Male

Tears
for
Fears
Embracing the ironic
performance of misandry

24 | bitch   f e m i n i s t r e s p o n s e t o p o p c u lt u r e Bitch Media is a non-profit, independent media organization.

*Catherine Young is
the 2016 BitchMedia
Writing Fellow in
Pop Culture.

F
or as long as feminism has existed, feminists have been accused of hating
men. Pleas for equal rights, franchise, and financial independence have been
met with not just ardent and sometimes violent opposition, but the persistent,
insidious untruth that feminists desire nothing more than to emasculate and
eradicate the male sex and “take over.”

by Catherine Young

While hating men isn’t a core tenet of feminist
ideology, a curious trend has taken hold online
over the past couple years: ironic misandry. Women
attach #KillAllMen and #BanMen hashtags to
news stories of male-perpetrated violence against
women or legislation sponsored by male politicians
designed to cut back on women’s rights. From the
celebration of “Gleeful Mobs of Women Murdering
Men in Western Art History” by the Toast to the
bracelets proclaiming that “All Men Must Die” and
mugs filled with “Male Tears” for sale on Etsy, the
idea of telegraphing male hatred in public as a per-
formance has really caught on. The thinking seems
to be this: If men continue to insist that striving for
gender equality is the same as hating them, why
not lean into it?
In a Vice essay titled “The Year in Male Tears,”
writer Chelsea Summers defined modern misan-
dry not as a hatred of men, but as “a seething rage
against patriarchal power” and declared 2014 “the
year misandry became chic.” It was the year femi-
nists agreed that “dick is abundant and low value”
and that male tears made the best moisturizer.
In 2015, #GiveYourMoneyToWomen emerged
and grew in strength and visibility. In a piece titled
“Give Your Money to Women: The End Game of
Capitalism,” feminist activists Lauren Chief Elk,
Yoeshin Lourdes, and Bardot Smith described the
radical hashtag and movement as a “theory and
practical framework of gender justice.” In short,
gymtw is centered around the idea that women
deserve to be directly compensated by men for the
emotional labor they provide. “gymtw is a decolonial
effort,” Chief Elk said in a 2016 tweet, and “Friday
is payday.”
Even celebrities got in on the fun. Gifs of Nicki
Minaj cutting a banana in half in her “Anaconda”
video were remixed with glitter “misandry” signs,
and in her music video for “Bitch Better Have My
Money,” Rihanna kidnapped and dismembered
the trif ling accountant who stole her money, then
bathed in his blood.

