reclaiming misandry from misogynistic rhetoric

Abstract

In recent years, misogyny has become a central concept in philosophy as well as an established concept in public discourse and political policy. But where is misogyny’s supposed counterpart, namely, misandry? In this article, I argue for an ameliorative analysis of ‘misandry’, arguing that it can be reformulated in an effort to reclaim it from misogynistic weaponisation. The term ‘misandry’ is used almost exclusively as a misogynistic rhetorical device for attributing unjust anger, hatred or other similar emotions to a speaker, thereby undermining their epistemic authority. Rather than dismissing the term as conceptually flawed and politically problematic, I argue that we ought to ameliorate misandry to instead refer to a felt anger, hostility or fear towards the patriarchal social order and its valorisation and/or expression in misogynistic and machismo behaviour. To support these claims, I begin with a discussion of Kate Manne’s analysis of misogyny before reflecting on how this can inform our understanding of misandry. I then demonstrate the various ways in which misandry is rhetorically deployed as a means of silencing speakers who express dissent against the patriarchy. Following this, I argue that we should ameliorate the term, not only to undermine these misogynistic practices but also to articulate a legitimate affective and reactive attitude against the patriarchal imposition of a hierarchical gender binary.

Introduction

In recent years, misogyny has become a central focus of philosophical analysis as well as an established concept in public discourse and political policy. ¹ But where is misogyny’s supposed counterpart, namely, misandry? Compared to misogyny, the term ‘misandry’ remains in the margins of philosophical thought. In this article, I argue that the term ‘misandry’ ought to be uncoupled from its supposed antonym ‘misogyny’ and (perhaps unintuitively) reformulated and reclaimed as a conceptually robust anti-patriarchal stance. The impetus for this project of reclamation is that ‘misandry’ is most often used as a rhetorical device to silence dissent levelled against the patriarchy. Further, this rhetorical deployment of ‘misandry’ is both epistemically and affectively unjust as it functions to attribute anger, hatred, spite or other similar emotions to a speaker who calls the patriarchal order into question. The function of this rhetoric is to undermine the speaker’s epistemic authority. As the speaker who is labelled a ‘misandrist’ is often a woman, ² and the rhetorical force relies on racist and misogynistic preconceptions concerning anger and epistemic authority, the term ‘misandry’ is typically (and ironically) found in discursive sites of misogyny. ³

The weaponisation of misandry stems from the popular usage of misandry to denote a hatred of men. In this article, I mitigate this misogynistic rhetorical use of the term by arguing for an ameliorative analysis in which ‘misandry’ should no longer be interpreted as a site of illegitimate hatred, but rather as a politically powerful and ethically legitimate stance against patriarchal norms. Reclaiming misandry in this way can be an important aspect of expressing dissent towards a hierarchical gender binarism, and an effective means of undermining patriarchal (anger-)silencing practices.

To achieve these ends, in the first section I begin by discussing Kate Manne’s (2019) ameliorative analysis of misogyny in which she argues for a reinterpretation of misogyny as a property of a patriarchal social order. Understood in this way, misogyny is no longer a psychological disposition or an individual’s attitude but a systemic phenomenon. In the second section, I turn to the notion of misandry. I argue that in my reading of Manne’s (ibid.) analysis, there is an implied dismissal of ‘misandry’ as incoherent if the term is intended to be meaningful beyond its rhetorical force. This leads me to the third section, where instead of condemning and dismissing ‘misandry’ as nonsensical, I sketch out the various ways in which an unchecked interpretation of ‘misandry’ is weaponised as a patriarchal tool to delegitimise a dissenting agent’s epistemic authority and affective attitude. What follows from this, I argue in the fourth section, is that misandry ought to be reinterpreted and reclaimed as a legitimate mode of feeling and expressing dissent against the patriarchy. In the fifth section, I conclude by making the claim that despite its negative connotations, there are sufficient grounds to reclaim misandry from misogynistic rhetoric.

Understanding misogyny

In Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2019), Kate Manne offers an ameliorative analysis of misogyny whereby she demonstrates how we ought to understand the term. Manne’s methodology follows Sally Haslanger, who conceives of ameliorative analysis as a process aimed at enhancing our conceptual resources for the purpose of furthering the cause of social justice (Haslanger and Saul 2006, p. 138; Haslanger, 2012, pp. 222–225). It involves critically reflecting on one’s understanding of a concept and then engineering it so that people’s use and understanding of the concept best serve its intended purpose. In her study of misogyny, Manne (2019, p. 34; emphasis in original) aims to highlight ‘misogyny’s political dimensions, rendering it psychologically more explicable, and supporting a clean contrast between misogyny and sexism’. In other words, Manne’s project attempts to rescue ‘misogyny’ from what she calls the ‘naïve conception’, which understands misogyny as:

