a (very) qualified defense of "ironic misandry"

a response to some posts of magdalene taylor's

I don’t weigh in much on “dating discourse” because I have no insight into it,¹ but there’s one author, Magdalene Taylor, who gets reposted in my Substack feed often and it’s her main beat. Every time I open up one of these posts I find myself thinking that I don’t really agree, and then it occurred to me that she and I share a platform on which we can disagree, so why not write about it?² This post of mine is largely responding to two of her recent posts: “Do Men Even Like Women Anymore?,” “Do Women Even Like Men Anymore?,” and, finally, one older post, “The Ick List.” But I’m most going to focus on the second one.

Part of my trouble here is that the first two posts I mention here strike me as deeply, perhaps hopelessly, Online. Online is real, yes… but it’s not that real. The third post is about Online, though, so we’ll get to it later.

Actually, let’s set aside the Online-ness of all three for a moment. Just as there are thin places in which the realm of the fairies bleeds into ours, so too are there parts of the world where Online and reality merge. I am informed by a friend who I trust that he often encounters dating app bios that say “hetero cis dudes” must work harder for this particular fair maiden’s right swipe. That is very dumb and annoying and maybe the app profiles of the women of New York and Los Angeles are full of things like “my favorite drink? my morning mug of male tears!!!!!” I concede this.

And, finally, just for the record: if you are a man dating a woman who insults you or talks you down constantly but says she’s allowed to and you can never object because of some social justice reason, you are probably in an emotionally abusive relationship. Even if you aren’t, you should still get out of it because you shouldn’t date people who just fundamentally don’t like or respect you. It’s bad for you. Anyway.³

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In her post about women and “I hate men” jokes, Taylor writes:⁴

Women do not like men in part because of [the reality of sexual and domestic violence]. They also, however, do not like men because we have promoted a culture in which this is normalized. It’s become deeply uncool as women to acknowledge any sort of affinity or appreciation for men.…

When we do like men, it’s often through the filter of ultra-specific portraits we’ve imagined ourselves to want: the myth of the 6’5 man in finance with blue eyes and a trust fund.…

A lot of us are probably just making jokes and venting our frustrations. That’s fine! That’s healthy! But I fear some of us are so wrapped up in this hostility that we’re making ourselves miserable.

So I do think 99% percent of people are “just making jokes and venting…frustrations.” But my qualified defense of “ironic misandry” is really and simply that what it is actually substituting for, and even preventing, in most cases is genuine hatred of men, which is maybe the most traditional women’s stance ever to exist—that is, men are basically rooting animals that God put in charge for some reason so you just try to manipulate them where you can and get out of the way when you can’t.⁵

Thus ironic man-hating satirizes a kind of “boys will be boys” attitude by pushing it to the point of absurdity and offense. One of the points in my life when I engaged in it most heavily was witnessing friends of mine undergo severe sexual harassment that was very clearly meant to get them to switch professions. We got mileage out of “male tears” every day for months. It’s a way of coping with stuff you can’t change.

And naturally, that also means men will in fact get offended by it—that’s fine. I don’t actually think it’s reasonable to expect men to be good sports about jokes about how much you hate them. The price of offensive humor is that… it incurs offense. But the irony is a way of getting anger out so it doesn’t poison you. That’s its role.⁶

Part of what makes the social operation of “ironic misandry” different from the pick-up artists that form Taylor’s first post in this series is that the guys who advised doing various weird and creepy things to get women into bed really thought you should do those things. They were not joking; they were prescribing a way of life. When they stuck a picture of a female journalist up on twitter and said “would still bang as long as she couldn’t talk” or whatever, they were not expressing that they “liked” women, they were reminding her that they could rape her.

In general, I think for many though of course not all women, you have to go through stages of hating yourself, hating other women, and hating men, not necessarily in that order, before you’ve cleared enough emotional ground to start feeling deeper feelings. You cannot stay frozen in the good girl stage where you only feel appropriate and socially acceptable feelings, even if you want to.⁷

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My second, wider problem here, though, is that there’s a sort of belief here that while I might make a joke, and you might make a joke, and we, being people of culture, understand that jokes are jokes, other people simply… do not. They don’t make jokes and they don’t get jokes. Everything they say is one hundred percent exactly what they do and think. When so woman logs onto some social media app and proclaims “I am soooooo done with MEN,” that is not only absolutely exactly how she feels but a social menace. She cannot be being playful, or ironic, or even authentically angry over something serious. But… of course she is! I would be! I’m not smarter than her!

When people get on Tiktok and chat into the camera, they are performing characters and they are doing bits. This is as true of the Mormon Tradwife Influencer making bricks from scratch as it is of the woman in her car saying men ain’t shit. Not all of these performances are jokes, of course, but they are all performances. Furthermore, I am going to guess that their fans know this, because I know it and I am, again, not smarter than anybody else. We understand that the kayfabe of reality TV is part of the “fun” of watching these shows. The supposed totally credulous viewer who believes sincerely in the reality of reality TV doesn’t exist any more than the pro wrestling fan who believes sincerely in the reality of wrestling. We do not at this time extend this same understanding to i.e. fans of Ballerina Farm. But we will… in five years or so.

