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diggMisandry is the message
A Canadian columnist lifts the lid on the last respectable form of cultural bias.
The family on the sofa is divided, but not equally. On one side a sullen, rather menacing father stares defiantly at the camera; on the other, a waifish, stressed-looking mother is shielding anxious children. The message of the advertisement is one we have heard or seen innumerable times in the media: domestic violence is only perpetrated by men, who are by nature disposed to controlling behaviours, while women and children (an inseparable unit) are always innocent victims. I call it misandry, discrimination against men, but although the Ontario Human Rights Code bars “discrimination via signs or symbols,” I doubt that any charges of discrimination will be laid against the Canadian Women’s Foundation, which has been carpet-bombing the media with this ad. Its appearance in newspapers, bank statements and on the sides of buses is aimed at promoting awareness of domestic violence:
| Generally speaking, men are portrayed as objects of scorn, objects of wrath or disparecidos -- that is to say, they are often not treated at all. |
The image represents a half-truth and therefore a lie. The truth, established by all credible, peer-reviewed research, including our official number cruncher StatsCan, is that unprovoked intimate-partner violence is about equally split between men and women. Imagine another picture based on a half-truth: a woman on one side of the sofa, a man protecting children or even his aged mother on the other -- because women abuse the elderly and their children more frequently than men do. You never will see such an ad. Media bias against men is as notable for what you don’t see and hear as for what you do.
(And speaking of what you don’t see or hear, when was the last time you saw a public service ad around the alarmingly elevated statistics for male suicides (up 81 per cent), especially those involved in acrimonious custody disputes? We’re inundated with breast cancer ads; when do we see ads about prostate cancer? And if 94 per cent of work-related deaths happened to women rather than to men, I think more of us would be familiar with that shocking statistic.)
Except for radio talk shows, where real people with no ideological axe to grind control the agenda, misandry is ubiquitous in the media – and by media I mean all kinds: advertisements, sitcoms, films, political ads, TV talk shows, social service agency websites and billboards, and of course the punditocracy.
But it flies beneath most people’s radar, which is another way of saying that misandry is such an acceptable form of cultural bias – the last respectable form of cultural bias – that people are unaware of it when they hear it, read it, or see it.
White, heterosexual men
We live in an age in which the media are scrupulously rigorous in self-censoring when it comes to the terrible social crime of offending women, gays, people of colour and natives. Only one identifiable group – white heterosexual men (if they’re Christian, so much the better) – is considered fair game for overt collective prejudice.
Identifying active misandry is easy. One has only to imagine the same words, image or falsehood or failure to report attached to any other identifiable group, and the imbalance becomes clear.
Here for example, is mainstream writer Nora Ephron, ironically a revered romantic comedy writer (she scripted When Harry met Sally, and Sleepless in Seattle), in a recent post on the Huffington Post blog regarding the American political primaries:
“This is an election about whether the people of Pennsylvania hate blacks more than they hate women. And when I say people, I don’t mean people, I mean white men…the outcome of the general election will depend on whether enough of them vote for McCain. A lot of them will: white men cannot be relied on, as all of us know who have spent a lifetime dating them…” It goes on in this vein.
Her claim is absurd. Blacks and blue-collar white women vote as bloc-ishly as white men, so why the anger at white men? It’s unseemly, and yet it went completely unremarked. Apply the same words to black men or women and watch the sparks fly. Of course no mainstream writer would ever say these things of blacks or women. They know better.
As a print journalist, my particular interest is my own peer group, many of whom echo Ephron’s gratuitous contempt for men. While most male writers take up journalism because they are news or political junkies, a good many women journalists have entered the field specifically as women with a feminist axe to grind.
That’s not quite the same as spreading a conservative or liberal or libertarian message, where you attack a line of thinking, not actual people. Urging feminism on readers and viewers is tantamount to spreading misandry, for feminism as it is ideologically conceived and played out in society today evokes zero-sum thinking and the conspiracy-theory temptation. When women succeed, it is because they are superior; when they fail, it is because they have been thwarted by men.
Male writers who try to defend men from anti-male bias or who criticize feminist ideology find it a very impolitic career move if they are not already well established. I personally know two excellent male writers, probably Canada’s most under-utilized researchers, who can’t get a media foothold because they critique feminism.
Male desaparecidos
Once you decide to take conscious notice of the problem, media bias in a myriad of forms leaps out at you. Positive images of women are ubiquitous; positive images of manly men are uncommon. Generally speaking, men are portrayed as objects of scorn, objects of wrath or desaparecidos -- that is to say, they are often not treated at all.
