December 21, 2016 • 51 mins
By shooting Andy Warhol, Valerie Solanas embodied the reviled stereotype of the feminist man hater. Cristen and Caroline unpack the etymological root of misandry and the chilling effect of crying man hater.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff Mob Never Told You from housetop works
dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and I feel like we need some
hollow notes playing in the background for this episode. Man eater. Yeah,
(00:23):
not quite man hater, but the same sentiment. You could
also sing man eater as man hater. Oh, here she comes,
She's a man hater. Yeah, see it works. Yeah perfect. Also,
I know what our next career move is. Hollow notes
cover band. Yeah, feminist haller notates cover band maybe like
(00:44):
Holland Ovaries, Holland Yogurt, Holland Yogurt. All right, done, wait
for our tour information. It'll be coming out soon. So
speaking of man haters. Though, a little fun fact that
I discovered while researching for this episode, man hater is
(01:05):
an entry in the dictionary, the Merriam Webster Dictionary, but
it's not the gender specific noun that we're talking about
today in the podcast, which is man hater, as in
what some people assume feminists are. According to the dictionary,
a man hater is a person who just hates mankind.
So just a miss and throat. Yeah, like a more
(01:29):
literal man Hugh Man hater um. But when we get
into more specifics, uh, the word that we're really talking
about is miss injury. And there are a lot of
people who have never heard the word miss injury before,
even though once once you find out what it is
to be like, I'm going to get a black cat
(01:50):
and name it miss injury, or I'll name my first
daughter miss indury. So do show with our FAI listeners
what miss indry is. I mean based the hatred of men,
it's it's the counterpoint to misogyny, which is hatred of women.
And it turns out that etymologically, misogyny is way older
(02:12):
than miss indry. Yeah, yes, exactly. It goes hold of
the way back to the seventeenth century. The Oxford English
Dictionary actually says that the origin of misogyny goes back
to sixteen eighteen and that it was introduced by the
play Sweatnam The Woman hater Um. Apparently Sweatnam was like
(02:35):
a real life dude named Joseph Sweatnam who published this
super lady hating misogynistic pamphlet that ended up kicking up
a bunch of controversy and dissenting pamphlets. It's basically like
a Twitter twitter storm, pre um electricity. I was gonna
say pre internet, but it's like, you know, pre industrial Revolution,
(02:55):
and the main character was named misogynose, and of course
from misogyn knows we get misogyny, which got into dictionaries
by sixteen fifty six, which seems like a pretty swift
adoption since this is pretty like everything. Yeah, the hatred
of women was apparently pretty trendy enough to name it
in then dictionary ify it um. But miss indry doesn't
(03:22):
roll around as a thing that has a word until
the nineteenth century, actually in the late nineteenth century at that. Uh.
The Oxford English Dictionary says that the first use of
miss indry was in an eighteen eighty two magazine article
and the quote was no man whom she had cared
for had ever proposed to marry her. She couldn't account
(03:44):
for it, and it was a growing source of bitterness
of misogyny as well as miss injury. So she was
just more of a misanthrope. Yeah, she hated everybody and
was angry at everyone. And I mean there is some
pretty important context of the time, right, like we don't
get it the word miss indry meaning hating men, not
(04:05):
hating mankind, but hating men until the suffrage movement is
in swing. I mean, this is when you see the
word feminist switching from meaning feminine quality, so you know,
lady like to someone who's a proponent of women's rights,
and man hating just kind of went along with that.
