Paul Nathanson is a researcher, religious studies, McGill University, and author of Spreading Misandry.

Katherine K. Young is James McGill Professor, religious studies, McGill University. She has published extensively on women's issues and ethics.

Introduction to
LEGALIZING MISANDRY:
From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men

By Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young © 2006

INTRODUCTION

One sure sign of danger at any time and in any place is a segment of the population that society considers unworthy of attention. No wonder more boys than girls face the future with apathy and drop out of school. Worse, far more young men than young women are committing suicide. Ditto for old men and old women.

Males are not faring well at all in a society that is now focused explicitly on the needs and problems of females and is often hostile to the very possibility that males might have any distinct needs and problems of their own. Rapid social change and depression have been listed as causes of these problems, but the question is why these factors affect men, especially young men, much more than they do women.

These are complex problems, to be sure, and have more than one explaination (as we will show in Transcending Misandry, the third volume of this trilogy; the first volume, Spreading Misandry, was published in 2001). Underlying many explanations, though, is a distinctly gynocentric worldview. Being woman-centred, by definition, gynocentrism ignores the needs and problems of men. (The irony is that it was originally adopted to correct the biases of an androcentric, or man-centred, worldview.) And because gynocentrism now has both official status (in law) and quasi-official status (in institutional policies), its bias has become deeply embedded in public policy. That status has created and even institutionalized a new double standard, one that favours women instead of men and that, in turn, has created many additional problems: psychological, political, and – above all – moral ones. It is hard to know precisely how these problems affect boys and men personally, but it is worth noting that no large-scale study has ever been done to find out. It would be folly to ignore the warning signs mentioned above, in our opinion, but that is precisely what has been happening.

At least one bar association has seen fit to threaten male dissenters, concluding a report on women with a stern warning. Men, it says, will try to stop affirmative action, deny their bias, refuse to understand the nature of systemic barriers to women, or even institute a backlash with stereotypes embedded in misogynistic messages, anecdotes, myths, and homilies or “accusations ... [that women are] ‘whining’ or being ‘provocative’ when legitimate complaints are raised.”3 From our point of view, this report – one that relies on its own stereotypes – has gone beyond gynocentrism and embraced misandry.

Gynocentrism is the self-centred counterpart of androcentrism, and misandry is the sexist counterpart of misogyny. From the very beginning of this volume, we must be as clear as we were in the earlier volume about one thing. We define hatred as a collectively shared and culturally propagated worldview, not a personal emotion such as dislike or anger. Ultimately, this worldview is always expressed as “our” contempt for “them.” Misandry, as such, has never been either legal or illegal. In a technical sense, therefore, it cannot be legalized in the same way that, say, marijuana can be legalized. Nonetheless, overt expressions of hatred toward specific groups are indeed illegal. Our point here is that hatred toward men is just as unacceptable morally as hatred toward any other group and should therefore be just as unacceptable legally. Some people are aware of misandry but fervently believe that hatred toward men should be regarded as a legitimate exception to the general rule against hatred toward other groups. Most people find it hard even to notice misandry. The very idea seems counterintuitive. Men, according to conventional wisdom, have all the power. Therefore, presumably, they are immune to all serious harm. Besides, no one has ever called explicitly for discrimination against men or against any other segment of the population. After all, modern democracies and their legal systems are based explicitly on the rhetoric of equality. Yet many people have called explicitly for discrimination in favour of women – that is, legal measures to solve problems faced only by women. As a result, women have gained special protections: for example, the right to job security and benefits during pregnancy. These reforms, which were originally welcomed in the name of fairness, were soon extended to include measures such as affirmative action. Designed to “level the playing field,” these measures were supposed ultimately to create equality by institutionalizing temporary inequality (although it was by no means self-evident that they could ever be terminated, no matter how much conditions might change, without a major political upheaval).

The goal was to raise the prospects of women, advocates explained, not to lower those of men. The result, nonetheless, was that gynocentrism and even misandry entered through the back door. Feminists explained the need for these legal measures by blaming the problems of women directly and exclusively on men, who were the scapegoats. Women were a victim class, said feminist lobby groups, and men the oppressor class. If men suffered
from the new discrimination, they added, then so be it; men were collectively guilty and deserved collective punishment. No wonder many people, including some men, accepted the notion that it was morally acceptable to impose legal obligations, penalties, and restrictive conditions on men but not on women. No wonder, also, that they found it morally acceptable to use hate legislation as a way of protecting women and minorities from negative stereotypes but not to as a way of protecting men from equally negative stereotypes. By now, our legal systems are based firmly on double standards. No matter how liberal, no matter how complacent, men who end up in court over conflicts with women soon discover these double standards not only in connection with custody and child support but also in connection with accusations of domestic violence and even in the reversal of such basic legal principles as the presumption that they are innocent unless proven guilty. Discrimination against men is by now so pervasively institutionalized that it is best described as systemic and characteristic of the legal system as a whole. Here, then, is the connection between the attitudes generated by misandry in popular culture and their institutionalization in policy and law.