Primarily a property of individual agents (typically, although not necessarily, men) who are prone to feel hatred, hostility, or other similar emotions toward any and every woman, or at least women generally simply because they are women. (Ibid., p. 32, emphasis in original)

The ‘naïveté’ of this conception lies in its treatment of misogyny as an anomalous individualistic trait rather than a product of the wider (patriarchal-)structural conditions within which it occurs. If we locate misogyny in individual agents’ attitudes, it threatens to become epistemically inaccessible to us. Attitudes are often inscrutable, thus making charges of misogyny near impossible. It also provides no explanation as to why misogyny seems to be rife in patriarchal settings (ibid., pp. 45–47). In relation to the latter problem, Manne (ibid., pp. 47–48) asks, ‘when it comes to the women who are not only dutifully but lovingly catering to his desires, what’s to hate, exactly?’.

Nevertheless, we find a similarly naïve account of misogyny in David Gilmore’s (2010, p. 9) anthropological study of its history, wherein Gilmore defines misogyny as ‘an unreasonable fear or hatred of women that takes on some palpable form in any given society’ and is ‘specifically acted out in society by males’. On the one hand, understanding misogyny in this way makes it personal and decontextualises it from the patriarchal social order in which it flourishes. On the other, it generalises misogyny to such an extent that any expression of respect, fondness or love for women (or even simply not being a man) seems to preclude the possibility of acting misogynistically. As Manne (2019, pp. 87–91) explains in detail, even Donald Trump employs women in high-powered positions and has women amongst his friends and family whom he cherishes; what makes Trump a misogynist is rather his patterns of sexual harassment, assault, threats and insults to women for the sake of consolidating his position of dominance. Thus, the naïve and individualistic account limits manifestations of misogyny to the margins of gendered violence, thereby ignoring the systemic nature of the oppression inflicted onto women in patriarchal societies.

Rescuing ‘misogyny’ from this naïve conception, Manne (ibid., p. 33) argues that misogyny must instead be understood as the ‘system that operates within a patriarchal social order to police and enforce women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance’; rather than being a property of individual agents, misogyny is now understood as primarily a property of social systems as a whole. A structure of power as historically established and socially pervasive as the patriarchy necessitates mechanisms for its enforcement. As Manne goes on to detail throughout her work, we see misogyny operating as this policing of women through an expansive range of practices, for example: microaggressions in the workplace, domestic abuse, gendered tropes, catcalling, slut shaming, tone policing and internet trolling. Understanding misogyny simply as a personally possessed and indiscriminate hatred is analytically and empirically naïve. It is difficult to conceive of such an indiscriminate hatred being practically or emotionally plausible, and this psychologistic explanation construes misogyny as a kind of irrational phobia or psychopathology (ibid., p. 49), rather than a concept intimately tied up with social power relations.

Manne’s (ibid.) ameliorative re-conceptualisation of misogyny also allows us to make sense of how misogyny can so easily be perpetrated by women. Although the naïve conception does not foreclose the possibility of a woman being particularly prone to feelings of hatred and hostility towards all other women, on that account it is quite difficult to imagine. As Manne explains at length, the misogynist often shows no sign of fear or hatred but is more precisely motivated by the drive to uphold the self-serving patriarchal order. Contra Gilmore (2010), Manne’s (2019, p. 72) structural formulation has the breadth of scope to include instances of internalised, institutional and overt misogyny, along with misogynistic acts, which manifest in the rewarding and valorising of women who conform to patriarchal norms. Misogyny, best understood, is tied up in structural arrangements rather than agential attitudes.

Where does this leave us with ‘misandry’?

In this section, I discuss the implications that Manne’s (2019) discussion of misogyny may have on the term ‘misandry’. Most theorists are inclined to dismiss ‘misandry’ as lacking the requisite social structures that underpin misogyny. Yet in following Manne’s analysis, I want to avoid a definition of misandry that is as indiscriminate, psychologically unfeasible and epistemically inaccessible as the naïve conception of misogyny. As Manne (ibid., p. 47) points out, even a prolific misogynist does not hate any and every woman, especially not those who adhere to the relevant prescribed social roles. Leaving misandry to denote a stance correlative to the naïve conception of misogyny would likewise be conceptually redundant.

Nonetheless, difficulties arise when we attempt to map misandry directly onto Manne’s (2019) ‘logic of misogyny’. Understood correlatively to the patriarchy, there is no matriarchal social order within which man’s subordination can be enforced, nor is there an established female dominance to uphold. Manne (ibid., p. 67, n. 12, emphasis in original) does not engage in detail with the implications that her analysis has on an understanding of misandry, except in a footnote where she recognises that ‘there will be no instances of genuine misandry absent the operation of matriarchal norms’. I take ‘genuine misandry’ here to mean misandry that is similarly structural in nature to Manne’s ameliorated misogyny. Such a dismissal of misandry is commonplace with theorists who recognise the salience of a patriarchal social order.

