How misandry is pervasive in popular culture
This article is a segment of a larger article
In contrast with common complaints by feminists about alleged misogyny in popular culture, the stark reality is that popular culture has become exceedingly misandrist. According to the Canadian Association for Equality :
Negative and ‘flawed’ images of men are perpetuated by most genre of popular culture — books, television shows, movies, greetings cards, comic streeps, ads and commercials and more. Men and boys are widely represented as violent and aggressive thieves, thugs, murderers, wife and girlfriend bashers, sexual abusers, molesters, perverts, irresponsible deadbeat dads and philanderers, even though, in reality, only a small proportion of men act out these roles and behaviours. Media discourses are powerful and shape perspectives of social attitudes. While much literature space has been dedicated to understanding how media influences the role of women in society, little work has been dedicated to media and the portrayal of men.
Media sources have a tendency to deny, minimize and at times ridicule male victimization such as physical abuse, sexual abuse, verbal abuse, and emotional trauma to name a few. The message we give to male victims is that they either “deserved it”, “asked for it”, and/or are “lying”. Violence towards males is normalized in our society, and so are the images that reinforce harmful stereotypes about males and masculinity. The male voice is further stifled by the media’s portrayal of the “butch man”, meaning that if a male victim wishes to complain or report an incident, they will be “whining” because society expects them to “take it as a man”.
Prison rape, injury to a man’s genitals, sexual abuse of boys by women under the guise of initiation and other behaviours, easily identifiable as physical or sexual abuse and assault when they happen to girls or women, are exploited for humor so regularly that they have become a norm in comedy films and entertainment.
Male sexuality faces a growing trend towards objectification in mass media strikingly similar or parallel to the objectification of women which has been widely documented. Among many other examples, pause to consider the mass appreciation of movies such as “Magic Mike”, shirtless photos of sexy male celebrities in Cosmo, or the “14 photos of hot guys who have great butts” on Elite Daily. The reality is that images that objectify, demonize and devalue men have negative consequences for men, women, and gender relations itself.
The very notion that men have a unique set of issues and concerns including fatherlessness, increasing suicide rates and declining post secondary enrollment rates has been met with criticism. Conferences with titles such as “What makes a man: Drawing a new map to manhood,” which seek to define the “right” kind of masculinity, would surely be considered simplistic and offensive — had males not been the topic discussed — are attended in large numbers. On the other hand, events with titles such as “From Misogyny to Misandry to Intersexual Dialogue”, or “Boys to Men: Transforming the Boys Crisis into our Sons’ Opportunities”, seeking safe spaces for men to discuss uniquely male problems across university campuses are protested. Misandry exists, and it is has become pervasive enough to enter academic, legal and political forums.
Misogyny is an attitude that nobody in his or her right mind would seek to defend, and popular culture takes a misogynist stance at its own peril.
Not so, misandry. It is perfectly acceptable — indeed, common — to portray men in misandric terms as violent, vulgar, insensitive boors, argue Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young in their provocative new book, Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture (McGill-Queen’s University Press).
Their research, which will eventually fill three volumes, is the result of 15 years of discussions between them about gender and its complex role in society and inter-sexual relations.
“We began to see a pattern emerging,” asserts Young, a religious studies professor. “And we were surprised at the extent of the misandry depicted. That, and the fact that there was absolutely no critique of it whatsoever. It just isn’t taken seriously.”
They write, “Misandry has become so embedded in our culture that few people — including men — even recognize it.” Furthermore, “these problems should sound very familiar. Precisely the same ones arose 30 years ago, in connection with discussions of women as portrayed in popular culture.” In other words, there’s a backlash in evidence. Ideological feminism, they argue, has twisted its disgust at the negative portrayals of women that were the norm 30 years ago into a derisive outlook on men.
“It’s part of a formula in our culture that women are victims, which leaves men to be portrayed as victimizers,” according to Nathanson, who has earned four degrees at McGill, including a PhD in religious studies. “It’s an ideological approach that insists that evil originates with “them.” This “them” changes over the course of time, but it is always some recognizable other, whether of a different race, nationality, or gender.”
Because misandry goes unchallenged, men make for a safe source of evil, one that is unlikely to cause the purveyors of pop culture any trouble by offending a segment of their market.
In Woke Father, author Katarina argues :
You might think misandry is not so popular today, since we’re doing a hell of a decent job at providing equal rights and opportunities for women. But on the contrary, misandry is rife throughout pop culture, across social media and even across the globe.
One way to show our deep hatred for the male population is wearing one of these beauties. Many think it’s edgy, funny, thought provoking, or maybe even profound.
