A while back, this space waded slowly into the “beach”
of the notion of misandry. A little tenuous, a little awkward and a more than a
little risky in a time when misogyny is being trumpeted on all media, seemingly
at all hours of the day and night, this “test-drive” needs to be updated.
For too long, the field of gender politics has been
dominated by the feminist voice, too often as victim of the misdeeds, and the
debasing attitudes of too many red neck men. In that vortex, men rarely venture
into openly expressing disdain, disgust and contempt for the actions and the
attitudes of those men who continue to tarnish the public reputation of
masculinity. Men also, in their silence, permit the heavy hitters among angry
and abused women to hold sway in the public consciousness about gender
relations.
Simultaneously, trump, the most heinous example of
masculinity on the planet, continues to debase especially women of colour,
while simultaneously giving encouragement and license for white supremacists.
Boris Johnston, newly elected prime minister of the United Kingdom, for his
part, does not offer much hope to that narrow bank of the demographic occupied
by enlightened, evolved and androgynous men.
Even those who have courageously established agencies
in support of men’s rights, focussing on fathers’ rights to children following
divorce, and to other legal male rights contests inside contemporary families,
have failed, likely by design, to venture into the question of the detection
of, the ferreting out of, and the exposing of and the implications of the other
side of the gender debate, misandry. There are also reasonable and probable reasons
for this posture: trying to thread a very small hole in a cultural needle to
avoid any perception of, or worse charge of, seeming to be misogynistic, or even
worse “being” misogynistic. In order to undertake the monumental task of
seeding a public agency to advocate for the rights of men, and bringing the
voices of all members of all families into the “room” CAFÉ, for example, has
studiously restrained all public utterances from even the bare hint of misogyny.
This piece not only respects that posture; it seeks to emulate it.
Physics reminds us that for every action, there is an
equal and opposite reaction. David Brinkley, the late NBC news anchor reminds
us, “A successful person is one who builds a firm foundation on the bricks that
have been thrown at him/her.” As a young boy, being “raised” by a woman who
hated her father, and who declared her recently deceased husband of sixty-two
years “no good” and who regularly meted out both physical and emotional abuse
to an innocent and unsuspecting son, I have what might be considered an inside
track on the misandry that enters too many rooms, in too many towns and cities,
churches, schools, and corporations in North America and has been slinking
under the doorways of public consciousness like an early morning fog, barely
visible and certainly free of both scent and expected detection. Perhaps a
better analogy would be the recently publicly disclosed “radon” gas.*
In the current cultural ethos, bombarded as it is with
evidence of inappropriate sexual behaviour and attitudes by men directed toward
too many women, including pending court cases and already documented convictions
in such cases, even to raise the specter of misandry seems highly
self-sabotaging, dangerous, and quixotic. Men, generally, are not bonded in a
manner similar to the “sisterhood” to which all women implicitly belong. In
fact, the reverse, exemplified by the historic encyclopaedic physical,
military, pugilistic and even legal/courtroom conflicts between men, more
typically exemplifies how men communicate: through direct confrontation,
competition, and fighting even to the death, if deemed necessary to assert and
to defend male honour.
Nevertheless, risking obliteration from both men and
women, like a canary in a coalmine, this piece seeks to bring forward repeated
evidence, too often denied or avoided or merely dismissed by men in positions
of authority, the contempt of men by women not only exists in each of our
contemporary social constructs, and contributes, without acknowledgement to
many of the conflicts that we have come to cluster under the rubric, “gender
politics.”
Reasons for women’s contempt, distaste, discomfort, in
all of its many forms and faces vary in both fact and intensity. They include
but are not restricted to:
·
a broken relationship with the fathers of
your girls,
·
a series of unmet expectations in the face
of high bars imposed or suggested by highly ambitious and insensitive fathers
on their daughters
·
a lengthy exposure to their mother’s
contempt for their fathers, or other men in their mother’s lives
·
exposure to and experience of a male
figure who is especially officious when solving an issue in which young girls
are involved, including teachers, principals, doctors, law enforcement
officials, social workers, and clergy
·
an unresolved competitive/conflicted
relationship between mothers and fathers of young girls
·
exposure to and experience of young men in
their dating lives who fail to exhibit a level of respect, decency and honour
for their female partners
·
exposure to and experience of men,
conversely, who failed to confront injustice whether imposed by other men or
women, incarnating a “eunuch” kind of failure
It all started, for me, with my father, although the
pattern was invisible to me in the first several decades of my life. The
physical and emotional abuse I experienced from my mother was never experienced/inflicted
in the presence of my father, nor was it ever exposed in conversations I
witnessed between them. In essence, this abuse was and remained closeted,
secret, except through direct communication from me to my father’s two sisters.