‘Misandry’ has been denounced as lacking the ‘systemic, transhistoric, institutionalised and legislated antipathy of misogyny’ (Flood et al., 2007, p. 442), and as being ‘utterly tendentious’ as it lacks either political institutionalisation and legitimation, or a repressive apparatus to enforce it (Kimmel, 2013, p. 131). Gilmore (2010, pp. 12–13) likewise concurs, arguing that misogyny is an unreciprocated cultural institution, leaving a term that denotes an institutionalised hatred of men to have little currency. To understand misandry as a coherent analogue to misogyny requires the absence of a prevailing patriarchal social order. If we want to avoid the naïve, individualised and psychologistic conception of misandry, then similarly to Manne’s (2019) work on misogyny, it seems misandry should be understood as being metaphysically dependent on a matriarchal social arrangement.

Though controversial, such a position is in fact held by some within the discipline of men’s studies. Most notably formulated in their three volumes on misandry, ⁴ Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young (2001, 2006, 2015) argue that misandry is even more pervasive, insidious and harmful than misogyny. Contra Manne’s (2019) brief denouncement of misandry, Nathanson and Young (2001, 2006, 2015) argue that there is a matriarchal social order such that ‘gynocentrism’ is propounded throughout cultural artifacts, religious symbolism and institutional legislation. In one volume, drawing on selected pop-cultural references, Nathanson and Young (2001) argue that misandry has become a ‘culturally propagated hatred’, consolidated by stereotypical depictions of men as inadequate and evil. One of the crucial problems, they argue, is that the feminist obsessing over misogyny has allowed misandry to proliferate without notice. In addition to the cultural propagation of misandry, Nathanson and Young (2006) attempt to demonstrate how there is a juridical discrimination against men in US American and Canadian laws, such that men are legally vilified through gender-based discrepancies in issues such as child custody, pay equity, pornography, prostitution, sexual harassment and violence against women. In centring all three of their volumes on what they deem the ‘essentialism’ and ‘dualism’ of ideological feminism, Nathanson and Young (ibid., 2001, 2006, 2015) have turned a critique of feminism into a detailing of a supposed social, moral and historical crisis.

Unfortunately, a detailed discussion of Nathanson and Young (ibid.) falls beyond the scope of this article. To take Nathanson and Young’s claims seriously, one would have to commit to their Copernican turn whereby men have become the subordinate group and patriarchy a relic of history rather than an enduring set of structures. Sure enough, some of Nathanson and Young’s examples are of men being represented as callous, violent and sub-human. Yet oftentimes the cultural products that Nathanson and Young draw on to substantiate their claims—rather than being evidence of the demonisation and ridiculing of men—are in fact comedic representations of the patriarchy (Kimmel, 2013).

A more compelling explanation for the phenomena discussed by Nathanson and Young (2001, 2006, 2015) can be found in Carol Harrington’s (2022, p. 64) discussion of how ‘neoliberal rationality’ (rather than ‘feminist misandry’) is responsible for the problematisations of masculinity and transformation of gender norms. Rather than pointing towards the dissolution of patriarchal structures, contemporary caricatures of men are indicative of the installation of hegemonic masculinities, which may eschew misogyny and traditional ‘toxic’ masculinity but nevertheless perpetuate patriarchal structures. Thus, the kind of men whom Nathanson and Young (2001, 2006, 2015) have in mind are likely working-class and racially minoritised men who are represented as backwardly traditional and hyper-masculine (cf. Harrington, 2022, p. 63). These negative representations of men function ‘to create the appearance that male-domination is on the decline’ (ibid.; emphasis mine), yet beneath the surface is still a cultural landscape that consistently objectifies women, celebrates patriarchal gender roles and takes for granted a hierarchical gender binary. ⁵

A perhaps more meaningful way of approaching misandry, and which requires a significantly smaller degree of controversial commitments, is bell hooks’ (2000, pp. 115–116; 2005 [2004], p. 97) discussion of ‘man-hating females’ within the feminist movement. hooks does not herself use the term ‘misandry’ but recognises how there is a characterisation of women as ‘man-hating’ that far outweighs actual ‘man-hating feminists’. Simply identifying oneself as a feminist is enough to be seen as a man-hating woman (hooks, 2005 [2004], p. 96). There is no smoke without fire, hooks (ibid.) argues, and there is a genuine—albeit, marginal—minority of feminists who refuse to accept men as possible comrades and instead simply despise any and every man. However, I want to argue that neither the concern from hooks nor the dismissals of misandry as conceptually incoherent are sufficient grounds upon which to expel misandry from the English lexicon. Rather, I want to explore the option of ameliorating misandry such that it denotes a conceptually coherent political stance that attests to neither a matriarchal social order nor a psychological disposition to ‘man-hating’.

