Rethinking “Men As A General Concept”

Lauren O'Neal
The Hairpin
Published in
1 min readMar 10, 2014

The London Review of Books has never been focused on gender equality. VIDA, the organization which tallies up male and female contributors and subjects in various publications every year, consistently ranks LRB as one of its worst offenders, and that status has apparently prompted the journal to rethink exactly nothing and make precisely zero changes.

So it’s rather a big surprise to find out that the journal’s editor, is a) a woman, and b) a sister in misandry:

Her feminism is, she concedes, “old-fashioned… I tend to take exception to men in a big way, but that’s a slightly outmoded form of feminism.”

Men as a general concept or men as individuals? “Men as a general concept, and individual men when they’re behaving like men.”

[…] She breaks off. “It happened earlier this morning. You’re talking to a male colleague, trying to get your point of view across, and then another male colleague walks across and agrees sagaciously with what the other man is saying. That always happens.”

[Guardian, via SNP]

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Lauren O'Neal
The Hairpin

Lauren O’Neal is a senior editor at Midnight Breakfast and cohosts the podcast Sunday School Dropouts.