Why Men Hate Women [Paperback]

Adam Jukes (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1997

What makes a man like John, in every respect a cultured and charming man, successful in his career and liked by his friends and acquaintances, behave violently towards a woman he says he loves? Is he sick? Is he different from other men? Is it, as he says, Jane's fault? Does she like being beaten? Otherwise why would she go on doing what she knows upsets him? Adam Jukes hopes that by the end of his demanding but gripping book, the reader will be able to answer these questions. Adam Jukes works with men who are abusive and violent to women. In the last five years he has been involved in the London Men's Centre, which offers dedicated programmes to men who are violent. He began working with abusive men as a psychodynamic psychotherapist, but as his work continued he found that the work of feminists in the refuge movement and in the 'speaking bitterness' literature could not be ignored. He integrates these two perspectives in his work. The way in which he presents men in this book will generate distress for those men who experience their masculinity as a burden - for he argues that misogyny, the hatred of women, is an inescapable element in the development of masculinity. But he also shows how the model of misogyny which informs the book is applied to an intervention programme to stop male abusiveness. This is a shocking book. Its thought-provoking view of the issues will be of great interest to mental health professionals and all concerned readers.

Product Details

• Paperback: 345 pages
• Publisher: Free Assn Books (March 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1853431958
• ISBN-13: 978-1853431951
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #871,909 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars why men hate women, December 6, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Why Men Hate Women (Paperback)

this book changed my life. Ihad read lots of books about abusive men and never really understood why I had been treated the way I had been. This book finally cleared the fog. it lifted years of guilt and shame. I knew befor I had finished it that I was not responsible and that he would have hit me even if I had met his demands to be the perfect wife. I will always be grateful I found this book

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Simplistic, and ironically, a bit misogynist, November 15, 2010

By 

Sam Wood "Sam" (Carthage, IL) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Why Men Hate Women (Paperback)

I've only read parts of the book, but I have some issues with it. The author attributes misogyny primarily to issues with the relationship between mothers and sons - a very Freudian idea, and Fried wasn't exactly a model of feminist thinking. Blaming of mothers for the bad attitudes of their sons is, well, misogynistic? Not too mention pretty simplistic, and it seems to place almost no responsibility on the role of fathers.

I think the roots of misogyny run deep in our culture and come from attitudes created by MEN to justify the oppression of women by other men. It's not something that happens just because a mother didn't pay enough attention at the right times to her son. We're saturated by a culture that devalues women, a culture that has origins millennia old and is expressed through sexist stereotypes in the media, through sexual double standards, through implicit ideas that "feminine" is the same as weak and irrational, etc. Blaming mothers for this lets men off the hook and ignores the deeply ingrained biases that support misogyny, making it harder to address.

As an aside, while I agree that misogyny is widespread, I passionately disagree with his assertion that all men hate women or have contempt for women. It's true that many men (more than we'd like to admit) have conscious or subconscious ideas that women are inferior, but cultural norms affect everyone differently, and some men certainly see women as completely equal to them in every way. I certainly do. We have to acknowledge the real pervasiveness of misogyny while also not defining non-misogynist men out of existence if we really want to change things for the better. :-)

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars stunning, February 17, 2003

By 

melinda taylor (uk) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Why Men Hate Women (Hardcover)

the best book I have ever read on the subject of why so many men abuse women in so many different ways. The other reviewer who talks about laughing when he read it is obviously a man who abuses women and he just couldn't stand the truth.