In this episode of Kat and Liz Talk About…, Kat Murti and Elizabeth Nolan Brown from Feminists for Liberty discuss the oft-repeated myth that feminists hate men. Where did it originate? Why can’t we seem to rid society of the idea that feminists are angry man-hating cat ladies? Why are anti-feminist memes so cringe? How does feminism HELP men? Do we want to know what character from Sex in the City you are? (No.) We answer these questions and many more!
Produced by Addyson Garner
TRANSCRIPT
Kat:
So, Hey, Liz, what do you hate men?
Liz:
I don’t. Why do you hate men?
Kat:
I don’t… Don’t hate men.
Liz:
I do not know that people on the internet keep telling me that feminists hate men.
Kat:
So here’s the thing. We’re both married to men. We work with men, we’re friends with men. We’re both about to become mothers to sons. We don’t hate men.
Liz:
Some of our best allies and friends and supporters are men.
Kat:
Yeah. So why do people always seem to assume that feminists hate men?
Liz:
One of the most persistent myths in the anti-feminist canon is that feminism is a movement devoted to despising or disempowering men rather than one devoted to empowering women and promoting equal rights and opportunities regardless of sex. I am not sure where this idea that feminists hate men began—some of the earliest U.S. feminist movements were both full of men themselves, and the women that were behind them were mostly married to men and in seemingly happy relationships with them. At the same time, some of the earliest anti-feminist memes revolved around this idea that feminists were man-haters who were either spinsters or married to these pathetic brow beat husbands.
Kat:
Yeah. Uh, I actually love a lot of those memes. And it’s funny how much those attitudes that you see in those memes are like the same as the memes you see nowadays, even though they’re over a hundred years old. There’s a lot of cats!
Liz:
Funny and sad, yeah. And there are a lot of cats. Cats have made the internet go round — er, communications go round — since long before the internet.
Kat:
But anyway, I think there’s some combo effect here, right? Like there are some misogynists who view any attempt at equality as inherently hostile to men. Then there are also those who, whether they believe it or not, find it a really useful talking point to say that feminists and women hate men. It’s also a messaging problem. So a lot of the concepts that are talked about by feminists can be easily misinterpreted and often are — sometimes innocently, sometimes deliberately—as statements of either aggression or hostility against men. For example, when feminists talk about “toxic masculinity,” they’re speaking about a specific set of negative traits that are different and separate from masculinity as a whole, which can be positive or negative or, well, neutral. But what a lot of people end up hearing and what they think feminists are saying is that masculinity—just plain old masculinity, all masculinity—is bad, and that feminists hate masculine traits.
There’s also the issue that when society has always by default revolved around your needs and interests—when you’ve essentially been the norm or the default for most of history—any step towards actual equality can really feel like an attack on you. Take the anger around the characters in the more recent “Star Wars” films, for example. For the vast, vast majority of “Star Wars” tenure in pop culture, it was really a movie about, well, white guys, right? Sure, you had princess Leia and you had Lando Calrissian, and then like a few decades later you got Princess Amidala. But like, now, all of a sudden, you have Finn and Rose and Ray. And while the vast, vast, vast majority of humans in the “Star Wars” universe are still white and male, those characters stick out because they’re not. And for the first time, a lot of people are being asked to empathize with characters who don’t look like them. For women and people of color, that’s nothing new. Again, in the entire original series, we only get to see, like, what — one woman and one black man in key roles, really? But when every protagonist has pretty much been a white male, when you have a protagonist who isn’t, you notice, and it can feel like something’s really being taken from you.
Liz:
So you kind of lost me at some of the “Star Wars” stuff, but.. I think that I agree with you about your diagnosis of how misunderstandings of what feminists are saying often contribute to this idea that feminists hate men. We should probably also add though that, I mean, some feminists really do hate men — or if not necessarily hate, at least have some pretty strongly negative and, frankly, sexist ideas about them. Uh, I think this is and always has been a minority among feminists, but it’s also a very vocal minority and one that gets outsized attention — from the media and from people who oppose women’s rights issues — because these sorts of feminists make much more effective PR against feminism than say, feminists like us do. So, this isn’t to deny that some man-hating feminists have existed or that some still do today! But there’s a lot of language that feminists use about men to make a point or to vent frustration — I’m thinking the whole “men are trash” meme that became a big controversy a few years back — and people (willfully or not) misinterpret this, when most of the people posting or commenting “men are trash” are doing so hyperbolically, in the same way you might be like “cilantro is literally the worst” or “fuck my life,” or whatever.
