrate their own humanity. So I wasn't really trying to surgically dissect all the reasons men wind up acting misogynist, I just want to complicate the narrative that every man who acts out is doing it because he was taught to act that way and just never bothered to question it. The evidence to that "women are people too" is so obvious it feels impossible to miss, so I feel like chalking misogyny up to that alone is oversimplifying whatever else might be going on, and I'd be curious to see what other folks might come up with when explaining how misogyny becomes a guy's whole shtick.
Yeah!! If you've got thoughts about what else might motivate misogyny into an "active" or intentional kind of form, I think it's worth it to think/write about!
Great piece with so many good turn of phrases, Jesse! (I might start saying "don't punt the chihuahua" IRL.) Honestly, I wonder how much of this flavor of rudderless misandry is an outgrown of online feminism/consumer feminism, where the goal is less about organizing for change and more about self expression. Feminist books (especially radical feminist ones, where getting to the root is the whole MO) are more serious about feminism as an actionable personal and political project. It has bigger aims for the movement than selling "male tears" mugs.
Looking forward to your next piece!
Thank you so much!! That's definitely where it comes from, but I'd be so curious to see someone with a better education than me do a really detailed exploration of how that happened. Sexist advertising has been a thing since at least the 50s (buy this instant coffee, even your stupid husband can make it!) so it definitely feels like capitalism has embraced feminism rather than the other way around, but that's about as deep of a thought as I can muster about it. Jessa Crispin recommended that I check out Jacqueline Rose, who wrote about the connection between psychology and misogyny-- I'd be curious to see anyone do a similar analysis of misandry in the context of consumerism + bell hooks' thoughts about the connection between culture and politics.
I've been feeling like cultural landscape around gender has been caught in a cyclical stagnation and something needs to change and/or evolve in order break out of the tumble-dryer of discourse so I really appreciate you broaching this subject so thoughtfully. Rendering men as dogs (I chuckled mostly because I do not like dogs all that much and am allergic to them) is perhaps a great way of making the topic of misandry more legible. Thank you for writing what I know must have been a very difficult essay.
Thank you!! It definitely feels like there's been a kind of acceleration going on-- there's been less and less time between new "waves" of feminism, and with the added complications of trans issues rising into public discourse + the buildup of reactionary misogynist movements, it feels like *something* is about to burst. Hopefully not fascism! Maybe it'll be a good thing instead! Maybe we are close to a saturation point of reactionaries and dull old stereotypes, and people will get bored of all that and start thinking in new directions. 🤞 I was hesitant about the dog metaphor since comparing people to animals is usually pretty demeaning, so I'm relieved I got the point across in a good way.
i think we are really struggling to engineer the social equipment necessary to meaningfully address these topics because public consciousness about them has populated so rapidly, so interpersonally and individually its creating this intense pressure. its at a point where i've been debating all day about whether to repost your essay despite the fact i agree with so much of it because i don't want you to be inundated with undue scrutiny.
so much effort, especially in online discourse, veers towards individualistic diagnosis to which the logical consequence becomes divestment (or isolation).
co-operation is far more complex, embarrassing, messy and in the case of the differing power dynamic between genders, risky. we can decide whether we want to do that work or not but it will requiring fostering a new way of literally speaking to one another.
also as someone with an interest in sensitive topics, the comparison to animals was effective on an analytical level but a tad unsettling on an emotional level but i'm able to keep the latter in check because of the context of the former, and i can see why you were hesitant. i think its apt vehicle, the right kind of shock value
this is a really well thought out piece thank you for sharing! whilst I have always been of the opinion that misandry doesn't operate on the scale of misogyny by any stretch, it's interesting to see how men recieve the "fuck men" messaging.
It did make me wonder if White people feel the way that you describe men to feel when communities of Colour make generalised statements about White people online, and whether we should care about that? some food for thought.
I guess it's all a curse of the online age of soundbites and quotables. distilling complex messages into a 3 word sentence is easy, and shareable, but also loses nuance when in the hands of those outside the community ("Black Lives Matter" is but one example of this)
I think sometimes those who participate in discourse about whether misandry exists forget or dismiss that the girl who vents about her tinder date... will book another date, with another man. idk it's missed sometimes that the person posting "men are trash" loves the men in their life so deeply. and not to minimise what happens in our virtual lives, but isn't it our real, interpersonal connections that make the difference?
