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.

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. Because, obviously, no man has ever hurt a woman in the whole course of human history. Or rather, no men have ever hurt any women.

But what if misandry were necessary – healthy, even?

What kind of woman are you if you avoid the male gaze? Take your choice: sex-starved, dyke, or hysteric.

misandry is also very difficult for men to deal with – an intolerable brutality that adds up to the shocking outrage of precisely zero deaths and zero casualties. Apparently, what with all this feminist bullshit, #MeToo and the rest of that crap, it’s very hard to be a man nowadays. They don’t know how to flirt any more, how to get in a lift with their female colleagues, how to crack a joke. What do they still have the right to do now?

This is good. This is very good.

So much existential dread, for which I don’t feel a great deal of sympathy.

Hating men as a social group, and sometimes as individuals too, brings me so much joy

I use the word misandry to mean a negative feeling towards the entirety of the male sex.

when I say ‘the male sex’ I mean all the cis men who have been socialised as such, and who enjoy their male privilege without ever calling it into question, or not enough

Ultimately, misandry is a principle of precaution.

Many of us believe that men can’t be feminists, that they have no right to appropriate a term that was forged by the oppressed.

There’s a whole world of difference between ‘understanding the mechanisms of oppression and one’s own place in the system’, and ‘appropriating it in order to take centre stage and make it all about yourself yet again’.

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.

If our misandry alienates us from men who can’t cope with our anger, are they really worth our time? Do they deserve our efforts?

conflated, though the two don’t necessarily go hand in hand. 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.

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

It’s a well-known fact: you just have to surround yourself with women to be automatically cleansed of all sexism.

Her sarcasm and wit is pretty great.

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. That’s where the problem lies. That’s the root of our loathing and distrust. But it also lies with the men who don’t rape, and all the other things they don’t do either.

Our misandry scares men, because it’s the sign that they’re going to have to start meriting our attention.

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.

Misandry is born out of and nourished by anger. 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.

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.

For a while now my guiding wisdom in life has been Canadian writer Sarah Hagi’s Daily Prayer to Combat Impostor Syndrome: ‘God give me the confidence of a mediocre white dude’.

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 –

time we allowed ourselves to be flawed human beings. Standards are very low for men, and far too high for women. Let’s reserve ourselves the right to be ugly, badly dressed, vulgar, mean, bad-tempered, untidy, exhausted, selfish, incompetent

But love is not, and never has been, the only factor in the process that pushes people into becoming a couple.

We teach children from a very young age that not having a girlfriend or boyfriend is almost a problem – but happily, we also let them understand that there’s ‘still time’. But we never give them the option of not wanting one.

Women need to be in a couple, for a single woman doesn’t have as much value in the eyes of the world as a woman who belongs to a man.

It turns out, in fact, that single women who don’t have children are the happiest demographic of all.

Happy Ever After,

Need to read this as well.

And when they do find a partner, it isn’t because they need one, it’s because they’ve met a person they genuinely want to commit to, with the intention of creating a relationship based on mutual fulfilment. Not because being single is a terrifying idea and Monsieur needs someone to wash his socks and organise his diary.

in so many areas of my life, where, I’ve finally realised, I have no need of men to shape the person I am.

I think I envy this epiphany. Just as I am jealous of friends who have a group of supportive women around them. Mine are so spread out that it can feel lonely.

The toxic masculinity that oppresses us is forged in closed male circles.

When they express outrage at our feminist meetings in single-sex spaces, what they’re really complaining about is the idea of us coming together as a political body, and that they have no say in the matter.

We have the power to create spaces and times in our lives where we do not serve the interests of men.

we mustn’t be afraid to rouse and express our misandry. Hating men and all they represent is absolutely our right. It’s also a celebration.

After all, the dominant French culture can’t bear discourse that’s critical of men and masculinity. Worse, it can’t bear women making themselves heard in public and engaging in political debate.

Rather than cancel culture, the writer Roxane Gay calls it ‘consequence culture’

be asked a few things designed to reassure readers that I wasn’t really a mad harpy. Surely I didn’t hate all men when I have a father and even a husband? What did they think of my work?

How interesting when compared to men being reminded they have relationships with women, mom or sister, in order to curb brutality.

Soon the patriarchy will topple and we shall dance among the ruins of the old order.