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Feminism: Sex and gender discussions

'Man-hating feminism'

443 replies

MisterDarsey · 16/05/2011 10:06

There's an article about this in the Times today by Libby Purves, provoked by Lionel Shriver's portrayal of the boy in 'We need to talk about Kevin'

Just thought you'd like to know Smile

OP posts:
HellAtWork · 17/05/2011 22:59

SGB got there before me:

"I always thought that the 'truth' of the book was that the narrator is as much of a self-obsessed monster as her son."

It is. The awful realisation is that he acted the way he did to shake his mother out of her self-obsessed inverted bohemian snobbery. Throughout the unreliable narrator gives clues that Kevin is very alike her and this is something that terrifies her more than any wider prejudices against boys. So in some ways it is pretty anti-feminist (always comes back to relationship with mother as cause) but on reflection (read it before having children) the message I got from it was to never treat your child as an extension of your own snobberies, ambitions etc and how damaging it can be for any parent to not recognise child as own person.

SpringchickenGoldBrass · 18/05/2011 00:16

I must admit I haven't read WNTTAK because I have a DS and I thnk I would just find it too upsetting (almighty wuss emoticon). Mind you I have just finished Room by Emma Donaghoe and that was upsetting too.

sakura · 18/05/2011 06:00

Lionel Shriver definitely has a misogynistic streak in her. In the beginning at that book she says that a shiver of revulsion runs through "people" when they see a pregnant woman. Here, I assume people= men. She is openly disgusted by women in many way.
Shame she is so male-identified because she is a bloody brilliant writer.

I thought Emma Donoghue's Room was amazing, really, truly. Now that is a radical feminist writer. I loved the way she just took the piss out of the way society is run, the way it doesn't like women breastfeeding for too long, for example. After reading that, I read The Slap by Christian Tsiolkas and it was like reading a pardody because he actually is disgusted with women who breastfeed "for too long"

Room: I just can't recommend it enough (the first chapters are hard-going but the escape from the Room takes place pretty soon into the book. It's not voyersitic, it wasn't written by a man, after all)

sakura · 18/05/2011 06:02

And misogynistic writers are always given an enormous platform, whether they're male or female

orsinian · 19/05/2011 20:31

Occasionally some women who will identify themselves as feminists, and who are sometimes held-up as the very essence of feminism will say or write something that gives credence to the idea that men-hating is apparent.

Fortunately most of the time such instances come from American sources, where a particularly extreme form of feminism resides. There are a few similar instances from the UK, but those are generally from feminists trying to emulate our American 'cousins'. The quotes though come from just a small minority of feminist writers and academics, notably Marilyn French, Catherine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin, who appear to have spent entire careers providing quotes for opponents of feminism to liberally (perhaps not the best word) employ whenever in a tight debating spot.

You will struggle to find similar quotes from beyond the white English-speaking world.

Of course most if not all of the quotes below could be simply taken out-of-context. I've read a few of the books mentioned in the past, and couldn't unfortunately find any such instance.

"As long as some men use physical force to subjugate females, all men need not. The knowledge that some men do suffices to threaten all women. He can beat or kill the woman he claims to love; he can rape women...he can sexually molest his daughters... THE VAST MAJORITY OF MEN IN THE WORLD DO ONE OR MORE OF THE ABOVE."
Marilyn French (her emphasis)

'My feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew just released from Dachau, I watch the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach and I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. What he was, as a person, I mean, what his shames and yearnings were, simply don't matter."
Marilyn French; The Woman's Room.

"All patriarchists exalt the home and family as sacred, demanding it remain inviolate from prying eyes. Men want privacy for their violations of women... All women learn in childhood that women as a sex are men's prey."
Marilyn French

"All men are rapists and that's all they are."
Marilyn French, Author; (later, advisor to Al Gore's Presidential Campaign.)

"All sex, even consensual sex between a married couple, is an act of violence perpetrated against a woman."
Catherine MacKinnon

"I believe that women have a capacity for understanding and compassion which man structurally does not have, does not have it because he cannot have it. He's just incapable of it."
Former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan.

