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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 Canadian Women’s Foundation is emblematic of the new “old girls club”. These Women’s organisations have extensive political control to cause discriminatory gender bias in Police procedures for domestic violence, government funding for treatment of domestic violence and generating publicity that obviously portrays a pro-female and anti-male message to all of society.
Women are just as aggressive and capable of causing damage to a man. Anyone who has found themselves looking down the end of a knife or at the receiving end of a kick to the genitals will know that women are VERY capable of seriously injuring a man. Unfortunately it is the invisible scars that cause the most long lasting damage. Moreover, an abused man and an abusive women will never receive they proper treatment that they need. The cycle of abuse will continue because gender biased organisations like the Canadian Women’s Foundation that only address half of the problem and not only neglect the other half of the problem but go further and publicly promote misandry.
Being raised by a single Mom and my grandmother and being an only son, I grew up with a greater respect for women than my peers. I’m an old fashioned type of guy. I’m 45, and I’m appalled.
Ladies, I was on your side for so long but you’ve lost me now… You have gone too far… You’re being ridiculous now.
If feminists are getting hundreds of millions in government funding, and making “great strides” for women, why am I seeing Canada’s Foreign Minister, “Mad Max Bernier” march into his official swearing in ceremony with “Jilted Julie Coulliard” who is showing so much cleavage it’s bordering on indecent?
Good Lord… He should’ve matched her outfit and dressed in a speedo, beer belly, and gold chains!!! LOL!!!
Yeah, I know, she’s a biker chick and the feminists will say she’s not a true representation of the modern woman… Really? Hmmm… Why then am I seeing girls and women everyday, showing that much cleavage? For goodness sake, 13 yr. olds are dressed like that nowadays!!! Who taught them this? Does anyone believe their fathers taught them this? What self-respecting father would even let his daughter out of the house dressed like that??? NOT THIS EXILED FATHER!!!
Is this what those hundreds of millions have produced?
I don’t need a multitude of “studies” to back me up, just look around, some things in life don’t require a study!!!
It’s legal in Ontario for women to walk down the street topless, how long will it be before a Foreign Minister goes to his swearing in ceremony with a topless woman on his arm? At the rate it’s going now it shouldn’t be long… (Jilted Julie was a gust of wind away from being the first!)
To all the self-respecting, intelligent, “classic” women, like Barbara Kay, I would implore you to speak up and help bring balance to this miserable state of affairs, the children need you, gentle-men need you, society needs you.
Well done that woman. Sadly not many women are as clear sighted as Barbara. They don’t seem to be aware of how they are being manipulated by the media and the state. It is beyond critical, this problem of official misandry.
I have experienced it I have lost friends and relatives in the men’s suicide epidemic which is feminisms hidden holocaust.
Abortion being part of this also.
It is sinister and because it is being deliberately promoted by politicians,the media, influential men and women alike. Why? Control,power, money - divide and conquer.Orwellian and very sneaky our politicians want to lord it over us all.What better way than to get rid of men first. Thus feminism is a useful weapon of the ruling elite. In the end they will turn on women too. But increasingly people see through them and the whistle blowers are emerging…
I have to again thank Barbara for writing the truth. Its very encouraging to see a woman understand the extent of what has been happening for some time now....
Ms. Ruddle’s rejoinder to Barbara Kay clearly states that violence against men is not CWF’s concern, “… we applaud other campaigns.” Applaud silently, of course.
No comprehensive survey of violence against men has ever been undertaken, by any government. Therefore no comparison of violence perpetration and victimization is possible. Further, CWF, as other feminist organizations, proclaim some women’s victimization claims as valid, on the assumption that women never lie. Rape claims, documented as over 60% false, offer insight into deceit.
Ms. Ruddle offers no verifiable public data source for her victimization litany. Such claims, echoing StatsCan’s 1993, $10,000,000 “Violence Against Women” were exposed as misandry, including by StatsCan’s subsequent publications. Inter-spousal violence is so rare in Canada as to fall below the incidence of psychopathology.
One category of assault, unequivocally ‘more severe’ for men is homicide. Since StatsCan began publishing data, twice as many men are murdered than women: 200 women vs. 400 men murdered annually. The revealing feminist rejoinder is, ‘Those are men killing men,’ as though men deserved fatal violence, because of their birth.