The kind of exaggerated and conflicted relations that originated from my mother
with public officials such as school authorities, was never disclosed by my
mother to my father, demonstrating further attempts to prevent disclosure of
such acts. These, however, also occurred almost exclusively between my mother
and male persons.
The obvious conflict about whether or not I could continue
to participate in minor hockey between my mother and father provided evidence,
on reflection decades later, that their conflict was neither resolved nor
resolvable. My father’s silence, for example, when my mother refused permission
to participate in a hockey tournament in Collingwood, exhibits a level of
insecurity, perhaps even fear in my father of my mother. This potential fear
also reared its head in his speech stammer, worse at home than at his
workplace, where he consistently dialogued freely and easily with customers in
the hardware store he managed.
Similar default on my father’s part appears around and
over family decisions on re-decorating, travel, family purchases, and even
family activities that seemed to be generated and directed by my mother.
Passive-aggression, however, was a repeated response from my father. Interjected
on top of a history, known to my father, that my mother literally detested her father
for his “premature” marriage to another women, shortly after the death of her
mother, and perhaps his own family history where his own mother clearly
dominated and controlled his father, this river of psychic sludge, inhabited as
it is by unstated voices, resentments, contempts, and disparagements and unconscious
projections necessarily contaminated the future of many, beyond the
expectations of most participants. In his upper eighties, my father acknowledged,
directly to me, “You were raised by Hitler and Chamberlain! And I was the
Chamberlain in the family!”
Contempt, however, is one of many faces of fear.
Others include, but are not restricted to: deceit, gossip, revenge, silence,
withdrawal, poison, undermining, deafness (both literal and metaphoric),
denigration, stereotyping, malicious humour/satire, dissociation and sexual
denial by women of their male partners. And in a complex vortex of female
emotional expressions (regardless of their intensity or appropriateness) most
men are both literally and metaphorically “speechless”. Not having fully engaged
in a process of exploring the emotional responses of characters in plays,
novels, poems and films in their humanities classes in both elementary and
secondary school, young men very often emerge into post-secondary institutions
and workplaces devoid of both the vocabulary to express and the habit and
comfort even to detect and disclose their personal emotional experience. Conventional
social culture and perception, however, is currently flooded with disparagement
of this male “inferiority” in the light of female vocabulary and familiarity with
sharing their personal emotions. The public “convention” then falls into the trap
of disdain of masculinity, both through the overt efforts of many women and the
silence of most men, who, in the words of my physician, when nudged by my statement,
“Men can learn to name and acknowledged their emotions,” replies, “Oh John, but
women do it so much better!”
“And who is making this exercise a competition but you; women certainly are not
on the personal level!” was my rebuttal.
Emotions, those unbridled, unbroken, unbreakable, and irrepressible
forces that continual rumble in the human psyche, as they have from the
beginning, nevertheless signal, warn, hint and even provide reconnaissance for
and in each situation regarding humans
everywhere. In history, emotions have conventionally been regarded as unreliable,
untrustworthy, dangerous and indicative of “mental instability” and even of
religious “intemperance” or perhaps even insanity. Clearly, both the medical
and religious communities have historically trusted human “reason,” science,
experimentation, empirical evidence, and the legal community has struggled for
centuries with the notion of human “motive”. In this detective search, they
have sought to connect the dots between empirical evidence and a possible motive
in most criminal activities, knowing that any approximation of what someone
might be “thinking” or “feeling” would be, at best, speculation.
A link between the medical, religious and legal
communities seems to lie in the human experience that is classified as “extreme”….usually
described by actions (words, beliefs, attitudes) of emotional extremes. Medical
conditions, legal cases, and religious conversions and missions are frequently
associated with and complicated by human “emotions”….and history is replete with
attempts by various scholars to disregard, eliminate, avoid, disparage or
generally to disregard the implicit force in those various situations. Extreme
emotions, for example, have fallen into one of two historical “problems”…sickness
in the eyes of the medical fraternity and evil in the eyes of the religious
fraternity.
