Customer Reviews

Why Men Hate Women

5 star:		(4)
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2 star:		(1)
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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

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. :-)

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.

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.

This book is unintentionally hilarious. It is also really badly written and quite embarrassing on the whole. It should have been called "Why people of both sexes hate this author". Anyone who subscribes to this stupid confused theory is either living in an alternate reality or just stupid. But really I'm not bagging this book out, it's great and should be filed with "The Rules" as one of the most idiotic books ever written. I'm in hysterics laughing now just remembering it.