The weaponisation of misandry

In this section, I turn to the ways in which ‘misandry’ is weaponised rhetorically and misogynistically. The term itself is negatively connotated and remains on the periphery of feminist scholarship. ⁶ This is understandable because so many attempts at thematising and critiquing patriarchal structures provoke immediate backlash such that the critic is deemed to be speaking from ‘misandric’ motivations. These instances of backlash are not only unwarranted but they also ultimately result in both epistemic and affective injustices. As will be shown, the force of these injustices often relies on the negative and unattractive connotations of ‘misandry’ and what it is taken to represent. Rather than simply motivating a critique of the patriarchy, I want to ameliorate misandry for the purpose of disabling its weaponisation.

Epistemic injustice

To begin with a paradigm example, and one in which ‘misandry’ is used and endorsed, I turn to Pauline Harmange’s book I Hate Men (2020). Here, Harmange defines misandry as:

A negative feeling towards the entirety of the male sex … and when I say ‘the male sex’ I mean all the cis men who have been socialised as such, and who enjoy their male privilege without ever calling it into question, or not enough. (ibid., p. 9)

Note how Harmange purposely drops the etymological ties to hatred, instead opting for a ‘negative feeling’. At risk of propounding a feminist position oft-criticised for impeding the wider feminist struggle, Harmange is careful to demonstrate how she is not simply ‘man-hating’. Instead, Harmange’s (ibid.) affective relation to unreflecting, uncritical cis men is one that ‘ranges from simple suspicion to outright loathing’. Moreover, it is a negative disposition towards men who enjoy reproducing obnoxious and harmful behaviours, rather than men as such.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Harmange’s (ibid.) publication provoked a far greater backlash than either she or her publishing house anticipated (Willsher, 2020). The furore even reached national politics when Ralph Zurmély, an adviser to France’s ministry on gender equality, threatened the publishers with censorship due to Harmange’s book being considered a hateful ‘ode to misandry’ (France 24, 2020). I want to draw out two insights from this example, which I use to motivate the present ameliorative project. Firstly, the backlash that Harmange’s publication received (most of which happened on the basis of the book’s title and description prior to its publication) is illustrative of how a position that propounds misandry will likely be immediately rejected and silenced. A misandric position is taken to be lacking epistemic authority. Secondly, the large international interest that I Hate Men was greeted with is suggestive of a widely supported sentiment that is rarely articulated: namely, a negative disposition towards men who enjoy the unearned privilege that results from their socialisation as cis men. It could be argued that despite Harmange’s book resonating with many people, the size of the backlash provides sufficient grounds to adopt a less confrontational approach. However, this concern is insubstantial insofar as backlash is an expected consequence of any dissent against the patriarchy; it is not reserved for self-proclaimed misandric dissent.

I now turn to a more interesting example that demonstrates how the response to Harmange was not exceptional, but was rather a predictable act of patriarchal policing. Jessica Eaton founded the first male mental health centre in the United Kingdom with the primary aim of tackling high suicide rates in men and boys. Despite being devoted to the well-being of men, the Eaton Foundation surprisingly has been the subject of misogynistic backlash. Most interesting for our present study is that Eaton (2018) herself has been labelled a ‘misandrist’ for publicly stating that masculine gender roles contribute to high suicide rates in men. This more intriguing example offers an additional insight: even if a woman’s actions are explicitly for the benefit of men, if they call the patriarchal order into question their actions can be dismissed as being motivated from a place of misandry. In both the examples of Harmange and Eaton, a naïve conception of misandry has been rhetorically deployed to attribute an unjust anger, hatred, spite or hostility to the speaker. I take these to be instances of epistemic injustice whereby the speaker has had their epistemic authority undermined and has had their beliefs, knowledge or insights silenced. We can understand this as a rhetorical weaponisation of ‘misandry’, which effects testimonial injustices.

As a form of epistemic injustice, Miranda Fricker (2007) articulates the harm of a testimonial injustice as occurring when an agent is wronged in their capacity as a giver of knowledge. Testimonial injustices manifest in myriad forms. I hereon focus on what Fricker (ibid., p. 28) takes to be the central case of testimonial injustice, namely ‘identity-prejudicial credibility deficit’. Both Harmange and Eaton were wronged in their capacities as givers of knowledge, as they suffered credibility deficits by virtue of them being not only women but ‘misandric’ women. The testimonial injustice experienced by Harmange and Eaton is not of the same severity as the examples given by Fricker (Tom Robinson in To Kill a Mockingbird, or Marge in The Talented Mr Ripley; ibid., pp. 9–14, 20–23), as the misogyny faced by Harmange and Eaton was far less successful in discrediting them as speakers and givers of knowledge. Nonetheless, the identity-prejudicial aspect is resoundingly present. Unlike incidental cases of testimonial injustice that involve a highly localised prejudice, prejudice that relates to social identity is systematic (ibid., p. 27). It could be argued that the case of Harmange was only incidental due to the provocative title of her publication, but I would hasten to suggest that the treatment that Eaton received warrants suspicion towards such an interpretation. ⁷ Both Harmange and Eaton were characterised and treated as angry hate-filled women whose credibility suffered due to their work standing in explicit opposition to the patriarchal social order. They suffered credibility deficits by virtue of an identity-based misogynistic prejudice.

