On Tumblr STFUFauxFeminists says misandry isn't a thing. While I'm sympathetic I disagree.

Here's how I see it.

There isn't really much misandry in the MRA thread-hijacking-on-feminist-blogs sense but it really is a thing. And like misogyny it's built into patriarchy. Say what one will about "proud feminist misandrists" but they can't hold a candle to the sheer fear, hatred, and contempt anti-feminists have for men.

Two examples: Look at their core belief that women must be kept down or men can't succeed! If men can't succeed on a level playing field with women, as the 'wingers insist, that means the 'wingers are insisting that not only are men not equal to women they're weaker! And what must rape apologists believe about male character to reflexively blame victims? That men generally lack the impulse control of pre-schoolers!

Another example: the persistent "traditional family values" assertion that single men are so dangerous to society that women should be required to effectively sacrifice themselves by attaching themselves to men in order to temper, or tame, or subdue them? Seriously? I'm sorry but if anti-feminists really believed men are superior they wouldn't insist they all needed minders.

It's less remarked upon, sure, and conspicuously missing from complaints by the usual suspects. But implicit, institutional misandry like that is central to the insanity of patriarchy.

Image via AddictingInfo.org.

So thanks to the network effects inherent in Facebook and, I guess, inexpensive cable modems, I've slowly become friends, or at least friends of friends, with a surprising number of men and women from my previous life back in Southern Appalachia.  Most of the men, at least, don't post much, and when they do it's almost stereotypically about bars they used to drink in, or guitars they wish they had, or about high gas prices, or (a lot of them) about the 12-Step Meetings they're attending and/or sponsoring others through.  Oh, and/or a lot of Pot-Farmville posts. You know, salt of the earth type guys but not really particularly connected to current events.  (This on my personal real-name account, not my basically neglected and otherwise unused figleaf one.)  In other words people pretty much just like me before we went our separate ways, and who turned out the ways we did more due to chance than apitutde, ambition, or intent.

Anyway, when I got home today and logged in to Facebook again (hey, evidently like a lot of other people I'm starting to find work!) something was different.

All those guys?  The ones who still drink whatever's cheapest in totally non-ironically-named bars and fix their Ford and Dodge slant-six cars themselves?  The ones who call each other "pee-pencil peckered sons of bitches" when they're mad?  The ones who've been through bad divorces and don't like to go to Red Lobster even after a wedding because it's too fancy?

Four or five of those guys were posting or reposting those photos of that buttwad all-male panel Darryl Issa called up in Congress to talk about how it's immoral for insurance to pay for contraception for women that have been making the rounds all day.

They were not, um, supportive either of Issa or the male panelists or that it was a good idea for a whole row of men to sit around brassing off about how depriving women of healthcare as a matter of "religious freedom."

That's... pretty different.

It's not like these guys were ever likely to vote for Republicans.  They're more likely not to vote at all!

But this got their attention.

If you're a right-wing extremist with an eye on the November elections that can't be good a good sign.

Update: I don't want to give the impression these are all guys who live so close together they've all got the same in-laws. One of them lives in northern Alabama, another in east Tennessee. One's been in Montana for more than 20 years. Another's actually from the middle-Appalachians, in Rick Santorum's rural Pennsylvania. I'm just saying it's weird to hear from any of them in a given month. To hear from all of them in one day, and all about the same thing, is... pretty unusual!

Anyone else noticed anything like this or is it really just a total fluke that I happened to see it?

Update #2: Also to be clear (because there seems to be some confusion) I'm not saying it's unusual for these people to say these things because "people like them" don't support women's rights or women's health.  Instead it's ususual because they rarely comment on politics at all.

M'kay so you want a direct example of how anti-feminists a) hate men and b) believe the only role women should have in society is as bait for men? Matthew Yglesias has the goods.  Emphasis mine.

This put me in mind of Monica Potts’ review of Kay Hymowitz:

“Before [today], the fact is that primarily, a 20-year-old woman would have been a wife and a mother,” author Kay Hymowitz told the crowd of about 100 at the Manhattan Institute in New York City. Men would have been mowing lawns and changing the oil in their family sedans instead of playing video games and watching television.

Hymowitz’s argument, essentially, is that not only has feminism opened up new doors of opportunity to women, but it’s helped contribute to the growth of a society in which young men are less crushed down with family and household obligations and are spending more time enjoying themselves. Except she means this as a bad thing! In both cases the conservative conceit seems to be that a decline in human suffering is a bad thing because it leads to a corresponding decline in admirable anti-suffering effort. John Holbo memorably dubbed this Donner Party Conservatism.

