Adonis Mirror
"The story of history is a story of mirrors. It is not a tale scribed by victors on bloody battlefields. Nor is it told by professors or preachers. Instead, it is the story of white men seated on greasy couches, watching late-night television with reddened eyes. Regardless of their station, their individual qualities during the day, they are all men who are given the sanction to imagine themselves as victors, links in a long chain, merely by looking the part. They see a reflection of their own personalities in the great generals and emperors of the past. Others, in their eyes, exist outside of such thrilling legacies. To them, the human record is filtered through an ego-colored glass that first rendered God as a man and then his Son as a white one. The history of dominance that they recall?some of it real, much of it pure fantasy?translates into contemporary power for those who are able to borrow authority from its hallowed vaults. Belonging to a social class with not just historic power but the power to control history can go a long way in making up for personal shortcomings.
The backlash against feminism has always found solace in a mythological past where men were men and gender lines were freely drawn in wide swaths of blood. They smugly insist that cavewomen were burdens to their brave hunters. They deny that there was ever any Great Goddess or matriarchy, even though such theories were highly promoted by male scholars before women themselves were admitted to the academy. As females became their peers, or at least too close for comfort, the idea of matriarchy was transformed from a libidinous hypothesis to a threatening reminder of the precariousness of male dominance. To this end, antifeminists also argue that sexism aimed against men is the most pressing danger to our own civilization, a society that just might tumble back to the Stone Age if the disparagement of masculinity continues. Criticism from women is somehow more dangerous than a male-created nuclear holocaust: evidently only men have the right to drive us onward to our extinction.
While men have long enjoyed attacking ungrateful women as ?man haters,? the epithet seems more than a little bit silly when transposed onto the printed page?something demanded by the burgeoning market for so-called Men?s Studies materials. It certainly lacks the gravitas required to reflect the widespread injury and social disadvantages that many white males believe they endure on a daily basis. Thus a more scientific-sounding term was needed for ?the hatred of men? and antifeminists crafted one out of their own perverted imagination of antiquity: misandry.
Cobbled together from two generally recognizable Greek components, ?misandry? has the appearance of consequence and refinement. Words with such roots are privileged in our society. They are used by doctors and lawyers, not out of necessity, but as a matter of status: they can view their own image in that mirror of history, standing tall with the great men of the ages. The capital letters we afford to Classical Civilization is an artifact of both racism and sexism. That very same authority, unearned as it is, was harnessed in order to fashion the word misandry. As it is an unfamiliar term to most who encounter it, many automatically assume that it has sound intellectual underpinnings given our society?s expectations for such words and the biases that surround them. This is no accident.
Furthermore, the archaic roots misrepresent misandry?s status as a new word, a neologism: antifeminists want nothing more than to mislead the public into thinking the word has always existed. With the seed of that deception planted, they can then blame its esoteric status on a feminist conspiracy that quietly removed misandry from our vernacular, just as reports of abusive women and battered men are allegedly censored by the agents of Political Correctness. This tactic has actually met with a good measure of success: many who encounter ?misandry? for the first time are given cause to wonder why they have never before heard a word that is made to seem ?obvious? in nature by its proponents. By adding a veneer of Pentelic marble to ?man hater,? these men are able to act as if ?misandry? were an unearthed treasure waiting to be found and not a newly minted piece of plastic.
The word and its variations (misandric, misandrist, et. al) were first used only by the most militant of antifeminists, where even the most published and professional remained outliers in male society. One early adopter of ?misandry? was Warren Farrell, a man who once wrote on the benefits of incest for Penthouse magazine. Yet its constant repetition over the past decade has turned it from the battle-cry of the pathetic to a banal trivia question. It serves as the answer to ?what is the opposite of misogyny,? a rhetorical question often posed to the editors of online-dictionaries by readers, all seemingly possessed of unlimited quantities of mock-innocence. Misandry?s less combustible presentation has allowed it to surge ahead of competing antifeminist devices (?androphobia?) that have since fallen by the wayside.
This transformation has framed the term in a ?common sense? approach that many feminists, especially young ones, have difficulty discounting: if the word misogyny exists, logically and mathematically, there must be another side of that coin to restore balance. This tact has the advantage of highlighting ?rationality? as a masculine attribute. Those who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of misandry, both as a word and as a sociological fact, are portrayed as effeminate and thus bereft of logic, no matter how detailed and thought-out their arguments might be. Feminists who employ the so-called ?soft sciences? of history and sociology in their rebuttals are easily disregarded by men who invoke ?hard science? on their own behalf: the Coin Defense involves mathematics, of a perverse kind, and is thus deemed ?objective? even though it is nothing of the sort."