I HATE MEN
Pauline Harmange
Translated by Natasha Lehrer

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.4thestate.co.uk

This eBook first published in Great Britain by 4th Estate in 2020

First published in France as Moi les hommes, je les déteste by Monstrograph, Collection Bootleg, in 2020

Copyright © Monstrograph and Pauline Harmange 2020

English translation © Natasha Lehrer 2020

Cover design: Julian Humphries

Pauline Harmange asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Natasha Lehrer hereby asserts her moral right to be identified as the author of the translation

The chapter title ‘I am woman, hear me roar’ is taken from the song ‘I am Woman’ by Helen Reddy and Ray Burton. Lyrics © Universal Music Publishing Group, BMG Rights Management

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008457587

Ebook Edition © November 2020 ISBN: 9780008457600

Version: 2020-11-03

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Misandry, a definition

Shacking up with a man

Hysterical and sexually frustrated misandrists

Men who hate women

I am woman, hear me roar

Mediocre as a white dude

The heterosexuality trap

Sisters

In praise of book clubs, pyjama parties and girls’ nights out

Footnotes

References

Acknowledgements

Interested in finding out more?

About the Author

About the Publisher

One day I wrote on my blog that I was fed up of men’s apathy and general lack of interest when it comes to women’s rights. Almost immediately an anonymous lurker left a comment: ‘Maybe you should ask yourself why men don’t want to talk about it. A few possibilities: the aggressive – hate-filled, even – attitude of feminists towards any man who doesn’t say “I’m ashamed to be a man! Down with men!” The day you accept the relationship between men and women for what it is – then we’ll listen to you. In the meantime, you’re just going to be dismissed as sex-starved shrews, and you’ll keep doing a disservice to your cause.’

With these words, this delightful gentleman was making a barely veiled accusation of misandry against me. I’m far from the only woman charged with manhating: plenty of feminists and lesbians are repeatedly accused of such an affront. As though challenging male power, or simply not being attracted to men, constitutes nothing more than hatred.

The accusation of misandry is a mechanism for silencing women, a way of silencing the anger – sometimes violent but always legitimate – of the oppressed standing up to their oppressors. Taking offence at misandry, claiming it’s merely a form of sexism like any other, and no less unacceptable (as if sexism were genuinely reviled), is a bad-faith way of sweeping under the carpet the mechanisms that make sexist oppression a systemic phenomenon buoyed throughout history by culture and authority. It’s to allege that a woman who hates men is as dangerous as a man who hates women – and that there’s no rational justification for what she feels, be it dislike, distrust or disdain. Because, obviously, no man has ever hurt a woman in the whole course of human history. Or rather, no men have ever hurt any women.

As a result of the way it’s been misunderstood or misconstrued, there’s a tendency in feminist movements to argue that misandry as a concept doesn’t actually exist. In a way, of course, this is true, because there is no coordinated, structured system for denigrating or coercing men. And because even when we do sometimes put all our messieurs in one basket, it’s more to laugh at them, it’s kind of tongue in cheek, if you know what I mean. Honestly, we’re very nice, underneath it all.

But what if misandry were necessary – healthy, even? I get why women reject it. It’s unnerving to be accused of being a horrid extremist who hates men. Thousands of women were burned at the stake for less.

But you know what? I’m going to have a go. I’ll admit it: I hate men. All of them, really? Yes, the whole lot of them. By default, I have very little respect for any of them. Which is funny actually, because ostensibly I don’t have any legitimacy when it comes to hating men. I chose to marry one, after all, and I have to admit that I’m still very fond of him.[fn1]

That doesn’t, however, stop me from wondering why men are as they are. They’re violent, selfish, lazy and cowardly. It doesn’t stop me wondering why we women are supposed graciously to accept their flaws – what am I saying, I mean their deficiencies – even though men beat, rape and murder us. Boys will be boys. Girls, on the other hand, will become women, and will learn to make their peace with this, because there’s no way to escape the narrow vision of our destiny as refracted through the crystal ball of the patriarchy. Come on, we’re perfectly capable of putting up with their little idiosyncrasies. In any case, we don’t have a choice. What kind of woman are you if you avoid the male gaze? Take your choice: sex-starved, dyke, or hysteric.

Apart from the fact that it undermines our cause, it appears that misandry is also very difficult for men to deal with – an intolerable brutality that adds up to the shocking outrage of precisely zero deaths and zero casualties. Apparently, what with all this feminist bullshit, #MeToo and the rest of that crap, it’s very hard to be a man nowadays. They don’t know how to flirt any more, how to get in a lift with their female colleagues, how to crack a joke. What do they still have the right to do now?

So much existential dread, for which I don’t feel a great deal of sympathy. All that time they spend snivelling about how hard it is to be a poor persecuted man nowadays is just a way of adroitly shirking their responsibility to make themselves a little less the pure products of the patriarchy.

Strangely, not many men actually stop to wonder why feminists dislike them so much – if they did they might notice the statistics are quite damning. But they’re too busy explaining to us that they’re not like that, that it’s really not nice to generalise like that. And if we alienate them with all that talk of men are trash, the risk is they won’t join in and help us in our struggle. As if we were incapable of organising our struggle without them, as if we haven’t been doing precisely that for years – and as if, when they invited themselves into our ranks to join the struggle, they didn’t always end up taking over, talking over us and even imposing their decisions on us while they were about it.

I see misandry as a potential way out. A way of refusing to accept these norms, of saying no with every breath. Hating men as a social group, and sometimes as individuals too, brings me so much joy – and not just because I’m a crazy old cat lady.