Thank you!! To answer the second question-- you're right, the misandry stans are kind of just having a little heteropessimism moment, but I think that anyone would rightfully call me a hypocrite if I was very kind to individual women to their faces and then talked smack about women online all day. But I'm less interested in judging the moral fiber of misandry stans on their bad days so much as I'm concerned with how those comments affect the boys who see them a lot-- especially boys who know they have already flunked out of the patriarchal paradigm of masculinity, who are isolated and sometimes dependent on feminist communities for both personal and political support.
For the first question: I'm so glad you asked, I think about that a lot!! I think the first thing that made me think "hm, maybe this 'men are trash' stuff is uncool" years and years ago was a friend pointing out that white girls who say that kind of thing implicitly mean black men, too (or otherwise talk about the world as if black men don't count as men and don't need to be considered). Personally, it's very easy for me to see black folks' expressions of resentment as simple venting about racism and not internalize it as a genuine indictment of my worth as a person, but I'm still reading and thinking about all the possible reasons why.
Contemporary liberal feminism is partially built on concepts from critical race theory, like privilege, right? But we have a tendency to treat racism and sexism as identical processes that just affect different types of people, rather than different processes which enmesh and bounce off of each other in all these complicated ways that can't be distilled down to just the psychology of "hate." So I try to be really careful when making those kinds of comparisons, and yeah, the short-form bombast of social media makes that kind of nuance extremely difficult!! I think #notallmen is a great example of anti-racist theory being re-translated through a feminist lens in a way that turned out pretty incoherent, but dissecting that alone would take a whole other essay.
This is really good. If you wrote more about this I would read it.
Thank you so much!! I probably will, the brain worms got me bad.
Beautiful explanation of what many “feminists” don’t seem to get: patriarchy is a system, not a gender
Thank you & well said!! "Men" and "patriarchy" are not interchangeable concepts.
"I think they are chasing that same reactionary impulse. They are getting a kick out of breaking a taboo"
I'm a man, but I was heavily involved in the feminist side of the reddit gender wars, frequenting SRS, KillAllMen, TheBluePill, etc. Debate-with-MRAs reddit. It may not surprise you to hear that as a boy on reddit, yes, this describes my motivations to a T. I was just a troll "for the other side" (I still am lbr).
My reading this year has made me really regret a lot of that stuff. I don't think we were directionally wrong, but I think in shirking empathy we drove a lot of people to a very bad place (or at least, held the door open for them).
I get it!! I was exactly the same way on Facebook like ten years ago, haha-- I picked a lot of fights with other peoples' conservative relatives, and at this point I'm off social media for the most part because I think the whole structure of it encourages that kind of impulse. I think the left lets ourselves get away with that kind of spitefulness because we do it out of a sense of injustice, but... well, I'm working on another piece about all that, too.
100% agree on social media. On the internet specifically, the dog piling of Lindsay Ellis is what sorta broke my willingness to try to find a way to 'use twitter well' - I just fundamentally think that short form algo sorted social media is an inherently broken way to talk to other people, now. On the ideological front... I just sorta ended up becoming a liberal, which I don't think was out of reaction to this stuff specifically but it did give me space to rethink things.
Reading the second piece right now btw, and it is a trip how much I'm relating to it. Thanks for posting these.
Okay, I lied in my response to you earlier, I was able to actually find the time to read this now. Really like this a lot and as I was reading it I kept thinking, MR. PRESIDENT, GET DOWN!! Your emphasis on needing SOLUTIONS is something that keeps pinging around in my head and motivates a lot of what I do nowadays. Obviously writing little theory posts on Substack (I'm vaguing myself here, not you) isn't "finding solutions" but having genuine conversations about things that we have knee-jerk reactions against talking about is how we get there.
I particularly like your distinction between the two kinds of misogyny and I think you hit the nail on the head with it. This is something I think a lot of different areas of the Left TM could internalize more -- people who are behaving the way we are just sort of conditioned to behave but could unlearn it and people who behaving that way because they want to make someone tick. There is also the third category of "people behaving that way because they are genuinely hateful" but that is much rarer than I think most people think and this is something I have to remind myself a lot too. Rhetoric that ignores the broader class oppression and encourages divisions instead is a rhetoric I strongly dislike and I wish people could understand that resolving some of the contradictions due to identity doesn't necessitate overthrowing a broader concept of solidarity and more nuanced understanding of human beings altogether. I'm just rambling now, haha. But I liked this a lot.