(04:27):
I guess, well sure immediately, Well sure, because think about
all of the anti suffrage propaganda at the time, portraying
women as being of course ugly, but also wanting nothing
to do with men, while also emulating men like we're
going to be become men who wanted nothing to do
with men. We just wanted men to take care of
(04:48):
our babies while we went out to vote. We voted
every day. We're just gonna go out and vote every day,
every single day, whatever we can, whatever we can possibly
vote about. And uh, you know, the reason at Kristen
asked me to define miss injury is because still today
a lot of people aren't super familiar with the word,
(05:09):
and certainly it was not common in the decades after,
even after it was introduced in that magazine article, it
was not common. Yeah, So um in Ellen shown Brockman
wrote a piece in The New York Times kind of
digging into the origin of miss injury, and she cited
the first appearance in text, not in two but all
(05:33):
the way in ninety six in a British journal of
literary criticism called Scrutiny. And she she goes on to
note she and also Meryl Pearlman, who wrote about the
same thing over at the Columbia Journalism Review, that miss
injury rarely appears in print before you start saying, it
(05:55):
pop up online a lot in the well the tens,
which is also the same time you see the rise
of Portmanteau's like man splaining, there's like an Internet culture
war going on. Yeah, yeah, I mean because you also
to have um more community building among men's rights activists
(06:17):
who um are are all all about uprooting society's miss
injury and blame feminism for what they perceived to be
miss injury taking over our our world. But we did
have a blip during Women's lib when you might might
(06:38):
might might hear miss injury, but usually we were just
called man haters, and by we I mean feminists. You know,
Oh those women they're just they're just man haters. They
don't want to shave their under arms, they're all lesbians
and they just hate men. Well, so Brockman says this
thing that I don't entirely understand. She says that she
(07:00):
surprised that missinjury doesn't even make it into all the dictionaries,
considering how misindrous humor is now politically correct. What is
she just talking about the uptick in talking about it. No,
so Brockman is writing back in and she meant, we
are totally fine portraying men as adults. So think about
Tim the Jewelman Taylor on Home Improvement, who was like
(07:23):
the arch villain of my childhood because he bothered my
parents so much because he made men look like such idiots.
So um. And you also see that reflected in commercials
that are thankfully becoming much less common of the bumbling dad. Um.
(07:44):
And so that's what she means in talking about misindrous
humor being politically correct. Um. But I have a pet
theory that it's also partly due to the fact that
women are the linguistic trend setters. This is the thing
we've talked about pretty extensively in the podcast. And this
goes all the way back centuries mean, back to the
(08:06):
day of misogynos on stage where women have usually forged
the slang and our ways of talking um that have
pushed things forward. And if that's the case, then it's
likelier that women would be talking about misogyny a lot
more than they would be talking about missindry. But that
(08:30):
again is just a theory. So the idea of man
hating and being a man hater, um, you know, it's
it's not a new concept to accuse a woman who
was fighting for women's rights or fighting to have a
voice at all. It's not. It's not a new concept
for her to be accused of hating men when all
(08:51):
she's trying to do is get up on the platform herself.
But an interesting little historical trip we took and preparing
for this episode was learning about the woman who sort
of became in the nineteen sixties and seventies a sort
of poster child for man hating. Oh yeah, and this
(09:11):
is something too that comes up in a lot of
YouTube comments style criticism from men's rights activist types. And
I say this anecdotally from what I have read on
the more than five videos on this stuff Mom Never
told you YouTube channel of um really uh, generalizing the
(09:36):
acts of one or two women, and Valerie Salonis was
really the first who puts some fuel in that fire
to say, see, feminists, feminists do hate men. Feminis really
really really hate men. And here is an example. It's like,
as long as they have one piece of evidence, then
that must mean then we're we're we're all s stable
(10:00):
too to catching this feminist plague. So Valerie Salanis is
one of the most fascinating people that I have read
about lately. She was a queer writer and the author
of something that we actually talked about in our podcast
a while back on radical feminism. It's this thing called
(10:22):
the Scum Manifesto. She wrote it in nineteen sixty seven originally,
but she would continually revise it. And Scum is an
acronym for Society for Cutting up Men, of which she
writes that she was its soul member. She wasn't really looking,
you know for like gal pals to join Scum. Salonis
(10:45):
was scum. Yeah, And she even advertised the Scum Manifesto
in The Village Voice as costing a dollar for men
and cents for women. Love it um, But don't think
she was trying to be a feminist hero and address
like the wage gap or anything. She even described feminists
as schmucks, dupes and no nothings. She was just like
(11:10):
she was the solo member of her group. Like that's
how she kind of saw life. She Valerie Salanis was
out for her own means and ends and really was
not interested in lifting up women with her as a group,
nor was she interested in lifting up menu which if
you read a little bit of the Scum Manifesto, you'll
(11:31):
quickly catch on to to her drift in it. She writes,
because no aspect of society is relevant to women, civic minded, responsible,
thrill seeking females should overthrow the government, eliminate the money system,
and eliminate the male sex, which is everything that men
who are afraid of women and feminists are afraid that
(11:53):
we are aiming to do. Yeah, we want to Lorena
bob at you. Yeah, and then send you to an island.