About “… violence … in their own homes,” Ms. Ruddle – like all feminists – omits data showing women as the primary perpetrators of violence, including homicide, against children, and adult daughters as the primary perpetrators of abuse and exploitation against elder parents. Who could be more defenseless than an infant, child or a disabled elder parent?
Endorsing “a gender-specific approach to addressing violence,” is amorally indistinguishable from opportunistically defining violence by religion, race or ethnicity. Ms. Ruddle and CWF’s intent is clearly to terrorize women against men. CWF does not intend to lessen abuse and violence for all Canadians.
Shame.
Jeffrey Asher
…
Another truthful article by Barbara Kay- well written and right to the point! Truth these days is a rare commodity when ideology and racketeering get in the way.
However I would like to reply to the individuals making money off of the misery of others in the domestic violence industry. (The attorneys- the judges- the psychologists-the psychiatrists- and the family counseling firms). Even the people employed by the domestic violence industry say it’s a failure. Yet Ontario persists with its ZERO Tolerance for Domestic Violence Policy. Could it be that being this intrusive into marriages is causing more deaths than before such a policy was adopted? Could it be that tearing apart families from their fathers is causing more grief, heartache, and murders? Could it be that knowing the statistics of how many mothers murder their children without their father’s involvement may help to end this misandry? (“The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services data on child abuse shows that over twice as many children are battered by their mothers (40.8%), as by their fathers (18.8%), excluding cases in which both parents are abusive (16.9%). Likewise the number of children killed by their mothers without their father’s involvement is double the number killed by their fathers without their mother’s involvement). Yet sole custody is given to the mother 87% of the time, it makes a rational person wonder. If anyone needs “Shelter from the Storm” Sarah Ruddle it is the children.
It’s time that we quit perceiving women as the principal care givers to the children; thereby alienating the father from the family unit, the only person in the majority of cases that can possibly save his own children’s lives.
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!
Dear Barbara,
Thank you for such a powerful and on target article. The tunnel has indeed been long and dark for this white, hetero, divorced father. It is what put me on the road to political activism.
You are a voice of reason in an unreasonable time.
You will go far should you continue to write on this topic.
You can do as Wendy McElroy of FOX and CNN has done, or Cathy Young of the Washington Post, or Kathleen Parker of the Orlando Sentinel. They have all built amazing, shooting star, careers on speaking the truth about the extreme societal/political abuse of the white hetero male.
I hope you continue to write on these topics and become fantastically successful.
Best Wishes and God Bless
Abdulahi Mahamad said…
Men, particularly white men are clearly fair game without limitations, it seems. Perhaps even more disturbing is the fact that those who create and enforce policy; laws against males are white male in high places.
Go figure.
easy dude $$$$$$$$$$$$$.....
I tell you, I teach dating skills and I teach the young guys when a Sarah Ruddle type is the date, or those like her start to go on like that, it is a deal-breaker.The young intelligent gen Y’S males are really aware of this,hopefully the next generation of young men will not have to put up with this as the Sarah Ruddle type will be extinct.
Sounds callous but I see know other solution.
MIchael Cavanaugh said…
Sarah Ruddle: Nobody here said violence against women was not a serious matter. Why are you trying to change the subject? How does evidence of the persecution of men somehow put women at risk? ...
easy she does not know anything else....
I wish to propose the notion modern feminism has become a political movement fueled by public money which doesn’t obey rules applicable either to political organizations or to lobbies. Its sole purpose is to foster its access to public funding. Its main strategy is to discredit men by accusing anyone who dares to voice men also have needs of misandry or masculinism. This meaningless label has yet to be reflected upon. The sooner the better.
Since governments depend on politicians electability and given the political power derived from colossal government funding granted to political feminist organizations it is unlikely politicians will be in a position to correct the situation in a foreseeable future. I deem the best hope for democracy lays with news organizations. They unfortunately are also victims of political feminist organization which control them by accusing media dissidence of misoginy and masculinism. Once freedom of speech is on the way of being restored there is no turning back.
Great piece, I’m so glad it was a woman who penned it.
I’m sick to the back teeth of the constant hatred of men, based purely on the fact that they were born with a penis, it is utterly repulsive.
