Misandry

While misogyny means the bias, prejudice or discrimination against women, misandry means the bias, prejudice or discrimination against men.

Overview

Misandry is a type of misanthropy whose targets are men. A misandrist is a person who hates men. They may hate men due to the belief that something wrong is with them, such as dirtiness, evilness or stupidity.

A society or a system that sets women above men is called matriarchy. Misandry is a form of sexism, which is based on hate. Misandry can include violence or discrimination against men.

Kalighat Painting, "Woman Striking Man With Broom," Calcutta, India, 1875.

Examples

Pauline Harmange

Pauline Harmange is a bisexual blogger who wrote the book Moi les hommes, je les déteste ("I Hate Men"), which sold thousands of copies in 2020. Harmange believes that "women have good reason to hate men" and should embrace misandry as a form of liberation. She also said that men could never be feminists. Her views are supported by radical feminists, who have huge influence in Western academia.

Reception

Ralph Zurmély, an adviser to France's ministry of gender equality at the time, saw the book as an "incitement to hatred" and demanded publishers to remove the book from sale. Some critics disagreed with her views that blamed all men for the patriarchy, which denied the role of some women who helped maintain the patriarchy. Notably, John Stuart Mill, one of the most famous male feminists, argued in The Subjection of Women (1869) that gender inequality was incompatible with social progress.

Issues

Manosphere

The concept of misandry is controversial among mainstream feminists. Many feminists doubt the existence of misandry, claiming that it is only a belief of those who are part of the manosphere – a loose group of blogs and forums reportedly promoting misogyny, masculinity and antifeminism.

Groups related to the manosphere are often criticized by left-wing scholars due to their disagreement with manosphere's opposition to certain progressive values. However, many believe that those criticizing the manosphere ignore the cause and effect of its existence.

Critics of manosphere sometimes refer to manosphere's participants as incels, which is considered by some critics as "alarmist, inaccurate, and misrepresenting" the problem. Mass media have also been criticized for their coverage of what they see as the "incel problem", some of which directly compare the problem to Islamic terrorism regardless of context.

Prevalence

In January 2023, The Times claimed that half of the persons referred to the Prevent, a British counter-extremism programme, were incels in the year ending March 2021. However, critics pointed out that there was no evidence to support such a claim.

The public data from the UK Home Office showed that only 22~25% of those referred to the Prevent were classified as having "mixed, unstable or unclear ideology" (MUU) – a category for anything other than right-wing or Islamic extremism. Among the small percentage of the referred, a small number of them were seen as potential terrorists, with some referrals dropped by specialists as they did not know the definition of incel.

Some scholars emphasized that most incels were lonely, depressed young men, many of whom were neurodivergent, of diverse ages, religions, ethnicities and sexual orientations. The social stigma is said to be refutable but repeatedly promoted by self-declared experts against the "lonely, depressed young men". The self-declared experts were also criticized for misusing dubious statistics (e.g. cherry-picking) to support their bias.

Related pages

• Gendered racism
• Child sexual abuse