misandry doesn't exist

Oh FGS Lilly, you can find all sorts of extremist nonsense relating to any movement if you choose to look for it, which you obviously do. Malcolm X said some pretty extreme things apropos white people but that didn't discredit the entire civil rights movement did it? The overwhelming majority of civil rights supporters didn't hate white people did they, just sought to overthrow the system that favored whites over blacks. Likewise with feminism.

Patriarchy theories? Are you saying that patriarchy never existed? Or that it existed until kind of recently and then all of a sudden stopped and has no legacy or effect whatsoever on current society as we know it? Because yeah, society changes that quickly. The word naive comes to mind.

But anyway really? A homophobic feminist? Almost an oxymoron some might say.

@messy - I've proven no such thing. This is only "proven" if I accept your assertion that "A feminist would be the last person to say any of those things."

Have you ever had a good look around feminist sites? Feminists use these kinds of put downs on men ALL THE TIME! The last person? Hah!

I also do not subscribe to your "patriarchy" theories.

"Whenever a woman tells a man that he should move out of his home with his mother, or he should get a life, or has a small penis, is gay or too weak to handle "a strong woman" or any of those things certain women say to men who disagree with them, then she is acting in a misandrist fashion."

A feminist would be the last person to say any of those things.

Slating a man for having strong emotional bonds, implying that a man's penis size is indicative of his manhood, homophobia and the general belief that men must be "strong" are rooted in patriarchal beliefs and represent everything that feminism is against.

So you've just proven that if misandry does exist then feminists are the least likely suspects.

IME the kind of woman who says such things is one that is trying to find ways of coping with the patriarchy, of carving out her own little niches of power and superiority in a system that values the masculine over the feminine. It's a coping mechanism. Feminism doesn't seek to cope with patriarchy but to replace it with a society in which men can love their mothers and not be called gay.

Of course misandry exists, women can hate men just as much as men can hate women. To deny that is like denying that the holocaust happened. OK it's nothing like being on the same scale, and I'm not suggesting that so please don't attack me for the comparison, it's just to make a point and not to suggest there's any other way that the two can be compared, only by the fact that both parties deny something that is so obviously real.

I'm just suggesting that it's an obvious truth that many women hate men, you only have to visit a few feminist sites to see that. And a woman who hates men is the definition of a misandrist in the same way that a man who hates women is a misogynist. To say that one exists but not the other is quite simply a lie.

I have seen women call a man a misogynist for the slightest of slights, and I have seen extremely hateful attacks made by women on men without any such accusations being levelled at her. Is this a level playing field?

Whenever a woman tells a man that he should move out of his home with his mother, or he should get a life, or has a small penis, is gay or too weak to handle "a strong woman" or any of those things certain women say to men who disagree with them, then she is acting in a misandrist fashion.

I also believe that the word "misogynist" has been a great weapon for feminists who don't believe in equality but oppression of anyone who dissents with their views, and that now the word "misandrist" has entered the language - with a vengeance - these same women are threatened by "their" weapon being used on them.

In other words they love to dish it out, but they don't want to take it.

They will do anything they can to destroy the concept of misandry because "misogyny" is a mind control method that they've had all to themselves until being challenged recently.

Well, it's always nice when someone finds what they are looking for I suppose.

Have a nice day jamma!

Oops, sorry mitchier, wrong thread! Didn't meant to derail with irrelevancies there.

Gather round, everyone, don't all push to the front at once ...

Unfortunately I've been diverted from this fascinating discussion.

Delving deeper into Child Sexual Assault: Feminist Perspectives (2001) I was shocked to find how many essays from Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse were listed in the Bibliography, many by American fundamentalists such as Pamela Sue Hudson and Jean M. Goodwin. Joan Coleman's fantastically-paranoid Satanic cult practices from that book features heavily.

I am now writing a draft contribution for an American web site to publish a chapter-by-chapter analysis of this particular volume.

