I Hate Men

by Pauline Harmange

The accusation of misandry is a mechanism for silencing women, a way of silencing the anger – sometimes violent but always legitimate – of the oppressed standing up to their oppressors. Taking offence at misandry, claiming it’s merely a form of sexism like any other, and no less unacceptable (as if sexism were genuinely reviled), is a bad-faith way of sweeping under the carpet the mechanisms that make sexist oppression a systemic phenomenon buoyed throughout history by culture and authority. It’s to allege that a woman who hates men is as dangerous as a man who hates women – and that there’s no rational justification for what she feels, be it dislike, distrust or disdain.

But what if misandry were necessary – healthy, even? I get why women reject it. It’s unnerving to be accused of being a horrid extremist who hates men. Thousands of women were burned at the stake for less. But you know what? I’m going to have a go. I’ll admit it: I hate men.

Boys will be boys. Girls, on the other hand, will become women, and will learn to make their peace with this, because there’s no way to escape the narrow vision of our destiny as refracted through the crystal ball of the patriarchy.

If we all became misandrists, what a fabulous hue and cry we could raise. We’d realise (though it might be a bit sad at first) that we don’t actually need men. I believe too we might liberate an unsuspected power: that of being able to soar far above the male gaze and the dictates of men, to discover at last who we really are.

We need to be vigilant, we have to keep our eye on even the genuinely decent ones, because anyone can stray off course, and all the more so if he’s cis, white, wealthy, able-bodied and heterosexual. The sum of his privilege is so great that it makes him very resistant to change. We need men to be exemplary in their behaviour, because when we women speak, no one listens.

What we want is for men to put their power and privilege to good use: by policing their male friends and acquaintances, for example, instead of explaining to women how to go about fighting their battles. We want men to know their place. Actually no, what we really want is for them to learn how to take up less space. They don’t get to play the lead, and they’re going to have to get used to that.

It was, I think, the regular practice of feminism that allowed me to develop a basic level of assertiveness and self-confidence. You become far less forgiving when you analyse the statistics on violence against women through the prism of sociology.

once they’ve had their eyes opened to the profound mediocrity of the majority of men, there’s no good reason to carry on liking them by default.

With a head filled to overflowing with the romantic nonsense with which little girls are indoctrinated, I was, clearly, excessively dramatic, but it was obvious that boys of my age were swanning about as though they both performed and expected sex (which I didn’t really want to give them, but if I had to go that far so as not to be cast away like a sock full of holes, I guessed I would) at the expense of love. That’s precisely what every girl that age is warned of, and what’s expected of every boy. We deny them any emotions.

We go into therapy, we read books to learn how to be more organised, how to relax, how to orgasm, we talk about our feelings, we initiate dialogue, we do sport, go on diets, have makeovers and cosmetic surgery, we get coaching, change jobs; we tie ourselves up in knots in a never-ending process of self-improvement.

With my yoga mat, my meditation app, my two different kinds of therapy, my books about non-violent communication and my relative ability to control my sometimes overwhelming emotions, I feel like such a cliché.

Or he could even – what a mad idea! – have taken the initiative, acknowledged that we never manage to resolve our arguments satisfactorily, and come up with some kind of solution himself. But that’s never what happens. I’m the one who shoulders the entire emotional burden of the relationship. That’s what women do, because in a heterosexual relationship it’s always the woman who’s learned to do that. Of course, men could learn to do it too, but it’s a bit like learning a foreign language: it’s that much harder once you’re an adult, and if there’s already someone there prepared to make the effort to speak the other person’s language, why bother?

If I refuse to grant him the right to be mediocre because he’s a man and that’s what men are like, it’s because I want to grant myself the same respect that I have for all women, for whom I wish truly egalitarian relationships.

The thing is, I don’t live in a bubble, cut off from the world and the rest of society. Every day I’m witness to the immense indifference that men have for women. I read statistics about rape, harassment, femicide; I observe debates on social media and listen to the conversations with men I come across or interact with. The decisions taken by male politicians, the words used to describe us by male artists. Sexist jokes that still make people bellow with laughter. I know that behind every man who is even slightly conscious of his male privilege are several women who have worked hard to help him open his eyes – yet how few men recognise this. And I know that there are still far too many men whose eyes remain desperately, obstinately closed.

