Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture

Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young argue that men have routinely been portrayed as evil, inadequate, or as honorary women in popular culture since the 1990s. These stereotypes are profoundly disturbing, the authors argue, for they both reflect and create hatred and thus further fracture an already fractured society. In Spreading Misandry they show that creating a workable society in the twenty-first century requires us to rethink feminist and other assumptions about men. The first in an eventual three part series, Spreading Misandry offers an impressive array of evidence from everyday life - case studies from movies, television programs, novels, comic strips, and even greeting cards - to identify a phenomenon that is just now being recognized as a serious cultural problem. Discussing misandry - the sexist counterpart of misogyny - the authors make clear that this form of hatred must not be confused with reverse sexism or anger and should neither be trivialized nor excused. They break new ground by discussing misandry in moral terms rather than purely psychological or sociological ones and refer critically not only to feminism but to political ideologies on both the left and the right. They also illuminate the larger context of this problem, showing that it reflects the enduring conflict between the Enlightenment and romanticism, inherent flaws in postmodernism, and the dualistic ("us" versus "them") mentality that has influenced Western thought since ancient times.