This is an excellent article by Cathy Young, exposing some of the widespread misandry within feminism.
I don’t agree with every point she makes. I think the 1848 demonizing of men is way more serious and shouldn’t be so easily dismissed. But that doesn’t take away from her main point: feminism is full of misandry, and if they want to be taken seriously by men, they need to address that.
Feminists like the term “toxic masculinity” as it’s intentionally and easily mis-usable and provides motte-and-bailey rhetorical defense for bad behavior on their part. This particular tactic comes up frequently, as feminists have a lot of soft power (due to overwhelming control of areas like governmental agencies, media, education, and HR) to enforce a particularly abusable denotation and use it. It certainly seems like feminists are splitting their message to appeal to the groundlings and the balconies at the same time, with different meanings for each. Ew.
My issues with the term. Hm.
First one, as listed above. This one is particularly galling as it highlights how cynical feminists are in practice and how much control they have over communication in like media, education, and HR.
Feminists are uncomfortable using the logical counterpart “toxic femininity”, and generally use it to describe women not being assertive enough. As a pattern, feminists reserve negative words to describe men and male behavior while embracing positive words to frame women’s behavior.
There is almost no clarity about what is or isn’t considered “masculinity”. Men getting into fights is “toxic masculinity”, but women get into fights too. Hilariously, some feminists also call this toxic masculinity, as they claim this is women emulating men. No, they fight like women for reasons that make sense to women.
Feminism is reluctant to discuss why society (and frequently, specifically women including feminist women) reward men for so called “toxic masculinity”. Working too much/hard is bad for men, but women still value earning power very highly when choosing parters. I’ve heard “man up” and “stop crying” from women plenty, I’ve actually never heard a man tell me this except in jest. Women are frequently repulsed when men express their concerns and fears, an experience that is sadly common to the point of almost every man I talk to having a story about learning not to so. This is the sort of double-bind that feminists love, because it places blame on men to change behavior while ignoring why the behavior exists in the first place.
I’m a middle-of-the-road, not particularly political, not traditionally masculine, egalitarian. Feminism-as-it-is-practiced has demonstrated too much misandry for me to accept it with a clear conscious. Your mileage may vary.
If you think you can advocate for equality as a feminist, I wish you luck. That you’ve been dismissive or evasive in every previous post to me makes me think you can’t (or simply won’t), but that’s on you. I won’t be replying to you again, this conversation is not useful in any way that I can identify.
Yes, the counterpart feminists will typically use is internalised misogyny. They never use toxic femininity and usually get angry if someone mentions it, which says they are completely aware of the victim blaming nature of the term. They believe that sexism against men actually roots from misogyny, hence their reluctance with terms like misandry or internalised misandry. Agency plays a big role in this as well, men are thought to have complete control over their lives whereas women are thought to have little to no agency.