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.

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’. 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.

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.

In 2017 in France, 90 per cent of the people who received death threats from their partners were women,1 while 86 per cent of those murdered by their partner or ex-partner were also women. Of the sixteen women who killed their partner, at least eleven, that is, 69 per cent of them, had themselves been victims of domestic violence.2 In 2019, 149 women were murdered by their partner or their former partner. In 2018, 96 per cent of those who received a prison sentence for domestic violence were men, and 99 per cent of those sentenced for sexual violence were men.3

5 In fact, whatever the sex or age of the victim of sexual harassment or violence – whether male or female, child or adult – it is vital to emphasise that the vast majority of those responsible for such violence are men.

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.

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

I realised that often the things that made me cry ought to have made me yell, and that when in the course of an argument I wept with misery at the unfairness of it, I was in a way resigning myself to losing.

But 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.’

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.

AHHH

When women give themselves permission to live alone, to experience single life as a life like any other, with its shortcomings as well as its rewards, rather than as a punishment, they (re)discover that they don’t actually need a man, or at least not just any man, in their lives. They relish their autonomy and freedom. 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.

Because female solidarity is never frivolous, it’s always political.