The more time you spend thinking about the patriarchy, the more you’re genuinely like UGH DUDES AMIRITE. Because the thing is, patriarchal culture actively trains men to be awful. They’re not born thinking that they’re in charge of women’s bodies, or that their opinions hold more weight and should get more credit, or that orgasms are their birthright! They have to get poisoned with those ideas by steeping in a culture that uses individual men as a tool to advance male supremacy.

Part of the reason misandry jokes take off, and part of the reason men who see the patriarchy matrix are some of the most enthusiastic misandry jokers, is that men are encouraged and rewarded for behavior that is, on the face of it, downright awful. Once you see through that horrible joke that patriarchy is playing on you, individual men start hating men-as-a-group in the same way that feminists hate them — not a way that encourages automatic hostility towards members of the group, but a way where you want to see the group disbanded and its charter destroyed and cast to the winds and forgotten.

***

To my male friends who have complained — gently! Respectfully! But still infuriatingly — about the “misandry thing”: I do not really want to send you to an island. I do not want to light you on fire, or send you into space, or put you in a box and put the box in the ocean. I do not need to drink your tears to live.

But I do think the concept of “manliness” needs to be taken out and shot. And when (not if, but when, because this is how privilege works) you slip up and do something sexist, when you shout down a woman who knows more than you or act like her body and clothes are designed for your pleasure or just ignore the inequities around you because you can, because you were told all your life that this was okay and only learned recently that it isn’t and you have to fight to remember that and it’s hard, that’s the guy I want to banish. I want to banish That Guy so you can be the generous, just, compassionate human being you are, and one day when all of Those Guys are banished we can be human beings together.

– Jess Zimmerman, “Men, Get On Board With Misandry,” Medium, August 8, 2014 (see also)