Misandry  

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Misandry is the hatred of men as a sex. It is considered a type of sexism, and those holding misandric beliefs can be of either sex. While usually ascribed to women, it is also possible for men to be misandrist. Unlike misogyny (a pathological aversion towards women), misandry has been little discussed or investigated. Some masculists maintain that misandry has been rampant for thirty years, due to feminist advocacy, and has become a social pathology. Some feminists believe that, while misogyny is a social disease, misandry doesn't exist. Others in both feminist and masculist camps consider the "war of the sexes" arising from traditional gender roles to be a powerful source of both misogyny and misandry.

Contents

Misandry in literature

Misandry in ancient Greek literature

Classics professor Froma Zeitlin of Princeton University discussed misandry in her article titled "Patterns of Gender in Aeschylean Drama: Seven against Thebes and the Danaid Trilogy."

"The most significant point of contact, however, between Eteocles and the suppliant Danaids is, in fact, their extreme positions with regard to the opposite sex: the misogyny of Eteocles’ outburst against all women of whatever variety (Se. 181-202) has its counterpart in the seeming misandry of the Danaids, who although opposed to their Egyptian cousins in particular (marriage with them is incestuous, they are violent men) often extend their objections to include the race of males as a whole and view their cause as a passionate contest between the sexes (cf. Su. 29, 393, 487, 818, 951)."

Misandry and literary criticism

In his book, Gender and Judaism: The transformation of tradition, Harry Brod, a Professor of Philosophy and Humanities in the Department of Philosophy and Religion at the University of Northern Iowa, writes:

"In the introduction to The Great Comic Book Heroes, Jules Feiffer writes that this is Superman's joke on the rest of us. Clark is Superman's vision of what other men are really like. We are scared, incompetent, and powerless, particularly around women. Though Feiffer took the joke good-naturedly, his misandry embodied the Clark and his misogyny in his wish that Lois be enamored of Clark (much like Oberon takes out hostility toward Titania by having her fall in love with an ass in Shakespeare's Midsummer-Night's Dream)."

Julie M. Thompson, a feminist author, connects misandry with envy of men, in particular "penis envy", a term coined by Sigmund Freud in 1908, in his theory of female sexual development.

Misandry and feminism

In My Enemy, My Love (1992), Judith Levine reveals a position of misandry within women when the following inappropriate labels are applied to males :

  • Infants: the Mama's Boy, the Babbler, the Bumbler and the Invalid
  • Betrayers: the Seducer, the Slave, the Abandoner and the Abductor
  • Beasts: the Brute, the Pet, the Pervert, the Prick and the Killer

Another example of misandry can be found in the SCUM Manifesto by Valerie Solanas, a radical feminist:

"As for the issue of whether or not to continue to reproduce males, it doesn't follow that because the male, like disease, has always existed among us that he should continue to exist.
When genetic control is possible — and soon it will be — it goes without saying that we should produce only whole, complete beings, not physical defects of deficiencies, including emotional deficiencies, such as maleness. Just as the deliberate production of blind people would be highly immoral, so would be the deliberate production of emotional cripples."

See also




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Misandry" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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