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My earlier post, “Re-Thinking Misandry” generated considerable interest. Some comments were positive, some negative, some constructive, some remarkably obscene, and much of it debating male privilege vs. female privilege: as in “Women and children first” and “At least you know the kid is yours.” Clearly both misogyny and misandry are alive and, well, sick. To visit the topic again may be helpful.
I received two emails, one personal and one forwarded by PT, which I would like to share and comment on.
“I found your article on misandry. I really liked it — I didn’t think about it this way. I think I am a misandrist. I have about 3 awesome male friends. And even them I secretly hate. And the rest of males I hate with passion. So my dating scene is out. I initially attract males, but then I just turn into a devil and emotionally attack them. I don’t like this state at all. My hate is eating me up. And I hit a downward spiral. Could you please suggest some materials on misandry to read. And then maybe I will understand men and will be able to bridge this gap or something…. And maybe I will stop hating one day. One day I started learning about misogyny. And I started hating males. I see misogyny everywhere, and I turned into a very pissed off woman….I have also been trafficked, raped, used, you name it. But I also have been saved and helped. By males. But I still hate their ways though. I’m kinda stuck and don’t know how to fix this problem.”
We corresponded for a while, and one can, I think, see and sympathize with “this problem.” The second comment is from September, signed, ominously, “dickchopper” :
“Don’t rethink a thing. You should not rethink hating males. They deserve to be hated and this article is nothing but mansplaining, manipulative rubbish. Males are sex-addicted psychopaths. A few are full-blown psychopaths, the rest have varying levels of it. Most want to screw anything halfway decent looking and are obsessed with screwing…They love to lie, manipulate and they will never love a woman the same way she is able to love him. He will also not love your children the same way you do. The male was built for screwing and building. A mechanical, basic creature. I will never understand the poor brainwashed women who marry these degenerates.”
This one is reminiscent of Valerie Solanas, author of The S.C.U.M. Manifesto, the Society for Cutting Up Men. The first reader “really liked it,” the second described it as “rubbish.” Take your pick. I am saddened by both of them. They have obviously been used and abused by men, and it is no consolation or solution to note that many men have been used and abused by women, and also by other men. Suffering inflicted by other humans is part of life, unfortunately, in both personal and global conflicts. But we do have to be careful with hatred, as the first woman notes. Yet hatred learned may be unlearned.
Perhaps the new book by P. Nathanson and K. Young, Replacing Misandry (2015) — the fourth volume in their series — will prove useful in replacing it with something more positive.
A friend forwarded this video with Lorena Bobbitt being applauded, which demonstrates a horrific degree of misandry. The stereotype of women as “warm and nurturing” takes a hit here. If anything similar had been done by a man to a woman, nothing like this would be tolerated. Equity feminism has its work cut out.
The treatment of veterans received considerable media attention on November 11, Remembrance Day. Their treatment by the late Harper government was described by many commentators as mean, shameful, ungrateful and unacceptable, including the closing of nine Veterans Affairs offices across the country, the abolition of the annual pension in favour of a lump sum payment, the lack of facilities for helping vets with PTSD in timely fashion and the expulsion of so many veterans from the military when considered not fit for combat (rather than re-deploying them elsewhere in the military: 1,900 in fiscal 2014). Still, they did help oust Harper. 158 soldiers were killed in Afghanistan before the Canadian combat mission ended, including at least six by suicide. But the war continues: another 53 completed suicide on their return, failed by the military, the Department of National Defence and their government. Such suicides continue and now constitute over one third of the combat total. This is not misandry as hatred, as seen in the above correspondences, but misandry as contempt: “who cares?” Men in this context are what Farrell calls “The disposable sex.”
Are men in crisis? This is the fashionable question now. Well, some are. Some are not.
