Mercatornet
Misandry is the message
Barbara Kay | Thursday, 15 May 2008
A Canadian columnist lifts the lid on the last respectable form of cultural bias.
An image from the Canadian Women’s Foundation
How misandry is made to work in the media
[Misandry — ] The family on the sofa is divided, but not equally. On one side a sullen, rather menacing father stares defiantly at the camera; on the other, a waifish, stressed-looking mother is shielding anxious children. The message of the advertisement is one we have heard or seen innumerable times in the media: domestic violence is only perpetrated by men, who are by nature disposed to controlling behaviours, while women and children (an inseparable unit) are always innocent victims.
I call it misandry, discrimination against men, but although the Ontario Human Rights Code bars “discrimination via signs or symbols,” I doubt that any charges of discrimination will be laid against the Canadian Women’s Foundation, which has been carpet-bombing the media with this ad. Its appearance in newspapers, bank statements and on the sides of buses is aimed at promoting awareness of domestic violence:
The image represents a half-truth and therefore a lie….(Full Story)
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Comments by Fathers for Life: Barbara Kay’s article is very important and absolutely required reading. The importance of the article begins with its title “Misandry is the message,” which is without doubt derived from Marshall McLuhan’s phrase “The medium is the message” (1964).
Marshall McLuhan received much attention and praise for his theories on the changing nature of the influence of the media via the impact of its message on social engineering. It seems that Barbara Kay went one step farther and identified the message of the media: all-pervasive and increasingly intensifying hatred of men and boys. It seems that Barbara Kay deserves credit for doing that to no lesser extent than Marshall McLuhan did, identifying the principle of which she illustrated one very important aspect: misandry.
The article has a very small flaw. That is that the definition of misandry it contains is not quite on the mark. More correctly, misandry is not discrimination against men, it is the cause of discrimination against men, just as discrimination against women (today no longer prevalent — if it ever truly was — but merely and almost exclusively only alleged by feminists) would not be misogyny (the hatred of women) but a consequence of misogyny. In other words, institutionalized misandry of the media leads to all-pervasive discrimination against men and boys, as surely as institutionalized misogyny — if it were to exist — would lead to overwhelming discrimination against women and girls.
Although many activists in the men’s movement already decades ago identified the need for the identification of misandry as the male counterpart to misogyny, many popular dictionaries refused for just as long to incorporate a definition of misandry (most commonly through simply ignoring requests for such inclusions). On Jan. 29, 2005, Wikipedia incorporated its first entry for misandry and now contains a much expanded definition of misandry that serves well and is widely accessible:
Misandry …is the hatred of men or boys, as opposed to misogyny, the hatred of women; or misanthropy, hatred of the human species. Misandry comes from misos (Greek …, “hatred”) + andr-ia (Greek anér-andros, “man”). Those holding misandric beliefs can be of either sex….
Mind you, given its politically-correct nature and general lack of academic standards and rigor when it comes to definitions of terms in a social context, and due to the habitually uneasy relationship of feminists in regard to logic, the description of misandry in Wikipedia contains a large jump in logic, such as that an example of misandry provided speaks of “the race of males.”
The use of the term males (much prevalent in today’s media) to identify men is one of many irrational consequences of the feminist re-engineering of the English language and most definitely doesn’t serve well. The term, which includes male animals such as cocks, stallions and dogs, invokes female counterparts: hens, mares and bitches. Nor is there or can there be a race of males. The word male in such a context always refers to the male sex of a species. However, the males of all species do not logically constitute a race; neither do the males of any given species. The correct word for human males is men (or boys).
The sum-total of the prevalence of misandry over that of misogyny manifests itself in discrimination against men and boys that grew into the enormously large difference in the average life expectancies of the sexes.
Barbara Kay quite correctly identified some of the very real manifestations of discrimination against men and boys, such as, “Ninety-nine per cent of funded social services in Canada, even those advertising “family services”, provide counseling and other forms of help only to women victims of domestic violence.”
It is remarkable that that greatly excessive disparity in discrimination against men and boys over discrimination against women and girls is reflected in other sectors of social discourse in Canada, such as in the ratio of incarceration of the sexes (99 men for every woman — in the USA that ratio is about 17.6 men for every woman), and in the bias against men in news reporting in Canada. As Jim Boyce reports,
My study of Canadian newspapers found a similar phenomenon. But in this case, the worthy victims were women and the unworthy victims were men.
I examined coverage of gender and violence in 1242 headlines published in seven major Canadian dailies from 1989 to 1992. (I chose headlines since they summarize news articles and are the most read and remembered part of a newspaper.) Considering that statistics on violence typically show that men are at least as victimized as women, the contrast in the amount of coverage given to each was striking:Of the 540 headlines which directly referred to the gender of victims, 525 (97.2%) focused on women and 15 (2.8%) focused on men, a ratio of 35 to 1.
A random sampling of the articles accompanying the rest of the headlines suggested the gap was even greater. I estimated that a total of 991 headlines focused on the gender of victims. Of these, 972 (98.1%) emphasized women and 19 ( 1.9%) emphasized men, a ratio of 51 to 1. (Quoted from Manufacturing Concern, by Jim Boyce; the thesis was submitted in 1994 to the Department of Religion & Culture in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree at Wilfrid Laurier University.)