Simultaneously, however, those human emotions have
continued to rumble, vibrate, shake, sooth, dance and even embrace the
experiences of the people they “
inhabit. Also, those emotions have been given, and have taken on the
personalities of various “gods,” demons, angels, snakes, dogs, birds, dragons,
and the like. In effect, humans have invariably given a personifying “face” and
identity to these emotions. Recognizing the persistence and ubiquity of our emotions,
humans have variously constructed mental hospitals, for example, “outside”
population centres, and have tended to apply clinical diagnose what has been
considered “dangerous” and aberrant behaviour and attitudes, all of them
emitted from human emotions. Churches, too, have regarded emotions as dangerous
to the spiritual pilgrimage of all humans.
At the core of each human encounter, whether between
same or opposite genders, the matter of human emotions is always in play. And
our various attempts to contain, repress, deny, avoid, or even ameliorate the
influence and power of human emotions, as well as the positive contribution to
building loving and supportive relationships, have always yielded to some kind
of imaginative analysis. Our human imagination holds our existence ‘together’
is what is a much more random and unpredictable and irrepressible, yet
life-giving force and power that defines the human being. Far from succumbing
to any religious doctrine, legal prescription, educational process or factum,
or even literary convention, our imagination and our emotions are and can be integrated
into a “world view” that does not presuppose the need for control, order, or
external authority.
However, our human fear of the extremes to which we
are vulnerable, whether expressed through medical diagnosis, or through sin, or
criminal activity, has contributed excessively and neurotically, perhaps even
psychotically, to our collective and individual self-sabotage. Rather than
restricting our “world view” to the dictates, diagnoses, sanctions and
expectations linked to the “experts” in all traditional professional fields, originally
charged with ‘establishing and sustaining order” in civilization(s), as a requisite
for human survival.
It is this premise with which we wish to contend. And
no straw-man is the premise.
Masculinity, for its resistance to its own
vulnerability in both acknowledging and identifying our emotional truths and
realities, and femininity, for its indulgence in the pleasures and the warning
signals emerging from their emotions have together brought us to this place.
And the continuing fractious contentions between the genders relegates this
public debate to the “either-or” “he said-she-said” dichotomy. Neither women
nor men will ultimately emerge from the conflict transformed into any approximation
of androgyny. Women will suit-up in their warrior armour to “protect” themselves
from the ravages of masculinity gone amuck; men will continue to hide from their
emotions, believing those emotions to betray their very masculinity.
My mother and father, unfortunately, were unable,
unwilling(?), untrained, un-open(?) or predisposed to refuse to have a conversation
that would (could?) have freed them both from their respective psychic cells.
Similar “cells” of emotional imprisonment, however, have bloomed in the public
organizations in which we have all participated.
Example:
·
the woman whose misandry goes unrecognized
and unacknowledged in her leadership of her organization, while disdaining men,
masculinity, including even their spouse, (secretly)
·
the advertising writers, actors and producers
who generate television advertising that blatantly demeans masculinity as
stupid, physically and emotionally immature and awkward
·
films and dramas that blatantly depict
masculinity as debasing all women
·
university curricular offerings and departments
entitled “gender studies” that focus primarily, or worse exclusively on “womens’
studies” (on the premise that all of history has been created, written and
documented by men)
·
enrollment patterns and inducements that
favour a female cohort over the male cohort, “to bring into balance” the
inequities of male dominance
·
then writing of laws, regulations and
processes that openly and publicly favour the stories of female ‘victims’ while
minimizing the contextual evidence that paints a more complex and more “fair”* picture
·
the surreptitious and often un-perceived,
or mis-acknowledged in its importance, the misandry of women, by both men and
women supervisors
·
the refusal/failure/omission of
negotiating “fair” employment wages, safety standards and opportunities of
advancement of women by male executives, as an implicit gender bias, too often
unaddressed by their male peers.
Undoubtedly, there are a
plethora of other perhaps even more relevant examples of how men and women both
fail their children, their grandchildren and their communities in their
respective ‘cracked’ visions of human emotions. And, while misogyny is openly discussed and acknowledged, misandry
needs to take its legitimate place at the public table.
*
* Radon is a chemical element with the symbol Rn and
atomic number 86. It is a radioactive, colourless, odorless, tasteless noble
gas….radon itself is the immediate decay product of radium. Its most stable
isotope 222Rn, has a half-life of only 3.8 days, making radon one of the rarest
elements since it decays away so quickly. (Wikipedia)
