Have Man-Hating Feminists Gone Too Far?
A toxic male takes a feminist class to learn about the other sex.
“Why Harris Lost Uninformed Voters” is now free.
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A frequent theme in the Trump voter interviews I’ve read is that this iteration of feminism has blamed men for all the world’s problems. I regularly read trade union reddits and witness union members discussing in confusion how young men like Trump because they’re anti-feminist. Evidently, anti-male liberalism convinced some Teamsters to endorse Trump. To quote one Hispanic Trump voter: “The [Democrats] spent the last four years demonizing men and blaming us for all of society’s ills.” Many exit polls find extreme gender divisions in the 2024 election, with men voting for Trump and women voting for Harris.
Has feminism put men down? Many Democratic pundits desperate to explain the gender divide appear to be relenting to Trump voters’ cries. Maybe liberals were too harsh on men. I somewhat bought into this idea a few years ago. Online culture became very critical of men in the 2010s and as an 18 year old, I sometimes felt defensive.
Every gender article on The Guardian, Jezebel, Buzzfeed etc. would proclaim men suck or men are bad. I had spent half of my twenties and teenage years fully immersed in the mid-2010s culture that talked a lot about “toxic masculinity” and “patriarchy” being the cause of social ills. Though it had died down by late 2022, memories of the MeToo movement canceling powerful men and random offenders in high school and college were fresh. Andrew Tate was a name everyone knew at my college in 2022 - 2023 and a MeToo backlash had begun.
As an honest 25-year-old in college who wanted to understand other people’s views, I took a feminist course! Also because my girlfriend challenged me to do so. Gender classes are not a part of the Computer Science articulation at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and I had witnessed sexism towards the minority of women in our classes. So, I wanted to understand what feminism actually thinks about men like me. I have a good relationship, but I’m not completely immune to “toxic masculinity.”
On the first day, I walked into a giant lecture full of hundreds of mostly White women with their faux-hippie clothes, punk outfits and colorful hair. I was used to walking into classes full of mostly males, usually Asian, and very few females. As a 6’6”, large Black man I am used to feeling out of place so neither scenario bothers me. There were only two other men in the feminist class on day one. One dropped out by the first week and the other was a queer TA. Considering the online male ecosystem is full of young men who pay a lot of money to try and understand the opposite sex, it’s telling that they don’t enroll in classes like these.
On Day 1 of Feminism class, my professor was surprised to learn I was a computer science major. After that, I was welcomed into the course like any other person and received zero hostility. I was confident in my masculinity so I knew I wouldn’t feel insecure about any criticisms of my gender. But I also knew I wasn’t in space-oriented around men and that I’d learn more by listening than talking or arguing. I was prepared to hear misandry or anti-male comments, and I had the fortitude to not be bothered by them. Based on internet discourse, I anticipated the use of phrases like patriarchy, rape culture and toxic masculinity. I was prepared to give my opinions on these challenging topics.
All my expectations were subverted. The professor gave out tons of reading yet most of it was about economics: Communism, Indigenous economics in pre-Columbian America, Hispanic-heavy domestic labor industries in the U.S., surrogacy in India and the trials and tribulations of motherhood. We also discussed theories of Anarchism and the futility or issues with hate crime laws.
Many women in the class spoke about issues they faced as women or queer people within their households. Usually about generational conflicts and issues with their mothers. The Latinas in the class talked about their struggles coming from agricultural communities in California. Several Black women discussed issues of housing affordability coming from Los Angeles. I remember several women ridiculed the trend of “traditional wives” on social media as nonsensical fantasy propaganda pushed by the rich to avoid class consciousness among working women.
One of our mid-terms had four essay prompts hitting at the key themes discussed in the class. The first critiqued “White feminism” for putting aside issues of racism when opposing sexism. The second was on the literature of a White-passing Latina who talks about all the privileges she’s afforded that dark-skinned Latinas do not receive. The third discussed “neoliberal takeovers” of social movements and attacks liberal activism for tokenizing identities rather than focusing on revolutions. The fourth discussed a Dakota woman’s argument that the nuclear family is an inferior method of raising children over multi-generational and polyamorous households.
