Feminism and Misandry.

If you ask an average person what they think about feminists, they’d most likely tell you that modern feminists are actually misandrists and that the true meaning of feminism has been lost. That they are just men haters who want to be men.

I used to think like this, in fact, I put up a post on this blog saying just that, it’s in the trash now tho; exactly where it belongs.

The funniest part was that I had never met any of the infamous misandrists, it was just something I had heard people say and because I believed men and women are equal, I always made sure to let them know I was a different type of feminist.

“I’m a real feminist not like those men haters on twitter” LMAO.

The irony was that my feminism centred around men. I called myself a feminist yet I spent most of the time talking more about misandry than misogyny (the reason feminism started in the first place). I was more interested in making my feminism pleasing to men than to address the real issues.

A feminist that ALL she talked about and to were men. Trying to sweet talk feminism to men, trying to show them all they stand to gain.

Lol, there was a time I dropped the name “feminist” cos I hated how people automatically got defensive around me once they heard that. I was scared of losing friends so I used to say; “I believe in equality. Don’t associate me with those angry, bitter women please”

I’ve discussed with many of my feminist friends and all of us had this phase. It’s relieving that I’m not alone but also funny at the same time. Patriarchy was so deep in our brains that even when we claimed to be breaking out of it, we still retained that wanting to be likeable, wanting male approval. Like, if the guys are fine with my feminism then I’m okay.

Sweet feminist phase.

If you try to have an in-depth conversation with these people that call feminists misandrists, you’d find out that they know little or nothing about feminism. They don’t know beyond the definition and also that we should fight for equity and not equality. Tell them to state the difference equity and equality and watch them flop.

Equality — treating everyone the same way; without considering differing attributes.
Equity- refers to fairness and considering everyone’s attribute and putting measures in place in order to ensure everyone gets an equal outcome.

Yes, I admit that equity is the ideal(how things should be) but this is the real world. In a world that we are still struggling to establish equality, how do you hope to achieve equity?

Let’s focus on attainable goals first and maybe one day in the future, when all humans are treated equally, we’d focus our energy on equity.

I don’t understand why you’d hold such strong opinions on a topic you know little or nothing about. You know the true meaning of feminism but you’re not a feminist yourself? You can’t see how funny that is?

Nobody knows “true feminism” more than people that aren’t feminists.

I find it rather absurd. In my opinion, nobody has an excuse to be ignorant;

I know how much I google stuff daily. I’m always ready to unlearn and relearn stuff. Just to write this post, I know how many articles I read cos I don’t want to give out false information. In the middle of arguments online, I’m googling and using a dictionary because I argue to learn and not just to prove I’m right. I’m always willing to change my stance whenever the other party is right.

That is why I find it very annoying engaging such people; people that would hold on tightly to their ignorance.

Ugh, read a book or something 😑

If you can argue on Twitter or WhatsApp, you definitely have google, use it dear. Read multiple sources, ignorance is a terrible disease.

They’d go further in their clownery and tell you they prefer first and second-wave feminists to modern feminists.

In their opinion, those women had things to fight for; right to vote and work. But that now, women are now treated equally so feminists should rest.

But it is very obvious they don’t know their history. Oh no, they don’t at all.

Anybody that thinks first wave feminism was calm is just ignorant. Feminists have never been calm, you can’t want to dismantle a whole system that has been going on for centuries by sweetly asking for it.

In fact, in all successful revolutions in history, anger has always been the fuel. Many guys have told me that they support feminism but they just don’t understand the anger. I always tell them that they can’t understand. Except you’ve experienced racism or sexism, you can never understand the anger.

Do you think slave trade ended with slaves sweetly asking for it? You think the French revolution happened because people calmly asked for their rights? Or did colonialism end with our heroes sweet-talking the colonial masters into leaving us alone?

You really believe women have the opportunity to vote and work today because the first feminists calmly requested for it?

Oh no, they screamed, they fought, they protested, many died, their sweat and blood went into it and that’s why we; blacks and women, can enjoy the level of freedom we have today.

You can’t expect people to smile in the face of oppression.

Labelling feminists as men haters didn’t even start from today.

I came across a couple of posters recently and ALL the names they label modern feminists were used for the first waves who were called suffragettes then; men haters, witches, lesbians. Nothing new at all.

It didn’t stop them then, do you really think it would stop us now?