The cumulative message is that if men try hard to meet criteria established by women as lovers, husbands and fathers, they can hope to achieve status as contributors to women’s and children’s happiness, though on the whole they are unnecessary to it.
But all too often they are portrayed as active agents of women’s and children’s unhappiness. Women who rid themselves of these bad eggs are portrayed as heroic. Promiscuous women in TV sitcoms like Sex and the City present as warm, loyal and liberated. The promiscuous men in these stories are depicted as shallow, untrustworthy and opportunistic.
When men are characterized as heroic fathers in films, it is usually because the woman has fled the scene or died, a paradigm that debuted with the 1979 film, Kramer vs Kramer. Men are only allowed to present as good parents when they are desperately trying to fill the shoes of a mother. It is a role they must learn. In movies with couples, it is rare for the father’s parenting skills to outshine the mother’s, whose commitment and skills are presented as inherent.
The past few years have seen a spate of “baby” movies: Juno, Waitress, Knocked Up, Baby Mama, Then She Found Me. All have in common career women challenged by fertility issues or inconvenient pregnancies they choose not to terminate. In every case the elective mother may have foibles, but she is on the whole mature, smart and responsible.
The men are undesirable parent material, lumps of animated clay to be tossed away, or spun and shaped by a woman potter into a domestically useful artefact. These potential or accidental fathers range from the merely wimpy, to infantile, to explicitly abusive. None of the films express reservations about a child’s future with no father.
Anger and violence
The most disturbing aspects of media misandry revolve around the issues of anger and violence. Domestic violence is -- apart from custody -- the hottest of the hot button issues for demonisers and myth busters alike.
The message that male anger is a problem, while female anger isn’t, ends in overt publicity campaigns like the divided-family ad I mentioned at the outset. But it begins in a common stereotype, pervasive in the media, of female anger as cute, inconsequential and victimless.
For example, a current TV ad promoting a stop-smoking aid features a flight attendant in the throes of nicotine withdrawal. A series of vignettes shows her screaming at male passengers for no reason, snarling and sobbing over the public address system and in general acting hysterically and irrationally.
The choice of setting -- an airplane -- is no accident. On airplanes and in airports in general, "civilians" are at the mercy of officials and airline personnel, who wield absolute power over passengers. There is no recourse for unfair treatment. The male passengers subjected to her tirades shrink away in bewildered acquiescence. Their “wussy” reaction is played for humour, but in fact their fear of her is rational. There is nothing funny about being arbitrarily thrown off an airplane.
But far from critiquing this woman's egregious misuse of her power, the ad makes light of it. In the end, once the nicotine remedy begins to work, she is sheepishly laughing at herself.
One cannot possibly imagine an ad in which a male flight attendant harangues and menaces a female passenger. Indeed, that would be considered a form of sexual assault under today's feminist- inspired governmental guidelines.
The message here is that when women humiliate and threaten men as a side effect of personal "issues", men can just suck it up, since their right to respectful treatment is always subject to women's discretion and situational needs.
Casually misandric ads like this can be found at one end of the spectrum. The other end is more socially and culturally consequential.
With the media’s facilitation, an entire industry has been built on the Montreal Massacre, a tragedy – unlike male gendercides, which frequently occur in war – that has no historical precedent or sequel. The weeks before every December 6th anniversary produce a media orgy around domestic violence against women, with Marc Lepine, who was a solitary sociopath, touted as a mere exaggeration of typical male drives.
Conversely the media treatment of Remembrance Day, the one day a year feminists tacitly lay off men, no longer celebrates the specifically manly trait of physical courage. If you’ll notice, Remembrance Day now is played out in gender-neutral programming, with combat/non-combat lines blurred to equalize the contributions of men and women.
Gays excused
While the plight of abused heterosexual men is ignored in the media, whatever afflicts gay men is instantly picked up on. When StatsCan released figures last month indicating intimate-partner violence was disproportionately high amongst gay and lesbian couples, the Globe and Mail immediately commissioned a feature article – “A Skeleton that’s Still in the Closet”.
The violence scenarios described in the selected gay-couple examples are exactly the same as those in straight couples, reinforcing objective research which finds that partner violence is gender-neutral, a function of individual pathology. Yet, unlike hetero male violence, for which no explanation other than an inherent urge to control women is ever offered, this article falls over itself finding reasons to excuse violent behaviour by gays.
In their treatment of men, a lazy perpetuation of falsehoods, an incurious acceptance of bogus studies and statistics, and an eager willingness to recycle superannuated stereotypes constitute the present media template.
