their creed.
As people who know me are aware, I love some women, I like others, and I dislike a small number. If my opinions about women make me a sexist or a misogynist then most people I know – men and women – are too.
The irony, of course, is that the charge of misogyny is most often employed by feminists, women who are themselves guilty of misandry: the hatred of men. I wasn’t familiar with the word before I started my research for David and Goliatha. Misandry is the beating heart of feminism, as we shall see.
Are you a misogynist if you only hate feminists? Of course not. You’re normal.
3| WHAT IS FEMINISM IN THE MODERN ERA?
I listen to feminists and all these radical gals – most of them are failures. They’ve blown it. Some of them have been married, but they married some Casper Milquetoast who asked permission to go to the bathroom. These women just need a man in the house. That’s all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they’re mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They’re sexist. They hate men – that’s their problem.
Jerry Falwell 1933-2007 American Baptist cleric, televangelist and conservative commentator
Countless words have been written – almost all of them by women – about the meaning of the words ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’. I read a number of books about feminism and concluded there are as many definitions of the words as there are writers on the topic. And when words have many meanings, they arguably have no useful meaning. We return to a useful distinction used by Christina Hoff Sommers, the author of Who Stole Feminism? (1994).
Ms Sommers is an American former professor of philosophy, and a self-described ‘equity feminist’. Wikipedia has some interesting material on Ms Sommers including the following:
‘Sommers uses the terms ‘equity feminism’ and ‘gender feminism’ to differentiate what she sees as acceptable and non-acceptable forms of feminism. She describes equity feminism as the struggle for equal legal and civil rights and many of the original goals of the early feminists, as in the first wave of the women’s movement. She describes gender feminism as the action of accenting the differences of genders for the purposes of what she believes is creating privilege for women in academia, government, industry, or advancing personal agendas.’
Throughout this book (unless stated otherwise) I shall use the terms ‘feminism’ and ‘feminist’ in the same sense that Ms Sommers refers to ‘gender feminism’ and ‘gender feminist’. After all, we’re all equity feminists now, aren’t we? Ever since Margaret Thatcher did such a tremendous job as prime minister of the United Kingdom over the country’s golden years of 1979-90, anyway…
The great irony in the modern era is that feminist thinking is coming under unprecedented levels of criticism, not least from women themselves; yet the power this small band of determined women exerts has never been greater. We shall see that feminists prefer to wield power by operating in the shadows, not emerging into the light where their arguments would be exposed as reflecting extreme left-wing ideologies.
4| MISANDRY (THE HATRED OF MEN)
Feminism cannot exist without blaming and demonising men. It needs to spread misandry as a necessary device to justify its existence. Misandry is the fuel that drives the feminist ideology and agenda, and keeps its Grievance Gravy-Train Industries in business.
Swayne O’Pie Why Britain Hates Men: Exposing Feminism (2011)
Misandry has been well documented in the modern era, most notably in a series of books by two academics at McGill University in Canada, Paul Nathanson and Katherine K Young. The first two in the series were Spreading Misandry (2001) and Legalizing Misandry (2006). Both are well worth reading.
I covered the topic of misandry at some length in The Glass Ceiling Delusion and I didn’t plan to return to it in this book. But just two months after that book’s publication in July 2011 a book focusing on the topic of misandry, within the context of feminism, came to my attention. It was written by the British writer Swayne O’Pie and titled Why Britain Hates Men: Exposing Feminism. Despite the title, the content will be of interest to readers across the developed world. The book is currently available to order only in the UK, but I understand from the publisher that it will shortly be made available internationally in both paperback and ebook editions.
The remainder of this chapter is drawn from Why Britain Hates Men with the writer’s kind permission. He shares my opinion of David Cameron, the current British prime minister, a very unconservative leader of the Conservative Party, the senior partner in the coalition currently in power.
LAY OFF MEN,
LESSING TELLS FEMINISTS
(The Guardian, 14 August 2001: Fiachra Gibbons)
Doris Lessing, who became a feminist icon with the books The Grass is Singing and The Golden Notebook, said a ‘lazy and insidious’ culture had taken hold within feminism that revelled in flailing men. Young boys were being weighed down with guilt about the crimes of their sex, she told the Edinburgh book festival.
‘I find myself increasingly shocked at the unthinking and automatic rubbishing of men which is now so part of our culture that it is hardly even noticed’, the 81-year-old Zimbabwean-born writer said yesterday.
‘I was in a class of nine- and ten-year-olds, girls and boys, and this young woman was telling these kids that the reason for wars was the innately violent nature of men. You could see the little girls fat with complacency and conceit, while the little boys sat there crumpled, apologising for their existence, thinking this was going to be the pattern of their lives.’
Lessing said that the teacher ‘tried to catch my eye, thinking that I would approve of this rubbish’.
She added: ‘This kind of thing is happening in schools all over the place and no one says a thing. It is time we began to ask who are these women who continually rubbish men. The most stupid, ill-educated and nasty woman can rubbish the nicest, kindest and most intelligent man, and no one protests. Men seem to be so cowed that they cannot fight back. And it is time they did.’
Universities have a great deal to answer for by producing ideologically-driven teachers who prejudice the minds of children against their fathers and their brothers, against the male half of the population. Totalitarian states, fascist and communist, also used the education system to create an ideologically-complicit populace, to create a compliant conventional wisdom. We don’t expect it to be so used in Britain.
Misandry and Men’s Lesser Worth
The stereotyping of a group as ‘bad people’ makes us callous to the death of its members.
IT’S SO HARD BEING A MAN
(The Sunday Telegraph, 7 November, 1993)
Last week the chief executive of the Samaritans drew attention to the growing number of young men committing suicide. There was little reaction…
Men are the last group that can be freely prejudicially denounced. It is perfectly acceptable to make general slurs about men that could never be made about an ethnic group, and certainly not about women.
That was written in 1993. Nothing has changed since. The male suicide rate is still four times greater than the female suicide rate. Do a gender
