An interesting Quillette piece from 2022. The estimable Paul Nathanson, a Canadian academic and co-author with Katherine K Young of Legalizing MIsandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men (2006), Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture (2006), Sanctifying Misandry: Goddess Idology and the Fall of Man (2010) and Replacing Misandry: A Revolutionary History of Men (2015) – a link to all the titles on Amazon here – comments on the piece:

“The authors claim that universities are becoming feminized, partly because female students (and feminist professors) are now in the majority. I need to challenge its beguiling underlying premise, which has by now become conventional wisdom in some circles. I’m not a psychologist, but I know that something is missing in this paper despite its social-scientific jargon and its elaborate statistical analyses. The problem reveals itself, at least to me, in their sloppy—or skewed—vocabulary.

The authors claim that women are more “egalitarian” then men, for instance, and yet women establish their own hierarchies and often support the hierarchies of their own societies to the extent that these support their own interests. White women in the ante-bellum South were by no means either indifferent or opposed to the slave system and the racial segregation that followed it. Similarly, German women supported the Nazi regime no less ardently than German men did, even though the regime relied heavily on both racial and sexual hierarchies. Many books have been written about that. So, whatever the authors actually meant by their claim, their words are not self-evidently true. It’s a clever theory, but it lacks support from the history of Western societies even during the past few centuries.

Moreover, they claim that men are interested in “things” and women in people. There’s truth in that neat claim but only part of the truth. It seems to me that men are more interested than women not only in “things” but also in ideas. Ignoring the latter renders their claim facile. Worse, it renders them useful to feminists who want to believe that women are not only different from men but also superior to men. After all, egalitarian words have much higher status than hierarchical ones in any democracy (regardless of the way that people actually live). This is why “equity” has replaced “equality” in popular parlance; the two words sound alike but are profoundly different. Similarly, neither women nor men would argue that “things” are more important than “people.” The comparison becomes more complex, however, with the addition of “ideas” on one side of the ledger. After all, most realize at some level of consciousness that ideas—including moral ideas—have profound effects on how all people actually live.”

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