"The traditional flowers of courtship are the traditional flowers of the grave, delivered to the victim before the kill. The cadaver is dressed up and made up and laid down and ritually violated and consecrated to an eternity of being used."
Andrea Dworkin

"The media treat male assaults on women like rape, beating, and murder of wives and female lovers, or male incest with children, as individual aberrations...obscuring the fact that all male violence toward women is part of a concerted campaign."
Marilyn French

"Probably the only place where a man can feel really secure is in a maximum security prison, except for the imminent threat of release."
Germaine Greer.

"Men who are unjustly accused of rape can sometimes gain from the experience."
Catherine Comin, Vassar College. Assistant Dean of Students.

"Men renounce whatever they have in common with women so as to experience no commonality with women; and what is left...is one piece of flesh a few inches long, the penis. The penis is the man; the man is human; the penis signifies humanity."
Andrea Dworkin

"You grow up with your father holding you down and covering your mouth so another man can make a horrible searing pain between your legs."
Catherine MacKinnon (Prominent legal feminist scholar; University of Michigan, & Yale.)

"Man-hating is everywhere, but everywhere it is twisted and transformed, disguised, tranquilized, and qualified. It coexists, never peacefully, with the love, desire, respect, and need women also feel for men. Always man-hating is shadowed by its milder, more diplomatic and doubtful twin, ambivalence."
Judith Levine

"I feel that 'man-hating' is an honorable and viable political act, that the oppressed have a right to class-hatred against the class that is oppressing them." -- Robin Morgan, MS. Magazine Editor

?I want to see a man beaten to a bloody pulp with a high-heel shoved in his mouth, like an apple in the mouth of a pig.? ? Andrea Dworkin

?The proportion of men must be reduced to and maintained at approximately 10% of the human race.? ? Sally Miller Gearhart

"Heterosexual intercourse is the pure, formalized expression of contempt for women's bodies." -- Andrea Dworkin

"Men love death. In everything they make, they hollow out a central place for death, let its rancid smell contaminate every dimension of whatever still survives. Men especially love murder. In art they celebrate it, and in life they commit it. They embrace murder as if life without it would be devoid of passion, meaning, and action, as if murder were solace, stilling their sobs as they mourn the emptiness and alienation of their lives."
-- Andrea Dworkin

"The institution of sexual intercourse is anti-feminist" -- Ti-Grace Atkinson

"In a patriarchal society, all heterosexual intercourse is rape because women, as a group, are not strong enough to give meaningful consent."
-- Catharine MacKinnon, quoted in Professing Feminism: Cautionary Tales from the Strange World of Women's Studies.

"If life is to survive on this planet, there must be a decontamination of the Earth. I think this will be accompanied by an evolutionary process that will result in a drastic reduction of the population of males." --Mary Daly, former Professor at Boston College, 2001.

"There are no boundaries between affectionate sex and slavery in (the male) world. Distinctions between pleasure and danger are academic; the dirty-laundrylist of 'sex acts'...includes rape, foot binding, fellatio, intercourse, auto eroticism, incest, anal intercourse, use and production of pornography, cunnilingus, sexual harassment, and murder."
-- Judith Levine; summarizing comment on the WAS document, (A southern Women's Writing Collective: Women Against Sex.)

From 'A feminist Dictionary; ed. Kramarae and Triechler, Pandora Press, 1985:

MALE:...represents a variant of or deviation from the category of female. The first males were mutants...the male sex represents a degeneration and deformity of the female.

MAN:...an obsolete life form... an ordinary creature who needs to be watched...a contradictory baby-man...

"Men's sexuality is mean and violent, and men so powerful that they can 'reach WITHIN women to /construct us from the inside out.' Satan-like, men possess women, making their wicked fantasies and desires women's own. A woman who has sex with a man, therefore, does so against her will, 'even if she does not feel forced.'
-- Judith Levine, (explicating comment profiling prevailing misandry.)

SmellsLikeTeenStrop · 19/05/2011 20:56

Meh, quote mining.

orsinian · 19/05/2011 21:17

Oh yes. Guilty as charged.

And that of course is the snag. With the Web, anything and everything written and said is never forgotten - not like in the past when today's headlines were tomorrows chip wrapper.

