Misandry

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Misandry (Greek μῖσος misos 'hate' and ἀνήρ anēr 'man', genitive ἀνδρός andros ; German hatred of men or hostility towards men ) is an abstract generic term for sociocultural attitude patterns of the lower morality or value of men or the higher morality or value of women . It is mainly used in anti-feminist discourses and within the so-called men's rights movement , where it describes a negative, derogatory, demonizing or hostile attitude towards men. Lexically, the term appeared at the beginning of the 19th century.

History of the development of the negative image of men in modern times

In his dissertation The Immoral Sex - On the Birth of Negative Andrology , the sociologist Christoph Kucklick analyzes the history of the development of modern masculinity and the negative image of men. The thesis of this dissertation is that the stereotype of the immoral, violent, sexually insatiable man arose long before modern feminism, namely around 1800 at the beginning of modernity by bourgeois thinkers such as John Millar , Johann Gottlieb Fichte , Wilhelm von Humboldt . Male self-doubt, as fueled by these authors, has brought about the turnaround towards a gender heterarchy that is one of the constituent elements of modernity, to a more complex inter-gender relationship than the simple hierarchy, as represented, for example, by Bourdieu's theory of the male habitus will.

Misandry in popular culture

In 2001, religious scholars Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young published the study Spreading Misandry: Teaching Contempt for Men in Popular Culture . They noted a misandry that was widespread in popular culture and in parts of elite culture. Just like misogyny , misandry is culturally propagated, but unlike misogyny, misandry is viewed as legitimate and not perceived as problematic. The basic assumption that men are human has been undermined by ignorance and prejudice. The authors were accused by the sociologist Michael Kimmel of neglecting essential findings of gender research due to their anti-feminist attitude . The work is “profoundly flat”, a feverish fantasy of the authors. Nathanson and Young objected that their work explicitly did not claim to be an empirical study, they lacked the means to do so. Rather, they would have demanded that an empirically founded study should be carried out with the question of Misandrie in the media. The book has been called a conspiracy theory because of its unscientific approach .

Doris Lessing spoke at the Edinburgh Books Festival 2001 of "men as the new secret victims in the war of the sexes". She criticized that feminism had spread a culture of devaluing men, which had become so much part of our culture that it was hardly noticed.

The political scientist Thomas Gesterkamp wrote in 2012 that "in the last twenty years (...) a kind of cultural reinterpretation of the man from the respected breadwinner to the mocked idiot" has taken place. The “sexual denunciation of men”, in which the entertainment industry played an important role, has now passed its peak.

Image of men in Anglo-American media

In his study Media and Male Identity: the Making and Remaking of Men (2006), the Australian media researcher Jim R. Macnamara deals with Nathanson and Young's theses and addresses the remaining research gaps. His own empirical research confirms and exceeds the results of Nathanson and Young. Men would be largely demonized, marginalized, trivialized and objectified in the modern Anglo-American media. Masculinity is widely presented as innate and culturally evil. 70 percent of the representations are negative, 80 percent unfavorable. In men, positive things are usually portrayed as “feminine qualities”. His analysis shows that the discrimination on grounds of sex in language and discourse have reversed or at least now concerns both sexes. The social consequences have yet to be researched, but the increasing importance of the mass media in contemporary societies is obvious.

Criticism of the term misandry

The American sociologist Allan Johnson argues that misandry has no place in a predominantly male-centered world and that the assertion of misandry further reinforces the prevailing patriarchal focus on men. Men are portrayed as victims of sexist prejudices, which are not comparable to misogynistic prejudices. Johnson also believes that complaints about misandry are intended to discredit feminism . Given the oppression of women and male privileges, and their reinforcement by men, it is hardly surprising that every woman occasionally feels hostility towards men as a dominant and privileged category of people.

The Australian sociologist Michael Flood also argues that misandry should not be equated with misogyny , since misandry does not have the systematic, transhistorical, institutionalized and legally anchored hostility inherent in misogyny. Instead, it is important to uncover discrimination that is directed against certain marginalized masculinity . Flood notes that the word is still being used more and more by certain men's rights groups.

According to Marjorie Garber , the word misandry is used in the media and by the right to describe a negative attitude towards patriarchy. “Hatred of men”, like unshaven legs, which are often associated with feminists in the media, is an alarmist tactic. The term misandry is used almost exclusively by anti-feminist groups and serves within the Manosphere as a connecting object of hatred for different anti-feminist currents.

Prejudice research

Judith Levines My Enemy, My Love. Men-Hating and Ambivalence in Women's Lives deals with the prejudices against men that have been compiled from interviews with women. According to Levine, misandry is a "collective cultural problem" and not an individual neurosis. She describes hatred of men as a result of the oppression of women by men.

Psychological research has shown that there are attributions at the prejudice level that are expected of men. A 2001 study of everyday modern sexism looked at both women and men as victims of interpersonal sexism. It was found that men are primarily affected by role ascriptions, but none of the men surveyed in the study (in contrast to women) stated that they felt seriously affected by being reduced to a (gender-specific) object status.

literature

  • R. Howard Bloch, Frances Ferguson (Eds.): Misogyny, Misandry, and Misanthropy. University of California Press, 1989
  • Judith Levine: My Enemy, My Love. Men-Hating and Ambivalence in Women's Lives. Doubleday, 1992
  • Paul Nathanson, Katherine K. Young: Spreading Misandry: Teaching Contempt for Men in Popular Culture. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001
  • Paul Nathanson, Katherine K. Young: Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men. McGill-Queen's University Press, 2006
  • Michael Flood, Judith Kargen Gardiner, Bob Pease, Keith Pringle (Eds.): Misandry. In: Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities. Routledge New York 2007, ISBN 978-0-415-33343-6 . P. 442ff.