Should masculinity be re-defined? Some say yes. Some say no. But it all depends on how you define masculinity, and whether you can talk of masculinity or plural masculinities. Some homogenise men, some do not. So it gets complicated. And much depends on one’s personal experiences of men. The Economist (May 30, 2015) published a cover story, entitled “The Weaker Sex. No jobs, no family, no prospects.” (It was mentioned in my last post.) The subtitle is “Men Adrift. Badly educated men in rich countries have not adapted well to trade, technology or feminism.” Here are some facts on the male ownership of power from the Economist, in percentages:
Forbes self-made billionaires: 97.6
Fortune 500 CEOs: 95.2
Heads of Government: 92.8
Central Bank Governors: 91.4
Here are some other facts about men from the same:
Prisoners in the U.S.: 93
Global murder victims: 79
Global deaths from suicide: 66
There is more. Add U.S. military deaths (about 99% of the total), occupational fatalities (about 92-4%), accidental deaths (about 66%), premature deaths, and the picture of alleged male patriarchal privilege and “hegemonic masculinity” shifts. So men “dominate” the top and bottom strata of society.
The old solid working class jobs ruled by brawn are largely gone. The primary sector (mining, logging, deep sea fishing, agriculture) has mostly been worn out, mechanised like agriculture or mechanised and exploited to death like the fisheries. The secondary sector, industry, has been largely automated or exported and outsourced. Both sectors were largely male jobs — or male dominated, as some would say. It is the service sector which is expanding: female friendly as they say, (not female dominated!). In 12 quick years, 2003 to 2015, the structure of employment in the US has changed perceptibly: agriculture down from 3% to 1%, industry down from 23% to 16.7%, but the service sector up from 74% to 81%. And the unemployment rate is 8.1%, up from 4.1%. (Economist Pocket World in Figures 2003, 2015). Meanwhile, between 1979 and 2013, the pay for men with only a high school diploma fell 21% in real terms, for those who had dropped out it fell 34%, while for women who graduated high school it rose 3% and for those who had not, it fell only 12%, according to the Economist article.
Good for women, not so good for men. Indeed the adaptations of capitalism to global markets have hit many men very hard. The shift from brawn and sweat to brain and charm, from production to service, is not easy for men to adapt to.
But this is not just about global markets, nor is it just about money, though money matters, a lot. Marriage and happiness are at stake here. The pill has enabled fertility to plummet, and this has opened up, or reinforced, a huge class divide, and a gender divide. 23% of married women with children now earn more than their husbands. Younger women are now better educated on average, than younger men, earning about 60% of Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees and about 50% of Doctorates in the U.S. and Canada. Women do not want unemployed partners, in general. And employment rates for working age men have fallen: in Britain from 92% in 1971 to 76% in 2013; and in the U.S. from 95% in the mid-60s to 84% in 2010. In 1970 most (white) married Americans said that they were “very happy”: 73% of the more educated and 67% of the working class. Today the educated are about the same, but among the working class happiness levels have dropped to barely 50%. At the same time the structure of the family is changing. 5% of births to women with college degrees are non-marital, but 50% of births to women without college degrees are non-marital. Boys without fathers do not generally fare well, and the poverty rate for single mother families is 31% in the U.S. In England and Wales the proportion of single mother births rose from 9% in 1974 to 48% in 2013. I wonder how much misandry accounts for “deadbeat dads,” and how much these dads account for misandry.
The situation is similar in Canada, which was founded on the cod and the beaver and First Nations land. The cod and beaver are now mostly gone; now Canada is founded on the service industry. With some poetic licence we might say that our economic foundations have shifted from cod and brawn to coffee and brains and smiles, men to women.
In sum, the victimisation of men by global capitalism, the failures of the education system, incarceration policies, inadequate industrial safety legislation and enforcement, health policies, wars, presumably also affect women negatively. Still, if women have adapted to the changing times, so can men, and so they are. The thing is, misandry is not just personal, as with those two emails above, it is institutional in all those health and education and safety and military policies. It is an almost invisible and largely unrecognized problem. Not that all men are victims, but some are, and misandry is not a solution.
To be continued.