Some of these topics may make you roll your eyes. But at no point during the duration of the course were men attacked. Not once. Not one woman, straight or queer, made any statement about how they hated men. Most of their criticism seemed aimed at other feminists, or even at ideas that feminists should hate men. The online caricatures of what feminists think were completely absent from the course.
The course actually dedicated the bulk of its criticism to “white feminism” in a class that was like 80% white girls and taught by a white woman. The fact that these white women can read deep and often harsh criticism of their social status without becoming reactionaries, while hordes of young men vote against their economic interests because a podcaster dug up some anti-male tweets or headlines from gossip magazines is unmanly and pathetic.
Yes, it was normal to see viral tweets shitting on men or attacking men on social media a few years ago. I figured deep in the core of feminism I would see this, but it turns out those tweets and “I hate all men” statements are just random young women and girls venting about their dating or interpersonal issues. It has no relation to feminist ideology, despite male content creators who make money telling young men that’s what feminists think about them.
The feminist class seemed unusually sympathetic towards men. We read text from radical lesbians rejecting sex and socialization with men, but we also read opposing text from prominent feminist theorists claiming allyship with men is necessary to advance gender equality. My professor on numerous occasions when talking about how women lacked jobs or money often stated that “this hurts men, too.” Even in discussions about violence, my professor said that not only were men the primary perpetrators of violence but the primary victims.
A clue that this perception of society hating men is due to online propaganda and not any feminist theory might be that the types of men griping about this are mostly in their teens, twenties and thirties. AKA people who get their news from YouTube and TikTok. A lot of older men I know are under no impression the world hates men and are disturbed by the anti-women backlash among young men. Older Teamsters in this article talked about having to fight this propaganda infesting their young male union members voting to un-employ themselves over online feminism.
The real misandry doesn’t come from these feminist classes that these boys never enroll in, but from the manosphere. Male-oriented content on social media does everything it can to make men’s lives worse and offers no usable advice except self-pity. Teen boys and men in their twenties are watching TikToks and YouTube videos about how cool, sigma or alpha it is to be a loner and not have friends. How you should suppress your feelings and mental issues and never talk to women except for romance or sex. There are whole seminars by people like Jordan Peterson just telling you to clean your room and that women are teasing them by wearing makeup and sexy clothes.
Men are watching recycled clips and compilations on YouTube of random nobody feminist activists screaming about toxic masculinity from nearly 14 years ago. Tons of YouTube content wallowing in self-pity, male loneliness and depression content. Loser men with rented cars and rented prostitutes shoving their fake wealth in teen boy’s faces for clicks. Joe Rogan hosts a podcast telling his male viewers that feminism classes just shit on men all day because he gets his news from Elon Musk who’s a bitter divorced dad.
The hate is so disproportionate. The feminists in the class were mostly concerned with caring for themselves, while the male-oriented content from Fox News to YouTube was more obsessed with hating and ridiculing these feminists and progressive women whose classes they’re too scared to even sit in. What kind of masculine man gets off to ridiculing women with funny-colored hair who don’t even talk or think about him? Pathetic.
I’m old enough (27) to remember that this period of performative man-hating was in reaction to gender culture on the Internet before 2014. It used to be very terrible for women. Internet communities seemed exclusively male back then because women would hide their gender or be harassed with “show your tits of GTFO” remarks. I was a gamer and players would regularly use “rape” as an insult until 2014. I wouldn’t let my young sister speak on Xbox Live because a woman’s voice on voice chat would result in an instant barrage of extremely sexist remarks. The YouTube content creators I watched in the late 2000s and early 2010s engaged in sexism and homophobia regularly.
Hatred of women was so normalized back then that there were multiple internet scandals of revenge porn being used against teenage girls by sinister men. I still recall the suicide of one teenage girl who was being bullied and harassed by a man online, and it shook everyone in high schools across North America in 2012. When I recall what online culture was like towards women just 10 years ago, the whining of men that “culture’s being mean to men” seems offensive.
Look, did the post-2014 feminist movement online often overcompensate and go too far sometimes? Yes, although remember what they were reacting to. Was the emphasis on men as individuals rather than a culture that can harm men a mistake? Yes, although the people doing this were mostly random women venting online and click-bait headlines on gossip sites like BuzzFeed and the Guardian. Not academic feminism. Still, non-college voters don’t have exposure to feminism by name except through those publications, so it does matter when they brand that gender war stuff as feminism when that’s not really what matters or what academia is saying. Did the use of feminist academic language in every day personal issues on Twitter and TikTok give some people the wrong idea about our culture’s stance on men? Yes.
