Taking misandry seriously
Abstract
At the core of our research on misandry, discussed most fully and directly in Replacing Misandry, is the historical, moral and psychological problem of masculine identity. Everyone needs a healthy identity, both personal and collective. To attain that, everyone must be able to make at least one contribution to family or community that is (a) distinctive; (b) necessary; and (c) publicly valued. Boys and young men must now try to grow up without a healthy identity (that is, with nothing distinctive, necessary or publicly valued to contribute). Neither gynocentrism (which entails the failure to acknowledge that boys and men actually have distinctive needs and serious problems) nor misandry (which entails the fostering, or at least the tacit condoning, of hatred toward men) encourages healthy masculine identity.
Keywords: feminism, gynocentrism, male, masculine identity, misandry
Author Biography
Paul Nathanson has a BA (art history), a BTh (Christian theology), an MLS (library service), an MA (history and philosophy of religion) and a PhD (comparative religion). Of particular interest to him is the surprisingly blurry relation between religion and secularity: how religious patterns of thought underlie seemingly secular phenomena such as popular movies and political ideologies. With Katherine Young, he has written a series on the problem of masculine identity in an age of identity politics and sexual polarization.