Kat:
Yeah. So there’s this great story from the early days of punk— because I was talking about star wars, now I’m going to talk about punk music.
Liz:
That’s much better.
Kat:
So, Richard Hell of the band Television makes this t-shirt, right? And it’s got a target painted on it and it says, “please kill me.” And he gives it to his band mate, Richard Lloyd. Yes. That is two Richards in one band. Uh, so he gives it to Richard Lloyd to wear. And Richard Lloyd wears this t-shirt to a gig that they’re at one of the early punk clubs. And after the show, these two kids come up and they’re like, really wild-eyed and they’re huge, huge fans. Right. And so they come up to Richard Lloyd and they say like, “are you serious? Like, can we be the ones to kill you, to prove that we’re your biggest fans?” And this totally freaked him out because like, how would that not freak you out? Right. Because he thought it was so obviously like tongue in cheek, like a joke, just like the whole punk ethos. And here were these kids actually offering to kill him because they assumed that that’s what he wanted. And needless to say, he never wore the shirt again.
Liz:
That sounds like a good choice.
Kat:
Yeah. Yeah. Uh, actually, strangely enough, you can actually now buy this shirt online. It’s mass produced and everything, which I think, uh, tells you something about the fact that like humor over time, it changes and people start to understand that it’s a joke, right. But humor aside, putting that to the side there, I digressed a little bit… A lot of people are also speaking from a place of trauma. Um, they’ve had these really bad negative experiences with certain terrible men — rape domestic violence, stalking, things like that. And they’re still processing and dealing with those. And, you know, objectively they more or less understand that not all men are rapists and abusers and in fact, most aren’t. But they don’t really have a really clear, easy, reliable way for determining which men they don’t know that well are a threat and which ones aren’t. And that’s often compounded by the sorts of attitudes you hear from people about things like, well, you should have known that he was dangerous or, well, it’s your fault that the man you married turned out to be an abuser.
Liz:
Right. And of course, it’s not just feminists who, you know, make these sort of blanket statements about men that are perhaps unfair, and sort of judge all men based on experiences or stories about, you know, a few men. Obviously, a lot of men and women — not necessarily feminists either — they don’t hate the opposite sex, but they do have a lot of sexist opinions about them. Like “all women are liars,” or “hysterical.” Or “all men have uncontrollable sexual urges,” or “men can’t help being physically violent.” I mean, there’s, there are so many things like that. “Boys will be boys,” you know? I think you’re actually much less likely to hear that sort of gendered thing coming from feminists in general.
Kat:
Yeah. I think you’re right. I think a lot of those ideas, a lot of that stuff is really very mainstream and it’s also a lot more hateful than anything that you’d hear from your average feminist, because feminists don’t think that men are inherently stupid or violent or evil, dangerous. We believe that some men can be — just as some women or non-binary can be. But in actuality, we hold everybody up to a higher standard — men, women, whatever — because we truly believe that most men and women and everyone else are, well, good people who want to do good things. And they aren’t these horrible, you know, characterizations that you hear about.
Liz:
Like, TV sitcom dads.
Kat:
Yes.
Liz:
Remember when this was a big discussion? They’re just like, always stupid and bumbling and incompetent, constantly failing their wives and their children. And that all gets played for comedic effect. That’s not feminists who are making the sitcoms! Like, we weren’t the ones making “Everybody Loves Raymond” or “The Simpsons,” you know? Sitcoms are arguably some of the most mainstream and least “woke” forms of entertainment out there.
Kat:
Exactly. And there’s just a lot of hatefulness about men and women built into our pop culture and just accepted all the time. And it’s actually feminists, including feminist men, who are the ones who are most likely to challenge these things.
Liz:
So that brings us to another good question. Or at least a question we hear a lot. … Can men be feminists?
Kat:
Yes. Yes. They can. Men can be feminists and, well, they need to be feminists. If only say women care about gender equality, then it’s never going to happen. The idea that people are individuals who deserve the same rights and have more or less the same basic needs and wants and desires and feelings, but they may individually vary on how they express those or how they want to acknowledge those. That needs to be something that everyone more or less generally accepts for it to work. And, you know, I really think we’re getting there. I think most people nowadays really do believe that women should be able to own property or decide who they want to marry or work in whatever career they prefer. And of course, there’s a lot of places where the genders are still unequal, but that’s often because we’re relying on these old cultural norms and attitudes and stuff like that. But those discussions are still happening and things are changing and they have a lot, even within our own lifetimes.