Before proceeding, it is worth pausing to review what we said in Spreading Misandry. That book was primarily about the various ways in which men are seen by society and the negative stereotypes of men that became pervasive during the 1990s. Our goal was to demonstrate that misandry had become deeply embedded in popular culture. Though by no means the only interesting pattern that could be found in popular culture, it was very common and had not yet been explored systematically by other scholars. Popular culture takes many forms. We discussed it in connection with the entertainment industry and some of its offshoots: movies, television shows, comic strips, greeting cards, and so on. Even though the productions we examined revealed a profoundly misandric worldview, they usually did so indirectly, implicitly, and unintentionally (except, of course, for talk shows and newsmagazines). As feminists had been doing for thirty years (not without initial resistance from skeptical commentators), we pointed out their sexist subtexts, according to which men may be stereotyped as either evil or inadequate; a few exceptions are allowed for “honorary women” (that is, either minority men or men who have “converted” to feminism).

Most of Spreading Misandry was devoted to description. But toward the end of it (and leading directly to this book), we discussed what underlies misandry. This phenomenon did not originate spontaneously at the grassroots level but was initiated and is still promoted by a segment of the academic elite that is affiliated with one branch of feminism. We called that branch “ideological feminism,” for two reasons. First, we wanted to distinguish it from the egalitarian feminism of the 1960s, which is probably still the most popular form of feminism, at least on the conscious level and in theory. Equality is a noble ideal. After publishing our first book, in fact, we found that many egalitarian feminists – especially those with sons – were willing to take seriously our observations on the negative portrayal of men in popular culture and even on the origin of that negativity in other forms of feminism. Although they supported the reforms that had improved women’s lives over the past century, they recognized that reforms carried too far were creating injustices for men and boys (which would not bode well for society as a whole in the long run). Two wrongs, they agreed, did not make a right.

Second, we wanted to link ideological feminism with other political ideologies on both the political left and the political right. Throughout Spreading Misandry, we referred specifically to ideological feminists or feminist ideologues. And of course it was understood that some women are indifferent to feminism and others hostile to it.

Ideological feminism is the direct heir of both the Enlightenment and Romanticism. From the former it takes the theory of class conflict, merely substituting “gender” for “class” and “patriarchy” for “bourgeoisie.” From the latter it takes the notion of nation or even race, focusing ultimately on the innate biological differences between women and men. The worldview of ideological feminism, like that of both Marxism and National Socialism – our analogies are between ways of thinking, not between specific ideas – is profoundly dualistic. In effect, “we” (women) are good, “they” (men) are evil. Or, to use the prevalent lingo, “we” are victims, “they” are oppressors. This particular feminist worldview reveals several additional and closely related features that are characteristic of ideologies on both sides of the political spectrum: essentialism (in this case, calling attention to the unique qualities of women), hierarchy (alleging directly or indirectly that women are superior to men), collectivism (asserting that the rights of individual men are less important than the communal goals of women), utopianism (establishing an ideal social order within history), selective cynicism (directing systematic suspicion only toward men), revolutionism (adopting a political program that goes beyond reform), consequentialism (asserting the belief that ends can justify means), and quasi-religiosity (creating what amounts to a secular religion).

We defined ideological feminism very precisely. Trouble is, discussing feminism is often tantamount to discussing personal and collective identity. And identity is seldom established and never defended on the basis of argument or negotiation. No matter what we say, some feminists are going to accuse us of attacking all feminists or even all women. Yet doing that would be counterproductive, because it would imply that some of our offending claims are indeed true of all feminists or all women and must therefore be defended. Our larger point was that gynocentrism and its misandric fallout – the cumulative results of ideological feminism – have transformed elite culture. They have become pervasive enough in academic, legal, and political circles to pass for conventional wisdom. They have become ways of thinking that seem self-evident and thus require no explanation, let alone justification. In view of all this, it is worth remembering our primary conclusion: that contempt for men – the idea that men can be classified only as evil or inadequate, or as honorary women – has been a recurring theme in popular culture for over a decade. We did not conclude that contempt for women has been absent from popular culture, by the way, although we did point out that misogyny, unlike misandry, has been carefully monitored, declared politically incorrect, and publicly excoriated.

