Today I’m going to ask you to take misandry seriously, because Wesleyan University has a misandry problem. I know it’s a tough ask, but I hope after a laugh with your friends you’ll consider what I have to say, and hopefully bring along a little compassion. Although there are many other significantly more harmful forms of bigotry in American society, change is most realizable at a local level. And while not as serious as other forms of discrimination, misandry is prevalent enough in Wesleyan culture to warrant some discussion. It is common in many progressive spaces, and Wesleyan is no different. And with men making up about 46% of Wesleyan students, I believe there’s good reason to address one of the most accepted forms of bigotry on our campus.
First off, misandry is sexism, discrimination, or bigotry towards men. It’s okay to want to dismantle oppressive systems like the patriarchy, or hate the damage that toxic masculinity causes. But doing so by holding contempt for men is unproductive, and, equally as important, hateful. It forgets that not just men, but also women and non-binary people contribute to and perpetuate the patriarchy. We can’t dismantle the patriarchy if we can’t correctly identify the problem. It also forgets that toxic masculinity hurts men. I oppose toxic masculinity based on my values of egalitarianism, but also from my own selfish desire to not be confined based on my gender.
As a man, Wesleyan University is shrouded in a hostile atmosphere. For me, the prevalence of misandry is undeniable. Men are a statistical minority of students. This means that more often than not, women are the dominant gender in student culture. This means frustrations with men are often expressed through jokes. While the occasional joke from anyone is fine, these jokes eventually compound and add to the misandrist atmosphere of campus. In female-dominated spaces, it feels like almost a certainty that a man doing anything of note is talked about sexistly. It feels nearly impossible to avoid at least one comment when I’m in these spaces. I’ve heard too many variations on “Why would you, as a man, do [action]?” to count. I’m told to carry my friends’ laundry. I’m pressured to wear a certain Halloween costume like I’m an accessory. I’m “just a man.” It’s confining, and I don’t want to be confined by my gender. Many women and non-binary people probably relate to this feeling, because we’ve replicated the culture that confines them on a smaller, less damaging scale at Wesleyan. We’re further normalizing conventions of toxic masculinity that we otherwise criticize.
Although usually expressed through jokes, many people have reasoned arguments in defense of their bigotry towards men. Oftentimes the misandrist jokes are inversions of the sexism women face. It’s meant to point out the ridiculousness and unacceptability of what women go through on a daily basis. But after being heard over and over and over again, they still feel like a reflection of a bias against men. That’s because there’s a lot of animosity towards men that stems from experiencing misogyny and living under the patriarchy. And while I’m sympathetic, those prejudices are still unfair. I should be judged based on my own actions, not on systems put in place centuries before me.
While transgender, gay, and gender-nonconforming men are still recognized as men, from my personal experience they are subject to misandry less often than cisgender, straight men. This is obviously problematic. Your sexual orientation, gender presentation, and transgender status can’t make you any less of a man. While it means these men are probably subject to less misandry, it comes at the cost of a subtle denial of their identity as men.
There’s also the issue of refusing to vocally defend men. For example, there’s been a surge in vocal support for Palestinians recently in response to Israel’s bombing of Palestine to target terrorists. Despite this, many of the Palestinians killed in the bombings have been innocent civilians. Discussions in defense of these Palestinians often focus on “women and children,” with no mention of Palestinian men. It’s as if people think defending Palestinian men is a lost cause. By refusing to acknowledge Palestinian men, we cede the idea that Palestinian men are all terrorists, that their lives aren’t worth defending. There’s a long history of sexism intersecting with race to hurt men of color, and this is no different. You shouldn’t have to fear that your activism will somehow become less compelling because you recognize the humanity of men.
While I’m a firm believer in intersectionality, it’s tiring to be forced to connect men’s issues to other forms of bigotry. Something can’t just be misandrist, it has to be misogynistic, racist, or transphobic to have any serious discussion. In fact, it’s best to ignore when something is misandrist. Bigotry is just ignored if it’s directed towards men, it’s seen as an unserious issue made up by whiny men that can’t take a joke. And while everything I’ve written is something I firmly believe in and am passionate about, it would be nice to be able to criticize misandry without also connecting it to the oppression of women or transgender people. It’s equally draining to dedicate paragraphs to how misandry in Wesleyan obviously isn’t as harmful as other forms of bigotry, something practically everyone agrees on. Having to do so makes talking about these issues much less accessible.
