Re: The year of ‘Listen to women,’ Opinion Nov. 5

The year of ‘Listen to women,’ Opinion Nov. 5

One day in the spring of this year I was engaged in conversation with two women. The subject turned to the suicide of a man only peripherally known to the two of them. It took place almost exactly one month after the sudden and unexpected death from natural causes of the man’s wife.

The two women were discussing this situation and, on the basis of little if any personal information, concluded that the man could not face the continuation of his life without his wife because “men are weak and have to be taken care of.” I found myself in the position of arguing that perhaps the relationship between the two of them had been so close and so loving that the man could not face the future without “the love of his life.” There was no way that these women would consider this possible interpretation.

I did not use this word at the time, but feel certain that they would have been totally baffled and bewildered if I had labeled their interpretation as “misandric.” But what they were doing was to negatively label the behaviour of all men – and this is “misandry.”

In her article, Anna Leventhal writes: “It means: we live in a society where misogyny is deep and pervasive and sometimes very hard to see, so much a part of the scenery is it.” But these very words could be said about misandry – “the teaching of contempt for men in popular culture.” (This was the very subtitle of the 2001 book Spreading Misandry by Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young, two Canadian academics.)

University of Ottawa English professor Janice Fiamengo has been speaking recently about the special challenges faced by men in our society, and her presentations have been overwhelmed by obscenity-shouting feminists who will do anything to prevent this mild-spoken academic from expressing her views.

A recent meeting to establish an Ottawa chapter of the organization Canadian Association for Equality (CAFE) was packed by feminists and their supporters with noise-making equipment, causing the meeting to be cancelled.

These are fascist techniques to limit the exposure of the hatred of some feminists for males. This very newspaper, the Star, carries a comic strip that is unrelentingly and continuously misandric, the adult male in the family continuously shown to be stupid, vulgar, simple, and egotistical.

It seems that what we need is a calm and cogent discussion of the two sides of this issue. It will probably result in the conclusion that, in different ways, men and women are both systematically discriminated against in our society.

Robert Grainger, Ottawa