I'm afraid that in the last 24 hours I have had to alter my initial opinion; British feminism is rank with misandry - it positively drips with misandry and it is there for all to see, in the written work of British feminists. Worst of all British feminism, or at least a mino;rity of its key protagonists are still heavily engaged in collusion with American and British religious fundamentalists. For some, you can't see a gap in their paranoid rantings.

Sarah Nelson's essay in Child Sexual Assault: Feminist Perspectives, Satanic Ritual Abuse - The Challenge for Feminists, with its numerous references to the work of extremist fundamentalists (and in the References section at the end of the essay) - is an incredible pointer to a world of paranoia I thought had long gone. It would perhaps be best suited to a David Icke publication. But it does display that the alleged collusion between feminists and religious fundamentalists was still in place in 2001 in Britain, and that very collusion appears driven by misandry. The damage done to those children caught-up in the scandals, particularly in Rochdale and the Orkneys seems to be deliberately ignored by Nelson.

I don't think there is any further value in me contributing to the Mumsnet feminism pages; now I have an insight into the somewhat unsavory obsessions that some 'feminists' (I have to use the term lightly) still possess.

It's been an eye-opener.

See, I would say that treating someone as not a full human being, entitled to full human rights, is denegrating them.

Yeah yeah, whatevs

I was up very late.

Well, this is drifting a bit, but I do sort of see the point about groups of people being exploited and denied full human rights because of the belief that they were not actually "full human beings." Sometimes the powers that be did and do call upon religion, economic theory, science, psychology, etc. to "prove" that such treatment is actually justified.

There are shedloads of examples including the enslavement of people of African origin in the Americas, labour of children as young as 5 in the South Wales mines, North of England mills, etc., forced sterilisation and incarceration of people with mental illnesses, disabilities or learning difficulties, allowing dire housing and labour conditions for working class people and yes, denying women legal and social rights because of their sex.

But, even if these things didn't happen because those in power hated the subjects or wanted to cause them suffering and pain "on purpose," they did cause them great suffering and pain. It's like the old stomping on the foot analogy. I might stomp on your foot by accident, but it will hurt just as much as if I did it on purpose. And, if I do it by accident and you tell me it hurts, but I keep leaping around the room, at times continuing to stomp your foot, though not intending to hurt you, it really ceases to be "just an unintended consequence."

It's not as though all the people in our social, economic and political institutions of the time or even today have no idea of the harmful consequences of policies for people who suffer harm because they were or still are regarded as being of "less value" than other people. Then, and now, folks in positions of power can "choose" to believe the "evidence" they want and ignore that which doesn't support their view. That's like carrying on leaping while aware that you could end up crushing someone's foot in the process (but insisting that your leaping is more important than them getting a broken foot.)

LeBOF ....you will say this is semantics I am sure ...but I think there is a difference between saying that women are less than fully human, and less than full human beings.

Less than fully human implies part something else, or being something other than human (...which is silly...) whereas less than full human beings is about being an independent person with full human rights.

(e.g. children were for a long time seen as fully human, but not full human beings IYSWIM)

That's interesting, Himalaya: I would say that the few of women as less than fully human is precisely what is at the root of misogyny. But apart from disagreeing on the semantics of it, I agree with a lot of your reasoning.

LRD -

I think about it like the parallel with the way children are treated in society.

60 years ago, and still in many places around the world children were treated in ways that we now recognise as physical and emotional child abuse, exploitation (child labor) and socially condoned sexual abuse (child marriage).

I don't think people did these things because they hated children or were anti-children. They did them for all kinds of reasons - lack of knowledge and education, desperation, the fact that children are demanding, economic need, the greater good of the family ...all underpinned by a view that children were not full human beings, entitled to full human rights.

I think oppression of women is the same kind of thing....all kinds of complex things...underpinned by the view that women are not full human beings entitled to full human rights.

...which isn't the same thing as hating women, or denegrating them.

