Customer Reviews

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

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4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
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1 star:		(4)

 

 

(...) this book (in spite of a few small flaws) is perhaps the best thing dealing with men's issues to come down the pike in the last couple of years. And that includes Warren Farrell's last two books, the first of which, "Women Can't Hear What Men Don't Say", deals with much the same topic (though it's nevertheless distinct in its particulars). The critique Nathanson & Young offer up is absolutely devastating and one can only hope that it opens up an entirely new field of badly needed criticism because, as extensive as the book is, it barely touches the surface when one stops to think about it. For example, the immensely popular "Frazier" TV show isn't even mentioned, and Seinfeld only appears in a footnote -- so there's much material yet to be mined, especially at the rate the garbage is being produced for dozens of channels.

One weak spot I noticed was the tendency to analyze works from the early 90's rather than more recent offerings. I got the impression much of the material had sat on the shelf for a long time and it made me wonder why this was, so it would have been nice to have had some explanation of this, perhaps in the preface. Because of the ephemeral nature of "hits", I wasn't sure that I'd even heard of some of the films they go into great depths on. This was only a minor drawback, but I did wonder why, if they were going back in time some, they ignored, for example, the mid-80's (`85?) Best (sic) Picture "Out of Africa", which seemed a prime example of many of their themes (which also touch on race), while perhaps trying too hard to make their case on one or two other films. No matter, I'm being picky. No book as impassioned as this could be absolutely perfect. They successfully make it impossible for anyone who reads this book -- even someone already somewhat sensitive to the central idea -- to ever look at popular media quite the same way again, which is exactly what they intended. Even if their exact theory as to *why* all this is going on might be subject to some more debate IMO, the overwhelming evidence they present is more than reason enough to read the book. I know I'll be re-reading sections of my copy for a long time to come in order to fully absorb all the important ideas here.

This book is absolutely enlightening! Just about any man who is honest with himself already realizes that male bashing is an allowable pastime within out pop culture. Not long ago, I walked into my front room to find my son upset at his favorite cable cartoon channels. He told me glumly that every man on there was stupid or incompetent or evil. I sat down with him, and sure enough, he was right. The big stupid guy looking for a date, but the women all physically assaulted him. The superhero girls saving the stupid city mayor (who has a smart and capable female assistant who really runs the city). The girl crime fighter, with a comic sidekick boy, who repeatedly needs rescuing. Yep, it's so blatant that a 12 year old could see it!

But how deep is this? Did my son merely fixate on a few anomalous exceptions? This book goes to great length to show just how widespread misandrous (anti-men) expressions have become in our culture, and how we got here. Don't read this book for yourself, read it for your sons and grandsons. There's something insidious going on here, and if you care for the young men who will inherit this country, then you need to get alarmed at the world that is being made for them.

In this fascinating book, authors Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young look at the pervasiveness of misadry (hatred and belittling of men) in American popular culture. Throughout the book, the authors give a great many examples of blatant misandry, and then carefully put them into context within the feminist worldview. The final chapter is, though, the crowning glory of this book, examining what ideology is, and how modern feminism is an ideology and what that means for ourselves and our future.

This is a fascinating and eye-opening book. I do believe that anyone who even casually watches television or movies is aware of a prevalent misandry, but the authors of this book go a long way towards putting the phenomenon in context, showing why it is being done and by whom. If you are interested in the course that American culture is taking, and why, then I highly recommend this book to you.

This excellent book presents convincing evidence of the pervasiveness of misandry (contempt for men) in popular culture. Written in a very scholarly manner and carefully documented, it analyzes numerous movies, cartoons and tv shows to prove this point. The reader is clearly shown how men are ridiculed and insulted in virtually every advertisement, cartoon and movie by individuals (male and female) who feel duty-bound to put men down at every opportunity.

Some readers wonder why so few men complain about this kind of treatment. The reason is clear. Western culture has a double standard whereby women may complain endlessly, but men must keep their mouths shut. It is not macho for a man to complain. Thus if a man dares to complain about misandry, he is likely to be reviled as a whimp, a whiner or a male chauvinist pig. Faced with such vilification, is it any wonder that men are reluctant to speak out? They know full well that they will never be taken seriously.

While some of the misandry emanates from men, much of it comes from feminists as well. All this and more is addressed in this well-written book. It should be required reading for all social science students.

Finally, a lucid, beautifully written book which takes seriously the politically inconvenient but dead true fact that current Western culture is awash in misandry. Type 'misandry' on your Word program and it will tell you that there is no such word. If Nathanson and Young's book gets anything like the readership it deserves, 'misandry' won't be a non-word much longer.

The thinking on display in 'Spreading Misandry' is so clear, so apt, so free of cant, that even the most militant ideological feminist ought to be able to read it with something approaching delight.