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"dick is
abundant Misandry has gone mainstream, and unfortu-
nately the irony seems to be lost on men. For the first
time, the primary drivers of conversations around
misandry are, in fact, the very feminists long-accused
of not-so-secretly wanting to do away with men.
and low
But why?
It’s no secret that the digital space is often unsafe
for women. Mobs of online trolls lead targeted
harassment campaigns against women who dare
to have a voice, fighting hard to silence dissent and
maintain the misogynistic status quo. More than
one high-profile feminist critic has been driven
from their home, stalked, or doxxed. But women are
using performative misandry as both comedy and
coping mechanism; a way to bond with each other
and commiserate about the seeming inevitability of
value"
their oppression. In a way, it’s the logical alternative
to the real violence we might have enacted if we had
decided to actually revolt.
According to Jess Zimmerman, editor of The
Archipelago, performative misandry is a way of
“inhabiting the most exaggerated, implausible
distortion of your position, in order to show that it’s
ridiculous.” Even if feminists sincerely did want to
kill all men, ban all men, or bathe in male tears, it
would be a logistically difficult and absurd proposi-
tion. Civil liberties and the criminal justice system
still exist. But it doesn’t mean the thought has never
crossed our minds.
Valerie Solanas’s 1967 SCUM Manifesto existed
as a satirical manuscript meant to critique the patri-
archal order, but after her attempt on Andy Warhol’s
life, it was held up as evidence of the danger of
radical feminism; she had written about eliminat-
ing men, and then she had attempted to do so. In
the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh popularized the word
“feminazi” in his book, The Way Things Ought to Be,
and credited Tom Hazlett, a professor of economics
at the University of California at Davis, with coining
the term. “Feminazi” quickly became a pejorative
for women deemed too radical, too feminist, or too
anti-men. The patriarchy finally had a slur it could
lob at women seeking equality, and a false equiva-
lence it could exploit. It made young women eager to
distance themselves from the radical feminists who
26 | bitch   f e m i n i s t r e s p o n s e t o p o p c u lt u r e
“burned their bras” and “didn’t shave” and would
never find a man to take care of them.
But in 2016, “feminist” is the buzzword du jour.
Rather than lobbing it as an accusation against
women, we use it as a measuring stick against
which to judge them. Is Beyoncé allowed to be a
feminist? Is Lena Dunham a good enough feminist?
Do we give men too much credit for being femi-
nists? Politically, we’re closer than ever before to
accepting feminism as a mainstream ideology that
doesn’t need to be challenged, but the culture war
hasn’t been won yet and the backlash has
been significant.
In a 2013 essay in Jezebel titled “If I Admit That
‘Hating Men’ Is a Thing, Will You Stop Turning It
Into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?” Lindy West argued
that if feminists hate men, it’s because of men's
own bad behavior:
"[The] most powerful proponent of misandry
in modern internet discourse is you—
specifically, your dogged insistence that
misandry is a genuine, systemic, oppres-
sive force on par with misogyny. This is
specious, it hurts women, and it is hurting
you. Most feminists don’t hate men, as a
group (we hate the system that dispro-
portionately favors men at the expense
of women), but—congratulations!—we
are starting to hate you. You, the person.
Your obsession with misandry has turned
misandry into a self-fulfilling prophecy.
(I mean, sort of. Hating individual men is
not the same as hating all men. But more
on that in a minute.)”
Essentially, part of the surge in performative
misandry is the acknowledgement that men should
face consequences for the unjust ways in which
they treat women. The other part is recognizing
that there’s little we can do on an individual level to
overhaul an institution, except make fun of those
who uphold it.
Zimmerman wrote in an essay in Medium:
“. . .JOIN THE FUCKING CLUB. We’ve been
listening to rape jokes and wife-beating
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WOMEN ARE USING PERFORMATIVE MISANDRY AS BOTH
COMEDY AND COPING MECHANISM; A WAY TO BOND WITH
EACH OTHER AND COMMISERATE ABOUT THE SEEMING
INEVITABILITY OF THEIR OPPRESSION.
jokes and smiling and gritting our teeth
since forever. I’m not going to stop with
the misandry jokes, because they make
women laugh and feel united and if
they make you squirm a little, well, not
everything is about men’s comfort, not
anymore. And I won’t lie: Making you
uncomfortable — n ot afraid or hurt, but
just a little bit discomfited — is part of
the point.”
Performative misandry is, in a way, a clever
catch-22. If these are “just jokes that don’t mean
anything,” as men have been claiming about their
taboo comedy for decades, then why are they so
bothered by jokes that exist at their expense? And
if the argument against such humor is that it inf lu-
ences the way people think about whole groups of
people, then why doesn’t the same logic apply to
rape jokes, and fat jokes, and jokes at the expense of
trans people? Performative misandry forces men to
reckon with their own hypocrisy in a world they’ve
built to coddle and support their own egos.
Of course, as with all groups of people, women
aren’t a monolith, and not all women are convinced
of the benefits of out-and-proud misandry. In a 2014
piece for Time titled “Ironic Misandry: Why Femi-
nists Pretending to Hate Men Isn’t Funny,” writer
Sarah Begley argued that not enough people are in
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on the joke to make ironic misandry a useful
tool against the patriarchy, calling it “terrible pr
for feminism.”
“Telling half the population that we hate
them, even in jest, is not the way to do
that. Feminism is still very much engaged
in the battle for hearts and minds;
appealing to the sense of humor of a
very small minority of the population
can be a good way to alienate the rest.
That’s not to say that feminists should
water down their true demands and
complaints to appeal to broader swaths
of the population. Nevertheless, to get
folks on your side, you need an appeal-
ing message. Humor can help. But ironic
misandry is just bad pr .”
But what Begley’s argument misses is that per-
formative misandry isn’t about men at all. It isn’t
meant to be a recruiting tool for the movement or
a panacea for the ills of the patriarchy. Feminist
misandry is an act of reclamation. It’s a way to de-
fang the accusations that at worst get women killed
and at best get them ostracized. It is an extended
exercise in harmless trolling.
In a piece for Matter titled “The Memeifi-
cation of Misandry,” writer Charlotte Shane
pointed out that “the most worthwhile and
w i n t e r . 17 | i s s u e n o . 73   bitch | 27
 "
instructive aspect of misandry is its rejection of
male approval. It f louts the notion that women
should be deferential to men, that we should pri-
oritize their comfort and pander to their egos.”
She further explains that according to Sarah
Jeong, contributing editor at Motherboard, misan-
dry is nothing more than “radical indifference to
men.” Not every aspect of the feminist movement
needs to be about acquiescing to male egos, how-
ever tempting and necessary avoiding male anger
often becomes.
But, justified critiques of ironic misandry do
arise when viewed intersectionally. In the same
piece for Matter, feminist writer Zoé Samudzi is
quoted as saying:
“‘[K]ill all men’ — even in jest — is a reminder
of the historical role white women play in white
masculine violence against men of color. Black men
are targets of institutional violence — a truth that’s
acutely impossible to ignore in light of the rampant
police murders of Black Americans. And when
Dylann Roof murdered nine Black church congre-
gants in South Carolina, reportedly attributing his
brutality to ‘you rape our women,’ white women’s

