Hello Gillian,
Not that I wish to throw around research and degrees (my main area of university study was 20th Century European, North American and Middle Eastern History with minors in English and Geography) but I counter your statement that I broaden my horizon with this passage:
In Hamlet, Ophelia responds to her brother Laertes’ paternalistic and infantilizing lecture,
“Do not, as some ungracious pastors do,
Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven
Whiles, like a puffed and reckless libertine,
Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads
And recks not his own rede.”
IOW, sorry to invoke the dialectic, but please if one makes an suggestion that another do some research one should expect a suggestion to do the same. (‘recks’: reckons to heeds to listens to his own ‘rede’ reed-instrument-song-lecture).
So here’s three academically sound books written by the same authors which may hopefully make your accusation that I am ‘gas-lighting’ a less reasonable one.
Lamentably, they were published at the turn of the century (2001–06) and were therefore too late to stop the rising tide of misandry, now alarmingly exacerbated by the entitled cancel-culture mob power of social media.
However, as these books were well researched, they should be required reading for all people who wish to comment cogently on the current social ‘movements’ and their often intellectually and scholastically unsound bias.
Even worse, some of the subsequent argumentations made by these ‘movements’, one being that feelings matter more than empirical data, were often being passed off as unassailable social science orthodoxy.
Young and Nathanson did try to warn the western world in general, and the academic world in particular, that the political, legal and commercial worlds were not just paying attention but responding.
“Spreading Misandry” by Katherine K. Young and Paul Nathanson.
(Spreading Misandry breaks new ground by discussing misandry in moral terms rather than purely psychological or sociological ones and by criticizing not only ideological feminism but other ideologies on both the left and the right.)
“Sanctifying Misandry: Goddess Ideology and the Fall of Man.”
(“In Sanctifying Misandry, the authors challenge an influential version of modern goddess religion, one that undermines sexual equality and promotes hatred in the form of misandry — the sexist counterpart of misogyny.”)
Lastly, “Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men”
(“The authors believe that there is a shift in the United States and Canada to a worldview based on ideological feminism, which presents all issues from the point of view of women and, in the process, explicitly or implicitly attacks men as a class. They argue that ideological feminism is silently reshaping law, public policy, education, and journalism.”)
So I started my reading on feminism with Germaine Greer, I read and taught Gloria Steinem and ‘now-seen-as-bad-feminist’ Margaret Atwood.
I even insisted that my students read from Shere Hite, and I marched with my colleagues in the mid 1980’s, and lost pay, to successfully protest the Evangelical Alliance Church and its takeover of our local hospital board in order to stop abortions.
A way back then, I believed in the equality as promised by feminism.
I have always detested bullies and fought them for most of my life.
It took me a while to realize that new wave feminism was no longer interested in equality and were in fact behaving as bullies.
Rather, it was more interested in the vilification of men and boys through shame and guilt and the decontextualization of history.
And that’s not even getting into the process of innocent until proven guilty.
Sadly, the use of guilt and shame have become the modalities currently being used with terms like white privilege and white fragility in order to judge people by the colour of their skin, the actions of their ancestors and silence their voices because of their race…how ironic.
Of course inequalities have to be addressed. Of course systemic racism exists…has since we started ruthlessly judging competing tribes by their regalia let alone their skin colour countless millennia ago.
My country is trying to address our racism but labelling all white men, all white people as colonizers or as potential racists waiting to emerge, will not help.
When a culture begins to deify victimhood beyond accountability, then regardless of the efforts of those with the privilege to enact much needed change, their voices will always be heard as the atoning clamour of trans-generational villains out there beyond the pale: where they belong!
And that will only bring about more division and intransigence.
Yikes indeed Gillian.
What I am trying to say is that we all have wars…how we fight them defines us.
As one of my students told me once when summing up ‘The Life of Pi’, ‘The process is the prize, Sir.”
Lastly, I end with apologies for my poorly articulated empathy for what should have never ever happened to you.