Thursday, November 6, 2008

Woman Hating and Man Hating: Fact and Fiction

It is worth noting the history, in the Anlgo West, of "misogyny" and "misandry". The English word "misogynist" was first recorded in 1620. There is no social or cultural history at all associated with the term misandrist, through this evening, anyway. Sorry to burst your delusional bubble, Men's Rights white boys. Actually, I'm not sorry at all.


From the video below:

"[...] Please check out the statistics of the murder of Indian women, by their spouses and by whites [...] It's open season. Native American women are being murdered right and left [...] Hundreds of Mexican women disappear or are murdered all through Mexico. It's open season on Mexican women. It's open season on women in the military: our service women are being murdered and raped. It's open season on women in Thailand, Vietnam."




Men's sexual, economic, and social violence against women, fueled by a potent combination of disrespect, disregard, and disdain, is a fact. Men really do hate women, and when men hate women, violence against women happens. Sometimes it happens even when the men express love for the women with whom they disagree or argue intensely. There are many websites dedicated to promoting men's hatred of women; industry-corporate-owned pornography sites display women as things without a particular history or character, unless it is character created and scripted by a pimp for his profit and for many men's pleasure. The cash profit is gigantic, amounting to over fifty million dollars each year.

Men's hatred of women is manifest in many terms commonly used against women in private and public realms. These terms are commonly used against women to degrade and humiliate them simply by being spoken, or in combination with racially and sexually subordinating acts beyond words, such as while being raped or battered. These same terms are spoken among groups of men, with and without women present, to give themselves more status and a greater sense of superiority.

By any measure imaginable--sociological, statistical, historical, or through the study of culture--men collectively control and dominate women in many ways successfully. This occurs, in post-industrial civilisations, always in two social spheres: the interpersonal and the institutional, each sphere's misogyny reinforcing the other.

Institutionally, men create economies where only some of women's work is understood and respected as work, men create laws which make holding most men accountable for assaulting women unlikely, if not impossible. In custom and culture, men maintain misogynist myths about women, often in their patriarchal religions.

Interpersonally, men beat up women so as to break their bones and their spirits; men rape women systematically so as to achieve dominance and express derision; men rape women not knowing it is rape because, for them and in society, the reduction of the possibility of meaningful consent is often a goal, and men's heterosexual conquest is what turns many men on. So pursuit and conquest, by whatever means necessary, including by intoxicating or drugging a woman, or assaulting her while asleep, or assaulting her at an age and level of disability where she cannot defend herself physically, or assaulting her with weapons, alone or in groups, such that she knows resistance likely equals death, is experienced purely as sex for many men. It is the definition of sex for many men. Not all men. Many men. Too many men.


In the West, men believe that having access to women's bodies is an entitlement, a right decreed by nature or God. In a male supremacist society, his is but one of several Men's Rights, however wrong it is. Men believe in and practice achieving access upon demand, need, compulsion, or desire to fulfill a fantasy by using harmful force. Men gain this access (and the fantasies) in several ways. One is by using pornography, another is by renting women as prostitutes. Men can have safe sex in these contexts and the level of safety practiced is generally determined by the men: the pimps and the consumers. Male corporate pornographers and pimps have set a definition of women of all colors as "those somewhat human beings who ought to be treated as things to be used, to be abused, and to be killed, without remorse."

But women are harmed by men in ways that are not sexual also. Women are mistreated by men due to race, for example. Women are also controlled and subordinated in marriage and in other relationships with men in too many ways to name here. Women actively, concretely care for men far more than men actively care for women. And that care from women is too often met with the arrogant and self-centered assumption by men that it's a given: "That is what she is there for, to care of me." Boys are cleaned and fed by women, almost always, if and when there is food to be eaten. Rarely do men take full responsibility for the care and feeding of their children, even when they have full custody--it is often another person in the man's life who does the mundane and most routine care. When women realise they can and ought to take care of themselves first, or when a man is cared for less by a woman than she used to care for him, there are usually negative consequences to her. The toll for all this care-taking is great to women's health. Women are harmed by the work they do, inside and outside the home, and by the work they sometimes refuse to do. They are frequently harmed or killed for breaking social codes of conduct men have constructed to constrain and control women.

If you don't know several women who have been harmed by men's hatred of women, sexually and socially, expressed interpersonally and bolstered institutionally, you don't know many women.

It should be noted that men are very cruel to one another as well, at most ages and stages of life. Men rape men, batter men, kill men. Although this is not generally done for the purposes of achieving erection and ejaculation, it is something men desire to do not because of hormones or genetics, but because of what many social systems teach and model for men. Men wage wars against one another, imprison one another, bully and harass one another, and are just plain mean to one another. Not all men. Many men. Too many men.

If you don't know several men who are or have been cruel to boys or men, or the boys or men who were recipients of that cruelty, you don't know many men or boys.

Now, as a point of comparison, let's see how this plays out in regard to man hating, which is defined the way it is defined by antimisandrists, as women's hatred of men.