I began with mention of the Ontario Human Rights Code. I will end with it as the central motif of a seemingly trivial but memorable example of misandry that was brought to my attention by an extremely vigilant reader.
Ninety-nine per cent of funded social services in Canada, even those advertising “family services”, provide counseling and other forms of help only to women victims of domestic violence. Here is how the Crouch Neighbourhood Resource Centre in London, Ontario provided itself with the moral high ground for refusing funded psychiatric help to men in crisis:
From their website last Fall: We at Crouch want to ensure that all our programming [is] accessible to all. The Ontario Human Rights Code states in section i: Every person has a right to equal treatment with respect to services, goods and facilities without discrimination because of race, age, ancestry, place of origin, colour, ethnic origin, citizenship, creed, sexual orientation, age, record of offences, marital status, same-sex partnership, family status or disability.
Sounds official, eh? But in the actual Ontario Human Rights Code, between the words creed and sexual orientation is the word sex. Its omission was no accident. To accommodate an ideological bias, this website deliberately falsified the Ontario Human Rights Code.
The excision of those three letters was, for me, in its Orwellian implications, the most chilling of all examples of media misandry.
Barbara Kay writes for the National Post, a leading Canadian daily.
The American House of reps has recently made some moves toward recognising the importance of fathers. A small roll-back of the misandry.
A petition has been raised to reinforce its movement and can be accessed via:
http://antimisandry.com/important_email_petiton_campaign_urge_us_
house_pass_joint_custody_resolution-t11265.html?t=11265
This link gives some detail and background.
Anti-Misandry is a board with a strong community that discusses the very subject in all its aspects.
The more people who sign the petition to the H of Reps, the better.
Feminists use International support in their submissions to the H of Reps; so can we. So Australian, English, Spaniards, Canadians, everybody wherever you are, please sign.
It is about time a revolution happened...first of all stop voting for the DEM’S and REP’S, start up mens rights political party’s, the two party system must go, same here in Australia, Labor/Libs, viva the revolution.This rubbish will not stop
men by the million strike. I think men should have a year off work, we must stop feeding the monster that is devouring us, an international strike, tens of millions of men “forgetting” to set the clock before they go to bed.
Until men really man-up, nothing will change. Also you young men, if you are dating and the woman is a feminist dump her.Breed them out, there is NO OTHER WAY.You are better off single.Tell as many men as you can about sites like these.Make posters and put them up at uni, the mens room is good for this. If a product or media outlet (TV radio print media) bash men, dump them, because at the end of the day newspapers, TV, radio etc are just a business and so what if they go bankrupt.I have watched around 10 hours of TV this year aND IT FEELS GREAT!
Barbara,
please let your readers know about http://www.menarebetterthanwomen.com/forums.
I am a man who spent 20 years being the best husband and father I could be, raising my wifes two children of a previous marriage, raising our own two children...all in the face of my wife refusing to work for 14 years of our 18 year marriage and the stress and strain that caused when trying to raise a family of 6 on one salary.
During my marriage I was attacked by my wife many times. She threw a knife at me once. She hit me, scratched me, kicked me....she struck our kids to the head when they were little for no reason and without warning....
She abused me mentally all our married life.
Her father, a man I have known for 32 years, calls me the finest son in law any of his 4 daughters has. My father is proud of what I achieved now all the cards are on the table.
Yet, when she went to court she accuses me of all sorts of mis-behaviour...the courts immediately destroyed my company, froze all my bank accounts, and cast me into poverty. I have not spoken with my two youngest children since before christmas....she accuses me of ‘abusing’ the children and ‘upsetting’ them because I wrote them a letter each and sent it to the schools…
The laws are rediculously biased and misandry is pervasive........I have been the best possible husabnd I knew how to be and I am persecuted while she was a terrible wife by any standards and is treated like she just fell down from heaven.....I am advising young men today to not get married and not have babies with the women they love to avoid my situation...until many more women like you fight the cause....this is the only way out…
Thankyou Barbara for this article. Unfortunately if it were a man who had written this article it would be likely have been automatically invalidated on the basis that all men are incapable of conceptualizing suffering , as it can only be felt by women as a result of men.
As a eighteen year old student I know the described attitude is endemic in my local university and is starting to impact upon a friend , who was accused wrongly of violence against a female student (I was with him at the time of the supposed attack), because they exchanged some harsh words and she decided to ‘get revenge’ . Whilst he was rightfully found not guilty, he has been bullied by other female students on campus, and refused entry to some classes based on his “record”. Just one ordinary guy.