In both cases, ‘misandry’ was rhetorically employed to inflict credibility deficits on Harmange and Eaton. In line with Manne’s (2019, p. 192) exposition of misogyny, we can understand these instances as manifest examples of how ‘misogyny’s primary function and constitutive manifestation is the punishment of “bad” women, and policing of women’s behaviour’. The credibility deficits are imposed for the sake of silencing those who attempt to publicly undermine the patriarchy. Silencing practices such as these are found across innumerable cases of testimonial injustice (Fricker, 2007; Dotson, 2011), all of which result in the silenced agent being epistemically harmed. Importantly, and what I take up in greater detail in the next section, is how the silence effected by the rhetorical use of misandry is intimately tied up with a delegitimisation of feminine anger and hostility.

Anger-silencing practices

Anger-silencing practices are forms of epistemic injustice that aim at directly managing subordinate groups’ angry knowledge (Bailey, 2018, p. 97). Alison Bailey argues that there are two paradigmatic forms, namely tone policing and tone vigilance. Both practices force the subject into a space of silence saturated with what Bailey refers to as—following Audre Lorde (2019 [1981])—a resistant anger. Such anger-silencing practices have also been conceptualised as practices of affective injustice (Srinivasan, 2018; Whitney, 2018; Archer and Mills, 2019), but let us first keep at what Bailey takes to be the epistemic implications.

Tone policing, for Bailey (2018), silences a marginalised individual by demanding that they alter their tone and subdue their anger for the sake of the listener. If anger communicates a felt injustice and aims to express that a situation ought to be otherwise, then demanding a more amicable tone and silencing this anger effectively tells the injured subject that their injury is unworthy of consideration by others (ibid., p. 97). Tone vigilance, on the other hand, attributes anger to the marginalised subject in a way that pre-silences them, forcing them to be vigilant of their tone if they want to speak with epistemic confidence (ibid.). The predominant role that misandry plays in popular discourse is this two-fold epistemic injustice. At one level, misandry is used as a rhetorical device to signal anger (and other negative feelings deemed illegitimate) in the individual, thus making the speaker vigilant of their tone; this then appeals to the practices of tone policing, whereby the speaker’s epistemic authority is rejected by virtue of being perceived as angry, crazy or hysterical (ibid., p. 101).

Of course, the naïve conception of misandry refers to a hatred of men rather than an anger towards men. However, it is this conflation which exacerbates the injustice in instances when a woman is labelled a ‘misandrist’ for merely expressing dissent towards the patriarchy. Oftentimes, as in the case of Jessica Eaton, she is speaking from a place neither of anger nor hatred but out of genuine concern. The epistemic injustice then emerges from the attribution of insincere motives—typically of hatred—as a means of discreditation. Harmange (2020, p. 48), on the other hand, was a convenient candidate for being misogynistically silenced as her dissent towards the patriarchy is explicitly ‘born out of and nourished by anger’.

Irrespective of their actual motivations or intentions, if the speaker is a woman and/or non-white, their anger is either silenced or falsely attributed and then silenced. ⁸ We can better understand the nature of the harm through Fricker’s (2007) distinction between the primary and secondary harms of an epistemic injustice. A ‘primary harm’ is when: ‘The subject is wronged in her capacity as a knower. To be wronged in one’s capacity as a knower is to be wronged in a capacity essential to human value … the capacity to reason’ (ibid., p. 44). The policing and silencing of anger produces what Fricker (ibid.) calls ‘secondary harms’, which are characterised as being either practical or epistemic. The practical harm could be the loss of revenue from one’s publication or film, or perhaps the loss of political votes if you are interpreted as being too angry or crazed to be considered an epistemic authority. ⁹ The epistemic harm is the ensuing doubt and loss of confidence in the epistemic legitimacy of one’s anger. To demand a speaker to express themselves amicably in the wake of a felt injustice suggests that they are overreacting or that their anger is ill-founded. This tone-policing mechanism is particularly damning for women of colour and women in distinctly masculine-coded environments (Brescoll and Uhlmann, 2008). Ultimately, the efficacy of this misogynistic tool rests on the patriarchal norm that women’s anger is illegitimate and undesirable. ¹⁰

This policing of anger extends into the epistemic injustices that result from tone vigilance, as women are both implicitly and explicitly aware of how (not) to articulate their concern or identify an injustice. The epistemic injustice then becomes an affective injustice, as being labelled an angry, man-hating feminist is an attempted attack not only on one’s epistemic authority but also on the aptness of how one feels (Srinivasan, 2018). ¹¹ A social movement or protest may have its beliefs and aims recognised but then be asked to express its demands without an accompanying expression of anger or rage. In such a case, a kind of ‘psychic tax’ (ibid., p. 135) is levied and the harm of being made to negotiate their emotional response arises, no matter its appropriateness.

