Reading Friday’s edition of The Argus last week, I came across a Letter to the Editor that I assume most readers of this article have also seen, (I know others have already written in response) titled “The Misandry Problem.” The opening line of that letter entreated its readers to “take misandry seriously,” to not let what the author anticipated to be their eye-rolling response dull their listening ears. I have taken ‘misandry’ seriously for the past couple of days, to respect, at the very least, what seemed like the sincerity of the original letter’s author. I have tried to consider his positionality, “[a]s a man” on Wesleyan’s campus, and not only that, as a first-year student. Not even 3 months into his tenure at Wesleyan, not even through his first set of courses, not having contributed to The Argus at any point before this first letter. What stuck out to this student most about our school, what compelled him to speak up for the first time, is this ‘Misandry’ Problem. As a student with perhaps a more solid grounding in the community, I want to speak to this student (and will address the rest of my letter thusly). I want to chance that his letter represented a good-faith argument, rather than the highly-committed satire I first assumed. I want to ask him to give more credit to the consciousness of Wesleyan’s student body. I hope he will take it seriously.

Dear Michael: You are right. Asking The Argus readers to take ‘misandry’ seriously is a “tough ask.” As you yourself noted that “it’s tiring to be forced to connect men’s issues to other forms of bigotry,” it is tiring for women and other oppressed groups to be asked to take attention away from issues that may be life or death, issues that require our notice and our activism, to give consideration to a form of bigotry with, at this time, no structural consequences of the same magnitude. Yet here we are.

I want to appreciate the fact that you concede the disproportion between ‘misandry’ and other forms of bigotry in your letter. I understand that that was quite “draining.” I agree that it is overwhelming to try and capture the sheer scale of interlocked prejudice in the world, but that is not precisely your argument. Your concern is more so that you have to first validate the oppression of others before asking them to validate your own. Your concern is more so that you must identify yourself as a beneficiary of prejudices before a victim of one. Your concern is, primarily, you. It frustrates you that “[s]omething can’t just be misandrist, it has to be misogynistic, racist, or transphobic.” You bemoan intersectionality, despite claiming it for the purposes of your argument. Though I oppose ‘misandry’ as the cause you choose to represent, since it is the cause you chose it is not that something ‘misandrist’ has to be misogynistic, racist, etc. It’s that it is. The basis of intersectionality is that no single aspect of identity (and thus, prejudice on the basis of that identity) exists or can be understood in isolation. You cannot use intersectionality to assure your readers of your critical thinking while contradicting it at the same time.

Despite your expressed wish to reject an intersectional framework, you do note moments where the ‘misandry’ intersects with other issues, namely gender identity and race. You note the focus on “women and children” in reporting on the violence against Palestinian civilians, which assumes that women and children are more sympathetic figures in the conflict than Palestinian men, who are liable to be accused of being the “terrorists” the violence is meant to ‘justifiably’ target rather than senseless casualties. This, as you note, is part of a long history of men of color being framed as hyper-masculine, violent, and inhuman (the focus of this discussion may be on men but I want to acknowledge that this affects all people of color, regardless of gender). It is an important consideration for activists in the Free Palestine movement, particularly white activists, who must not play to racist ideas in the effort to garner the sympathy and support needed to achieve change. A quick Google search for articles about the war in Ukraine containing the keyword “civilians” shows a comparative lack of “women and children” being singled out in describing these civilians. Searching up articles on “women and children” yields top results of articles directly investigating the effect of the war in Ukraine on “women and girls.” Though there is clearly reporting to be found that focuses solely on women and girls (which is warranted; the war has disproportionate effects on girls and women without access to necessary healthcare and with less mobility), it does not come at the expense of men in the same way as it does in the Palestinian conflict. Ukrainian men still hold a focus of reporting on the war. Ukrainian men are soldiers, heroically defending their home from invaders. Palestinian men defending their homes, in contrast, are called terrorists. The lack of focus on Palestinian men in the media except to villainize them is abhorrent. This, Michael, is something we agree on. But I think your use of their plight to bolster your argument is also quite frustrating. The difference in their media treatment with that of Ukrainian men, similarly engaged in a battle for their homeland but contrastingly not racialized, makes it clear that what they face is undeniably intersectional. It is the result of white supremacy weaponizing perceptions of the weakness of (particularly white) women to demonize men of color. I question your sincerity in bringing up this intersectional issue when you desire to talk about ‘misandry’ without it also ‘having’ to be racist, misogynistic, etc.

You also note that you do not want to be judged on “systems put in place centuries before me.” This particular line rang strangely familiar to me. Something to do with white Americans today distancing themselves from the racist history of our country, I think. So I will offer an unoriginal response, which I credit the many before me who have likely said the same thing to a reparations-opposed devil’s advocate: the system may have been built long ago, but it is reinforced every day by people who refuse to recognize that they are complicit in maintaining that system, that they could affect change if they chose. No, you could not tear down the patriarchy just because you wanted to. And I would not fault you for not taking on that kind of personal responsibility if you did not deny that you hold any personal responsibility throughout your letter.

But back to credit where credit is due. You seem to understand the limited scope of the ‘Misandry’ Problem you identify. You do not aspire to structural change that eliminates ‘misandry’ in its big-picture forms, rather remind us that “change is most realizable at a local level.” This is, of course, because ‘misandry’ does not exist on a structural level. What might be identified as structural disenfranchisement of men, such as their likelihood of losing child custody in divorce and the imposition of military duties on them is the result of the patriarchal systems built by men, not ‘misandry.’ The use of the term ‘misandry’ actually post-dates these trends. The word itself was created as an antonym for the already-existing ‘misogyny,’ and was not widely used until the 1980s as a response to the feminist movement identifying “misogyny” as the source of much of women’s oppression. The etymology and popularization of the word itself, then, is based on a falsified equivalence with the oppression of women. This is really the crux of my issue with your letter, Michael. That you choose to give such weight and power to a word whose very purpose is to disempower the struggles of non-men. Misogyny is a word created to name an existing phenomenon with serious implications. Misandry is simply a theorized equivalent, that we now use to categorize what men feel disempowered by. In conversations around your letter, though many people took issue, they would say “he made good points about misandry,” “it was just a weak argument,” “he could have supported his points better,” etc. Some recognized that your argument lacked strength, but didn’t question the validity of ‘misandry’ as its topic. By platforming misandry, which focuses on men solely as victims, you de-entered men in the issues they face. Toxic masculinity and patriarchy necessitate acknowledging men as part of the problem. Though you recognize how they contribute to the issues you discuss: “[o]ftentimes the misandrist jokes are inversions of the sexism women face,” they are notably not the object of your criticism. You do not write about how the bigotry you face drives you to critical investigation of where it comes from and leads you to consider how solving it necessitates personal commitment to the issues it is rooted in. You ask us readers to take the problem seriously even as you refuse to take the solution seriously and meet it with the appropriate nuance and complexity. Frustratingly, it feels as though you care more about the symptom than the cause of ‘misandry,’ perhaps because that is the part that affects you. Or maybe you are simply intimidated by the scale of the patriarchy or misogyny to make them the focus of your attack, since both exist on a much larger scale than the problem you choose to focus on instead. But take heart; “change is most realizable at a local level.”

Sadie Gray is a member of the class of 2026 and can be reached at sgray01@wesleyan.edu.