MISANDRY
Misandry is the message
A Canadian columnist lifts the lid on the last respectable form of cultural bias.
Barbara Kay
Thursday, 15 May 2008
http://www.mercatornet.com/articles/misandry_is_the_message/P0/
The family on the sofa is divided, but not equally. On one side a sullen, rather menacing father stares defiantly at the camera; on the other, a waifish, stressed-looking mother is shielding anxious children. The message of the advertisement is one we have heard or seen innumerable times in the media: domestic violence is only perpetrated by men, who are by nature disposed to controlling behaviours, while women and children (an inseparable unit) are always innocent victims.
I call it misandry, discrimination against men, but although the Ontario Human Rights Code bars “discrimination via signs or symbols,” I doubt that any charges of discrimination will be laid against the Canadian Women’s Foundation, which has been carpet-bombing the media with this ad. Its appearance in newspapers, bank statements and on the sides of buses is aimed at promoting awareness of domestic violence:
The
image represents a half-truth and therefore a lie. The truth, established by all
credible, peer-reviewed research, including our official number cruncher
StatsCan, is that unprovoked intimate-partner violence is about equally split
between men and women. Imagine another picture based on a half-truth: a woman on
one side of the sofa, a man protecting children or even his aged mother on the
other -- because women abuse the elderly and their children more frequently than
men do. You never will see such an ad. Media bias against men is as notable for
what you don’t see and hear as for what you do.
(And
speaking of what you don’t see or hear, when was the last time you saw a
public service ad around the alarmingly elevated statistics for male suicides
(up 81 per cent), especially those involved in acrimonious custody disputes?
We’re inundated with breast cancer ads; when do we see ads about prostate
cancer? And if 94 per cent of work-related deaths happened to women rather than
to men, I think more of us would be familiar with that shocking statistic.)
Except
for radio talk shows, where real people with no ideological axe to grind control
the agenda, misandry is ubiquitous in the media–and by media I mean all kinds:
advertisements, sitcoms, films, political ads, TV talk shows, social service
agency websites and billboards, and of course the punditocracy.
But
it flies beneath most people’s radar, which is another way of saying that
misandry is such an acceptable form of cultural bias – the last respectable
form of cultural bias – that people are unaware of it when they hear it, read
it, or see it.
White,
heterosexual men
We
live in an age in which the media are scrupulously rigorous in self-censoring
when it comes to the terrible social crime of offending women, gays, people of
colour and natives. Only one identifiable group – white heterosexual men (if
they’re Christian, so much the better) – is considered fair game for overt
collective prejudice.
Identifying
active misandry is easy. One has only to imagine the same words, image or
falsehood or failure to report attached to any other identifiable group, and the
imbalance becomes clear.
Here
for example, is mainstream writer Nora Ephron, ironically a revered romantic
comedy writer (she scripted When Harry met Sally, and Sleepless in
Seattle), in a recent post on the Huffington Post blog regarding
the American political primaries:
“This
is an election about whether the people of
Her
claim is absurd. Blacks and blue-collar white women vote as bloc-ishly as white
men, so why the anger at white men? It’s unseemly, and yet it went completely
unremarked. Apply the same words to black men or women and watch the sparks fly.
Of course no mainstream writer would ever say these things of blacks or women.
They know better.
As
a print journalist, my particular interest is my own peer group, many of whom
echo Ephron’s gratuitous contempt for men. While most male writers take up
journalism because they are news or political junkies, a good many women
journalists have entered the field specifically as women with a feminist axe to
grind.
That’s
not quite the same as spreading a conservative or liberal or libertarian
message, where you attack a line of thinking, not actual people. Urging feminism
on readers and viewers is tantamount to spreading misandry, for feminism as it
is ideologically conceived and played out in society today evokes zero-sum
thinking and the conspiracy-theory temptation. When women succeed, it is because
they are superior; when they fail, it is because they have been thwarted by men.
Male
writers who try to defend men from anti-male bias or who criticize feminist
ideology find it a very impolitic career move if they are not already well
established. I personally know two excellent male writers, probably
Male
desaparecidos
Once
you decide to take conscious notice of the problem, media bias in a myriad of
forms leaps out at you. Positive images of women are ubiquitous; positive images
of manly men are uncommon. Generally speaking, men are portrayed as objects of
scorn, objects of wrath or desaparecidos -- that is to say, they are
often not treated at all.
The
cumulative message is that if men try hard to meet criteria established by women
as lovers, husbands and fathers, they can hope to achieve status as contributors
to women’s and children’s happiness, though on the whole they are
unnecessary to it.
But
all too often they are portrayed as active agents of women’s and children’s
unhappiness. Women who rid themselves of these bad eggs are portrayed as heroic.
Promiscuous women in TV sitcoms like Sex and the City present as warm,
loyal and liberated. The promiscuous men in these stories are depicted as
shallow, untrustworthy and opportunistic.