Source: Matthew Yglesias

Got that?  Conservatives just fucking hate it when women have political and social autonomy, that they're approaching economic parity, that thanks to contraceptives, Plan B, and abortion they can have children when they want to and still have sex when they don't, and most importantly, that women can have men in their lives because they want men in their lives and not because they'll starve if they don't offer their asses to someone who'll support and "protect" them.

And why do conservatives hate women with social, economic, reproductive, and sexual autonomy?

Because with all that freedom they're not obliged to drag men down into early marriage, into greater responsibility, into ground down death-of-a-salesman lifespans.  Which means that men too have new freedom.

And before anyone goes all work-ethic angst-y about men "slacking off" I just want to point out that the ex anti baseline was... men working twice as hard as necessary in order to support an able-bodied partner who was effectively forbidden to work at all! In other words men are only "slacking off" relative to the Willie Lomans of conservative findom fetishists.  Fuck them!

Anyway, I think that really nicely illustrates how

• Men benefit not only indirectly but directly from feminism
• How conservatism views women primarily as bait to use to dominate and control men
• How neither women or men are intended to benefit from the system of patriarchy
• Why men ought to have as vested an interest in the outcome of feminism as women do
• Why men should direct their ire not at feminism but the fucking assholes who want to use women to control men.

And finally,

• How it's patriarchy rather than feminism that genuinely, truly, madly, and deeply hates and fears men.

I mean seriously! What decent person... what person with any hint of integrity or honor... what person in his or her right mind thinks the real reason women should be kept barefoot, pregnant, and chained to the stove is to keep men's noses chained to the grindstone?!?!?

Oh, and it's not just Hymowitz who blames women for men's happiness.  Yglesias begins his post with news that the American Enterprise Institute just hosted a whole fucking conference on the insufficient misery suffered by millions of American men and women.

Fuck them and the horse they rode up on!

Via Amanda Marcotte, who's own post excoriating the Right's viscious assault on men's happiness and freedom is called The War on Joy.

Update: But see also Echidne who catches conservative British cabinet minister David Willets being a little more honest: all those feminists are making upward mobility more difficult for men.

Image by Flickr user x-ray delta one, Used under a Creative Commons license.

Reflecting Kay Hymowtz's latest lazy anti-feminist screed in the Wall Street Journal, Kay Steiger notes that

Kay Hymowitz and I might share a first name, but there seems to be little else that we share. She's written about dating and marriage in the past, saying, "By the early twentieth century, things had evolved so that in the United States, at any rate, a man knew the following: he was supposed to call for a date; he was supposed to pick up his date; he was supposed to take his date out, say, to a dance, a movie, or an ice-cream joint; if the date went well, he was supposed to call for another one; and at some point, if the relationship seemed charged enough—or if the woman got pregnant—he was supposed to ask her to marry him."

Source: Kay Steiger

Hymowitz is just so full of shit. That whole litany at the beginning about what men had "learned" by the beginning of the 20th Century? Any idea who all that learning, and the resulting behavior, was intended to impress? The prospective date's parents (mostly her father)... who at the time were still the arbiters of whether their daughter's "hand" would be given to the boy. For marriage or anything else.

The idea that increased empowerment for (young, single) women has automatically meant decreased power for their prospective young, single suitors is almost as novel as the idea that young single men have ever had very much power. Even if you were to buy Hymowitz's claims without reservation (which I wouldn't recommend) then the primary difference for young single men at the beginning of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st would be that decision-making power has shifted from young women's fathers to the women themselves.

And dear sweet mother of pearl let's not point out that Hymowitz's deprecation of today's callow, snot-nosed, "self-abusing" men is nothing compared to the combined scorn and anxiety heaped on them towards the end of the 19th Century.

It's not quite true that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it. Instead it's that those who don't know history doom us to hearing the same alarums raised generation after generation.

Do men have a little catching up to do? Sure. But it's not women we need to catch up with. It's residual patriarchy -- internalized and external -- that's holding us back.

I'd just add that patriarchy being a co-ed enterprise, Hymowitz's punditry is part of the problem for men, not part of the solution.

I'd also point out that, predictably, Hymowitz's subtext isn't that women make men small. It's the classic anti-feminist subtext that men are such sniveling losers that the only way to make them look big is to hold women back. The reason I like feminism is feminism's enduring faith in men's ability to rise to meet ordinary expectations. Anti-feminists? Not so much.

And she wants us to believe that feminists are the man haters!