Web links

Wiktionary: Misandry  - explanations of meanings, word origins, synonyms, translations

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b Thomas Gesterkamp: Beyond Feminism and Anti-Feminism. Plea for an independent male policy. In: Markus Theunert (Ed.): Men's politics. What makes boys, men and fathers strong. Springer VS, Wiesbaden 2012, ISBN 978-3-531-18419-7 , p. 66
  2. ↑ Rolf Pohl: Men - the disadvantaged sex ?: Defense against femininity and anti-feminism in the discourse on the crisis of masculinity . In: Group Psychotherapy and Group Dynamics . tape 48 , no. 3 , September 2012, ISSN  0017-4947 , p. 296-324 , doi : 10.13109 / grup.2012.48.3.296 .
  3. ↑ a b Alice E. Marwick, Robyn Caplan: Drinking male tears: language, the manosphere, and networked harassment . In: Feminist Media Studies . tape 18 , no. 4 , July 4, 2018, ISSN  1468-0777 , p. 553 , doi : 10.1080 / 14680777.2018.1450568 .
  4. ↑ Johann Georg Krünitz, Friedrich Jakob Floerken, Heinrich Gustav Flörke: Economic-Technological Encyclopedia, or general system of the state, town, house and agriculture, and the history of art, in alphabetical order . tape 91 . J. Pauli, Berlin 1803, p. 461 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  5. ↑ Christoph Kucklick: The immoral sex - To the birth of the negative andrology. Suhrkamp, ​​2008, ISBN 978-3-518-12538-0 (“Modernity fixes its resentment against itself in men.” P. 13). Ruben Marc Hackler: Review of: Kucklick, Christoph: The immoral gender. For the birth of negative andrology. Frankfurt am Main 2008. In: H-Soz-Kult . March 5, 2010, accessed June 12, 2017.
  6. ↑ see also: Christoph Kucklick: The demonized sex. In: The time . No. 16, 2012 ( online , archived from the original on April 20, 2012, accessed on June 12, 2017).
  7. ^ Paul Nathanson, Katherine R. Young: Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture. McGill-Queen's University Press, Harper Paperbacks, Montreal 2001, ISBN 978-0-7735-3099-7 , p. 5
  8. ↑ a b c d Jim R. Mcnamara: Media and Male Identity. The Making and Remaking of Men. ( Memento of the original from August 17, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 2006, p. 14. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.palgrave.com
  9. ^ Paul Nathanson, Katherine K. Young: Legalizing misandry: from public shame to systemic discrimination against men. McGill-Queen's Press, 2006, pp. 329-330
  10. ↑ Michael Dorland: Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture by Paul Nathanson, Katherine K. Young (review) . In: University of Toronto Quarterly . tape 72 , no. 1 , 2002, ISSN  1712-5278 , p. 483 ( jhu.edu [accessed April 18, 2020]).
  11. ^ The Guardian : Lay off men, Lessing tells feminists. August 14, 2001. Retrieved December 4, 2015
  12. ^ Allan G. Johnson: The Gender Knot: Unraveling Our Patriarchal Legacy. Pearson Longman, Philadelphia 2005, p. 107, ISBN 81-317-1101-3 (“ The accusation of man hating and male bashing also shifts attention away from women and onto men in a sympathetic way that reinforces patriarchal male centeredness while putting women on the defensive for criticizing it. In the process, it portrays men as victims of a gender prejudice that on the surface seems comparable to the sexism directed at women. Like many such false parallels, this ignores the fact that antifemale and antimale prejudices have different social bases and produce very different consequences. Resentment and hatred of women are grounded in a misogynist culture that devalues ​​femaleness itself as part of male privilege and female oppression. For women, however, mainstream patriarchal culture offers no comparable antimale ideology, and so their resentment is based more on experience as a subordinate group and men's part in it. […] Accusations of male bashing and man hating also work to discredit feminism because […] people often confuse men as individuals with men as a dominant and privileged category of people. Given the reality of women's oppression, male privilege, and men's enforcement of both, it's hardly surprising that every woman should have moments when she resents or even hates 'men.' ”Emphasis in the original).
  13. ↑ Michael Flood et al. a. (Ed.): International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities. Routledge, London / New York 2007, p. 442. (“ Despite contrary claims, misandry lacks the systemic, transhistoric, institutionalized and legislated antipathy of misogyny. Nevertheless, the notion is gaining in currency among 'masculists' and 'men's rights' groups seeking to redress supposedly discriminatory divorce, domestic violence, and rape shield laws. ")
  14. ^ Marjorie B. Garber: Bisexuality and the Eroticism of Everyday Life. Routledge, New York 2000, p. 44, ISBN 0-415-92661-0 .
  15. ^ Judith Levine: My Enemy, My Love. Men-Hating and Ambivalence in Women's Lives. Doubleday, 1992
  16. ↑ Janet K. Swim, Lauri L. Hyers, Laurie L. Cohen, Melissa J. Ferguson: Everyday Sexism: Evidence for Its Incidence, Nature, and Psychological Impact From Three Daily Diary Studies - Statistical Data Included. In: Journal of Social Issues. 2001 (spring issue) [1]