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SUNDAY SPECTATOR
June 18, 2006
Father's Day
Well, just in time for Father’s Day, two thick tomes have landed in my snail-mail, with a third promised. They are from the courageous McGill Queen’s University Press, and I will give their full titles, for these give a fair idea what’s inside. One is, Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture. The other is, Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men. And both are by the team of Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young.“What’s misandry?” I hear one of you still asking. Oddly, everyone today knows that “misogyny” means hatred of women, but in our multiculture, the idea that there could be an equal and opposite mental condition does not necessarily surface. Not that the idea isn’t there, just that it isn’t touched upon in daily life and conversation, for fear that witches may shriek. (The perpetrator of man-hatred is called a “misandrist”, incidentally, not a “misandronist”. Whereas a “misanthropist” hates human beings equally, regardless of race, colour, creed, size, or sexual orientation.) I leave the curious reader to find her own way through those remarkably detailed and well-referenced books: I just mention them in case anyone wants to know some facts. But I can’t resist giving you a little taste, from the middle of the thicker volume. The authors expound a survey of police records, to show that men are violent to women more often than vice versa. But only slightly. The great majority of men use raw bodily force to express themselves in such instances. The great majority of women use lethal weapons. Moreover, a remarkably high proportion of men kill themselves after killing their spouses. They don’t try to get away with it, or collect the insurance. And did you know? Right across North America, all a woman has to do to get her spouse arrested is call 911 and say, “Officer, he hit me.” It is the one-stop solution to her domestic problems: the charge doesn’t even have to be true. Later, in the family courts, she may help herself to what the man used to own. It’s called “no-fault divorce”, and I’ve seen several cases where a cheatin’ wife has disposed of an unwanted husband in this profitable way. Getting custody of his children is child’s play. Preventing him from ever seeing them again is more complicated, but still not hard. Indeed, as I’ve learned at first hand, a woman who goes to Ontario’s Family Responsibility Office can do pretty much anything she wants to an ex-partner, and the Province will pay her law bills. It argues well for women, that so few of them actually do such things. There is still a certain reserve of decency in the average woman -- instilled in her soul by God, and nurtured through centuries of civilization. But keep dangling temptation in her way, and even a woman will succumb, eventually. Are men ever unfair to women? Has a man ever made cynical calculations to take an ex-wife to the cleaners? You bet. I know of cases where it has happened quite recently -- invariably because a woman with too little self-regard failed to defend her own interests vigorously. It might even be argued that the laws used to be unfair to women. But this is a worthless argument, for those days are long passed. As these books show exhaustively, yet as we knew before opening them, the feminist movement succeeded in de-legitimizing the male sex, and we now have a public system of misandry. It has been stripping our whole society of the masculine protections we need to survive in a cruel world. It has been stunting the growth of boys in playground and schoolroom, and thus depriving women of their supply of grown-up men. And in return for the elimination of a few petty injustices, feminism has sent men and women, by their millions, via an earthly into a perpetual hell. And yet this man-hating movement could be over-rated. For feminism is itself only part of something larger: the self-destruction of a wonderfully paternal social order, that brought the world the highest civilization it had ever seen. “It’s just our castles burning.” It follows, that Father’s Day is a day on which men should renew hope. Why? Because there is always hope of recovery, while we breathe, and our society still exists. Fathers, take your lumps and get on with it: for so long as a man would rather be a man, he isn’t beaten yet. David Warren
© Ottawa Citizen
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