I got to thinking yesterday, and I came up with the following statement:

It says something about our culture that we have a word for the hatred of women (misogyny), but not one for the hatred of men. The hatred of men is a non-issue to most of the world, and is even seen as elevating in our post-feminist reflection. We seem consumed by the oppression of specific classes of people, but ignore the oppression of all people. The freedom of one is emphatically not the freedom of all.

The dictionary gives us a multitude of words for different hatreds, but never one for the hatred of men. One can be a misogynist, a misanthrope, or homophobic, yet there is no specific word for hating men.

We can look at this lack of diction in a couple of ways: either there is no hatred of men in the world, or no one cares about it. I'm more inclined to believe the latter.

I'm not saying that misogyny should be ignored, but I do think that it shouldn't be the all-consuming passion that it is. 

Let's stop saying that men oppress women, and start saying that people oppress people. Let's stop saying that bombs kill children, and say that bombs take human life. Patriarchal religion doesn't keep the men in charge; it is a tool to oppress people with.

Stop believing that only one type of person is affected by oppression! Oppression is indiscriminate, as are bombs and a lack of medical supplies. It is not okay for anyone to go without medical supplies or food.

I dislike activists because they ignore groups of people in both rhetoric and reality. They decry the delineation between people and "others", yet see groups who oppress as their own "others". No activist I have ever read has talked about the impact of war on men, or the number of men killed in the witch hunts of the middle ages.

Activism, when it desires to further skew arguments away from the true problem, is a useless endeavor.

Keep in mind that I'm not advocating just accepting the world as it is, or ignoring starving children in Iraq. The rhetoric that is pronounced ignores the fact that the problems are not faced by a single group of people, but by all people.

That's all I'm sayin', ya know?

Silly activist links:

Starhawk.org One of the worst, and the inspiration for this essay.

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