It didn’t seem possible to me that Kay Hymowitz could come up with a piece that’s lighter on evidence than her recent Wall Street Journal piece that cast all twentysomething women as dour marriage obsessives and all twentysomething men as perennial children, because that’s how she saw it in a Judd Apatow movie. But she really outdid herself in the Daily Beast , with an article explaining why men are universally angry with women. Her evidence for this? The rantings of men on internet boards that are dedicated to misogyny. That’s like reading a white supremacist website and concluding that all white people worship Hitler.
The Web sites Hymowitz (who has a forthcoming book, Manning Up ) uses as evidence for her “men all hate women now” theory are all on the far end of the “men’s rights activist” spectrum, which is a subculture of anti-feminists who spend all their money on “pick-up artist” scams and mail-order bride businesses, at least when they’re not tying their ex-wives up in court for years at a time with frivolous lawsuits. George Sodini, the misogynist who shot up a gym class and killed three women , sprang from this subculture. So did the guy who keeps suing nightclubs for having Ladies Night , because he’s still bitter that his Russian bride got the hell out the second she secured her green card. And so did Darren Mack, the man who killed his ex-wife and tried to kill the judge presiding over their divorce. Men join up with this subculture because they buy into the belief that feminists have convinced women to make up rape, domestic violence, and child abuse to control men, and that men are a deeply oppressed group, and that the more money and leadership positions thing is just an illusion concealing the truth of our matriarchy.
In other words, not the guys you want to ask if you’re looking for average male sentiments about women.
Unsurprisingly, asking a bunch of misogynists what they think of women results in hearing that the worst part about women is that they’re all different people, instead of easily controlled sexbots :
Women may want equality at the conference table and treadmill. But when it comes to sex and dating, they aren’t so sure. The might hook up as freely as a Duke athlete. Or, they might want men to play Greatest Generation gentleman. Yes, they want men to pay for dinner, call for dates-a writer at the popular dating website The Frisky titled a recent piece “Call me and ask me out for a damn date!”-and open doors for them. A lot of men wonder: “WTF??!”
And sometimes they don’t! Oh horrors, women are human and variable, when the misogynists were promised computer programs that always produce the same results when you type in the same commands. In Hymowitz’s world, women have an obligation to all be exactly the same, and have exactly the same priorities and desires, so men don’t have to demean themselves by having to bother to get to know you. In a world where men weren’t so oppressed, men could just go to the store in the morning, buy the first woman on the shelf that fits their list of physical characteristics, and have their new wives scrubbing floors in sexy French maid outfits by the afternoon. Instead, men are forced to go through this hell of treating women like they’re people, and Hymowitz is having none of it. Honestly, I don’t particularly understand why it is that women reading this are supposed to be so upset that a handful of men who hate women so much don’t want to date you. Men who are upfront about their hate save you the effort of worrying what they think of you.
Ironically, kissing the ass of men who hate women so much isn’t really doing Hymowitz any favors. The same group of misogynists she believes represent all men tend to think any woman who shows enough literacy and ambition to write for the Wall Street Journa l must be a hated feminist. Hymowitz may think that the online misogynist communities are fonts of wisdom, but they look at her and see just another dumb broad flapping her lips .