Most of the quotes come from a particular period of time - the early-to-mid-1990s, the moment perhaps when a minority of American feminists fell off an intellectual cliff. In the UK we had a few equivalents who followed the US loony element, notably the US-born but UK-resident Catherine Itzin.

Hard to find similar quotes from more recent times. The McKinnon/Dworkin/French generation might still be regarded with affection by some, but they provoked the 'backlash' against feminism in the US more effectively than anything else.

Now, particularly in the UK, we see a more adept form of feminism, though I'm afraid 'SlutWalk' might have set that back by a few years.

SpringchickenGoldBrass · 19/05/2011 21:33

Orsinian: Ah yes, Catherine Itzin. I had many a run in with that buckethead in the 90s. I never had to try to make her look like a fucking idiot, she was so good at doing it for herself. ANd exaggerating her CV didn't do her any favours, either.

dittany · 19/05/2011 22:04

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dittany · 19/05/2011 22:05

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MitchiestInge · 19/05/2011 22:53

I actually do think it would be a good idea to thin out the male population by culling about 95%. Just to see if it helps.

Didyouever · 19/05/2011 23:04

Would that include Mumsnetters' sons,husbands,father,brothers etc. ?

Goblinchild · 19/05/2011 23:09

Probably. That's the problem with culls.
Are those quotes that orsinian listed correct?

orsinian · 19/05/2011 23:13

Yep. Guilty as charged.

There are numerous MRA sites listing, on some occasions entire chapters, of quotes from the works of McKinnon/Dworkin/French. Those three managed to set feminism back to the intellectual stoneage; it will take feminism generations to rid itself of the vulnerability caused by those three alone. Simply those three simply thought that feminists would read their work, without thinking for one second that they could have perhaps expressed their theories in a somewhat more subtle form.

And now feminism, even British feminism is lumbered with the work of these three, endlessly quotable, routinely employed by those who want to tarnish the efforts of those at the cutting edge of things. McKinnon/Dworkin/French provided a litany, a rhetoric, a vocabulary for women's rage. But they exposed a side of feminism that can't be easily reconciled for some, including myself. So I make no apology for conveniently cut-and-pasting from MRA sources that list those quotes - even if never visited before. Those sites are out there, they present an image of feminism that has to be challenged over the coming decades.

dittany · 19/05/2011 23:18

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dittany · 19/05/2011 23:20

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PrinceHumperdink · 19/05/2011 23:25

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Straight2Extremes · 19/05/2011 23:53

That is not remotely funny MitchiestInge

Goblinchild · 19/05/2011 23:58

You think she was joking?

Didyouever · 20/05/2011 00:09

It'd mean about 27 million men and boys 'culled' in this country,so I assumed she was joking.

Beachcomber · 20/05/2011 05:01

Ah is this bit where an MRA quotes a bunch of women out of context as proof that women are quite angry about male violence?

My favourite is the oft quoted 'all men are rapists' from Marilyn French - it is from a work of fiction. It is a phrase said by a fictional character after her student daughter has been raped and threatened with a knife in the street.

The quote is speaking about how the character and her daughter were subsequently treated by the hospital and law enforcement (i.e. not very well - this is the 1950s/60s). In particular she is referring to how her young and beautiful daughter felt being eyed up by men at the courtroom whilst she is there to go through the soul destroying experience of giving a detailed account of her rape to a roomfull of people.

The full quote is;

"all men are rapists, and that's all they are. They rape us with their eyes, their laws and their codes."

But hey why let the truth or any actual knowledge of the subject get in the way of a little feminist bashing/misogyny?

Also cutting and pasting without linking to one's source is intellectually dishonest - as is claiming to have 'read these things in context', whilst not appearing to know that one of the most famous quotes of all time in this discussion, comes from a work of fiction and is always misrepresented and quoted entirely out of context.

PrinceHumperdink · 20/05/2011 07:25

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sprogger · 20/05/2011 07:45

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PrinceHumperdink · 20/05/2011 07:48

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Goblinchild · 20/05/2011 07:49

I'd not seen it before, I'm appreciating the way that you are putting them into context.

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