Some retailers go as far as to print logos such as “Boys are stupid”.
Social media is rife with feminists posing with attires such as these. Most of the time, the people wearing them are the ones who genuinely hate men. All too often, they are also self-proclaimed feminists. The excuses are always the same. These women were abused in the past. They remain victims still, and apparently all men in the world are singularly to blame for it.
Equality in this case means silencing and destroying “toxic masculinity”. It also means silencing men in general, because a certain group of people decided that everything about men is evil.
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Diversity. That’s one way to put it. The other is simpler and truer — you are a privileged white man and you can no longer work here, even though you are an extremely experienced professional. You are apparently not part of what we are now calling “diversity”. Your opinion doesn’t matter.The BBC is on the misandry wagon, willing to remove male employees simply to make room for more females, stating that women should make up half of the staff by 2020. Basically, you can lose your job only because you are a man. And for no other reason at all.
A popular song by Carrie Underwood depicting men as cheating pigs and how it’s apparently okay to key his car has hit around 132,455 views and climbing. The song may be catchy, but the message is horrible. The boyfriend is a cheater. But instead of confronting the situation like a mature adult, you are somehow entitled to enter full-on crazy mode.
The only requirement for entitlement to use violence in response to a non-violent situation is apparently being a a woman. Somehow, that gives you justification for violent revenge and even gender-based hatred. These are behaviors we would never accept from men. Yet we somehow find a way to excuse ourselves from being held up to those same standards. That’s called hypocrisy.
The uncomfortable truth is that misandry, as well as misogyny, are real threats to people. It has been debated that misogyny should be treated as a hate crime, but nothing has been said about misandry. Actually, the opposite is true.
Feminists claim that they should be treated differently, because women were the ones who have been pushed down in the past, while men were bearing the fruits of their freedom.
This actually has no reflection in reality, or even history for that matter. Hatred towards men is very real and sometimes leads to dire consequences, such as cases where good fathers are refused custody of their own children.
In Commentary, author Christine Rosen states :
That was then — in 2015, CafePress began selling mugs with the words “male tears” on them. Now the misandry seems less jokey and performative and more in earnest. “It seems logical to hate men,” wrote Suzanna Danuta Walters, a sociology professor and editor of the “gender studies journal” Signs, in a Washington Post op-ed this past June. “When they have gone low for all of human history, maybe it’s time for us to go all Thelma and Louise and Foxy Brown on their collective butts,” Walters wrote, denouncing the U.S. as the “land of legislatively legitimated toxic masculinity.” She ended her screed by calling on men to “Lean out so we can actually just stand up without being beaten down. Pledge to vote for feminist women only. Don’t run for office. Don’t be in charge of anything. Step away from the power. … We have every right to hate you. You have done us wrong. #BecausePatriarchy.”
In a recent interview in Bustle, Blythe Roberson describes her “hilariously relatable” new book, How to Date Men When You Hate Men, as crucial because “the patriarchy messes with everything, even romance.” The book begins: “I think about men all the time. About how they, individually (Donald Trump), and as a group, are oppressing me.” Later, she writes, “I think that if you picked up a book with a title about hating men, you’re already pretty hip to the ubiquity of sexism and toxic masculinity. Young men are taking guns to school and shooting their classmates. An extremely high percentage of any men you’ve ever heard of have recently been revealed to lie somewhere on the spectrum of creepy to sexual criminal. … Men: they need to get their shit together!” The book, which comes out in January 2019, is marketed as “comedy-philosophy.”
The same misandry-laced condescension is evident in a recent opinion piece by Valenti in the New York Times. The essay, which claims to teach readers “What Feminists Can Do for Boys,” takes as its starting assumption that boys are natural-born misogynists. “Budding patriarchs could use our help,” the subhead observes. Valenti suggests that every person with XY chromosomes and an Internet connection is a future incel sociopath. “Feminism has long focused on issues of sexual assault, reproductive rights, harassment and more,” Valenti concludes. “But issues don’t hurt women, men do. Until we grapple with how to stop misogynists themselves — starting with ensuring boys don’t grow up to be one — women will never be free.” This from the woman who bathes in male tears.
Buried in the feminist excuse-making for misandry is a demand for absolute tolerance for everything women do and zero tolerance for anything remotely sexist that men might do.
But the new misandry is not, as Bitch magazine claims, merely an “extended exercise in harmless trolling” (which was also the excuse that Jeong used to justify her racist tweeting).
