Bashing the male-bashers

By MARGARET WENTE

Saturday, December 29, 2001 – Print Edition, Page D16

Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture
By Paul Nathanson
and Katherine K. Young
McGill-Queen's, 370 pages,
$39.95

Here's the latest from Germaine Greer, from a recent essay published in a leading British newspaper: "God knows how many women already have no use for their men, who are all too often idle and incompetent both as wage-earners and around the house, uninterested in the children and hopeless in bed."

It's her standard stuff. But why aren't people more offended? No leading paper would dare publish such a rant against women.

In our culture, it's fine to say that men are brutes. In case we forget it there's always Montreal Massacre day each December 6. This anniversary is a hook for papers across Canada to publish such gems as this, from the op-ed page of the Ottawa Citizen: "The past 12 years have seen an unprecedented rise in anti-women propaganda and near-hysterical anti-feminist backlash . . . Alas, our own country is rife with the hatred of women."

So Spreading Misandry: Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture is welcome, and also necessary.

"It is now unthinkable for people, especially public figures, to ridicule or attack women," write Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young, a male freelance editor and a female professor of the history of religions at McGill. "But it is considered perfectly respectable for women to ridicule or attack men."

Misandry, the hatred of men, is the opposite of misogyny, of which we've heard so much. Spreading Misandry sets out to demonstrate that our culture is shot through with unexamined sexism -- directed against men. To prove it, the authors offer up lengthy dissections of movies and TV shows from the past two decades.

Some of their targets are familiar. They cite the female-oriented daytime talk shows, led by Donahue, which turned into long-running bitch sessions about men's shortcomings and sins. And some targets are overdue for criticism. It's refreshing to see them knock the stuffing out of that prim Anna Quindlen, the New York Times and Newsweek columnist who once wrote, "It's not that I don't like men; women are just better."

Quindlen belongs to a large group of soft-core feminists who basically believe that men (and society) would be a lot better off if men were more like women. This faintly patronizing attitude is widespread. You can see it reflected in TV hits such as Home Improvement, in which the men are played for laughs and the women always know better. The trouble is that casual misandry has become so deeply embedded in the culture that we don't even see it any more.

The authors go further, though. They argue that men have not only been patronized, but dehumanized, even demonized. There was a period in pop culture when every movie-of-the-week seemed to feature female victims of incest, rape and battery. The archetypal parable of misandry was The Burning Bed (1984), a wife-abuse saga in which, as always, the tortured but brave woman prevails in the end.

Over the past decade, large parts of the culture have come to favour "female" values over "male" ones. Many people (including many men) have come to believe that the virtues of expressiveness, feeling, connection, intuition, caring, community and egalitarianism are somehow better than the virtues of reserve, stoicism, action, hierarchy, duty, power, patriotism, discipline and technology. Estrogen good. Testosterone bad.

How did this happen? The authors blame ideological feminism, a form of rigid group-think that remains extremely well-entrenched in universities. Ideological feminism holds that women are not just equal to, but superior to, men, and that men are responsible for most of women's problems.

This attitude has spread to the wider world. It has done profound damage to men, they argue, and has driven a wedge between the sexes. They want this book (two others are to follow) to help undo all that. Their ultimate goal is no less than "to help reverse the current polarization of men and women by laying the foundation for a new social contract between the sexes."

This book is a welcome antidote to two decades of women's studies rubbish. But it has some of the same flaws. First, it's too grab-baggy. Although their thesis is broadly true, the authors pound away with a blunt instrument, and too many of their examples are obscure and dated. They're shocked that someone wrote a book for women called Sweet Revenge: The Wicked Delights of Getting Even. But so what?

Spreading Misandry is rather earnest and humourless, which perhaps reflects its quasi-academic roots. Like many feminist tracts, it also overstates its case. Are men and women really polarized? They may be on TV sitcoms. But the authors present no evidence that they are so in real life. And will it really take decades, as the authors warn, to undo the damage and "create a spirit of genuine reciprocity between men and women"? Like many others who have gone before them, they think pop culture is far more dangerous than it really is.

Maybe I'm trivializing, but it seems to me the war between the sexes is finally on the wane. The counter-revolution has been under way for quite some time now, and backlash books are a bigger industry now than man-bashing ones.

Something else has happened since this book was written. Since Sept. 11, all those despised male values have galloped right back into fashion. Everyone is celebrating manly men again. I even saw a beer ad the other day that dared to poke fun at men and women both. Which is, of course, just the way it should be.

Margaret Wente is a Globe and Mail columnist who writes often on men-women issues.