I Hate Men

by Pauline Harmange

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. All of them, really? Yes, the whole lot of them. By default, I have very little respect for any of them. Which is funny actually, because ostensibly I don’t have any legitimacy when it comes to hating men. I chose to marry one, after all, and I have to admit that I’m still very fond of him.[fn1] That doesn’t, however, stop me from wondering why men are as they are. They’re violent, selfish, lazy and cowardly. It doesn’t stop me wondering why we women are supposed graciously to accept their flaws – what am I saying, I mean their deficiencies – even though men beat, rape and murder us. 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. Come on, we’re perfectly capable of putting up with their little idiosyncrasies. In any case, we don’t have a choice. What kind of woman are you if you avoid the male gaze? Take your choice: sex-starved, dyke, or hysteric.

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? So much existential dread, for which I don’t feel a great deal of sympathy. All that time they spend snivelling about how hard it is to be a poor persecuted man nowadays is just a way of adroitly shirking their responsibility to make themselves a little less the pure products of the patriarchy.

Strangely, not many men actually stop to wonder why feminists dislike them so much – if they did they might notice the statistics are quite damning. But they’re too busy explaining to us that they’re not like that, that it’s really not nice to generalise like that. And if we alienate them with all that talk of men are trash, the risk is they won’t join in and help us in our struggle. As if we were incapable of organising our struggle without them, as if we haven’t been doing precisely that for years – and as if, when they invited themselves into our ranks to join the struggle, they didn’t always end up taking over, talking over us and even imposing their decisions on us while they were about it.

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

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.

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.

I don’t recall ever getting angry when I was a little girl. I must have done when I was a baby, but as a child people always said that I was good as gold. I think I understood very quickly that I wasn’t allowed to be angry. None of the women around me ever got angry, nor any of the little girls. I say ‘none of the women’ because I’m not counting maternal anger directed towards children. This kind of anger is part of a complex system in which the mental burden and unequal division of labour related to the bringing up of children prompts more occasions for anger in the mother than in the father, who more often than not only takes an active role in the enjoyable aspects of parenthood.

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.

the truth is there’s no good means of expressing anger if you’re a woman in a relationship with a man. 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.’

I get the impression, whenever I discuss this with other people, that in the case of heterosexual couples it’s almost always the woman who picks domestic fights. 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.

single women who don’t have children are the happiest demographic of all.

A little observation with no scientific basis: most of the time when a man goes on about how decent he is, you only have to scratch the surface for the veneer to begin to crack. It’s a bit like that old cliché about sex itself, except in this case it’s true – the ones who go on about it the most are the least likely to be actually doing it.