When
men are characterized as heroic fathers in films, it is usually because the
woman has fled the scene or died, a paradigm that debuted with the 1979 film, Kramer
vs Kramer. Men are only allowed to present as good parents when they are
desperately trying to fill the shoes of a mother. It is a role they must learn.
In movies with couples, it is rare for the father’s parenting skills to
outshine the mother’s, whose commitment and skills are presented as inherent.
The
past few years have seen a spate of “baby” movies: Juno, Waitress,
Knocked Up, Baby Mama, Then She
The
men are undesirable parent material, lumps of animated clay to be tossed away,
or spun and shaped by a woman potter into a domestically useful artefact. These
potential or accidental fathers range from the merely wimpy, to infantile, to
explicitly abusive. None of the films express reservations about a child’s
future with no father.
Anger
and violence
The
most disturbing aspects of media misandry revolve around the issues of anger and
violence. Domestic violence is -- apart from custody -- the hottest of the hot
button issues for demonisers and myth busters alike.
The
message that male anger is a problem, while female anger isn’t, ends in overt
publicity campaigns like the divided-family ad I mentioned at the outset. But it
begins in a common stereotype, pervasive in the media, of female anger as cute,
inconsequential and victimless.
For
example, a current TV ad promoting a stop-smoking aid features a flight
attendant in the throes of nicotine withdrawal. A series of vignettes shows her
screaming at male passengers for no reason, snarling and sobbing over the public
address system and in general acting hysterically and irrationally.
The
choice of setting -- an airplane -- is no accident. On airplanes and in airports
in general, "civilians" are at the mercy of officials and airline
personnel, who wield absolute power over passengers. There is no recourse for
unfair treatment. The male passengers subjected to her tirades shrink away in
bewildered acquiescence. Their “wussy” reaction is played for humour, but in
fact their fear of her is rational. There is nothing funny about being
arbitrarily thrown off an airplane.
But
far from critiquing this woman's egregious misuse of her power, the ad makes
light of it. In the end, once the nicotine remedy begins to work, she is
sheepishly laughing at herself.
One
cannot possibly imagine an ad in which a male flight attendant harangues and
menaces a female passenger. Indeed, that would be considered a form of sexual
assault under today's feminist- inspired governmental guidelines.
The
message here is that when women humiliate and threaten men as a side effect of
personal "issues", men can just suck it up, since their right to
respectful treatment is always subject to women's discretion and situational
needs.
Casually
misandric ads like this can be found at one end of the spectrum. The other end
is more socially and culturally consequential.
With
the media’s facilitation, an entire industry has been built on the Montreal
Massacre, a tragedy – unlike male gendercides, which frequently occur in war
– that has no historical precedent or sequel. The weeks before every December
6th anniversary produce a media orgy around domestic violence against women,
with Marc Lepine, who was a solitary sociopath, touted as a mere exaggeration of
typical male drives.
Conversely
the media treatment of Remembrance Day, the one day a year feminists tacitly lay
off men, no longer celebrates the specifically manly trait of physical courage.
If you’ll notice, Remembrance Day now is played out in gender-neutral
programming, with combat/non-combat lines blurred to equalize the contributions
of men and women.
Gays
excused
While
the plight of abused heterosexual men is ignored in the media, whatever afflicts
gay men is instantly picked up on. When StatsCan released figures last month
indicating intimate-partner violence was disproportionately high amongst gay and
lesbian couples, the Globe and Mail immediately commissioned a feature
article – “A Skeleton that’s Still in the Closet”.
The
violence scenarios described in the selected gay-couple examples are exactly the
same as those in straight couples, reinforcing objective research which finds
that partner violence is gender-neutral, a function of individual pathology.
Yet, unlike hetero male violence, for which no explanation other than an
inherent urge to control women is ever offered, this article falls over itself
finding reasons to excuse violent behaviour by gays.
In
their treatment of men, a lazy perpetuation of falsehoods, an incurious
acceptance of bogus studies and statistics, and an eager willingness to recycle
superannuated stereotypes constitute the present media template.
I
began with mention of the Ontario Human Rights Code. I will end with it as the
central motif of a seemingly trivial but memorable example of misandry that was
brought to my attention by an extremely vigilant reader.
Ninety-nine
per cent of funded social services in
From
their website last Fall: We at Crouch want to ensure that all our
programming [is] accessible to all. The Ontario Human Rights Code states in
section i: Every person has a right to equal treatment with respect to services,
goods and facilities without discrimination because of race, age, ancestry,
place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sexual orientation,
age, record of offences, marital status, same-sex partnership, family status or
disability.
Sounds
official, eh? But in the actual Ontario Human Rights Code, between the words creed
and sexual orientation is the word sex. Its omission was no
accident. To
accommodate an ideological bias, this website deliberately falsified the Ontario
Human Rights Code.
The
excision of those three letters was, for me, in its Orwellian implications, the
most chilling of all examples of media misandry.
Barbara Kay writes for the National Post, a leading Canadian daily.