As a gay guy, does feminism and misandry hit differently for you? So much of the harsher feminist dialogue is about how straight men act (or fail to) in heterosexual relationships, how our sexuality is inherently dangerous to women…but none of that really applies to you. Thoughts?
That's a good question, thank you for asking!!! I kind of have a million thoughts that I touch on a lot in various essays here, but trying to make it short-ish for a comment:
I think what I've found is that, though people try to relate all of men's problems back to sexual obsession and violence, the fear and hatred of men day-to-day has a lot more to do with the threat of emotional harm rather than physical. Being gay (and also five foot three lol) doesn't stop people from treating me like I am incompetent, arrogant, entitled, intimidating, unfairly-empowered, etc. It doesn't stop people from treating me exactly the way they treat straight men: like a liability and a nuisance, a perpetual hurdle between them and their own success/wellbeing.
So a lot of shit-talk about men affects me in more-or-less identical ways as any other guy, but I have this additional social pressure to defend myself by drawing an ontological separation between myself and other men-- I'm good, I'm safe, I'm not like other boys! etc etc. But I wouldn't have transitioned if I didn't want to be alike to other men, and I wouldn't be gay if I didn't love men unironically, so I really resent this pressure and the alienation that springs from capitulating to it. I got into this a lot in my "ten years pt 2" & "trust no man" posts, if you feel like digging into what I've said about it long-form.
Feminist theory hits me in the good way most of the time, but feminist culture is another story. Even theory which is specifically fixated on hetero gender dynamics usually has some useful and meaningful things to say about the human condition, the kind of care and respect we owe each other, etc even if it doesn't have much imagination about what is up with [queer] men or queer masculinity. (bell hooks is a great example of this-- she didn't have great takes on queer stuff, but she was openly critical of man-hating styles of feminism and brought a lot of racial awareness to the table in a way that I think is overall merciful, nuanced, and under-considered among the mainstream.) The culture of TV shows and tiktok influencers and twitter arguments and what-have-you is mostly braindead, presumptive nonsense from people who don't consider that I exist, that I am a man as much as any other and love men unironically, that I have a demonstrably worse life than a lot of the people who shit-talk men as privileged and entitled, and that I can read and internalize what they're saying about us even when they do half-hearted and self-conscious caveats that they totally only mean straight/cis/white/etc men.
So that's pretty frustrating, and winds up being a lot of what I write about on here, even though I don't really like focusing on "post-feminist" critique as my like raison d'etre. I think its more interesting and useful to actively refuse that kind of separation-from-other-men along lines of orientation or what-have-you in favor of looking at what strife I have in common with other men who aren't exactly like me, so as to complicate the cultural-feminist idea that maleness affords a kind of unilateral power or ingrained patriarchal ego, and that you can talk shit about men all you like without considering the actual experiences of men who are listening.
I appreciate the long response, if you’re ever in Colorado I’ll buy you a beer and give you a hug for what I’m sure would be a fascinating conversation.
Thank you so much!! Colorado rules and I'd love to wind up back there someday, so I'll keep that in mind. 🤝✨
Brilliant essay on a gnarly topic. One of those where I really had to fight to choose which quotes to restack because there were so many great ones.
Many thanks!!!! 🙇♂️ I rewrote it so many times I was really sure I was just fully huffing my own farts by the end, so I'm relieved that I landed on something that resonates.
Nope, fucking nailed it. I’m gonna re-read it just for effect.
"I rewrote it so many times" And yet you couldn't improve it one bit.
you literally didn't read it!!
Not anymore; so now the conclusion I must come to is that you scam non-subscribers with acutely inflammatory headlines for attention.
i don't monetize/paywall my substack so i'm not sure what you mean. i wrote the headline as kind of bait-and-switch because i assumed it would attract a type of "radical" feminist who thinks men are dogs in a derogatory way, when my point was to invoke the way that people love animals as an example for how we ought to love each other. i think it's pretty clear to everyone else who has liked or responded that my point is that men are human beings who deserve to not be treated like trash even by women who are mad at them for sympathetic political reasons, so i think you are really tilting at windmills here-- we probably agree with each other that the way women tend to talk about men is inappropriate and cruel.
i'm sorry to have upset you with the headline but i really think you'd likely agree with my whole point, so if you can't see past the superficial to the meat of it then i suppose you are just not my target audience! that's not your fault, you have just kind of proven my point about how the way people talk about men makes us all feel very bad and reactive, and that the internet especially exacerbates this problem, so thank you for that. for what it's worth if i could buy you a beer and give you an hour to vent about the whole mess, i absolutely would!
