I Hate Men

by Pauline Harmange

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.

Are standards so low that men are really allowed to get off so lightly? To be fair, I’m not perfect either. Nobody is. It just seems to me that women’s efforts to make themselves more pleasing to their spouses are rarely reciprocated.

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 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.

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.

It’s a choice not to hear the emotions of an interlocutor – the choice of not wanting to understand the other side of the story, and of refusing to envisage the possibility that one might bear any responsibility for it.

What would the mediocre white dude do?