It is something that has been consistent throughout history. Calling women that just want equal rights as men names in an attempt to discredit the movement.

“Don’t mind them, they’re just irrational, overly emotional, angry and bitter women who just hate men. They’d never find any man to love them, they’ll end up alone”

That’s one reason patriarchy sold the lie that women are overly emotional and not logical at all. It’s so nobody ever takes what a woman says seriously. “She’s being too dramatic and emotional”

I can’t count how many times someone has told me not to let my emotions get the best of me in a dismissive way. Yes, they were mostly men. Always trying to police my tone.

“Yeah, Rhoda I get that feminism is important but you don’t have to be so angry or emotional about it”

When something is your reality, when you live your life in constant fear and you can’t even step out of your house in peace without fear of harassment, you would get the anger.

When you hear about fellow women in South Africa dying every day at the hands of their spouse or boyfriends, little girls getting sold off to marriage in Northern Nigeria, Female Genital Mutilation still happening right there in the city you live, you would understand the pain.

People label feminists misandrists because feminists say men are trash/scum. Because some feminists say they hate men.

And because of this, I’ve heard someone conclude that feminists trample on men.

Yes, to them this is oppression. To them, feminists oppress men by calling them scum. I don’t know if it’s because people don’t know what oppression means or just because they want to jump on any bandwagon to discredit the movement.

Misandry in this sense is a patriarchal myth.

All they wanted was a right to vote; like men but people saw it as them wanting to treat men the same way they treat women. There are so many things wrong with this picture. It means the men knew that the way they treated women was terrible and they didn’t want to be treated that way.

Somehow, people see a bunch of women clamouring have the same rights as men as wanting to be superior to men.

Calm down and think about it. If women wanting to be treated with respect means to you that they just want to be men, can you not see the problem?

It means subconsciously you understand that right now, women are being treated unfairly . And you as a man you know that you don’t want to be treated the same way women are being treated rn, so why do you expect women to be okay with it?

No matter how much you try to sugarcoat it, you know there’s a problem and women are at the receiving end of it.

Am I saying misandry doesn’t exist?

Well, up to 3 weeks ago, I believed it didn’t exist. I believed it was just a word made up by men who want to believe they are oppressed too. But during an argument with a bunch of people, they made me realize that misandrists actually exist and it amazed me.

What exactly is misandry?

If you search Wikipedia, the definitions given for both misandry and misogyny are exactly the same i.e misandry is just the female counterpart of misogyny.

As someone who knows first hand what misogyny is and what it feels like, I would use it to explain misandry.

When people hear misogyny, they immediately think of hatred for women. But it’s much more deeper than that. In fact, there are some misogynists who seem to “respect” women and are super chivalrous.

Defining it in my own words, misogyny is the belief that women are lesser than men.

Now it can manifest in different ways; hatred, contempt, prejudice, sexist jokes, people that have no qualms employing a woman but can never let her rise to the position of men, people that would employ a man and a woman for the same position but pay the man more, people that only respect married women and not single women especially single mothers, people that slut-shame women, body shame women, catcall women, “nice” guys etc.

Also the benevolent sexists, this one is all too common; “I only respect women, I don’t respect hoes” or “I only respect married mothers, I don’t respect single mothers”

For them, women must fit into a particular standard before they can respect them. That’s okay because we all have standards, right? The question is, do they hold men to this very same standard? Obviously not, in fact, they’d hail a man for doing the very same thing they’d shame a woman for.

Basically, they don’t see women as equal to men. They won’t mind a man leading them but would have very big issues if a woman does. It’s something that happens subconsciously at times. And yes, a woman can be misogynistic.

If you don’t have issues with a man having multiple partners, but would slut-shame a woman for doing the same; you don’t have an issue with people having multiple partners, you have an issue with women.

That is an example of misogyny. It can be so subtle at times that you don’t even realize it except you are very intentional about it.

Defining misandry according to this, misandry is the belief that men are lesser than women.

In short, people that do all that I mentioned but to men; catcall, body-shame, slut-shame, have no qualms with a woman leading but won’t want a male leader, people who want to establish a matriarchy.

That’s it basically and although, I find it very hard to believe these people exist. Someone told me he has met a woman like that and errr, let me just believe him.

But then, there’s still a difference in misandry and misogyny. Misandry may exist but it isn’t systemic.