Jamma, you just seem to be tossing out random factoids about unrelated incidents and insisting there are some conclusions to be drawn in there, some kind of great conspiracy. They're just random factoids (and you keep mewing and crying about how horrible it is for you to "have" to read them - good grief.)

Despite saying you were a social worker in 1987, your recall of the Cleveland case is pretty patchy. Children were taken into care and in some cases investigations of child sexual abuse were launched against families due to "diagnosis" by the two paediatricians involved of abuse using the later discredited "anal reflex dilatation" technique.

Three and four years later, there were different cases in Rochdale and Orkney where therapists used controversial models of therapy with children who disclosed information interpreted by social workers as evidence of ritual satanic abuse.

There was no grand Christian conspiracy or feminist conspiracy or any other conspiracy going on in any of these cases. They were examples where practitioners introduced untested methods to diagnose that children had been harmed, their methods were not scrutinised or challenged and were later found to be inaccurate and inadequate.

These cases remind me of those where women were accused and convicted of murdering their babies on the evidence of controversial paediatrician Roy Meddow (when it transpired they died of natural causes and convictions were overturned.)

Again, no grand conspiracy, but a convincing practitioner who wasn't challenged by the powers that be.

All of these "scandals" happened within health and social services systems that operated an "orthodox" approach to families, not ones influenced by feminist views on the family.

Interestingly enough, the work of Liz Kelly and many others who are critical of the "orthodox" approach of social services, health and the criminal justice system towards violence in families is that the approach fails to identify where children are at risk because it clings to "traditional" beliefs about family structures, relationships, parenting, etc. It's these approaches that have let down vulnerable children, not feminist critiques of them.

'I don't think that 'its misogyny' is a good explanation for complex phenonmena like domestic violence, rape, sex specific abortion, the status of women, lack of reproductive rights, child marriage of girls to older men, trafficking and exploitation of women etc....'

Why not, though? The common factor to those things is that they either exclusively or disproportionately affect women. Why is anti-woman sentiment a bad explanation? Surely it is a pretty unavoidable explanation, even if you want to advance others too.

Fascinating stuff. Got some typing to do.

I hope you are aware of the source material from those mentioned as being folks who research the phenomenon of child sexual abuse 'cos unfortunately I do, and political, gender and religious dogma dominates any such discourse.

You perhaps didn't read the quotes in themselves;

(the) re-emergence of a professional and popular discourse on ?paedophiles? which sees child sexual abusers as abnormal, as ?other?, thus disguising the connections that they have with ?normal men/normal masculinity?.

And what drives this? Well many professionals are shedding the political, gender and religious dogma that dominated such research in the past and are genuinely working on identifying what factors do see pedophile men (and increasingly in recent years) women.

Catherine Itzin had a weakness for employing Ray Wyre in her work (Home Truths About Child Sexual Abuse: A Reader) features his work in profiling pedophiles - identifying them as being those who try to fit-in but can nonetheless are not the same as ordinary males/boys.

She though had different opinions and was inclined to the view that all men, by default are paedophiles,

And unfortunately that view was first established back in 1987 in a pre-Clevland scandal conference;

The crucial difference between the feminist approach and the family dysfunction model is that we argue that it is not in families that have 'gone wrong' that child sexual abuse occurs, but in traditional families, carried out by ordinary men. Neither the individual man, nor the family are seen as 'sick' or 'dysfunctional'.

(from Child Sexual Abuse: Towards A Feminist Professional Practice Report of the Conference held by The Child Abuse Studies Unit 6,7 & 8 April 1987 at The Polytechnic of North London)

You'll no doubt remember the Cleveland RAD Scandal of 1987. I certainly did (being a social worker at-the-time). Men were supposed to be systematically buggering and sodomising their children without leaving any injuries, forensic evidence, disclosures, confrontations and justifiable homicides by their girlfriends and spouses...