There’s also the fact that sexist men — men who really do believe that women are inferior to them — are not going to listen to women. They need to hear these ideas coming from men that they trust and respect. They need to have the men in their own social circles calling them out or, you know, calling them in when they say or do something sexist. Or, you know, just telling them, “Hey man, that’s not cool.”
There’s also some not so nice men out there who use the language or the ideas of feminism to excuse their bad behavior — who think that feminism is this easy tool for them to manipulate some more naive women to do things that they otherwise wouldn’t do. And I think there’s also a lot of good men who worry that if they called themselves feminists, people will perceive them that way. That they’ll think that they’re one of these creeps. But overall I think that’s actually really rare. Most people are decent people. Most men are decent people. And for the most part, most people really do believe in the concept of equality, even if they sometimes fall back on less than equal norms and customs that they just really hadn’t thought about.
Liz:
That’s all really good analysis. I’ll just add that… I mean, yes, in my opinion, men can totally be feminists. Uh, I can understand though why some men who are very feminist in their principles and in their thinking might feel uncomfortable saying so, and prefer to say that they’re feminist allies, or egalitarians, or something like that. I don’t much care one way or the other, to be honest — it’s one of those debates that comes up every few years and I wish it would stop. It’s boring and unproductive, I think. You know, I don’t care what feminist-minded men or anyone calls themselves, I care more about what they do. But you know, we’ve talked about this before in terms of gender and it comes up in terms of things like sexuality and politics and religion and all sorts of things. People are sort of obsessed with labels and who gets to rightfully use them. And some movements and feminist movements and groups can get really hung up on that. And I think that that just distracts us from, you know, more important work.
Kat:
Yeah. So that, that actually reminds me of something else we’ve discussed with feminist labeling: the shifting goalposts. So you’ll have people who say things like “how can anyone not consider themselves a feminist? Feminism just means that women should have rights.” Or “feminism just means caring about equality.”
Liz:
Or, my favorite: “feminism is just the radical notion that women are people.”
Kat:
Right? So then a lot of people say, like, “okay then yeah, I’m a feminist. If that’s the definition, if it just means that I believe that women can be equal to men, then sure I’m a feminist.” And then once they do, the same women’s rights groups or segments of feminists will come right back at them and say things like, “okay, but if you don’t support Joe Biden’s ‘free'” — note the scare quotes around that — “childcare plans, then you’re not really a feminist store. If you don’t support whatever Hillary Clinton is saying about this issue or Kamala Harris is saying about this issue or whatever some other democratic woman does, you’re not really a feminist .” Or, “how can you call yourself a feminist and not be for gun control?” Or, “if you were really a feminist, you would be anti-capitalism” or “you would vote blue,” or you would whatever, right? Ugh!
Liz:
Yeah, it’s a bait and switch. It starts with this broad definition so that it’s like, “how could you not call yourself a feminist? Only the biggest Neanderthals and, you know, misogynists and terrible people would say that they’re not feminist!” But then if you say you are a feminist, and you’re not the right kind of person, you’ll hear that actually, you can’t be a feminist. Because, you know, it’s these people trying to define feminism as essentially whatever Democrats or progressives want at the time or whatever is popular for them at the time. Anyway, we like to say that libertarian feminism is the radical notion that women — and men, everybody — they’re all individuals and should be treated like individuals.
Kat:
Right. And we do that, and then people are like, okay, so then why are you calling yourself a feminist? Why don’t you just call yourself an egalitarian then?
Liz:
Yeah. This is another big criticism that we always get, or at least, you know, a big comment that we always get: why, if feminism is all about equality and it’s not just about women and female supremacy, then why don’t you call it egalitarianism instead? Or why don’t you call it humanism instead? But that’s a whole other movement, so, no. But —
Kat:
Right. So they argue that because feminism has that fem root in it that it necessarily has to be only about and for women. And then sometimes they go on to say that feminism is actually about female supremacy or something similar to that, which is either just really ignorant or really disingenuous, in my opinion,
Liz:
Feminism is called feminism because for the vast expanse of history, both laws and culture overwhelmingly benefited men over women and women were legally barred from owning property and making their own reproductive and sexual decisions, making economic decisions, and things like that. So the road to equality necessarily needed to focus on women and women’s rights because there were clear short-term gains to be made toward equality.
Kat:
Right. And now we’re at a point that it’s no longer just about women’s rights we’re focused on. There’s many specific issues that we care about that might actually relate more to the rights of men or to trans people or non-binary people, but the general principle and goals of the movement haven’t changed. So it really just doesn’t make a lot of sense to spend a lot of time and energy totally rebranding the movement, especially when the main reason why we would do so is just because some people are just really uncomfortable thinking about the extent to which women specifically really just weren’t and haven’t been given equal rights for much of human history. a
Liz:
There’s also the fact that people are already using the term feminism. So it means something, it has a following and people care about it. It’s a branding thing.