Beyond these examples where tone policing and tone vigilance impact the individual, the testimonial injustice also occurs at the level of discourse. This article lacks the scope to explore this in detail, but one need only look to the discussions surrounding ‘post-feminism’, ‘popular feminism’ and ‘neoliberal feminism’ to see how feminist discourse has also become unjustly vigilant of which kind of tone to adopt (Gill, 2016; Banet-Weiser, Gill and Rottenberg, 2019). These are all forms of feminism that have actively directed themselves away from the kind of ‘man-hating feminism’ to which misandry is attributed.

But what if ‘misandry’ no longer denoted this naïve and epistemically disarming notion of man-hating? In the discussion above, I have shown how the rhetorical weaponisation of misandry is one tool (of many) that enables epistemic and affective injustices. The force of its rhetorical use relies on the assumption that misandry is an inappropriate affective attitude or illegitimate source of epistemic authority, as it denotes a hatred of men. The question now becomes: how can we undermine this assumption, instead turning misandry into a legitimate stance which captures an appropriate response to an injustice?

Reformulating misandry

With the unjust rhetorical weaponisation of ‘misandry’ outlined, I now turn to how we ought to reformulate and reclaim misandry through ameliorative analysis. To achieve this, I compare two attempts that have already been made at reformulating misandry before combining their respective merits into a new understanding. Firstly, Gilmore’s (2010) reformulation is a great improvement on the conceptually ineffective notion of misandry as a hatred of any and every man. Gilmore (ibid., p. 12) writes that if we are to understand an antimasculinist position like misandry (or his preferred label, ‘viriphobia’), then it only makes sense when it is a ‘hatred of men’s traditional role, the obnoxious manly pose, a culture of machismo’. By emphasising that the object of misandry is the culture of machismo behaviour, rather than men as such, Gilmore’s reformulation already goes some way to providing a more structural conception of misandry. However, Gilmore’s etymological commitment to the notion of hatred is ultimately impeding. Misandry exists in response to harms, constraints and oppression that are felt as a direct result of patriarchal social arrangements. The term should capture that it aims to communicate a felt injustice and a desire for change. Correlatively to how there is often no expression of hatred in acts of misogyny but instead a motivation to uphold a self-serving patriarchal order, hatred is also not required in misandry; instead, there is a desire to undermine, disrupt and critique the same social order and its normative pre-/proscriptions.

For these reasons, I propose to distance misandry from its etymological ties to hatred. Instead, we can take a lead from Harmange (2020, p. 9) and replace ‘hatred’ with ‘negative feelings’. More specifically, we can unpack ‘negative feelings’ into (at least) the feelings of anger, hostility and fear, as they seem to best capture felt reactions to misogynistic, transphobic and homophobic practices and overt machismo behaviour. With this in mind, misandry will hereon be understood as the felt anger, hostility or fear towards the patriarchal social order and its valorisation and/or expression in misogynistic and machismo behaviour. In short, misandry is a reactive attitude felt towards representatives, advocates, defenders, symbols and structures of the patriarchy. Just as misogyny ‘primarily targets women because they are women in a man’s world’ (Manne, 2019, p. 64), misandry primarily targets men because they maintain the structures and enforce the norms of this very same man’s world. I take this to be an ameliorative analysis of the term, sacrificing certain etymological ties for the sake of theoretical and practical utility as well as aims of social justice. This utility is misandry’s ability to capture a politically powerful, already present and ethically legitimate sentiment that undermines its own weaponisation and suppression.

Before discussing the political merits of this ameliorative project, let us further unpack this reformulation. Firstly, as has been widely noted, misandry is not analogical to misogyny; rather, it is more precise to understand misandry as expressing a reactive attitude provoked by an unjust social and normative arrangement. It is difficult to conceive of misandry in this way without the precursor of institutionalised misogyny. Unlike misogyny, misandry does not seek to uphold and perpetuate any structural conditions but, rather, to undermine, critique and voice dissent to those already in place.

Related to the first aspect of reactiveness is that, secondly, misandry has both communicative and normative functions which have their basis in moral and political emotions such as anger and fear. Misandry aims to communicate a felt (or anticipated) injustice or moral violation, and it serves the normative function of expressing that the cause of this injustice is morally wrong and ought to be otherwise. This twofold characterisation of misandry is developed in line with feminist epistemological approaches to emotion that argue for a critical re-evaluation of the politically and epistemically resourceful nature of anger (Jaggar, 1989; Chemaly, 2018; Srinivasan, 2018, p. 128; Aumann and Cogley, 2019, p. 46). Such emphases on the epistemic value of anger—especially when experienced in response to racial or gender oppression—must be distinguished clearly from the destructive character of hatred (Lorde, 2019 [1981], p. 122). By shifting misandry’s constitutive affect away from hatred to other emotions, we can come to appreciate the productive goal of change at the heart of misandric feelings.

