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SPREADING MISANDRY
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Spreading Misandry
The Teaching of Contempt
for Men in Popular Culture
PAUL NATHANSON
.
AND KATHERINE K YOUNG
McGill-Queen’s University Press
Montreal & Kingston · London · Ithaca
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© McGill-Queen’s University Press 2001
isbn 0-7735-2272-7
Legal deposit fourth quarter 2001
Bibliothèque nationale du Québec
Printed in Canada on acid-free paper
McGill-Queen’s University Press acknowledges
the financial support of the Government of
Canada through the Book Publishing Industry
Development Program (bpidp) for its
publishing activities. It also acknowledges
the support of the Canada Council for
the Arts for its publishing program.
National Library of Canada Cataloguing
in Publication Data
Nathanson, Paul, 1947–
Spreading misandry : The teaching
of contempt for men in popular culture
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 0-7735-2272-7
1. Misandry. 2. Men in popular culture.
3. Sex discrimination against men.
4. Men – Identity. i. Young, Katherine K.,
1944– ii. Title.
hq1090.n37 2001 305.31 c2001-900819-8
Typeset in Sabon 10/12
by Caractéra inc., Quebec City
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Preface ix
1 Introduction: Misandry in Popular Culture 3
2 Laughing at Men: The Last of Vaudeville 20
3 Looking Down on Men: Separate but Unequal 49
4 Bypassing Men: Women Alone Together 79
5 Blaming Men: A History of Their Own 108
6 Dehumanizing Men: From Bad Boys to Beasts 137
7 Demonizing Men: The Devil Is a Man 168
8 Making the World Safe for Ideology:
The Roots of Misandry 194
9 Conclusion 234
Appendix 1:
Quasi-Misandric Movies 253
Appendix 2:
The Misandric Week on Television 268
Appendix 3:
Misandric Movie Genres 276
Appendix 4:
Populist or Elitist: Talk Shows in the Context of
Democracy 280
Appendix 5:
Deconstructionists and Jacques Derrida, Founding Hero 286
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vi Contents
Appendix 6:
Film Theory and Ideological Feminism 289
Appendix 7:
Into the Twenty-First Century 296
Notes 297
Index 351
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Acknowledgments
We thank the Donner Canadian Foundation for its extremely generous
financial support beginning in 1988 (which was part of its Program
on Medicine, Ethics and Law and the Contemporary Canadian Family,
established at the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics, and Law). In
addition, we acknowledge with deep appreciation the Social Sciences
and Humanities Research Council of Canada (which awarded Paul
Nathanson a Canada Research Fellowship, held between 1989 and
1994), and the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics, and Law (which
provided matching funds). We are grateful to the McGill Faculty of
Religious Studies, which supported Nathanson’s Canada Research
Fellowship and provided Katherine Young with teaching-release time
at several critical stages of this project. Finally, we thank our research
assistant, Harold Wilson, and our editor, Maureen Garvie, for her
many perceptive comments.
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Preface
We began this book, the first volume in a trilogy called Beyond the
Fall of Man, by noting that many pop cultural artifacts and produc-
tions from the 1990s said very negative things about men. This led to
our initial hypothesis: that misandry, the sexist counterpart of misog-
yny, had become pervasive in the popular culture of our society – that
is, of Canada and the United States – during that decade. But how
pervasive? And why? These questions presented us with several prob-
lems: (1) defining popular culture; (2) overcoming conventional wis-
dom; (3) describing the artifacts and productions of popular culture
in a disciplined way; (4) interpreting them as potential carriers of
misandry; (5) demonstrating that misandry in popular culture has
become a significant phenomenon and is thus worth being taken
seriously by scholars; and (6) examining our evidence in relation to
the many studies on misogyny in popular culture.
In some ways, our work presupposes the existence of a more or less
unified popular culture. This is unlike traditional folk cultures in at
least one important way: it is not created by and for a non-literate
segment of the population. It is carried to everyone, moreover, through
the mass media made possible by an industrial society. Contemporary
popular culture is the property of all people, regardless of traditional
barriers such as class or religion (except for the Amish, the Hasidim,
and other groups that deliberately isolate themselves from the larger
society). The poorest residents of rural communities are thus united
in at least one respect with the richest residents of gated communities:
they all listen to popular singers, watch popular movies and television
shows, read popular books or magazines, and so on. There are “taste
communities,” it is true. Consider the case of music. Some people
prefer country and western, others heavy metal, and still others the
sentimental ballads of divas. But all are exposed every day to the full
range of popular styles, and most find some gratification in at least
one of them. Preference is by no means dictated by race and other