Kat:
Yeah. And like, if we just refuse to engage with those people — if we decide we’re not going to talk about feminism, we’re not going to call ourselves feminists, we’re not gonna anything that has feminism in it, we just, like, won’t talk about or read or go to those conferences or whatever — people aren’t just going to suddenly stop becoming feminists and decide that they’re now egalitarians or whatever. Instead, they’re just not going to listen to anything that we have to say. And they’ll probably — possibly rightfully — assume that we’re not actually on their side and we don’t share any common ground with them. When really, we do.
Liz:
I think it’s fair to say that feminism is, is obviously concerned with women’s rights still. But it’s also become a movement — and especially libertarian feminism is a movement — that’s more about equality before the law and, you know, striking down gender stereotypes and gendered expectations and things like that. And that is definitely something that doesn’t just benefit women.
Kat:
Yeah. Yes. Feminism is good for women, but feminism is good for men too. Feminism is good for everyone.
Liz:
So I hope all the dudes out there watching understand by now that, first, guys, we don’t hate you. Really. And second, we — Kat and I, and a whole bunch of other feminists — we actually want to help you. Because we think feminism is, at its core, about bolstering the ability for everyone, regardless of sex, to have the most full choices and live their best lives. And no matter what chromosomes or genitalia you have, it’s hard to live your best life and your most free life if people insist on putting you in some sort of box.
Kat:
Yeah, there’s really nothing more collectivist than simply treating people as a representative of their sex or their gender. And that is exactly what anti-feminism does. Antifeminism says, people are not individuals who have their own unique mix of traits and talents and wants and goals and desires, but rather that they are, or at least that they should be, a certain way based entirely on their sex.
Liz:
This is very bad for women, but it’s also very bad for men too.
Kat:
Yeah. A lot of the things that feminists have historically been fighting against — those things, we might call, you know, The Patriarchy — puts a lot of unnecessary pressure on boys and men as well, not just on women. Those are things like expectations that men will always be strong. That they’ll always be brave. That men will always be the breadwinner —
Liz:
That men will always make the first move in romance or sex…
Kat:
That men shouldn’t cry, and that they can’t be interested in certain things like, I don’t know, dancing or cooking or looking nice in their clothes.
Liz:
I saw someone say the other day, like “I wonder if Gen Z knows about metrosexuals, that we used to have to have a whole separate term for men who can groom themselves.”
Kat:
Right, yeah.
Liz:
That’s, you know, that’s kind of another stereotype: that only men who were gay cared about grooming. Or, if they were straight and they did, that it was so novel that they needed like their own separate term. Um, yeah. So that’s one. I was also gonna say, you know, this idea that men aren’t good at parenting —
Kat:
Yeah, that men who work in childcare must be pedophiles or creeps or something. That, you know, men and boys always want sex from whomever is offering it — unless of course, it’s a man, you know, eyeroll. Um, and then, that men can’t be raped or, you know, that they can’t just not be in the mood sometimes.
Liz:
All of these assumptions can lead to bad situations for women, preventing them from reaching their full potential and putting them in danger. But they can also be really damaging for men too.
Kat:
So when Liz and I were younger, there were books like “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” and “The Rules,” which were bestsellers that shaped a lot of how many, if not, most Americans felt about the opposite sex. They pitted men and women against each other, almost as these, like, warring teams with different and contradictory interests, who needed to plot and plan and manipulate each other to trick each other into forming relationships and getting married and having sex. Like, um, aren’t those things supposed to be nice? Aren’t you supposed to enjoy them and, you know, maybe want to do them with the right people?
Liz:
That was also the premise of all of the “pickup artist” stuff — like “The Game” and all — that was really popular for a while in the aughts. This idea that men needed to, you know, put on airs and trick women into—
Kat:
Yeah, in a really —in this very weird way, the whole pickup artist thing was almost like “The Rules,” but for men in fedoras.
Liz:
And, and those kinds of attitudes, they prevent men and women from being happy. And from having relationships that are based on, you know, who people actually are as individuals and the individuals that they’re interacting with, instead of just this Idea about Men or Women. They prevent them from having, I think, happy friendships too, with people of the opposite sex. It’s just… It’s really sad. Luckily, as a society, though, we do seem to be moving away from those types of gender games. And I think that’s obviously a good thing.