Cleveland of course begat the satanic ritual abuse frenzy (recent British history is fascinating) and the efforts to literally demonize poor families and portray men as satanists and women as witches (take a look at Valerie Sinason's 1994 book Treating Survivors of Satanist Abuse, adored by Sarah Nelson in Child Sexual Assault: Feminist Perspectives if you fancy some jaw-dropping not-light-reading.)

It all seems so far back, but unfortunately dogma trumps reality and the religious and politial/gender dogma hobbled research into child sex abuse for over a decade. Only now are the lost decades being recovered-from.

Misogyny, to me I think exists at two different levels.

There are misogynists - people who hate women - you know them when you meet them (...or have to work with them...). Its an unpleasant personality trait probably to do with insecurity or somesuch thing but shouldn't be acceptable behavior anywhere. (...and institutions that condone it are condoning bullying)

Then there is casual/unthinking misogyny - offensive cultural portrayals of women, nasty t-shirts and jokes etc... that some people who are not misogynists, think are edgy and funny, but in most cases because they haven't really engaged their brain and are a bit emotionally immature anyway.

I am sure that misandry exists as a parallel to both the two levels - people who hate men, and people who make stupid jokes and generalisations about men.... but the context in which this takes place is different. Just like people making stupid jokes and generalisations about black people is different from people making stupid jokes and generalisations about white people - given the history and reality of oppression and discrimination.

I don't think that 'its misogyny' is a good explanation for complex phenonmena like domestic violence, rape, sex specific abortion, the status of women, lack of reproductive rights, child marriage of girls to older men, trafficking and exploitation of women etc....

When these things change - become more common or less common over time, or we compare different countries etc...we can see all kinds of systemic factors - economic, legal, cultural etc.. which make change happen. Its not just ' ah, well men must hate women more in India than in Sweden' or 'men must have hated women more in 1950 than they do now'.

And when people with privilege resist change that would undermine their privilege... that's something different again (and not necessarily sex specific)

By wrapping the whole thing up as 'misogyny' I think that is where you fall into the trap of people who would argue that there is a parallel situation in misandry.

Jamma, take off your hair shirt for pity sake. No one is accusing you of being a paedophile except perhaps in your own mind. However, the fact that you are drawing bizarre, unsubstantiated assumptions and conclusions from texts based on information that is clearly not there, might lead some to wonder if you were lacking in some kind of comprehension or analytical faculties (or in lay person's terms, "stupid.")

I don't believe you are stupid. I believe, however, that you are deliberately misrepresenting writings to suit your own objectives.

The comment from MitchierInge (Tue 10-Jan-12 14:30:28) really sums up the point that the point of the article from Hilary McCollum that you linked earlier and the statement from Dr Liz Kelly quoted within it. Basically, if men who commit child sexual abuse were really so abnormal, so deviant, so demonic as the mainstream media, popular culture and even some professionals (e.g. psychology, sociology, criminology, etc.) would have us believe, you could spot them miles away and avoid them.

But, they're not like that. They are very adept at passing for "normal" men because that is how they are able to perpetuate their abuse, mostly undetected. Surely you get that concept.

If, however, you deny that, then you are starting to sound rather like an apologist for perpetrators of child sexual abuse, imho.

And please, spare us the agonising adjectives about the material you are reading. Folks who research the phenomenon of child sexual abuse read and those of us working with young people hear harrowing content ALL THE TIME and don't suffer from bouts of the vapours every five minutes. Folks do it because they give a damn, because they want to help those who've experienced abuse and especially want to be part of preventing other boys and girls from suffering in the future.

Next to this, I'm afraid your tutting and hand wringing sounds a bit self-indulgent and whiny, imho.

Are you wilfully trying to misunderstand me, jamma?

No, the fact you object to any men ever being associated with paedophila did suggest to me you don't think you're doing anything to condone it. However, that doesn't make using a crime agaisnt children as a central argument that misandry exists any more ok, or any less entitled.

HTH.