Surely it only harms our cause, proving to our opponents and detractors that feminists are indeed sexually frustrated, irrational and vindictive hysterics? What’s the point of alienating all men? Don’t we want them to be our allies?

Conflict and anger are not tools and emotions that we tend naturally to be able to control: we’re brought up to be docile little girls who will grow up to become gentle and understanding women. To announce point blank that one doesn’t like men is to personify an anger that is far larger than our own selves, and to lay ourselves open to confrontation – with society in general, which gives so much space to men, their idiosyncrasies and their crimes; and with individual men, if they’re not prepared to listen to how we feel.

Anger at being treated as an inferior is not remotely comparable to the violence committed by the men who humiliate, rape and kill us, or even the violence committed by the men who ignore us, turn their backs on us and mock us. We have everything to gain by distancing ourselves from the limited role of the patient, gentle, almost passive woman, and insisting that men make the effort to become better people.

If misandry is a characteristic of someone who hates men, and misogyny that of someone who hates women, it has to be conceded that in reality, the two concepts are not equal, either in terms of the dangers posed to their targets or the means used to express them.

Misandry and misogyny cannot be compared, quite simply because the former exists only in reaction to the latter.

Fundamentally, any man who believes that the patriarchy is merely the fruit of the feminist imagination rather than a concrete reality is complicit in systemic sexism.

It’s true that not all men are rapists, but it’s also true that almost all rapists are men – and almost all women have or will suffer some kind of violence at the hands of men.

As long as there are misogynistic men who don’t give a damn, and a culture that condones and encourages them, there will be women who are so fed up they refuse to bear the brunt of exhausting or toxic relationships.

However, I think that when my mother’s in conflict with those she’s close to, those who matter to her (her husband, my father, for example), she struggles to express her anger. Like me, she grumbles then weeps, in a swift escalation of emotion that goes straight from irritation to floods of tears and ultimately fails to articulate anything very distinct. At least that’s how I see it, for I often use the same technique with my own husband, and it’s doomed to failure. Partly because it’s difficult to communicate criticism or reproach to a person you love and live with, but also, perhaps, because it’s difficult to convey criticism or reproach to a man, full stop.

The examples we set in both cases are toxic; neither the violence we encourage in boys nor the passivity we impose on girls is an appropriate response, for ourselves or for other people, in situations of injustice or conflict. But then what alternatives should we propose, in order for our children’s selves to be shaped differently?

If you weep as a way of articulating a kind of despair at a situation that seems dedicated to maintaining the status quo (which I have a tendency to do), you’re being too emotional, or unnecessarily dramatic. If you get angry and try to express more clearly what’s gone wrong and insist that things change, you’ll be accused of being aggressive and no one will listen to you any more, with that age-old argument: ‘I can’t hear you when you shout like that.’

Instead of interpreting this as the biological tendency of women to be constantly nagging and nitpicking, surely it would be better to think about the causes of these disputes. People might then recognise how often they’re rooted in an attempt to balance out a deeply inequitable situation. And how the weight of the mental burden in a heterosexual relationship, where the tendency of a man is simply not to hear what his partner is telling him, means that a woman has no choice but to raise her voice. Criticising women for creating discord is dishonest as well as sexist.

Only someone in a position of dominance can permit himself to be calm and reasonable in any circumstance, because he’s not the one who is suffering.

Feminism is the interface between private anger, which belongs in the domestic space, and public anger; ‘the personal is political’, whether we’re talking about the gender pay gap or which person in a couple has remembered to put on the washing.

Our anger insists that men take responsibility for their behaviour and spurs on our revolution.

What to do about all those mediocre men I saw all around me?

This isn’t to say that all men are necessarily malign, but it’s hard to fight the idea that’s imprinted on our psyches very early on in our lives that men’s opinions, even those given in passing on the street, are more valuable than ours.

Women have been brought up to doubt themselves constantly, while men grow up full of confidence, however way off base that may be in reality – or at the very least they’re extremely good at concealing their shortcomings. There was an exasperating piece of research done by LinkedIn that showed that when a man sees a job advertised he’s likely to ‘give it a go’ and ‘see how it turns out’, while women ‘tend not to apply unless they’re sure they’re really cut out for the post’.8