I would also like to make it clear that the misandry problem is not the fault of women, this is the fault of us as a community. It’d be easy to just blame women, but that would be just as sexist and incorrect as some of the misandry I’m writing about. Not all women perpetuate misandry, and men perpetuate misandry fairly often. It’s typically done as a joke, but that doesn’t mean we don’t share accountability.
However, many men probably don’t recognize this culture of bigotry. Whether it be from not particularly caring about unserious sexist comments, to being afraid to speak out, it’s uncommon to hear pushback against misandry. Often, discussions of misandry will be shut down by other men that refuse to recognize its prevalence. As men, we have to advocate for ourselves. We have to recognize how we are treated and show some initiative. Although it’s scary to face judgment for caring about something so seemingly unimportant as sexism toward men, Wesleyan is also full of kind, caring, and smart people. The vast majority of people here are against sexism and bigotry. Standing up for yourself could mean getting laughed at, but just as likely your friends could respond with compassion. Don’t be an ass, but be vocal. Be respectful. Be genuine. Hopefully, it will be returned.
Michael Haybron is a member of the class of 2027 and can be reached at mhaybron@wesleyan.edu.
28 Comments
Miss Andry
Truly bleak…
boohoo women mean to men :’(
you doofus!
boohoo women mean to men :’(
that is in reference to the author. not you, mis angry. i agree that this is completely bleak and upsetting
Miss Andry
L take
Ben Shapiro
“And while everything I’ve written is something I firmly believe in and am passionate about, it would be nice to be able to criticize misandry without also connecting it to the oppression of women or transgender people.” Hmmm…. I wonder if its almost as if… misandry is a response… of some sort…. to patriarchal systems of oppression?
a woman
honestly…shame on The Argus for publishing this. when the rights and lives of trans people are under attack around the world, is it really necessary to argue that we actually need to be more oppressive towards trans men if we’re going to be truly misandrist? sorry freshperson, but this take is unnecessary and harmful to minority groups, despite your many disclaimers. Since you’re “a firm believer in intersectionality,” you should know that trans identity is much more complex than “trans men are men and should be treated the same as cis men.” most trans men have been socialized for their entire lives as women and thus have an infinitely deeper understanding of women’s experiences. cis men can claim no such experience. perhaps instead of publishing a deeply transphobic piece in the school newspaper after attending this school for…like…3 months???, do some thinking about whether this is an opinion that needs to be foregrounded in the wake of violence against trans people and Palestinians (whom you also invoke) around the world. again, your voice as a man is needed to hoist up the struggles of the less privileged, not advocate for how your life is just as hard. news flash! it’s not.
from google
You claim to know about trans issues yet you say that trans men should not be treated like cis men cause of FeMaLe sOcIaLiZaTiOn, which if you checked anywhere online would see is seen as a fairly transphobic thing to say. Wild that you think that you have the knowledge to call someone else for being transphobic, when you know less than the bare minimum about trans issues.
Sad 2 See
This is a wild thing to post and even wilder to post with your name attached to it. I think it’s maybe a stretch to claim to understand the deeply rooted issues that exist at Wesleyan (which there undoubtedly are) and purport that nobody is doing anything about them after being here for two months. Bringing in minority groups who face systemic power differences in a white, cis, straight male dominated world and put in place by white patriarchal systems of oppression does not help in convince people that cis straight men are more disadvantaged than others.
Bob
Why are you as man writing this article
Anonymous
this article is fascinating because the author identifies multiple symptoms of the long-standing patriarchal culture of violence against non-cis-men, and he comes so close to putting the pieces together, but he concludes that cis men are being victimized. quite possibly the most baffling thing i’ve ever read in the argus. this isn’t about you
A (Hopefully) Helpful Peer
Partially because I feel bad for you, and the hate you’ve received, and partially because I’d like to see you grow, I’ll critically respond to your argument, and examine what exactly you’ve got right, because, I must concede, there does exist something, and what exactly you missed, which I’ll assert, is most of your article.
You actually start off on a good note — you’re right; holding contempt for men is indeed unproductive, and that the patriarchy is indeed structural, and exists beyond, as a substrate, to individual social interactions. However, you then veer off track and fail to make the point that appears evident: you substantiate a hypothetical ‘misandry’ with merely anecdotes of jokes you’ve heard that, let me get this right, hurt your feelings? None of the experiences you’ve mentioned exist on a structural, or even substantial, level. No one, no construct, no enforcement, exists precluding you from denying your friends request to do their laundry, or wear a halloween costume. You hint that this perhaps may be structural from your construction of ‘female dominated spaces,’ yet, your only evidence for their existence is that men are a demographic minority — a non-sequitur, if I’ve ever seen one.