When Spreading Misandry was published in 2001, the topic was hot enough for journalists to cover – we were interviewed for many newspapers, radio shows, and television shows – but not hot enough to be taken seriously by most of them. In some cases, it was the equivalent of a publicity stunt; the goal was to hook readers or viewers with sensationalism – prejudice against men, of all people! – not to explore a social problem with profound moral implications. Print journalists often admitted that men had been portrayed unfairly in popular culture during the 1990s but pointed out that the situation had changed. The culture wars, they declared, were over. Misandry (though not necessarily misogyny) was gone, they opined, along with titillating jokes about Bill Clinton. Men and women were now getting along just fine, thank you very much. How did they know that? By asking a few of their co-workers at the water cooler. Their attitude might be explained as naive optimism, unconscious denial, political strategy, ideological ridicule, or whatever. The point is that many – not all, by any means, but many – of those who direct public opinion found it either desirable or necessary to trivialize our warning about the increasing polarization of men and women (along with other groups making use of identity politics) in our society. We respond to our critics in appendix 1 of this book.

In this second volume, Legalizing Misandry, we focus on the interface between popular culture and elite culture at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. This is the realm not of movie moguls and media mavens but of lawyers, legislators, and journalists, a realm that not merely reflects a worldview created by others but creates, institutionalizes, and even enforces that worldview. To create a symbolic, or structural, framework for all this, we use two closely related metaphors: litigation and revolution. The early stages of most great revolutions of the last few hundred years – those of the English, the French, and the Russians, for instance – were marked by litigation (trials of monarchs blamed for the misery) that led to revolution.

First, consider the metaphor of litigation. In part 1 we show that men as a “class” have been put on trial in the court of public opinion by journalists exploiting the emotions generated by sensational events, and that they have been found guilty by a hung jury of academics or professionals manipulating evidence to fit their postmodern or ideological theories but undermining scholarship in the process. These first four chapters describe an important cultural phenomenon that pervaded society in the late twentieth century and therefore provide a historical context for the discussions of legal theory that follow.

Parts 2 and 3 are specifically about men in the courts of law, the ways in which public perceptions of men (and women) have been translated into the legal codes and public policies of both the United States and Canada. Why two countries? Because public perceptions of men and women in both countries are almost identical. Unlike legal and political structures, they do not stop at the border. But our comparative study does two things. First, it shows that Canadian ideologues have been able to extend the influence of feminism much more deeply than American feminists into education, law, bureaucracy, and society at large, with the result that it is undermining the very structure of liberal democracy. Second, it shows that some American feminists are trying to achieve precisely the same things and often in very similar ways. This should be a wake-up call to American legislators and justices, who might still have enough legal or political clout to do something.

Beginning with part 2, then, we move from the metaphor to the daily reality of litigation. Leading the way are ideological feminists. But because they have carefully disguised their role by using euphemisms and other fronts, their influence has often gone unnoticed. Chapters 5 and 6, which are about men and rights, show that the prevalent legal rhetoric favours rights of women and undermines rights of men. Whether intentionally or not, feminists who support that point of view have placed the whole notion of human rights on trial. Part 3 (chapters 7, 8, and 9) is about the prevalent legal rhetoric on sex – that is, the male sex. Intentionally, ideological feminists have placed the whole notion of sex, or at least sex between women and men, on trial.

Part 4 is about men and society from a more theoretical perspective. In chapter 10, we show that the scholarship on which society depends has been severely undermined by feminist ideology. As a direct result, equality has been severely undermined, not merely because of public “debates” over sensational or grotesque public scandals and not merely because of legislation promoted by interest groups but also – ultimately – because of an ideological worldview that has been actively promoted for several decades in schools, colleges, and universities. The result is a gynocentric worldview (ostensibly a mere correction of the older, androcentric one) accompanied by misandry (ostensibly an unfortunate side effect).

That brings us, in chapter 11, to the metaphor of revolution. This has been a “quiet revolution” and thus both less costly and more effective than most of the noisy ones that end up in bloody streets and coups d’états. The doctrines of ideological feminism have been introduced so quickly, so cleverly, and so subtly that most citizens – including most lawyers and legislators – have not even recognized what has been happening. And most of those who have are quickly silenced by a reign of terror uniquely suited to the needs of a quiet revolution: that of political (and sexual) correctness.

Bear in mind that what follows is about the moral and philosophical implications of law, not law per se. Even though this or that ruling can be legitimated by legal precedent or legal analogy, for instance, it cannot necessarily be legitimated morally or philosophically. Lawyers, judges, and even legislators more and more often ground their opinions, interpretations, or reinterpretations, either directly or indirectly, on questionable ideological principles. And feminist ideologues (some of whom happen to be lawyers, judges, or legislators) have done precisely the same thing by arguing that the fundamental premises of legal theory must be reexamined in view of their own theories or even epistemologies. In fact, it is precisely the attempt to legalize and bureaucratize – and thus institutionalize – feminist epistemologies that constitutes the essence of what we call a quiet revolution.

Copyright 2006 Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young, all rights reserved