> "i wrote the headline as kind of bait-and-switch"
Understood.
This was a really interesting read. I found myself resistant to your ideas at some points, but you were so thoughtful in your writing. I struggle with trying not to direct my anger at the patriarchy at all men, despite my awareness it is unhelpful/harmful. I think I am open to being more sympathetic, but I also can be overly sensitive to any perceived slight or misrepresentation made about feminists even if it is insightful and well meaning. Obviously it is not helpful to any meaningful change if feminists are easily detracted by such insignificant details as it stifles any kind of discussion and keeps everyone walking on eggshells.
I do agree social media and the greater exposure to the horrors and injustices of today has worsened the problem. It is an attempt at control or power at an individual level when faced with much larger social structures that we feel so helpless in. I think this is what makes it feel so justified when it is the opposite.
I do think the line drawn between active misogynists and violent men with men who more passively operate as part of patriarchal system is a bit too distinct. Violent misogyny is important to the maintenance of patriarchy and so has an effect on most men socialised in this system. I think that while most do not enact these violent ideas to such an extreme, they do perpetrate it and endorse it in smaller ways, which means they cannot wholly be separated and seen as distinct from those other men. That doesn’t mean men can’t unlearn these ideas or that women should be unsympathetic to these men, the framing just seems a little off.
Haha, I relate!! Thank you so much for reading with an open heart. I know my tone is pretty abrasive and sarcastic, so I really appreciate the patience.
I definitely didn't mean to imply that guys who pick up patriarchal messaging as a tool (rather than following it as a genuine belief system from childhood on) are somehow doing less damage or not contributing to the same problems, or anything like that. Those guys are total jags no matter where they got their ideas.
I think that the connection between social esteem and political oppression has been so heavily emphasized since the 70s-90s that today, we have a lot of social habits where the powerful pay lip service to the problems of minorities while refusing to change the systems that have a stronger impact those minorities' wellbeing. Like, a doctor's office can ask for pronouns on their forms, but that doesn't mean they're going to let me get surgery without $10k and a paternalistic therapist signing off on my sanity. Of course I would rather have that acknowledgement than not, but it's not a sufficient *alternative* to, say, removing the therapy letter requirement and establishing free public healthcare in America. Putting a line on a form is easy, so the easy thing is the thing that gets done, and our awareness that Respect Matters winds up being an excuse for why institutions can do little else.
So that's the sort of thing I have in mind when I push back against it. Cultural attitudes and political oppression are definitely correlated, but that correlation can be kind of mushy, right? Feminism made great strides in the last 100-odd years for women's legal and economic rights, but obviously, just because women can vote and have their own credit cards does not mean that cultural misogyny has gone away or is less of a big deal than it was back then. At the same time, I think if I want to say that I am doing something serious re: dismantling the patriarchy, I probably should do a bit more than simply love my mother and not tell rape jokes.
I think it's good that we do not praise men overmuch for simply not being overt misogynists, but when men's good social behavior is seen as achieving nothing while their bad behavior is seen as *enabling literal violence,* it makes men-who-care feel like they can do nothing but evil, because they are men. Whether or not we think that tying male identity to evil this way amounts to a political sort of problem, it certainly doesn't make decent dudes eager to do anything more than stay home and try not to make things *worse.*
That's what I'm working with so far, at least, but maybe you can see something I don't! If so I'd be interested to hear about it. I'm working on another piece about "misandry" that gets more into the weeds of feminist theory and the history of patriarchal culture, and I really want it to be Good, haha.
"misandry as a load-bearing pillar of transphobia and the ideological lineage of transphobic feminisms"
That sounds odd given how often TERFs have partnered with men, even anti-feminist men, in attacking trans people. I mean, classic example of TERFs in action: MichFest - they let men in & perform as along as they were trans. But they wouldn't allow trans women.