Instead of this tangled nest of anecdotal evidence and fallacies, the better point you could have made is that the contempt of men defers to a bio-essentialism that reduces genders to biological epistemes, and in doing so, ignores the very real patriarchal structure, and leaves no space for non-binary peoples. In that manner, contempt for men is unproductive, or even ruinous, if equality is the goal.
Next, your argument about Palestine gets so frustratingly close to a good point, yet you miss the focus in attempting to reconcile this women-and-children rhetoric with your anecdotal experiences. The gendering of race, and by that I mean, the bestialization, or hyper-masculinization, of people of color, and homonationalism, or the staunch defense of women and the LGBT against the foreign enemy in the West as a support of neoliberalism, both serve to reproduce the patriarchy in very real ways, yet, you frame this exclusion of men as rooted in an ignorance of men, or a view of men as fungible and replaceable in a way women and children are not. This is not the case; men are very much still at the rhetorical forefront of both the Israeli and Palestinian organizations, and to illustrate this I’ll refer to Netanyahu, and both Israel and Palestine’s organizational structure, where men are revealed to hold nearly all positions of power. You’ve taken surface-level platitudes as dogmatic fact, and in doing so, you’ve occluded the power men still possess.
Nevertheless, the largest and most pervasive fallacy you’ve made is your construction of a hypothetical ‘misandry.’ Specific realizations of the patriarchy upon men does not constitute misandry; as women are subjugated, men then hold a privileged position above them, at it is not the subjugation of men, or misandry, that confines, instead, it is a veneration of men that is then realized as confining, as all categorization is. Yet, what you’ve done is highlight the issues of men in the patriarchy in an exceptional light, holding them up as an undiagnosed ‘misandry,’ equating them to the struggle of women, thereby effacing the privileges men posses, and the inherent nature of the patriarchy that contributes to this. To your credit, you do mention that it is the community that builds this confining nature upon men, however, in failing to elaborate, or, in failing to relate these struggles to the encompassing nature of the patriarchy upon men and women, you merely reproduce the erasure of women that exists as a natural corollary to the issues whose surface-level you touch upon. Even in merely using the term ‘misandry,’ you are equating your experiences and placing them in opposition to ‘misogyny,’ a word that encompasses women’s struggles. In doing this, you’ve erased the complexity and particular nature of women’s struggles, which are not comparable to those of men, and, you’ve ignored the patriarchy, which realizes either.
A (Hopefully) Helpful Peer
Your argument was also partially transphobic, but I don’t feel that I know enough rn to include that in my critique.
Nossiryessir
Hoss, you’re in for a long, lonely four years.
Read Audre Lorde
Beyond braindead. Reflects poorly on the institution that they’d allow someone this ignorant in.
shocked student
You have been at this school for exactly two months and claim to see overwhelming misandry. The examples that you have shared are fractions of what women experience when it comes to misogyny. The history of men being in power has proven that the most misogynistic act against women has been literally taking away human rights, while the worse that can happen to men are negative comments. I don’t mean to minimize your experiences, but rather than saying that these events occurred because of misandry , maybe look at the friends you are surrounding yourself with. It sounds like you are suffering more from a case of peer pressure than true bigotry.
Lydia Brutvan
I can tell from the tone of this article that you really thought you did something, that you really thought you tapped into some widespread unspoken aspect of Wesleyan’s culture that no one wants to talk about. Rather than pausing and taking time to consider why you are having the experiences you have and why the friends around you, regardless of gender, are making the comments that they are, you decided that you had correctly identified a widespread issue o after a mere two months on this campus that warranted a very public, quite poorly written meltdown.
Somehow, over the course of less than ten paragraphs, you somehow managed to disparage and further marginalize almost every single group that you and your cisgender, heterosexual comrades have been placed in a position of power over by a corrupt, deeply engrained patriarchal system. Rather than displaying empathy and concern for the victims of war, you made the unimaginable decision to incorporate widespread murder of marginalized groups into your argument and attempt to equate it to your own so-called oppression. As if your bigotry against marginalized groups on campus wasn’t disgusting enough, you also felt the need to attempt to make a global humanitarian crisis about you.
