WomensStuff

I feel like I've known a few men who experienced internalised misandry. My late best friend, for example, was a man who was progressive punk who had his blind spots, but was driven by a deep sense of justice that made him keen to keep growing.

Reflecting on my friend's relationship with his own sexuality reminds me of aspects of how Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist (TERF) rhetoric makes me deeply uncomfortable. Radical feminism tends to emphasise a pretty bioessentialist way of thinking, and the way they talk makes it sound like penises are some cursed appendage that makes people into predators. There's a sense of maleness and masculinity as being inherently dangerous, especially when it comes to sexual desire. This idea isn't limited to radical feminism.

We can see a similar line of thinking in the kind of homophobia that a lesbian in a women's changing room may face — the idea that lesbian desire is inherently more masculine, and thus more predatory. I consider this to be nonsense. After all, I'm bisexual, and if someone is getting changed in the same room as me, I politely look away, because that's the courteous thing to do.

My friend seemed to struggle with his own sexual attraction to women, in the sense that he seemed to be disgusted with himself for feeling said attraction, and he repressed it somewhat. I found this odd, because I had never seen or heard of him acting inappropriately towards anyone. What's more, he was beloved by many precisely because he was the kind of person who was loud, charismatic, and had zero tolerance for that kind of bullshit, resulting in a sort of aura of "safe" vibes around him.

I was perplexed at the apparent mismatch between his beliefs/actions and the tremendous guilt he seemed to feel, so one night, during drunken deep chats, I basically interrogated him about this to try to understand where this complex came from. I asked him, for example, whether he perhaps had sexual fantasies that involved violence towards women (I once had a girlfriend who had a deep submissive streak that disgusted her, because she felt like being aroused by fantasies on non consensual sex made her a bad feminist). He seemed horrified by the prospect, and said that his aversion towards violence in this context meant that he had struggled in the past when he had a girlfriend who wanted to experiment with rough roleplay — it was such a turn off that he wasn't able to indulge her.

I think the problem he was struggling with was fundamentally one of internalised misandry. He seemed to feel responsible for the sins of all men, even though he understood that misogyny is fundamentally a systemic problem. This seemed to cause him to "overcorrect" when it came to sexual desire towards women — he basically pre-emptively "friend-zoned" any women he was friends with, and basically put them in a mental box that was shielded from any attraction he may feel towards them; I remember that after he got together with a close friend who had been crushing on him for a long time, he walked around looking shell shocked for about a week, because he genuinely didn't see it coming — having to take her out of the "friend" box meant being overwhelmed with a heckton of emotions and physical desires towards her that he'd been walling off. He was a very silly man.

I am glad that I got to know him as well as I did, because I gained a far better understanding of internalised misandry. He's just one person, but through him, I've come to recognise the same motifs of internalised misandry in other progressive, feminist men. Men have far greater power and safety when it comes to challenging instances of sexism in the every day world, but there's not much an individual can do against the rise of disgusting people like Andrew Tate. Even if, as a progressive man, you're able to steer other men in your life away from that stuff, none of us can escape hearing the awfulness that comes from "the Manosphere". No amount of turning up to protests, or helping organise for women's rights will change the fact that many of the people pushing to make the world a more unjust place are men, and I can see how that could easily lead to internalised misandry.