We live in a misogynist society. We’re so inured to it, we forget about it, so we forget that: women can be misogynists (see Girl On Girl), misogyny can be harsh on boys, and it breeds what is medically known as a secondary infection – misandry, the hatred of men.
Misandry is the flip side of the misogynist coin. The two are symbiotic parasites. Denying that won’t make it go away.
Most women carry a weight of disappointment in men, both generally and specifically. As children, they were sold on Cinderella and Snow White. Relationships don’t end in the rosy freeze-frame sunset of happy ever after. They often do end, but in pain, confusion and an endless blame game, leaving the kind of baggage it takes Heathrow a year to lose.
Men grow up with the weight of their mothers’ disappointment and of their unrealistic expectations, and the weight of a misogynists society’s expectations of men.
These days, what makes a man? It’s not manners or clothes. Is a real man macho? Or sensitive? A player? Or a gentleman?
Our perception of manhood is just as dictated by misogynist constructs as our idea of femininity. The insults flung at gay men in particular are accusations of femininity – of acting or looking like a girl.
But misogyny dictates that men are macho: rugged, sexually promiscuous, etc while girls are the opposite… Every definition Google can find compares “metrosexual” to the gay male vain shopper stereotype, the female vain shopper stereotype, or both. Misogyny and misandry had their wicked way with the concept of ‘metrosexual’ long before the term was coined.
Girls grow up with fairy tales in which they have no purpose but to wait to be whisked off into married happily-ever-after by Prince Charming. The real world doesn’t operate on the basis of happily-ever-after, and Prince Charming is charming, not nice.
So women are disappointed – as a society, we make sure we set ourselves up for disappointment. So women tend to hold something of a grudge towards the male of the species, however much we may love individual men.
It’s this somewhat twisted dichotomy that mothers pass onto their sons, this misandry – the flip side or secondary infection of misogyny – that perpetuates the cycle.
As misogyny engenders misandry, so misandry engenders misogyny as both sexes get twisted up by what we’re told to be, and to expect of each other, and who we actually are.
So let’s have a look at that bastion of manliness – lads’ mags. Your average lads’ mag, the world over, is only interested in depicting girls as: girls not women – young, nubile, slim with large breasts (often not real) and always ready for sex.
The models, of course, get paid for baring their breasts, and the lads pay to see the results. It has been argued that this means men rather than women who are exploited. But it creates a vicious circle that exploits both sexes. It tells boys how they should behave, who they should fancy, how to be ‘lads’ – and they buy into that because it’s virtually impossible to resist, and girls know boys buy into it, so they try harder to fit the unrealistic stereotypes, and the cycle sprials to extremes.
The boys are being told by lads’ mags that real men eat man-sized macho meals, they drink manly amounts of macho drinks. Surely the macho man stereotype is as restrictive to men as page 3 is to girls?
Men and women need each other to survive, to procreate. And ironically, it’s the act of procreation that created this mess in the first place. Men are needed for sperm, for sex itself. Women then carry the foetus, give birth, and nurse the child…. No wonder men began to feel slightly redundant.
This fear underlies misogyny. The trouble is: we are much more than merely biology. Our society is not purely about procreation, and it’s not only stupid, it’s indefensible to let such an irrelevant fear dominate our society to the point where it harms everyone: not only women, not only men. Worse still, it is misogyny/ misandry that lie behind attitudes like homophobia.
So: is there a way out? Well, yes, but it needs us to think for ourselves. We need to de-sexualise. We are all human first, male or female second. We need to learn to keep hold of the differences between porn and page 3, and reality.
And who knows? Maybe one day we’ll evolve to the point where page 3 and porn are at least realistic, if not gone.
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