Women are raped and assaulted on Halloween “because” of their Halloween costumes. Women have historically been beaten and even murdered for simply misperforming housework. Instead of feeling offended because someone asked “Why would you, as a man, do [action]?”, perhaps a more worthwhile use of your time would be to come up with a worthwhile response. Take time to consider whether or not what you are experiencing is misandry, or simply resistance for perhaps the first time in your life to your dismissive and disrespectful treatment of others. While it is unfortunate that anyone would so much as take the time of day to read and respond to your article, I feel motivated to do so because your piece normalizes the dismissal of the painful experiences of marginalized groups in favor of your own privileged experiences. It is dangerous to allow such marginalization to remain unchecked.
Also, if you have the gall to try and pretend to come off as sensitive, you should probably remove the “suck suck suck my dick” from your instagram bio.
I would take some time to reflect on whether or not Wesleyan is the place for you.
texncali
I'm a mom of two boys and one girl. I've been saying to my boys, way before this Trump era and misogyny became a buzz word , that no one is looking out for them and they'll have to make their own "parade".
Many women don't even realize they're misandristic behavior. I hear women making sexual comments about men thinking it's all in fun but I know if it were the other way around women would flip out.
I have a great and very healthy relationship with all of my kids; now in their late 20's and early 30's. None of them are wrapped up into all the political hoopla and all that goes along with of choosing some side.
People are the problem by identifying so strongly with a group and lumping everyone into one, whether it be your sexual orientation, race, political bias, etc. If we want to make things better, we need to have a healthy respect (not agreement) of the individual.
Gossip girl
Ok
Gossip girl xoxoxoxoxox
BRUH
Gossip girl xoxoxoxoxox
Idk if this cooked tbh
Amalie Little
lol.
Ben Dover
Sure, the school w the second highest rapes per thousand people in the country has a misandry problem.
NetReaper
Thanks to Arne Hoffmann for translating this article into German. The comments under the article are a declaration of bankruptcy and confirm the author’s thesis.
2020 Vision
Hey man. Just wanna start by saying that I respect your willingness to put this out here and accept the fact that you’re going to become campus’ main character for a decent period of time and get a lot of criticism thrown your way. However, I have to push back on you a bit.
I graduated in 2020. Any circumstances where I felt that I was in any way marginalized due to being a man were times where I felt that happening due to being a black man, not just a man. I was often in spaces and organizations that were mostly inhabited by white women and I felt like I couldn’t push back on them with my disagreements about the way they handled things due to the danger of being seen as the angry black man. And these same thing happened to other People of Color who weren’t men either! That marginalization was more racial then gender-based.
Second, I think your friends just might suck? If your friends are demanding you carry their laundry or limiting what you can wear for Halloween, maybe you should hang out with new people? It happens. A lot of my freshman year friends sucked. It is what it is.
Third, just like, try not to be that dude. You mention that you shouldn’t be judged based on systems that you didn’t create. That’s just gonna happen, man. People might give you shit for being a dude here. It is what it is. Just try not to take it too seriously and don’t do bad things that will make people rightfully criticize you.
DKE Bro
As someone who graduated some time ago, I strongly encourage you to transfer to another school. Wesleyan will not meet your needs, intellectually or socially
Sjl
Very good article and truthful. Not just it this young man’s arena but in the judicial system as well. Misandry has been prevalent in child custody cases for roughly 20 years let alone divorce. It’s sad to know that a pasture can not marry someone with out a 25.00 marriage certificate but a divorce can happen and cost the man twice as much financially then the women let alone the pain and confusion the kids go threw by not seeing there father which in turn is a ripple affect for the kids. But no one wants to talk about that.
At least we got electricity now adays and women don’t have to make bread like the old days.
squonkpuss
You notice that all the nasty little messages here in the comments section, are written anonymously? That's a pretty strong hint that the author is completely correct.
texncali
I'm a mom of two boys and one girl. I've been saying to my boys, way before this Trump era and misogyny became a buzz word , that no one is looking out for them and they'll have to make their own "parade" ….so I get where this young man is coming from.
Many women don't even realize they're misandristic behavior. I hear women making sexual comments about men thinking it's all in fun but I know if it were the other way around women would flip out.
I have great and very healthy relationships with all of my kids; now in their late 20's and early 30's. None of them are wrapped up into all the political hoopla and all that goes along with choosing some side, person, or narrative which is where most of the problem stems from.
People are the problem when they identify so strongly with a group and lump everyone into one, whether it be sexual orientation, race, political bias, etc. If we want to make things better, we need to have a healthy respect (not agreement) of individuals and quit the categorizing and behavior that goes along with it.