And so singular and distinct is the authorial voice in the book that one can only gasp in admiration that it was in fact written by two authors. Moreover, since one of them is a man, the other a woman, readers can have real hope that the spread of misandry can be stopped by men AND women acting together for the sake of that old friend of humankind 'the common good'.

In his review above under Library Journal, Jeff Ingram proves that he either did not read all of the book, or he did not understand it, but either way he commits two of the errors which the authors specifically raise: the trivializing of misandry, and the justification of it.
Now providing us with a classic example of these, first Ingram trivializes misandry by apparently saying, 'oh well, the media is going to engage in this sort of thing anyway..'; he then justifies misandry by stating 'someone has to be the bad person', implying that it might as well be the man (and it usually is, which Ingram would know if he had read all the pages).
Finally, his notion that this one volume, will somehow 'balance' the massive feminist literature on misogyny, is a joke.
Thank you Mr. Ingram, for inadvertantly endorsing the book!

I thought this book was going to be "preaching to the already-converted" since I had been aware of man-hating becoming an all-pervasive feature of American films and TV since the early 90s. But Nathanson and Young gave me a lot more than mere support for what I already believed. I got a much better understanding of the situation on a much deeper level. Their argument is clearly and logically presented. I'll admit that the relatively brief discussions of "Deconstruction" and "Post-Modernism" made me (a non-academic) squirm, but they were important to laying down the basics for the overall presentation and were presented in an understandable manner. Oh, and at times the authors lay on the irony a little too thick and perhaps go a bit over-the-top in some of their interpretations of films, but overall, this is a brilliant book that has broadened the scope of my thinking. It is also a disturbing book. Is there a way out of this? Or is misandry to be permanently institutionalized? The authors provide no remedy. That is depressing.

This is an extraordinarily insightful book that I would wholeheartedly recommend to anyone with an intellect. The essay that serves as Appendix 4, "Populist or Elitist? Talk Shows in the Context of Democracy," is an important work on its own. I wish the authors would write another book directed at a more populist audience. I think that perhaps some people in the general audience may tune out during the "Post-Modernism" and "Deconstruction" segments, but I think this is a terrific book and I am grateful to the authors for writing it. I thought I was the only one who had noticed.

This book is a serious and articulate academic work, a well documented and insightful examination of misandry in our popular cultural expressions. It is surprisingly easy to read for a book of such intellectual and critical caliber. It is the first part of a three-volume set to be called Beyond the Fall of Man. I presume that Man here is meant to mean men, not women, illustrating the authors' observation that in our current social context the convention that we belong to one species is no longer to be presumed.

The larger purpose of the trilogy according to Nathanson and Young is to "help reverse the current polarization of men and women by laying the foundation for a new social contract between the sexes - one that takes seriously the distinctive needs and problems of both sexes. But this is far beyond the scope of this volume." In the words of authors, the "immediate goal in this [first] book has been the rather modest one of describing a phenomenon or, to be more precise, the link between two phenomena: pop cultural misandry and ideological feminism."

The authors have focused first on clearly illustrating the spreading of misandry, deliberate or unwitting, throughout much of contemporary popular culture. They support their observations meticulously within a formally structured approach. The first seven chapters are a detailed examination of instances of misandric commercial entertainment productions. The authors take an abundance of examples from the various genres in the visual arts, organize them in groupings according to their differently nuanced misandric themes, and examine each instance in a thorough critical exercise. They go to great lengths to avoid any examples but those that are clearly and unequivocally misandric.

The latter part of the book is an exploration of the implications of the phenomenon they have documented. To explain this relatively recent trend in the cultural idiom of Western societies in general and North America in particular, the authors investigate the relationship between popular cultural expressions of misandry and the historical development of feminist thought and influence, both academic and popular. In doing so, they situate both these phenomena within the context of the practical legacies of postmodern philosophical thought and its offshoots.

Nathanson and Young have succeeded without any doubt in defining the characteristics of the phenomenon that they isolate, and in demonstrating it's astounding ubiquity. They also go a long way to showing its intimate relationship with the assumptions, uncritical and unconscious or critical and deliberate, of the politically correct views on gender legitimated by the academic world.

One may, and certainly many will, find fault with their views on the pervasiveness of misandry in today's cultural forms, or on its meaning and importance, but the fault will not be due to any lack of intellectual rigour on the part of the authors. If anything they have been more thorough than should be necessary. Were it not for the contentious reception they could anticipate, such an exhaustive analysis in support of their theses might be considered unnecessary.

This book has shown me how ignorant I was at any conscious level of the rampant misandric sub texts peppering the daily fare we are being served by popular culture. As a man I have become used to a kind of generalized rhetorical misandry in the public discourse over the years, which I credited as the temporary by product of a justified and necessary feminist political movement. I compared it to the somewhat similar anti-white discourses that accompanied black and native militancy in the sixities and seventies, which I also refused to take personally or to consider as more than an impermanent expedient for sympathetic political ends. But if the authors are right, and I believe they are in the light of cumulative personal experience, misandry (and its uncritical acceptance) is not such a relatively innocuous and temporary political event. It is an indication of a far more serious malaise.