THE PREVALENCE OF JOKES ABOUT WOMEN’S LOOKS,

FUCKABILITY, AND DISPOSABILITY ARE REFLECTED IN
THE WAY MEN TREAT WOMEN....THESE THINGS HAPPEN
TO WOMEN EVERY DAY, REGARDLESS OF WHETHER OR
NOT THEY “DRINK MALE TEARS” FOR BREAKFAST.

28 | bitch   f e m i n i s t r e s p o n s e t o p o p c u lt u r e Bitch Media is a non-profit, independent media organization.

 tacit and active participation in white supremacy large-scale institutional slights. Displaying misan-
was brought even further to the fore.” drist tendencies as a badge of pride seems to be an
In other words, not all men are equal under a easy and compelling method for Western feminists
white supremacist patriarchy, and ignoring the ra- to signal to one another that they understand the
cialized struggles of men of color collapses systems crushing reality that is womanhood in a patriar-
of power in favor of easy and ahistorical binaries chal society. It harms no one, and gives us a brief
that don’t hold up to intersectional scrutiny. respite in a world where serious contemplation of
But in the end, what angry men’s rights activists the harm that women face daily can overwhelm us
fail to acknowledge in their sincere fight against with despair.
performative misandry is that the balance of power The rising prominence of feminism in main-
between men and women has always been unequal. stream discourse does mean that fewer men will
Both individually and institutionally, men have had automatically have access to unearned privilege. But
more opportunity, more wealth, more access, and the key word is “unearned.” In a fair and just world,
more opportunity than women since the dawn of men never would have been privy to those benefits
time, and a few mocking t-shirts and mugs isn’t in the first place.
going to change that. That is, after all, the goal: To convert our society
Over the years, research has shown that a culture into the meritocracy we have long claimed already
of casual misogyny can and has contributed to existed. But until we get there, women can have fun
actual violence against women. The same isn’t true reciting writer Mallory Ortberg’s misandrist lullaby:
of misandry. The prevalence of jokes about women’s
It’s raining, it’s pouring;
looks, fuckability, and disposability are ref lected in
The old man is snoring
the way men treat women. Women are passed over
Now is our chance.
for promotions because they’re assumed to be un-
serious. They’re punished both for having children
and being child-free, each coming with a different CATHERINE YOUNG is a Trinidadian writer who discovered
but equally toxic set of cultural baggage. They are too late she could get paid for her opinions if she wrote
threatened with violence and rape for kindly turning them down. Her interests include sentient robots,
down dates and killed in the street for rejecting sex- dystopian futures and time travel. No, she won't point
ual advances. These things happen to women every out Trinidad on a map. She is the 2016 Bitch Media
day, regardless of whether or not they “drink male Writing Fellow in Pop Culture.
tears” for breakfast. The world is actively hostile to
women in a way that it isn’t to men. The threat of
male violence is an ever-present part of women’s
lives and the pressure can be too much to handle.
At the time of writing this article the Republi-
can nominee for President of the United States
is currently under fire for joking about sexual
assault. A man whose public misogyny has been
well-documented and fact-checked is one step from
the White House and he refuses to concede to his
continued legacy of bigotry. Is there any wonder that
a woman living in this world might opine that men
are the problem?
Performative misandry has allowed women a
way to voice their displeasure with the patriarchy
in a manner that is relatively safe and harmless.
Hurt feelings suck, but they pale in comparison to

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