Thirdly, the primary object of misandric feelings is not men per se, nor just the actions and behaviour of traditionally masculine men. ¹² Misandry may be felt in response to agents, environments or practices that serve to uphold and benefit from the patriarchy. This means that the object of misandric anger can be a group of men who act misogynistically, a more diffuse collective agent such as a political party or even a particular place; one can imagine feeling fearful of a local bar that tolerates catcalling, sexual harassment and homophobia, and so on. Nonetheless, the patriarchy is often represented, defended and valorised by much less explicitly malicious characters; misandry can easily be directed towards, for example, agents who are reflectively or unreflectively committed to the gender binary or who hold ideals of love that make monogamy compulsory (Manne, 2019, p. 27), or even towards male intimate partners who fail to share in the ‘hermeneutic labour’ of a relationship (Anderson, 2023). The list goes on.

In addition to being directed at agents who represent a heteropatriarchal status quo, misandry takes environments, rituals and practices as its objects. One may be angry at one’s workplace environment due to the machismo culture it encourages or at a sports club feared because of its misogynistic and racist rituals, or one might express hostility towards a governmental party due to its transphobic and homophobic policies. ¹³ Misandry is therefore a response to both the immediately felt harms that manifest in agential behaviour as well as to harms that result from and contribute to wider systemic and structural injustices.

Fourthly, similar to how Manne’s (2019, p. 146) reformulation of misogyny allows us to thematise the mechanisms underpinning internalised misogyny, reformulating misandry in this way frees it from being an exclusively feminine-coded stance. Although patriarchal norms lead to much greater harms for women and trans people, there are also differential harms depending on ‘what kind of man you are’. Patriarchal structures celebrate an exclusionary hegemonic masculinity. This means that although certain expressions of ‘machismo behaviour’ may dominate headlines in terms of what a misogynist looks like, such a reduction to individual behavioural types risks diverting attention away from the structural mechanisms which keep the patriarchy in place. ¹⁴ Expressions of approval for the patriarchal social order can just as easily be identified in ‘masculine heroes’ who condemn ‘toxically masculine men’ (Harrington, 2021, p. 349). Machismo, misogynistic and homophobic behaviour are thus not the only provocateurs for misandric anger, fear and hostility; it is thus also in many men’s interests to undermine and disrupt the delimiting binary distribution of appropriate gender expressions, behaviours and expectations.

The patriarchy is also a heteropatriarchy, such that men who are not cisgender or heterosexual or who simply deviate from heteronormative expectations are also subject to policing. The heteropatriarchal binary of masculine-coded norms over feminine-coded norms sets up particular kinds of masculinity as the only expressions of gender legitimately available to men and boys (Waling, 2019, p. 363; see also Harrington, 2022, p. 61). It is typically a white, able-bodied and ‘elite’ form of masculinity which serves as the telos for patriarchal norms, such that expressions of a working-class or Black masculinity can be stigmatised and misconstrued as aggressive, criminal or ‘toxic’ in comparison to the so-construed ‘healthy’ expressions reserved for white, high-income heterosexual men (Harrington, 2021, p. 348; 2022). On the one hand, this both devalues femininity and androgyny as we see in practices of misogyny and transphobia, and dismisses, tokenises and misrepresents Black culture as we see in anti-Black racism and white supremacy. On the other hand, the adherence by men to certain masculine norms, such as self-reliance, assertiveness and violence, has also been shown to lead to higher levels of suicidal ideation and diminished emotional well-being, even for white, high-earning and heterosexual men (King et al., 2020). Though certain expressions of hegemonic masculinity are too often celebrated and rewarded, these very patterns of behaviour that benefit cis men are not without corresponding (self-)harms. It is not my aim here to argue that men suffer at the hands of the patriarchy as much as others. Rather, it must be acknowledged that men also have plenty of reasons to feel anger, hostility and fear towards core tenets of the patriarchy, especially when they are not a white heterosexual member of the male ‘elite’.

Reclaiming misandry

In this final section, I discuss two possible points of contention with the above argument for reclaiming misandry as a productive political stance. Firstly, misandry, even if admissible, is a politically unappealing sentiment, as there are preferable ways in which structural injustices rooted in the patriarchy can be problematised and critiqued. Secondly, even if we deny the first point of contention and take the sentiment to be legitimate and worth advocating, then the same ends could be achieved without use of a term as negatively connotated as ‘misandry’.

