Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture by Paul Nathanson, Katherine K. Young (review)

482 letters in canada 2001 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 and thoroughly in tune with politicians who defined wholesale privatization as >common sense.= In meanderings which began in 1997 and continued through youthful mood swings and fashions, Kostash has found plenty of articulate voices and might have found more if they had not been busy piling up dot.com fortunes or moving to Dallas or Davos. While she conscientiously tried to meander without an ideological agenda, her favourite voices, amid devout individualists, narcissists, cynics, and a disturbing colonialism about the Quebec-Canada relationship, are plenty of young idealists who would have been soul mates in her own youth. Her next Canada will have plenty of eloquent people who believe, as she does, that universal medicare and access to higher education are part of the generous, caring society that is her Canada, even in her native Alberta. In her conclusion Kostash declares: >There was not a single person among my interviewees who spoke for the Aright@ to enrich herself or himself at the expense of others. If anything, eschewing this Aright@ was what made them Canadian, they argued.= Critics may suggest that, by her unsystematic interviewing, Kostash also eschewed >social science=; others may lack the patience for an extensive collection of interviews and disjunctive opinions. My students often complain when serious books have >too many facts= and are therefore >dry.= We geezers are made of sterner stuff. Who ever said that explorations have to be fun? Learning about people who may or may not comfort our old age is good for us. And a little encouraging. The >next Canadians,= Kostash reports, are not bad sorts, really. In fact, barring extra computer skills and low average interest in parliamentary politics, they resemble no one so much as us. (DESMOND MORTON) Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young. Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture McGill-Queen=s University Press. xvi, 370. $39.95 Here=s a new concept to add to one=s vocabulary of political correctness. >Misandry,= according to Nathanson and Young=s first volume in a proposed three-volume series, is to the human male what misogyny is to the human female, and they claim it is a growing problem throughout contemporary popular culture. I suppose that general observers of popular culture should have seen this one coming, particularly since Susan Faludi=s 1999 Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, something of a drastic turnabout given her previous study of the backlash against feminism. More specialized analysts may be less surprised, however, given the growth of gay, lesbian, and transgender studies, also in the wake of feminism, and the attention within these paid to the study of >masculinities.= humanities 483 university of toronto quarterly, volume 72, number 1, winter 2002/3 Nathanson, a freelance writer and author of an earlier study on the myth of the Wizard of Oz, and Young, a professor of the history of religions at McGill and author of previous studies dealing with women=s issues, hypothesize that like misogyny >misandry has become so deeply embedded in our culture that few people B including men B even recognize it.= The task they therefore have set themselves in this book is to bring out the dimensions of the problem. And these are considerable, leading to a >worldview of our society that has become increasingly both gynocentric ... and misandric.= The chief villain here is something they term >ideological feminism,= one form of feminism that is a subset of another evil, deconstructionist theory, in the transformation of what was once an androcentric culture into one that had become by the 1990s problematically gynocentric. Contemporary misandry, they argue, can be found in almost every genre of popular culture B books, TV shows, movies, greeting cards, comic strips, and commercials B and seems to afflict particularly North America. What it all comes down to is another consequence of the decline of religion, and in the last century or so, its replacement by nations, classes, and ethnicities B and now the two sexes B by the favouring of a conspiracy theory of history in which one specific group is identified as the...