homophu-deactivated20180101 asked: hey, just curious, but what's your understanding of the word misandry? i just ask because, from how i've seen it used and understand it, it's an attempt to essentially mirror the word misogyny and imply that there's some kind of matriarchal power structure behind, what is essentially, the patriarchy backfiring on men. the way you're using it, however, leads me to think you're using it to describe specifically women abusing men and yea i was just wondering if you could expand/shed light on that

Yeah! I tag ‘misandry cw’ for hatred/contempt of men expressed specifically in a way that exploits systemic power dynamics. So a woman abusing a man isn’t misandry, but dismissal of men who have been violently abused because ‘men are always the abuser’ or ‘women can’t be violent’ or ‘what are you, weak and pathetic?’ reflects harmful attitudes toward men that are a consequence of structural power. Gender policing of men is a consequence of structural power; violent homophobia against men is as well. Jokes about violence toward men in prison come from an assumption that violence against men and rape of men is less serious, an assumption grounded in structural expectations about masculinity. Calling the ‘male body’ ‘weak, fragile, pathetic’ etc., as was happening in one conversation in my misandry tag, comes from a place of contempt for people who are not able-bodied (ableism, a form of structural oppression) leveraged to hurt men. And so forth.

It’s not a claim that, on the whole, women exert oppressive power over men (they don’t) but a claim that, as a whole, society exerts oppressive power which in this case is being leveraged (by whoever I’m arguing with) to harm men.

I don’t love the idea of the ‘patriarchy backfiring’, because the patriarchy isn’t a conspiracy by men, or even a system built to support the interests of men. It’s a system that rewards people for fulfilling gender roles, and rewards men who perform the male gender role with power over others and especially over women, but it’s also a system that profoundly fucks over people who are expected to perform the male gender role and can’t/don’t. ‘backfiring on men’ suggests that men are firing it, and that just doesn’t actually reflect the ways that gender expectations hurt men (or the sources of the systemic power imbalances here.)