Nevertheless, unapologetic masculinity from pre-2014 appears to be all the rage right now, embodied in the second election of a rapist, convicted felon to the White House, who promptly nominated a rapist to head the Department of Defense and a pedophile, sex-trafficker to head the Department of Justice. As my feminist class explained, this masculinity is self-destructive and will end up hurting men as it does hurting women. The pendulum will swing back to the left; however, that will take time as a Pew study from yesterday reveals that young men are captured by right-wing propaganda online that’ll take years (or maybe actual life experience) to dislodge them from.
One of my high school friends was a White male Republican from Orange County who transplanted to Berkeley. In the early days, he would complain about liberal bias and was very defensive about being a White male. The liberal White boys in my class would roll their eyes at his rants but otherwise, we were very friendly with him. By graduation time, he chilled out on that whole victim complex thing once he was out of his bubble and realized the intolerant Berkeley liberals did not crucify him for his opinions.
The best remedy against this propaganda is exposure to the liberal, tolerant, progressive spaces they’re taught to hate and fear. Part of that is that these spaces must learn to communicate to people who don’t take feminism courses at university. Left-wing disregard for how their messaging comes off can be bad. Unfortunately, the young men who need to hear this aren’t the types to read news. But as I broaden into more mediums, I encourage them to be a real man: If you’re genuinely interested in what feminism or women think about you, enroll in a feminist course at your local community college or at university. The real challenge is for men to hear stuff like this, and not this self-destructive behavior of learning about the opposite sex from online profiteers monetizing off male loneliness.
I think a core lesson here, both in you going into the potentially “uncomfortable” space and your conservative friend who transferred to Berkeley is that real interactions with real people tend to sand the edges off of perceptions of what people are like—turning caricatures into, well, real people.
While I do think some of the entire reaction (“we were too mean!”) right now is overblown, this doesn’t dispel actual problem and opportunity in certain circles.
You described them yourself in terms of what you heard as a young man. These voices aren’t actually academic feminists and are not the intellectually rigorous part of the progressive movement. Many of them are probably the other side of the coin of the manosphere (Andrew Tate is not a shining star of intellectual rigor either). Whatever the conversation here is isn’t going to change them (on either side). But the Democratic Party still does need to think about how to reach people who hear them and think that is its core.
I’ve talked to plenty of men (in the trades, Uber drivers, etc) in Berkeley and Oakland who said they were absolutely going to vote for Trump. It was not all this man-hating stuff. Some was “Trump’s going to fix the economy, Democrats screwed it all up.” Some of it was, “I knew a cousin who died because he took the COVID vaccine that the Democrats pushed on us without testing.” But some of it was, indeed, “Dude, the Democrats just hate men and all they go on about is race, trans stuff, and whatever.” As a note, all of these tended to be Black or Hispanic men.
I also took feminist philosophy, ethnic studies… and religious studies (a course on the Bible)… at Berkeley. It’s always interesting to see what these things are actually about. I think indicting “feminism” is a dumb take. But knowing how to talk to non-white (and white) working class men that make them feel like the party understands their issues doesn’t have to come at the cost of fighting for any of the things (or people) the party cares about. It just needs to be less out of touch with its actual core voting base cares about (or what used to be its core voting base, John Judis’s emerging Democratic majority that is kind of moving in the direction of turning into the Republican’s…).
I enjoyed this piece a lot and think it’s important for some people to read about from your personal experience of it. It’s good pushback because everyone’s a critic after the fact—most of the media narratives right now would be quite different if Harris won. It still doesn’t either make the virulent Vox media style sphere not exist, nor does it mean Democrats have done well in communicating their values (and promises) in a coherent way.
Darrell it's articles like this that make me subscribe. Something that they manosphere right doesn't seem to get is that higher education is where you're presented challenging views; just because you're reading Andrea Dworkin does not mean that anyone's endorsing her views. Your intellectual development is defined by your ability to consider a range of viewpoints and opinions.