Women's sexual, economic, and social violence against men, fueled by a potent combination of disrespect, disregard, and disdain, is fiction. Women do not hate men, and when the occasional woman does despise a man who has harmed her, he doesn't suffer the forms of violence against him leveled at women by men who despise them. Disagreements, arguments, and emotionally hurtful actions are not uncommon between a woman and a man. Sometimes women express love for the men with whom they disagree or intensely argue. The forms of hurt do not include, unless exceptionally and anecdotally, sexual or physical violence including murder. There are a few websites dedicated to promoting this hatred of men by women: overwhelmingly, they are run by men and are filled with lies about the alleged power or superiority of women. These websites do not have much to draw from in culture, so one name tends to be brought up a lot: Valerie Solanas, author of a piece of social analysis of gender that has never been sold for profit. It was photocopied (xeroxed) for a small period of time, and most people have never seen it or even heard of it. It was never published by any major press, nor is it easy to find a copy of it.

The title of the piece, S.C.U.M. Manifesto, was named not by Solanis, but by a man, and his acronym means the Society for Cutting Up Men. Cutting is a real problem in society, and it is gendered. But it occurs socially in two forms: men cutting women, and women and girls cutting themselves. A society in which women cut up men is fictional. There is no evidence that it is anything else, except anecdotally. There is no industry run by women, earning women millions of dollars in profits annually, designed to promote and eroticise women doing physical harm to men. One of many genres of pornography that men produce does script scenes where women harm men. To be clear: this is for men's profits and pleasure, not women's. Men portray each other in pornography as things without a particular history or character, unless as characters, often racist, created by white male corporate pimps, for white men's profits and pleasure.

There is no industry, not one, which produces excessive cash profits for women not men. There are no industries or institutions which naturalise and normalise women's brutality against men. The anecdotal woman who may appear to hate a man is not manifest in society generally or commonly. And what men call man-hating is often a woman who does not behave in ways women are supposed to behave according to that society of men. So if a woman is verbally abrupt or rude, sarcastic or cynical, critical or analytical, not deferential, not submissive, including in written forms, men often misperceive this as hatred. Men are not so quick as to call men being abrupt, rude, sarcastic, cynical, critical, analytical, not deferential, not submissive to other men as a form of hatred against men. Nor are men likely to be honest about the fact that when they are any of those things with women, it is an expression of men's hatred of women.

There is no long list of terms women use to put down men, and those terms are not combined, in speech, with racially and sexually subordinating acts of violence against men which violently penetrate their bodies, break their bones, and crush their spirits. To the extent that the short list of terms used to put down men are spoken among women or men, this is not done in a context in which it is played out, in which women systematically assault men using those terms the ways men do to women and other men.

Sometimes women scratch men or hit men. Sometimes women yell or scream at men. Sometimes women up and leave men. Some men's hearts are broken by women, not literally. This is, in no way, comparable to what men do to women, and men do all those things to women too, but sometimes the heart is also broken literally, along with the rest of the stabbed or dismembered body. When men act sexually violent, they often target women's chests and groins as the areas they stab or tear open. There is no social practice of women doing this to men.

When women utter negative terms about men it does not change their collective status from oppressed to oppressor, from subordinated to dominant. Men's use of misogynist terms is part of the practice of subordinating and dominating women, collectively.

By any measure imaginable--sociological, statistical, historical, or through the study of culture--women do not collectively control and dominate men in any ways successfully. This collective control and domination occurs, in post-industrial civilisations, in neither the interpersonal nor the institutional spheres. And when women do have some control of their home, there is the force of a man's fist, or the weapon of his penis, ready at any time to remind her of her proper place relative to him. Men are not usually killed for breaking social codes of conduct women prefer.

Institutionally, women (alone or collectively) do not create economies, laws, customs, cultures, and religions which maintain misandrist societies.

Interpersonally, women do not beat up men so as to break their bones and their spirits; women do not rape men systematically so as to achieve dominance and express derision. Pursuit and conquest of a man by a woman, by whatever means necessary, including by intoxicating or drugging a man, or assaulting him while asleep, or assaulting him at an age and level of disability where he cannot defend himself physically, or assaulting him with weapons, alone or in groups, such that he knows resistance likely equals death, is fiction.

In the West, women do not believe that having access to men's bodies is an entitlement, a right decreed by nature or God. There exists no female supremacist society in which this is but one of Women's Rights. Women do not believe in and practice achieving access upon demand, need, compulsion, or desire to fulfill a fantasy using harmful force. The relatively small amount of pornography that is made by women, doesn't assist women in gaining this access. Women do not have access upon demand of men in systems of prostitution, including the pornography industry. Women in pornography and prostitution are not there for their own sexual satisfaction, do not generally control the level of STI/STD protection, and are extremely vulnerable to rape, battery, and murder. There are no female corporate pornographers and pimps who set a definition of white men as "those somewhat human beings who ought to be treated as things to be used, to be abused, and to be killed, without remorse."

If you don't know several men who have been harmed by women's hatred of men, sexually and socially, expressed interpersonally and bolstered institutionally, that is because you are living in reality.