It has a corrosive effect on debate — and not just online — at a time when civil debate is more necessary than ever. Even if you accept the left-progressive notion that a woman could never be a misandrist #BecausePatriarchy, or that a racial minority could never express racist views because minorities lack power, no decent person should accept the gleefulness with which they bandy about cruel and denigrating remarks.
A well-functioning, free society should always discourage hatred aimed at groups because of the color of their skin or their sex or their religious faith or their sexual orientation. A man who attached #KillAllWomen hashtags to his tweets and then claimed it was all a big joke probably wouldn’t get much sympathy from the likes of these performative misandrists. (Nor would he be offered a job on the New York Times’ op-ed page.) The First Amendment protects the misogynist’s and the misandrist’s right to spew their venom. But it doesn’t make either any less guilty of noxious incivility.
Not every feminist has been enthusiastic about the turn to misandry. Writing in the British paper Metro, Miranda Larbi suggested feminists pledge to distance themselves from misandry: “In 2018, more of us need to commit to speaking less generally and more specifically when we’re taking men to task. We need to make an effort to consider their opinions before we negate them entirely. We need to value the male experience as much as we do the female. We need to stop telling them that they can’t have a voice just for being male.” In other words, they need to treat men the way they’ve been demanding that men treat women since the first wave of the feminist movement.
But the vast majority of feminists (and, more broadly, the progressive left) have embraced the idea that because women are broadly oppressed, anything goes with regard to man-hating.
Hollywood is no less guilty of perpetuating misandry, as author Philip points out in Woke Father :
Perhaps the best example of how Hollywood often portrays men in film is shown in John Tucker Must Die. Women fully admit that this film is misandrist. It makes autostraddle.com’s list of “20 Movies About Friendship and Misandry For When You Want to Burn it All down”, and has a misandry score of 6/10.
The plot is simple: The man is a stereotypical sexual predator; a mindless, clueless sports jock whose only purpose is to lie and cheat. He simultaneously dates three girls at once, and these girls, along with a friend, team up to humiliate him and get their revenge.
The girls spread a rumor that John has genital herpes, and mix estrogen in his protein powder. When that doesn’t work, they get their friend to seduce him, and because he’s a mindless sexual predator, he falls for it.
The end of the movie shows professors in thongs, and John Tucker is sexually objectified throughout. The entire theme of the movie is “destroying” men, and the movie rejoices in this theme. There are many such revenge films floating around, all with similar sexist stereotypes, all man-hating, and all with similar plots. “The Other Woman“, for example, is essentially the same film. They are meant to appeal to a sexist audience who enjoys films that promote hatred and sexism.
There are less-obvious forms of misandry in Hollywood, but they are just as perverse.
For example, the new Star Wars trilogy is a feminist mess. Led by extreme feminist ideologue Kathleen Kennedy, who famously wore t-shirts that read, “The Force is Female”, the latest Star Wars trilogy has faced massive backlash from fans, mostly due to their distaste for sexist feminist writing.
Though the character of Rey had potential. After all, who doesn’t want to see a female Jedi who’s as badass as Ellen Ripley was in the Alien film series from the 1980s?
However, that potential was ruined by the fact that she never materialized into anything other than a Mary Sue. It wasn’t until the third film, when J.J. Abrams was called in to fix things, that Rey’s uber powers made any sense at all.
Before that, we saw Rey effortlessly winning at everything, easily defeating the likes of the more skilled and powerful Ben Solo, and even besting the most powerful Jedi in the history of Star Wars: Luke Skywalker.
Until the third film, she had no weaknesses, no backstory, no failures, no challenges, and no setbacks. In contrast, the male characters in these films were all written as weak, clueless, incompetent buffoons who were lucky to bask in the glory of Rey.
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The aforementioned films are examples of feminist ideology playing up sexist male stereotypes for entertainment. But they’re just a small sampling of what’s coming out of Hollywood these days.Not only are men made to look the fool in front of the ever-present superior woman, but men are accepted in all of these films as disposable. Violence and murder against men is accepted without any thought, while similar scenes involving the same violence against women would incite a riot.
This hypocrisy may very well be due to traditional stereotypes about men that are only further fueled by feminist hate-based ideology which too many writers and directors have come to accept. There is intense pressure in Hollywood to do this, as a result of the lobbying of extreme feminists.
To portray a female even slightly negatively without making her character sympathetic incites extreme outrage, yet the same exact objectification and subversion of men is regularly accepted as normal and even promoted. Feminism thrives in Hollywood, and as a result, misandry continues to make its way into movies and TV shows more than ever. Unfortunately, this only fuels negative myths and stereotypes about men by warping social consciousness regarding men.