Karen Straughan (@girlwriteswhat) succinctly discusses that men don’t hate women.
VERY interesting:
I don’t think there is a universe that could exist where men, in general, hate women.
So maybe the first thing would be to stop accusing men of hating women? And to call out the women in positions of power who accuse men of hating women? And to call out the women like Quinn Norton who claim that men are raised to hate women, or Chloe Angyal of Feministing who claim that our entire society hates women?
Honestly, the Nazis hated the Jews. The Hutus hated the Tutsis. The KKK hated blacks. And yet this male dominated society, where men hold the majority of the positions of power, somehow HATES women despite not a single lynching of a woman for wronging a man, despite NOMAAS and the White Ribbon Campaign and HeForShe and a male feminist president, despite Boko Haram’s sparing of girls while burning boys in their dormitories, despite the unbelievable (and unbelievably unspoken-of) gender gap in executions and criminal sentencing in Islamic countries, despite males being the primary receptacles of violence by both males and females from infancy to old age GLOBALLY, despite not a single genocide in history that DIDN’T begin with the systematic extermination of almost exclusively men and boys.
And you think men hate women. If men hate women, then how do men feel about men? On any given day, any given male is more likely to assault a male, undermine a male, ignore a male in need, murder a male, celebrate the suffering of a male wrongdoer, hit his male child, make a decision to mutilate his male child, arrest a male, convict a male, and sentence a male to incarceration or death, than he is a female.
And yet women–yes, women–have allowed a narrative to become entrenched in all our systems and institutions that males favor other males at the expense of females. That somehow, there is a “team men” that has been oppressing, subjugating and subordinating women since the dawn of human history. That men have waged a “war on women” since we descended from the trees and first tottered on two legs on the African Savannah.
Men have bled for their women, fought to protect their women, died for their women, and admonished each other for millennia to love their virtuous women as Christ loves the Church, to treat their honorable women as queens and as jewels, to present to them the heads of the men who displease them, and to duel to the death to defend their honor. The literary canon, written primarily by men, has always lauded a masculinity that protects women–the villains identified by their willingness to harm women, and the heroes identified by their willingness to avenge those harms.
And you think men hate women?
Men have never hated women. Men will never hate women.
What you see as hate is fear and frustration. Fear of what you have the power to do to any given man on any given day, just by virtue of being female. Frustration that no matter how far men bend to your whims, it’s never enough to prove to you that they don’t hate you and have never hated you.
For god sake, have you ever gone on a conservative website and seen what the people there write about Islam and misogyny? These men couldn’t care less that for every 1 woman executed for adultery in Saudi Arabia, 500 men are executed for less serious crimes. They couldn’t care less that 80% of women in Saudi Arabia DON’T want the driving ban lifted, because it would mean giving up the privilege of being waited on by male family members. Those conservatives say, “OMG, look at how those horrible Islamists treat their women! They objectify and sexually exploit them!” And what do you think the Islamists are saying about Americans? “OMG, look at how those horrible Americans treat their women! They objectify and sexually degrade them!”
And somehow, a minority of women (feminists) have convinced all of society that men hate women.
No wonder men are afraid of you. If you [women] can convince society that it hates women, in the face of all the evidence to the contrary, then you have a power that is unfathomable to the average man. A power that is unfathomable to the most powerful man. You have the power to convince society that men hate you because they don’t love you 10 or 100 or 1000 times as much as they love other men, and you have the power to convince society to enact legislation an policy based on that completely stupefying false belief, and these powerful men who supposedly hate you and are in charge of everything will do it. They’ll lie and they’ll cheat and they’ll throw less privileged men under the bus just to prove to you that they’re not misogynists.
Putting your foot down and saying, “what you’re doing is abuse” is not hate. Drawing a boundary and saying, “this far, no further” is not hate. Saying, “I choose not to have anything to do with women unless necessary” is not hate.
It’s self-preservation.