If we all became misandrists, what a fabulous hue and cry we could raise. We’d realise (though it might be a bit sad at first) that we don’t actually need men. I believe too we might liberate an unsuspected power: that of being able to soar far above the male gaze and the dictates of men, to discover at last who we really are.

Misandry, a definition

I think at this point it’s worth defining the concept of misandry as I employ it in this essay. I use the word misandry to mean a negative feeling towards the entirety of the male sex. This negative feeling might be understood as a spectrum that ranges from simple suspicion to outright loathing, and is generally expressed by an impatience towards men and a rejection of their presence in women’s spaces. 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 (yes, misandry is a demanding and elitist concept).

Ultimately, misandry is a principle of precaution. Having spent so much time being at best disappointed and at worst abused by men – all the more so having absorbed the feminist theory that articulates patriarchy and sexism – it’s quite natural to develop a carapace and stop opening up to the first man who comes along and swears on his heart that he’s a really good guy.[fn1] All the more so given that to prove his worth, the man in question simply has to demonstrate genuine thoughtfulness in order for our hostile feelings to subside. But his probation period will last forever: nothing against him personally, it’s just that it’s hard to give up privilege, and even more so to actively campaign for all one’s fellow men to be similarly stripped of theirs. He might be feeling a bit low one day and be tempted to hit on a girl in a bar who’s already made it very clear that she’s not interested. A lousy day at the office, and he’s back to his bad habit of shameless mansplaining and interrupting you every five minutes. We need to be vigilant, we have to keep our eye on even the genuinely decent ones, because anyone can stray off course, and all the more so if he’s cis, white, wealthy, able-bodied and heterosexual. The sum of his privilege is so great that it makes him very resistant to change. We need men to be exemplary in their behaviour, because when we women speak, no one listens. We simply can’t afford to let them get away with doing things half-heartedly.

The very least a man can do when faced with a woman who expresses misandrist ideas is shut up and listen. He’d learn a great deal and emerge a better person. He might even agree, in the end. But beware of the man who slopes off in the other direction, and starts beating himself up with a great wailing and gnashing of teeth; no woman, and certainly no misandrist, has the slightest desire to listen to a man bemoaning his lot as a privileged male, playing the martyr. I’m yet to come across a man who claims to be a misandrist, but I’m pretty sure if I did it would have the same effect on me as when I hear a man declare himself a feminist. Feminist activists have always had an instinctive suspicion of and tendency to reject these men. Many of us believe that men can’t be feminists, that they have no right to appropriate a term that was forged by the oppressed. It’s extraordinarily common for men who like to trumpet the fact that they are feminists to have failed to deconstruct their privilege as much as they’d like us to think, and to blithely take advantage of it to trample on and abuse the women in their lives. There is nothing more tedious than to see a man being covered in plaudits that are completely disproportionate to the minuscule effort he makes, while women continue to be subject to impossible standards that mean they’re always the ones to lose out. We have to stop praising men for such pathetically trivial things as leaving work early to pick up their kid from school. Do not forget that in exactly the same situation a woman is blamed and criticised, whatever her choice.

Hang on, though: I’m not saying that men shouldn’t be interested in feminism, nor that they shouldn’t try to understand the struggle and share its values. Quite the opposite: what I resent is their not being interested enough, or feigning an interest for the wrong reasons (because they fancy a feminist, for example – just don’t go there). There’s a whole world of difference between ‘understanding the mechanisms of oppression and one’s own place in the system’, and ‘appropriating it in order to take centre stage and make it all about yourself yet again’. What we want is for men to put their power and privilege to good use: by policing their male friends and acquaintances, for example, instead of explaining to women how to go about fighting their battles. We want men to know their place. Actually no, what we really want is for them to learn how to take up less space. They don’t get to play the lead, and they’re going to have to get used to that.

If I like to highlight the correspondence between misandry and feminism, it’s for the simple reason that it took me several years of moving in feminist circles to develop my dislike of men, to be comfortable with it, and to stop trying to hide it, even in the company of my close male friends. It was, I think, the regular practice of feminism that allowed me to develop a basic level of assertiveness and self-confidence. You become far less forgiving when you analyse the statistics on violence against women through the prism of sociology. Now we recognise that what we experience within the types of relationships that are usually considered private and personal also has a political dimension. These experiences are systemic; it’s not that we’ve lost our minds because we love making a drama out of everything.

At last we’ve woken up to the fact that we’re not alone, whether we’re being wolf-whistled in the street, or assaulted[fn2] by some guy we thought we could trust, or because we’re stuck inside keeping the home fires burning; the reason we’re fed up isn’t because we’re the weaker sex, or because we’ve got an aggressive temperament, but because of a profound sense of an injustice of which we are all victim.

I’ve noticed a similar pattern among many of my female friends and acquaintances in terms of their relationship to both feminism and misandry. They start out as fairly apolitical feminists ‘à la française’ (which is to say very keen to recognise the problem of equality between the sexes in other countries, but generally inclined to conclude that things in France are mostly okay, we don’t have too much to complain about), but as they begin to dig a little deeper, to investigate a bit more, they become increasingly outraged at the situation, both here and elsewhere, and to feel a deep sense of anger. As they delve more deeply, they can no longer ignore the evidence – the fact that men and masculinity are a problem, undoubtedly for the whole of society, but particularly for women. This is how they become misandrists. Because there simply aren’t very many other options, and because, once they’ve had their eyes opened to the profound mediocrity of the majority of men, there’s no good reason to carry on liking them by default.

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