A misandrist is a person who hates men or a person perceived to hate men; usually it is a man doing the perceiving, and the perceived man-hater is a woman. She may or may not but probably does not hate men though she almost definitely hates having to tell people that she does not hate men; she may have ceased to argue when people accuse her of hating men, a refusal indicating to her accusers that she does, after all, hate men. She probably does not hate men but she does hate male power, or the machinations of male-dominated society, and also hates what men do to women within such a society, what male power is succored by men doing to women, like raping beating selling murdering enslaving them. The misandrist is open about hating patriarchy and its consequences for women, as she is open about her certainty that social transformation is the solution. She is a feminist. But because the mind stymied by masculinist dualistic thought is bound to binary oppositions and cannot wrench itself beyond reductive EITHER/OR, because the feminist recognizes and reviles the harm done to women by men in a man-made culture, because she would make a better situation for women, the feminist – the misandrist – must therefore desire a worse situation for men; women rise up, men sink down; she must dream of women dragging men around on leashes, women punishing men, a cadre of Amazons giggling while waves of sludge drive the mewling weeping bodies of men into Boschian Hell-mouths.
She is angry, so she is mad.
Surely something horrible happened in the madwoman’s life for her to hate men viciously enough that she would challenge the rightness of male supremacy and her own inferior status, her subordinated selfhood, the tightness of the cage built around her life and the constant threat that tonight, tomorrow, this morning, in an hour: she could be raped. Or her sister could call her, tell her she was raped. Or her friend.
Every woman I love: a man has harmed her. You want me to tell you I do not hate men?
( i do not hate men i hate most men i hate hatred more i do not hate i hate i will not let myself hate you )
But if I hate men because men have hurt me, then I am discredited by my hatred, an enmity even the men acknowledge to be rightful, since they expect it: that one of them hurt me, so now I hate.
The misandrist’s hatred is irrational; it is not the outcome of careful thinking, study, observation, analysis, but has its basis in the blind rage that floods her female brain by constitution, and by the messy influence of hormones, erratic. Unstable. Once she was fucked over and now she is fucked up forever, wrathful in her post-fucked fever of man-hating. Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.
Something else about the misandrist is that she is a lesbian. Lesbianism is one more way that she is sick. She hates men because she has a deviant aversion to the penis as an organ.
In high school I refused to speak to a boy who followed me around while I was working asking me pointless questions I suppose he thought were flirtatious which I cannot remember and did not answer because they were below both memory and response. I would turn my face to the pavement, walk by in silence without looking at him when he would shout my name. Later one of his friends spat on me and called me a lesbian. “She doesn’t like boys,” the boy who followed me said to another boy when I was forced to stand within earshot of them because we worked in the same building, “she’d rather eat pussy.” Several middle-aged women who were notary clerks with spiked red arches penciled over their sockets affecting eyebrows turned to squint at me, the pussy-eater. I hated men.
Yes, I do love women.
My mother does not know the word “misandrist” but that has not stopped her from believing I am one. My mother told me she did not understand me. I asked her what there was to understand.
Mother: This thing, your obsession, how you hate men. Were you raped?
My mother was not spontaneously disclosing previously unspoken concern over whether or not a man raped me, I knew. I did not answer her. Begrudgingly I began a mumbled delivery of my prepared speech on the subject of How I Do Not Hate Men, I Hate Male Supremacy as the Organizing Principle of Human Society, I Hate the Injuries Men Inflict Upon Women, I Hate Men’s Acceptance and Revelry in the Power They Are Granted Over Women, I Hate Male Supremacy Because I Place It at the Root of All Oppressive Systems, And I Am Opposed to All Oppressive Systems, I Am Committed to Their Unmaking, but my mother interrupted me: “I like men,” smirking, self-satisfied, as if her intact affinity for males were a prize I should envy. I congratulated her. I will not spend a single minute more of my life trying to convince anyone I do not hate men. At least I will not reek of pandering.
The misandrist is the feminist, pathologized and trivialized. “Misandrist” is the label invoked to slander her, implying she is damaged, unreasonable. The bitch is broken. She cannot be taken seriously; she is not a sensible woman—she’s a violent freak! she doesn’t like men! Continue reading “The Misandrists (2017)”