I am not saying here that jokes can never be harmful, or that strains of humor can never be toxic or evil, or whatever else. I may never rewatch My Cousin Vinny because I found its extended prison rape joke sequence so gross.⁸ And of course something can still be playful or knowingly fake and bad. (This is how I basically feel about reality TV and probably how I’d feel about pro wrestling if I paid attention to it.⁹) Irony opens up a space in which people are allowed enough distance from how they feel to feel it. They can do good things and bad things there. It is one way of doing and being that is not a good way to live all the time but is absolutely necessary for some of the time.

So when Taylor concedes that many of the Tiktok are jokes or, re: “icks,” “I’ve mostly interpreted the ick as something lighthearted, but in taking a closer look at how we’ve begun talking about it, I’m witnessing a deeper problem unfold.…” I don’t know! I do think they’re just jokes. I don’t think there’s anything deeper going on except the experience of watching a bunch of amateur performers make the same joke back to back to back on your FYP. I have heard people present deeply absurd reasons for rejecting others romantically but in general these reasons stand in for some other incompatibility that they either cannot express or don’t especially want to express to me at that time.¹⁰

To return to the idea that “we” only allow ourselves to want over six feet blondes in finance, I would guess many women who joke like that are really making jokes about a life of ease and luxury they know they would not especially like if they had it.¹¹ I have a friend who is gay who is constantly joking about wanting A Finance Man In A Fleece to take him away and finance his life in the arts. But I don’t think that he is actually organizing his life around that principle. He’s joking about how his life would be easier if he were wealthy. He knows that the desire to find a rich man to erase all the problems in your life is bad. That’s why it’s a fantasy and a joke.

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I do completely agree with Taylor that setting off on the dating world believing yourself to know totally what you want and what is good for you is foolish. (I would also add that the degree to which dating apps cause people to prioritize shared tastes sets a lot of people up badly. You can learn to share a taste!) If you want to get married to somebody, it is good to be pragmatic, but part of what dating itself involves is learning who takes pragmatism to be a virtue (“you’re right, we need a plan on how we’re going to achieve X kind of financial stability”) and who takes it as an offensive (“you mentioned money?? do you only love MONEY????”).

Even when it comes to the big things, on which compromise is not possible, some level of flexibility is still required in a partner: you might want children desperately but turn out to be unable to have them, for instance. (Plenty of fertility problems will not be screened for unless you are actively trying to conceive!) When you commit to somebody romantically you are committing to a future you cannot control except for the part where it includes them. Everything else is, as the vows say, for better and for worse and for sickness and in health.

1. As a person in a chronically “long distance” and furthermore “age gap” relationship, you could say I’m interrogating… uh… something something something.

2. At BDM Industries, all disagreements are impersonal! Don’t make it personal in the comments, danke.

3. Obligatory “Let’s Generalize About Men”:

4. As the “.…” indicates these quote cover several paragraphs in the original post.

5. The current musical star who most embodies this attitude is Lana, with her “cause you’re just a man / it’s just what you do,” etc.

6. Somebody might be going “yeah, but if it were a man doing this you’d say” etc. I do think it’s not the same, but also, this kind of ironic use of rage does exist for men. It’s called, for instance, “the musical output of Eminem.”

I don’t sit around and listen to “Kim.” It’s a very hateful song. It is also pretty clearly theatrical and purgative. I do not listen to it thinking that this is the product of a guy who wants to murder his ex-wife, but that it’s by a guy who is getting his feelings of rage out in a way that does not involve violence.

I also don’t think Eminem is some kind of perfect man; it’s obvious that he inflicted real psychological damage on his ex-wife. However, he doesn’t need to be perfect for “Kim” to work artistically—he just needs to not have murdered his ex-wife. He manages to get over that bar! Good for him!

7. This is part of what Virginia Woolf means when she says she had to murder the Angel of the House in “Professions for Women”:

I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her.

Longtime readers probably thought this footnote was going to be about Taylor Swift. I’ve trained you well. I’m proud. Also yes, it was going to be. #streamTTPD

8. That said, the reason prison rape jokes disgust me so much is that institutionally speaking America proves it doesn’t care what happens to prisoners every day. We don’t care if they eat moldy food, we don’t care if they freeze. The “joke” is that people are suffering. And in something like My Cousin Vinny, part of the “joke” is that the person who thinks he’s threatened doesn’t actually belong in prison. If he did, there would be no joke, it would just be what he deserves.

9. I’m basically in total agreement with this book review. But also, I do not really watch reality TV, so I don’t talk about it. (If you want smart discussion of reality TV, try

Rich Text

.)

10. Hence tweets like “why are you, as a man, drinking soda.” If I thought that this represented a sincere belief that men should not drink soda, that would trouble me. But I don’t.

11. I have heard enough stories to know that women who ruthlessly filter out male dating prospects by height and income are extremely real, but frankly guys… anybody who makes that their dating criteria is doing you a favor lol. They suck! There is a lot of literature dedicated to how the worst thing you can possibly do in your life is get into a romantic relationship with somebody who sucks! This is why men need to read novels I guess.