Just one sign of the big problem eh ?
Being in the military, I frequently watch the Air Force Network (a service that allows military members and families to view American programming while stationed overseas), and during commercial breaks, men are often portrayed as sexual deviants - scenes of women getting drunk at a bar and a sinister male in the background who inevitably takes advantage of one of the women.
Even in the commissary, posters abound saying, “We salute the WOMEN in our military” (the capitals not exaggerrated, mind you) without any posters at all for both sexes or for the men. Up until now, I wasn’t aware that female service meant more to our country than the men’s.
Thank you Ms. Kay for the article. With an issue like this, it means a lot more that it is written by a woman, I think. Not many would take a white male complaining about sexism very seriously.
I find the latest campaign of lies by the Canadian Women’s Foundation so offensive I am beside myself. This poster appeared in the Fort St. John Safeway a couple weeks ago when I stopped in to pick up a few things. I asked the lady at the customer service desk if Safeway was aware of what they would be supporting when they agreed to promote this campaign by CWF; explaining to her that just under half of domestic violence is actually committed by women against men. Her response was that “this is the side of domestic violence people relate to”.
I explained that if organizations such as theirs would stop supporting campaigns which perpetuate the “myth” about domestic violence, then the public may actually start hearing the truth. She justified CWF’s actions further by saying if men have issues with this type of campaign, they have every right to form groups of their own to try getting their own message out to the public. I told her this sounds fine in principle; except CWF receives millions in funding while every male victim of domestic violence in this country (who ever did anything to try stopping it) has been bankrupted. I then directed her attention to my two young boys standing beside our shopping cart (which contained a few basic necessities) and told her, “I’m going to be 40 years old this year, I have two young boys to raise and my parents had to give me the money for these groceries so I could feed them. And you wonder why men don’t speak up when they are victims of domestic violence?”.
She then asked if there was anything else she could do for me today.
The damage being done by campaigns such as this one by CWF, and the corporate support they receive, is horrendous. They need to be stopped. Thank you very much Barbara, for your perseverance in trying to awaken the Canadian public to this tragedy.
Don Dymond (male victim of domestic violence)
Fort St. John, BC
Barbara,
Thank you for your honesty, thank you for your courage.
Do I know of this Bias? I live it every day. I am one of the very rare fathers in Canada that actually won equal access to his children.
Can you imagine what I have had to over come? False allegations, child endangerment, and financially crippled can you imagine? I don’t have to, now I am trying to fix the emotional damage that was done to my children. I was not taken seriously as a parent because I was a man, I must be trying to control my ex wife… correct? There is no way I would actually want to be in my children’s life on an equal basis is there? I am a man… I must be up to something…… I had no criminal record, no domestic violence calls were ever taken for my house, I had not even had a speeding ticket and I had a bag full of heroine needles from her and her new boyfriend (who is now dead of a drug overdose) as evidence. The courts where more interested accusations that I was “angry” than the actual physical evidence I had before them. It took me three years to clear my name and it cost me more money than I can ever pay off. The ultimate cost to my children is still unveiling itself.
Gender bias I now all about it.
I’m from the uk.This has been going on for about 10 years or maybe more,have some men only just noticed it?If I wereyou I would look at all the laws that have been implemented against you in that time because it will get worse.Men are down and out because men have allowed it to happenthat way,it’s too late now.It takes a woman to spring to male defence because there are no male voices allowed on tvor in the media today.
David Page said… “The direction of all these posts, and the original article, is that white, straight men have a terrible time of it in Western society. Oh please!”
Sigh.. there are none so blind as.... ?
Yes. I was once just like you. There was a time I would not have believed any of this. Had I met myself then as I am now I guess I would have walked away and told my then wife that there must be something wrong with the fellow and that he surely must have done something to deserve what has befallen him.
You can not know how bad things really are out there for men. Especially Fathers.
As far as the biased family law aspect of things goes it is perhaps best to heed the wise words of a comrade of mine when he stated “The reason for Family Law was to ‘help’ families get over the end of a relationship, and to ensure the children are properly cared for. What has happened is the exact opposite. The average person does not believe that there is a serious problem with Family law. They only realize how bad it is once they get caught in its claws”.
So it is with you and men like you You hear it from Barbara and from many others on these pages yet you doubt because you do not see it. But one day you might or someone else close to you might. Then you will know. Too late.
Jeremy Swanson
Fathers Rights Activist
FathersCan
Ottawa, Ontartio
Canada
Thank you, Barbara, for this article. Men are losing a war that they don’t even know they should be fighting.