In terms of the first concern, we can examine how many facets of activism, lobbying and protest are expressions of collective anger and hostility, but that these are not constitutive of their political efficacy. To enjoin with one another to change the background conditions of something as historically instituted and socially pervasive as structures of patriarchy often also involves diplomacy, restraint and popular appeal. However, it does not follow from this that misandry cannot also be an effective means for collective action and political change. Misandry, properly understood, is non-ideal. ¹⁵ It is made meaningful only in light of a white heteropatriarchy, which prescribes a binary of feminine-coded goods against and beneath masculine-coded goods. Without this backdrop, misandry would be of little relevance or utility.

By virtue of how much the patriarchy intersects with classism, racism and homophobia, there is a legitimate worry that misandry as an affective attitude would be unequally directed towards individual men who are otherwise socially stigmatised. It is not difficult to imagine fear or hostility that is motivated by racist, classist or transphobic commitments being misrepresented as a misandric response to supposed misogynistic or machismo behaviour. ¹⁶ Sadly, however, such practices already occur only without labelling them ‘misandry’. With this in mind, I want to defend this reformulated conception of misandry as a valuable and worthwhile stance even if there are potential drawbacks in some contexts.

What makes misandry more than admissible is that it directly attempts to undermine patriarchal practices and expectations regarding the expression and legitimacy of anger and assertive behaviour. The practices of tone policing and tone vigilance elaborated on in the third section run deeper than the examples given of the treatment of Pauline Harmange and Jessica Eaton. Norms that are construed as feminine, such as docility and amicability, are so insidiously woven into the social fabric that women are often as guilty as men for enforcing them. Tone vigilance not only applies to vocal tone but can even be seen in the ‘tone’ of one’s facial expression. Studies show that women and adolescent girls smile at a higher rate than men and adolescent boys, and the difference in rate corresponds to the salience of gender norms in a given context (LaFrance, Paluck and Hecht, 2003). Furthermore, social psychological studies that researched the assertiveness of women’s responses to heterosexist and sexist behaviour found that 75 per cent of participants considered assertive responses but only 40 per cent made them (Hyers, 2007, p. 6). Interestingly, non-assertive responders often reported benefitting from avoiding conflict during the incident but also reported less satisfaction with their response, more desire to respond differently in the future and less closure due to lingering anger or regret that a perpetrator was left ‘uneducated’ and ‘unchanged’ (ibid., p. 9). My aim here is not to suggest that women ought to always respond assertively, as this comes with its own risks, but that Lauri L. Hyers’ findings further illuminate the affectively unjust suppression of misandric feelings and how this leads to women being vigilant of their tone and hesitant to defy entrenched behavioural norms.

Rejecting misandry on the grounds of it being too confrontational, alienating and thereby politically unhelpful runs the risk of further perpetuating already-existing epistemic and affective injustices. It cannot be denied that such a misandric stance may provoke more backlash and resistance than necessary; however, my aim is not to argue that misandry ought to be advocated at the expense of other anti-patriarchal actions. I am simply suggesting that we should be suspicious of the dismissal of misandry on ‘practical’ grounds.

Turning to the second contention—that even if we now concede the theoretical and practical value of misandry, we ought to nonetheless condemn the term ‘misandry’ because of its negative connotations and subsequent weaponisation—I am more sympathetic to this concern, and I will not attempt to deny that this is an inevitable risk that reclamation runs into (Herbert, 2015). The very point of reclaiming misandry is to reappropriate a negative term into something politically productive and conceptually purposeful. One could rightfully claim that feminine-coded anger and hostility towards patriarchal norms could be achieved without labelling it ‘misandric’. As was shown in the second section, it is theoretically straightforward to disregard the term ‘misandry’ as nonsensical and conceptually redundant. However, if we take this route and fail to provide a more nuanced understanding of the term, then I fear that it will persist in being rhetorically deployed to safeguard the patriarchal status quo. Providing an ameliorative analysis of the term, and reclaiming it as a productive and legitimate stance, is a potential avenue for undermining the appeal of ‘misandry’ as a means of manufacturing silence and epistemic and affective discreditation. Throughout history, slurs used by privileged and oppressing groups have been subversively reappropriated to nullify their attraction and efficacy. I believe the same reclamation can be achieved regarding misandry.

In sum, I have argued for the amelioration and redefinition of misandry as the felt anger, hostility or fear towards the patriarchal social order and its valorisation and/or expression in misogynistic and machismo behaviour. This reformulation leads from Kate Manne’s (2019) understanding of misogyny as a more structural property of social arrangements rather than an individualised hatred. Despite the temptation to dismiss misandry as lacking in conceptual value, I have argued that this dismissal neglects misandry’s current epistemically and affectively unjust rhetorical use. The motivation for ameliorating misandry from its naïve conception stems from misogynistic weaponisation of it. The motivation for endorsing its ameliorated formulation, however, is that the valorisation of white, classist and heteropatriarchal norms impacts everyone to varying degrees. Men, for their own sake and that of others, must also recognise their deep-seated fear of patriarchal expectations, develop an anger towards heterosexism and the normative demands of hegemonic masculinities and begin to react with hostility towards misogynistic behaviour.