Misogyny has and continues to limit women. It oppresses women. It prevents women from reaching the peak of their careers, it prevents women from leading countries, it prevents women from choosing not to get married, it causes widows to be shamed, girls to undergo genital mutilation, it has done and still continues to do a lot of terrible thing to women.

Misandry on the other hand doesn’t oppress men.

Read it again.

Misandry doesn’t stop any man from reaching his career goals. Calling a man scum doesn’t prevent him from having access to education or becoming the president of a country. It doesn’t limit men at all.

Even if I scream I hate men from now till forever, it’s not going to stop any man from being able to get a job he’s qualified for.

Misogynists have the power to limit women, misandrists don’t. Misogyny has eaten so deep into our society that it is deemed normal.

Am I saying men don’t suffer too? Everybody suffers but men don’t suffer because they are men. Men don’t suffer from gender-based violence.

I see misandry as an answer to misogyny. After centuries of oppression, some women are like, why don’t men also get a taste of oppression. Or, it’s just in men’s heads; they can’t imagine a world where people can be treated equally. Because they see having power as an avenue to oppress the other, they believe women would do the same.

I learnt recently that in India, it’s illegal for you to check the gender of your unborn child, why? Because there’s a high rate of female feticide. People would intentionally kill a foetus when they find out it’s a girl.

Coming back home to Nigeria, so many women have been shamed for not giving birth to a male child. I have female friends who have been treated terribly by their fathers and father’s family because none of their siblings is a boy.

No man has ever had to suffer this.

We all know how much people celebrate giving birth to a boy in contrast to having a girl. Except we choose to pretend, we all know this.

Right from infancy, the girl child has been told that she’s less than the boy child. That’s how deep misogyny has gotten.

And so it is very insensitive for you to ignore all these and then focus on misandry and hate feminists because you believe they want to oppress men.

I don’t even know where y’all got that from because I’ve met a lot of feminists and none of them is interested in being superior to men. We just want to be treated like human beings, just like men are.

So, maybe misandry actually exists but it isn’t mutually exclusive to feminism. It is totally different from feminism. There’s nothing like extreme feminists are misandrists. I prefer the term radical feminists though.

Radical or not, all feminists want equality. We want to usurp the balance; not to be placed higher than men but to be placed exactly on the same level as men.

In all honesty, I don’t blame any woman that hates men. If you ask them, you’d find out that they’ve been abused by men or they know someone very close to them that have been abused. I can’t blame the oppressed for hating his oppressors, I can’t at all. Men make it very hard to like them.

I know most of you are interested in establishing that not all men are terrible. Okay, that’s true. But only one man was enough to damage her. The terrible men are enough in this world that ALL women have experienced it.

When we say men are scum, we’re not saying all men are scum. No, we’re saying enough men are scum that women experience it every day. Women can hardly leave their home in peace without the fear of harassment.

So instead of you to be more interested in a generalisation that doesn’t even harm you at all, you should be more interested in making the world very uncomfortable for scum.

Call them out, look at yourself too. Unlearn some things. Stop referring to women as hoes, stop catcalling women, stop whistling when a girl with big breasts or big ass passes by. It’s these very subtle things that make life uncomfortable for women. Stop it.

Trust me, nobody wants men not to be scum more than feminists. When men stop being scum, we’ll stop saying men are scum.

And we have every right to be angry and what you term bitter. You can not think about what women go through every day and not be angry. Lately, I’ve been tired. It seems like nothing is changing.

But after I saw those posters and considered how the first feminists must have felt too, considered the results they got at the end, I gained my strength back.

No matter how attacked we get, we won’t stop till women are treated as human beings.

Maybe in the future, our granddaughters too would be told that they prefer fourth-wave feminists to them because they’re just witches and men haters. Our granddaughters too won’t stop but they’ll laugh cos they know it didn’t just start then.

They’ll be enjoying the results we fought for. And they’ll continue to fight till one day in the not far away future that people would finally realize and accept that women are as much human beings as men are.

And till then, feminism is here to stay.

Thank you very much for reading. Let me know what you think in the comment. Subscribe if you haven’t and share to anyone you think may need to see this.

Still unapologetically feminist,
Rhodarr.

Originally published at http://rhodarrsdiary.wordpress.com on August 3, 2020.