Misandry is rife in Australia as well. It is funded and supported by federal government and enforced by the special interest womens groups—their own interests is what they see as being special.
it takes a lot of courage to write what you have and I as many before me have both applaud and thank you for capability to be objective in this subject.
you will now be ostracized by the lame stream media sisterhood as well by womens groups who will be on a vendetta to discredit and destroy you.
I hope that you are able to keep a record of the comments here from a variety of people as these will be your ammunition in your fight to defend yourself , your thoughts and your position.
I in thanks wish you success and happiness in life
Wonderful article and community comments.
An endless cycle of use, abuse and mis-use of Children of the Glorious Almighty may seem to never end.
Today,
It pays,
To hate,
Discriminate,
And invigorate,
Ill-will.
Thus,
It falls upon our shoulders,
To educate,
Of the state,
Of “our” State,
On da-Dole.
As with any addiction, acknowledgment remains representative of the most difficult and necessary step. And while it remains pending, various crimes against humanity ensue given that compassion otherwise owing the dignity of the victims of their crimes remains lost within deep voids or the abyss of irrationally compromised minds of our entrusted. Yes, our entrusted may be found in co-dependent rapports with the More’s.
“IV-mainliners” must be brought to light.
Grant us gracious guidance and compassion for all afflicted.
- just adad
A well-written balanced article and highly unusual to find it in the mainstream media. You can Google hundreds of articles a week regarding domestic violence committed by men against women in the UK alone, but probably once a month you will find one about men being subjected to domestic violence, (and it requires a world wide search at that).
I note a number of commentators have already mentioned that in the past such articles would have ended a career, but now more and more people are questioning the status quo based on their own observations of daily life.
... continued
The most galling aspect of corporate (men’s as well as women’s shopping dollars) and public (via direct governmental largess and ill-conceived tax laws with respect to hate-mongering phony ‘charities’ and ‘foundations’) funding of misandry is precisely that.
So, floods of ‘official’ complaints coupled with boycotting and public shaming offenders is its only reasonable response.
Our own money, surrendered voluntarily in the marketplace and compelled by taxation and/or tax deductibility loopholes, is bankrolling males’ demotion to second class citizens and malicious crypto-Marxist promotion of undue acrimony between the sexes clearly aimed at the destruction of the conventional family and related denial of children’s mutually loving, beneficial and emotionally healthy relationships with both of their natural parents.
Plainly with - as but one of literally countless confirming examples - jobs within Ontario’s public service now being 62% female-held, the one-time battle for women’s rights is over and there’s no socially legitimate need for a foundation “Investing in the power of women and the dreams of girls” which thus exists solely to provide lucrative employment for professional gender bigots like Ms. Ruddle and her ‘DV industry’ sisters while advancing their elite self-evidently selfish anti-family socio-political agenda.
I am a loving father blessed with children of both genders and, accordingly, logically equally opposed to misogyny and misandry.
That said, hopefully this makes it at least marginally more difficult for professional apologists for sexist hate-mongering, like Ms. Ruddle, to dismiss my views out-of-hand solely based upon my gender.
Surely, a complaint against the Canadian Women’s Foundation & every single one of its corporate sponsors (or at least - most certainly - the 4 whose logos are so brazenly displayed on the offending webpage) to Ontario’s alleged ‘Human Rights’ Commission since the ‘couch’ graphic quite plainly amounts to the promotion of “discrimination via signs or symbols” specifically barred under its Code.
Why? Certainly not because it/they will likely be appropriately sanctioned but, for the two-fold purpose of exposing both their hate crimes and further evidencing this phony Commission’s already well known one-sided agenda-driven hypocrisy.
Plus, complaints and intentionally bringing blatant evil and sexist double standards to the light of day rightly shouldn’t stop there.
No opportunities should also ever be missed to demonstrate that the left’s vaunted Charter of supposed ‘Rights and Freedoms’ likewise isn’t worth the paper it’s printed upon since it’s Sections 15-a and 28, allegedly guaranteeing gender equality to all, are an open joke to most any heterosexual male who’s ever had the misfortune to have dealings with Canada’s Courts, quasi-judicial bodies and/or most governmental agencies.
Every day in our Nation’s so-called ‘family’ Courts, openly biased Judges make a shameless mockery of this imagined equality - not to mention the additional Charter ‘right’ of ‘freedom of association’ supposedly guaranteed to both fathers and their children and international Treaties to which Canada is a signatory; such as the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.
... continued
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