Kat:
I think you’re really right about that. We have moved a lot away. I’ve actually been watching “Sex In The City” lately, which is a show that was hugely popular when I was a young teen. And I hated the show when it was first on the air, uh, because it seemed like such a caricature to me. It was just like… women and men, they aren’t really like that, right? But I wanted to go back and watch it because, you know, it, it shaped a lot of pop culture. And going back and watching now, it’s — a lot of those attitudes that they’re just saying there, that are mainstream views at the time, those are shocking! It’s all this stuff about men and women like men and women have to play games, that men can’t respect a woman who makes more money than them, that if a woman wants to get married, she has to be a renter — she can’t own a property. She can’t buy her own property and still expect to be married because no man would want to marry her because that throws off the balance of power or something like that. And I think recognizing how much those views have changed in really not that long of a time, that’s actually made it a lot more fun to watch for me. Uh, I still don’t love the show, but like, it’s, it’s actually really interesting. And you know, the same is true with “Friends,” which is a show that I actually really did enjoy growing up, but which I’m honestly really perplexed is somehow popular with zoomers now, because a lot of the jokes in “Friends” are just, like, beyond the pale of things that we don’t say and are not okay to say any more today, right? Like, there’s all these jokes about like this nanny that Rachel hires for her baby, because he’s a man. Or Chandler, like, really passionately hates his parent who is trans, just because they’re trans. And it’s a joke. And that was actually like a really common joke in a lot of 90 shows too. Um, but like those shows —”Friends,” “Sex In the City” — those were seen as really cutting edge and super progressive at the time, right? Like before “Friends,” you really hadn’t seen too many character arcs in mainstream television that were really just about males and females who could be friends, no romance implied.
Liz:
So, first: I hate “Sex in the City.” Hate, hate, hate it, for exactly the same reasons you said. I, you know, the first time I watched it, I was like, why are people watching this? Like, it makes women look bad, it makes men look bad, it just makes everyone look bad. Uh, in terms of “Friends,” I think it’s interesting cause it’s sort of like an edge case. A lot of the things that you’re talking about — you know, like Ross’ sort of troglodyte attitudes, or Chandler’s relationship with his father — I mean, they’re, they’re played for laughs, but they’re also not necessarily like… they’re not necessarily the good guys in this, too. Like Ross actually gets a lot of shit for his attitudes. And Chandler, you know, there’s actually like towards the — I mean, I know in the beginning, but then — towards the end, there’s something where he actually, like, grapples with his relationship with his father and how maybe he’s been the one being shitty. So I think that it’s interesting because you saw a lot of this where they weren’t necessarily condoning these attitudes, but they… But they were still using them and playing them for laughs. It was sort of, you know, you can see that we’re on the verge of sort of shifting cultural attitudes towards a lot of things with gender and sexuality. “
Kat:
“Friends” was on the air for a really long time. And you can basically, like, as you watch the whole show, watch how much society is changing so quickly. Like the show starts out with Ross’s whole masculinity being questioned because his wife has left him to marry another woman — just, like, “oh, well, you know, if your wife leaves you for a woman, clearly you’re not really a man” type thing. And then, like, by the end of the show it’s just like, yes, lesbians exist and get married. This is just, this is just normal. Right?
Liz:
Yeah. It is really crazy too that the idea that men and women could just be friends — that there could be a group of friends that can just contain men and women and not have, you know, all hell break loose — was an idea that people actually thought was something novel. It does show us how far we’ve come. And, you know, again, like that’s, that’s one of those things that comes from these stereotypes that we’re talking about. This idea that men and women are SO different is actually, you know, one of the things that feminists are trying to get rid of. And I think that kind of is the bottom line we’re trying to get at here today, which is .. we don’t need men to approve of feminism. We’re not doing this video because we’re, like, begging men to like us. But we’re discussing this because the man-hater stereotype really does hurt the cause of equality.
Kat:
Right. And that is what it is about. Right? Like feminism is about EQUALITY. Feminism has, yes, is about women. It’s about women’s equality, but it’s really about everyone’s equality. And the ideas, the attitudes, the norms, the policies that feminists, especially libertarian feminists like us are addressing, are attitudes that hurt everybody of all genders.
Liz:
So that’s one of the things that we are discussing a lot of in myriad different forms in this video series … which, if you like, you should subscribe to our YouTube channel, follow us on social media, share this with your friends…
Kat:
Put in the comments like which “Sex In The City” character you are..
Liz:
No, don’t do that! We do not care which “Sex In The City” character you are!
Kat:
I would like to be none of them, thank you. But — subscribe to this video, like and share. And tell us what you think.
Liz:
Thank you.