Being the rhetorical culprit does become tiring. Any white, middle-aged, north- American, middle-class, etc, male can vouch for it. If one has a strong sense of personal identity, a good sense of perspective, and at least a little sense of humour, it is by no means a truly great burden. But once being the universal culprit becomes by definition fully personal, a fundamentally defining identity, almost an inescapable raison d'ętre, how can it not be hard to bear, and to what end should it be borne?

I think Nathanson and Young, among other things, have hit upon the subtle fact that to remain enfranchised and politically effective in our society today almost requires becoming a vocal victim. This means victimizers are both in demand and in dwindling supply. Men (imagined in whatever particular variant expedient to the circumstances of the moment) are traditionally handily cast in that role, and today, they are rapidly becoming the only candidates for the job. What happens when, as a group, they too must claim the rights of victims, or simply decide to do so in self-defense, or out of political self-interest? If all victims are equal, and both women and men are victims, equally worthy by definition, where do we look for the unworthy victimizer required by ideological definition? Put another way, as unlikely as it may sound, the growing misandry Nathanson and Young have found in popular culture, if pushed to its logical conclusion within the context of the ideological and philosophical roots they have identified is an indication of a deep and pervasive misanthropy to come. As a philosophical foundation for political life, public human interaction, it bodes ill for the prospects of humanity does it not?

I think the book is an extremely responsible and courageous enterprise, particularly given the prevalent climate in the academic environment the authors inhabit and among the peers with whom they share it. I should like to thank them both for opening my eyes and my mind to the dimensions of a problem to which I have given only scant attention.

Misandry - the hatred or contempt for men - is a very strange phenomenon. Many people have become more aware of a significant uptick in recent years of the denigration of men, usually referred to as male bashing, yet examples of such are so widespread and diffuse that most instances go unnoticed. Many people, especially men, are reluctant to discuss the issue. Doing so not only exposes emotional vulnerability, difficult for many men, but also because those most likely to engage in male bashing are also most likely to ridicule and belittle any man who protests against it.

In SPREADING MISANDRY, the authors Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young not only take up the issue, and do so quite well, but also address those mechanisms that prevent the issue from being better recognized and challenged. The result is a very good book that could pave the way for more widespread discussions of the issue.

The authors focus on misandry in pop culture, most notably movies and TV shows but also greeting cards and cartoons. This focus on pop culture is, in my opinion, one of the strengths of the book as it allows the reader to see how misandry has seeped into the larger culture rather than simply exist within some small isolated corner, such as among academic feminists.

The actual analyses of various movies and TV shows is usually pretty good and at times is exceptional. Interestingly, the authors discuss misandry in moral terms and this infuses their take on things. It is pointed out again and again that male characters are not only evil, but intrinsically so. The directors of such movies feel no need to explain why men are evil. This is not so for women characters who, if they behave in a similar manner, are contextualized so that their behavior is seen not only more sympathetically but usually as a result of mistreatment by men.

Nathanson and Young also focus in on one of the more typical tactics to promote misandry: the one-sided interpretation. This is especially useful in historical pieces as it allows women to be portrayed as having had their choices severely constricted in the past while not pointing out that the same was true for the overwhelming majority of men as well. Producers of such material then defend their pieces by pointing out, well, women did have their choices constricted. But it is not the truth of such a portrayal that is of interest here but rather that men are portrayed as being far, far more privileged than was actually the case. This allows for the male-privileged/female-oppressed dichotomy to flourish in a more subtle manner than overt trashing of men.

If there is a weak point to the book it is that the authors spend more time than is necessary on movies and TV shows that do not even rise to the level of mediocre. More time on other aspects of pop culture, such as the aforementioned greeting cards and comics, would have been some time better spent. Nonetheless, Nathanson and Young are working in fresh territory and some leeway is warranted. Kind of ironic, isn't it? The universities are filled with people who cry out against the injustices of the past and who arrogantly believe that if they themselves had lived way back when, they would have had the moral courage to stand up for what is right. Yet these same academics do live in a time in which some groups are unfairly maligned and stigmatized and not only do they do nothing to stop it, they usually contribute to the problem. SPREADING MISANDRY is a welcome bucking of that trend.

You get a firm idea of just how important this book is by reading some of the awfully distorted, hate-inspired reviews already printed here.

'Spreading Misandry'is not an anti-feminist text. It is anti-female supremist and anti-gender hatred. Female supremist movements threaten all the important fundamentals of feminism and the contribution it has made to a stronger modern society. This book helps decode the arrangment that sees this perversion of feminism gaining greater and greater legitimacy in popular culture.

A fascinating read.