Considering MichFest's famous "for womyn-born womyn" policy, I don't think they had any sincere belief that they were including "real" men when they allowed entry to trans men. It's not particularly trans-affirming to include trans men only by framing us as a type of women.
But yes, transphobia and misogyny/misandry are more complex than hard-line separatism. I know it seems backwards, but there is some mutual benefit when bigots ally with token members of the groups they target, so long as those tokens agree with the bigoted point of view.
For instance, Blaire White and Buck Angel are popular among right-wingers because they make concessions about the "realness" of their genders and like to frame other trans people as mentally ill. This serves as cover for the 'phobes to say that their viewpoint is not ~really~ hateful, and also allows the tokenized person to individually separate themself from the targeted group in a "I'm one of the Good Ones" kind of way. Those two probably think they will be safe from the encroaching criminalization of trans healthcare, but they have made so much money already off this grift that the problems of the collective are not really their concern. So even though this uneasy alliance benefits them personally, it does not make the grift any less transphobic.
I think the same process is at play when men frame themselves as protecting women from the "other," dangerous men. Or when women buy into misogynist Christian attitudes about how a woman's place is as her husband's obedient helper. Or when nonwhite people hang out on white supremacist forums. etc etc-- All these ideologies are still bigoted towards the people they employ as supportive tokens.
Imagine if you added "wo" right before the beginning of the title. Oh, wait, one gender is allowed to be endlessly criticized and the other not so much. So does feminism mean "equality of treatment" anymore or did you schizo-lunatic factions of the XX-chromosomed half of humanity redefine the word *AGAIN* to mean something even more insane?
lol what. did you read what i actually wrote??
Do I even need to clarify- oh wait, for you cases of insanity, I guess I do.
So are you also going to publish an article entitled "women are d*gs" or is one gender more immune against criticism than the other?
ah ok. i promise if you really read the thing you will find out that my whole point is to dissect the arguments feminists make which i think are dehumanizing to men, because i think that feminism is built on the basis of the idea of a fundamental human dignity which applies to men as much as it applies to women, it's just that a lot of people who write about men and feminism seem to have convinced themselves otherwise.
i get why the title set you off! that kind of thing triggers me, too, but i am doing a little thing they call "subversion" here. please read what i am actually saying, because we probably are already on the same page.
"Sure." Your overdressed salad managed to miss the simple fact that the natural trajectory of modern "feminism" as we know it culminates in the "radical" tendencies you profess to criticize, not to mention that this entire culture war is the product of a dialectically controlled clash as part of a self-accelerating whirlpool.
> "i am doing a little thing they call 'subversion'"
Ah yes, "the ends justify the means." Very Jesuitic.
i'm not sure what you're talking about but i hope you feel better soon
So it turns out I was wrong about exactly *what* your problem is. At first I was naive enough to assume you were consistently honest in implied meaning between headlines and article content. It actually turns out you're no better than typical "news" article writers who post baity headlines only to indicate something completely different in the article body.
Something like that? It's not easy to dissect tbh! I was mostly thinking of the way that I have heard from a lot of feminist women that American patriarchy teaches men to hate women as a kind of cultural norm, which is reinforced more-or-less-subtly throughout our day through advertising, TV shows, comedy, social interactions, etc etc. There is a lot of emphasis on resisting patriarchy by "checking your privilege" and noticing these things and resisting what they are trying to tell you about how women think, what they are for, what they are worth, etc. (Or at least there was when I first started paying attention like ten years ago, I think that phrase has kind of a cringe-stink on it now.)
A lot of trans guys I know are very paranoid about internalizing this messaging and becoming misogynists on accident, but honestly I think it's pretty easy to resist if you like, respect your mom at all, or notice that some of your classmates are smarter than you, or really have ANY interactions with women you care about where they demonstrate their own humanity. So I wasn't really trying to surgically dissect all the reasons men wind up acting misogynist, I just want to complicate the narrative that every man who acts out is doing it because he was taught to act that way and just never bothered to question it. The evidence to that "women are people too" is so obvious it feels impossible to miss, so I feel like chalking misogyny up to that alone is oversimplifying whatever else might be going on, and I'd be curious to see what other folks might come up with when explaining how misogyny becomes a guy's whole shtick.
Yeah!! If you've got thoughts about what else might motivate misogyny into an "active" or intentional kind of form, I think it's worth it to think/write about!