Of misandry and men

1 Comment | Sunday Herald, The, Apr 20, 2003 | by Hannah McGill

THERE'S a particularly annoying TV advert on at present, probably for a mobile phone. It involves an apparently slightly stoned young woman musing on what she would alter if the world were hers to control. Among her fantasies is a desire to see "cats get even", a scenario illustrated by a mean cat terrorising a Labrador perched high in the branches of a tree. Now, clearly a cat wouldn't bother itself to chase a dog up a tree even if the power to do so was miraculously afforded to it. It would simply look witheringly at the dog - who would feel very hurt and sad - and then slink off to do something louche under a shrub.

But my point is - would the cat's revenge be justified, on the basis that it was acting on behalf of generations of its oppressed feline brothers and sisters? Is nastiness justified if it comes as a bold and long-delayed response to incalculable opposing nastiness?

The popular psychologist Oliver James clearly thinks not. He has been writing recently about how upsetting he finds this bolshy new generation of post-feminist ladies, and their casual abuse of his frail gender. Women, for instance, now habitually badmouth male sexual performance in public. To James, this betrays "a shift away from misogyny towards mysandry".

Mysandry! There's a word that smacks as much of anxious linguistic over-compensation as 'herstory' (that's history from a female perspective - how earnest, dumb, and eminently mockable) or 'ebonics' (a term for African-American speech - ditto). James has even managed to spell it incorrectly: it should be 'misandry', and it's a word that was invented in the Thirties to counter 'misogyny', which, tellingly, has been around since the 17th Century.

James is straying dangerously close to the territory of those oddball American men's groups that operate according to two strikingly contradictory principles - firstly, that men are by nature the stronger and more domineering sex; secondly, that they flounder at the mercy of those nasty bullying women towards whom all society is unjustly biased. I always get a nervous headache and have to loosen my corset when men start bleating on about the sexist abuse they suffer. Excuse my unfeminine language, but it strikes me that they don't know what the hell they're talking about.

Let's use an example drawn from the rich lexicon of funk music. If a black person should call me 'whitey', is the insult the same as if I should call them nigger? I would strongly argue not. I'd argue that many centuries of social injustice, persecution, and bodies dangling from trees skew the balance somewhat. I would argue, furthermore, that my own privileged social position as a white westerner equips me with inbuilt defences; with the back-up of the dominant social hierarchy, with - in short - the automatic advantage.

Someone calling me 'whitey' might be unpleasant, but it doesn't strike at the very foundations of a fragile, nascent, hard-won equality. It doesn't hurt.

Let's transfer the same model on to gender. To Oliver James's distress, within contemporary culture 'Males are increasingly presented as disposable'. The fact that one of his reference points is Channel 4's mercifully short-lived series The Girlie Show - off the air since 1997 - devalues his argument a tad.

But let's take him at his word and acknowledge that within the pages of women's glossies, in the Women's Studies departments of otherwise respectable universities, and in the course of certain episodes of Sex and the City, men are, on occasion, presented as disposable. Poor things. It must break their wee hearts, having only their enduring dominance over the upper levels of politics, medicine, education, the judiciary, the police, the media and the arts to keep them warm at night. Perhaps waving their disproportionately fat pay packets at passing women will make them feel better? Or they could bolster themselves up with a quick glance at the figures on domestic violence, murder and rape. Men are still forging ahead there, and the courts tend to make every effort to back them up.

Before anyone puts righteous pen to paper to tell me what a misandrist I am, I don't hate men. I freely accept that not all men are rapists, or wife-beaters, or murderers. And I'm not one of those soppy feminists who thinks that if women ran the world there would be no more wars. Anyone who has spent time in all-female company knows perfectly well that a war run by women would probably be a brutally efficient, utterly inhumane business, with vicious psychological torture providing a cost-efficient alternative to weapons of mass destruction.

But don't expect me to cry for the hurt feelings of the sector of society that earns more, controls more, and abuses its power more. It'll take more than a couple of impotence gags to destabilise that status quo.