Adverts for TV shows often show men getting a slap across the chops from a woman, in a comical way, which makes it all the more difficult to take violence against women seriously, since they seem to see it as a barrel of laughs when men suffer it.
I’m a big boy, I can take the odd ribbing, no complaints here, but when that ribbing is constantly in your face every two minutes, without ever taking a rest, it just starts to get too much.
We have many misandric shows on TV here, one of them is called Loose Women, and every day they talk about a subject, then within seconds, the focus of the subject is on the differences between men and women regarding that subject. Once they were talking about ATM’s, no need for misandry there, right? Wrong, they turned the conversation the way of “Have you ever noticed that men forget their PIN numbers?” or “Why do men always forget to take the card with them?”, all this just to make their audience feel better about themselves, since they feel inferior to men.
Then there are song lyrics that are aimed at young girls, some of them are just straight out disgraceful, like Fergie’s “My humps, will make you spend your money on me” or Destiny’s Child with their “Do you pay my bills? I don’t think you do, so you and me are through”. This is what is being fed to our younger generation of girls, I weep for the future.
I have seen misandry my entire life, actually, daily. I really believe that two types of people will come through for us though, and most would not expect their help, and those two are gay men and the next generation of young women (with fathers). Let’s hope I’m right, we need more voices that are not just heterosexual white men.
Thank you Barbara. It is WOMEN who need to speak out as strongly as you do to change the bias, the double-standards, the sheer male-hatred in all its insidious forms, the laws that oppress men.
Men’s voices are just not heard any more.
Men’s voices are disdained, dismissed, distorted. They are devalued. And all by the same misandry - oh, and it is good to see that word getting some traction.
Men are the new Jew. Rolled in with the new Black.
Their blatant misandry exposed, the Canadian Women’s Foundation attempts to paint a picture of innocence.
All they have left are more lies and deceit in order to defend one set of lies and obfuscation with another.
The myth itself is directly responsible for the legal horrors which daily remove children from their Fathers in domestic disputes.
Domestic violence is a minor issue in Canada It is people like Ms Ruddle and her group with millions of dollars in government and other funding which make it a much bigger issue than it is. The rate of DV is so small that it hardly registers in the overall global scale. You wouldn’t think so to hear Ms Ruddle tell it. She is of course paid by those same funds.
93% of women in Canada report no violence against them by men. 94% of men reported no violence from women against them either-a very different picture to that suggested by the CWF.
The CWF fully realizes that their existence relies on the myth. There has to be anissue or there would be no way to raise the money.
Ms Ruddle can’t hide the reality of what she and CWF are doing. Of course the campaign is anti-male. How else can it work if an ‘abusive male’ is not responsible for the invented violence? A plethora of social workers thrive on the myth. The more myth,the more lies to help the courts remove children from their Fathers.
The bigger the lie the more innocent men go to jail or lose everything. Research shows that 87% of domestic violence accusations are unfounded.
For Fathers activists this is all good. They will use it to hold these people to account, close off the funding and lead to the eventual arrest, and punishment for the perpetrators of this outrage. I don’t believe the activists are kidding either.
Jeremy Swanson
At the risk of sounding like a misogynist I must once again applaud an article built upon reason, and that from a woman. That’s not to say that woman are incapable of reason but just that the media’s portrayal of women is of the feminist ideology which is to often void of it as Kaye aptly pointed out in the stewardess commercial she used as an illustration.
I however am able to see the true forces driving the globalist agenda behind feminism, which could quite likely write me off as a conspiracy theorist, anarchist, or some other politically correct term used to discredit any type of honest dialogue.
So from my point of view I see feminism as not an empowering of women but rather as disempowering of men. A type of abuse conditioning by the system. An emasculation process that especially allows for abuse of process. A type of constitutional criminality that works within the system void of checks and balances in the name of someone’s idea of a what the greater good should be. It really gives rights without responsibility to women and responsibility without rights to men.
The scary thing about it is when a state is given this type of unchecked power it can lead to a holocaust as it did in Nazi Germany.
I just think that sometimes it necessary to measure the rights that we take by what the greater evil could be, which is a state without constraints.
So if I am mad its because I have had to listen to the feminist ideology for to many years and suffer its effects.
A systemically beaten up dad.
Brent Matthews
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