Although that sounds kind of nice, honestly, Yeah, I need
a vacation. But getting back to Salanas. Before she writes
the Skun Manifesto, she had graduated from the University of
Maryland with a degree in psychology. She grew up, you know,
(12:14):
in a in a fine middle class home. But when
she went for her masters, she ended up dropping out
because of sexism. She was just over it and she
ended up in After kind of bouncing around a bit,
she lands in New York and she is intermittently homeless.
(12:35):
She's not very good at like making consistent money. Um.
She is known as a hustler. And there was this
trick that she would do to men on the sidewalk. Yes,
so she would get their attention and say, hey, hey, buddy,
for a dollar, I'll tell you a dirty word. And
they'd be like, oh yeah, baby, and they'd give a
dollar and she'd say men. And she loved it. She
(12:56):
loved that trick. Joke never got old to Salanas. Yeah, exactly.
And we have to give a hat tip to brand
Faz and her two thousand four book Valerie Salanas, The
Defiant Life of the Woman who wrote Scum and Shot
Andy Warhol, at which point listeners unfamiliar with her bio
or like, what Andy Warhol? Yeah, And it is worth noting,
(13:18):
and we will explain this in just a second, Um,
but it is worth noting that briand Faz did not
want to include any reference to Andy Warhol, and the
title of this biography because Valerie Salana says, complex and
turbulent existence was much deeper, and her her existence just
(13:39):
extended beyond the borders of what history has placed her in,
which is the woman who shot Andy Warhol because she
was angry, well, and how ironic for her legacy to
be um attached to a man, you know, to be
interpreted through a guy, because this woman wrote Scum Manifesto exactly,
(14:00):
and so you know, while she's in New York playing
tricks on men in the street, Salonis ends up sort
of being befriended by Andy Warhol and the Factory crew.
She appeared in his film I a Man, and she
had begged Warhol to produce her scatological avant garde play
(14:21):
called Up Your Ass Um, but it was it was
too far out for him. And as fas rights, Up
Your Ass is definitely ahead of its time. Uh Still,
she argues Um and Salonas basically, because she would later
be diagnosed with schizophrenia, basically was under the impression or
delusion that Andy Warhol had taken control of all of
(14:45):
her all the rights to her writing um, including the
Scum Manifesto and also this play, and she was just
furious that he would not support the play or publish
helped publish the manifesto. Yeah, well, she she specifically wanted
him to produce Up Your Ass, and she gave him
(15:06):
a screenplay which he ended up misplacing, and that set
her off because she it fed into this idea that
he was just hiding it from her, that he was
selling it and going to make money off of it.
Um that she, you know, was losing all of her
rights to everything, which which wasn't the case. Warhol insisted,
(15:27):
like Valerie, I just cannot produce this thing. It is
really intense. Um. So on June three, Andy Warhol and
his pals are kind of hanging out and shooting the
breeze and Salanis walks in and shoots Andy Warhol three times,
(15:53):
and she also shoots a couple of the other people
who were there and basically said, like at one point
one of the one of the dudes like, please don't
shoot me. She had already shot war Hall, who looked
like he could have been dead, um, And he says,
please don't shoot me, and she says, I have to
do this bang and then she SCRAMs. But of course,
in that darkly ironic twist that act forever defines her
(16:16):
through a man and and she realized it, I mean
in her lifetime. She realized, like, I can't believe that
now I am linked forever. You know, this is a
thing that would go on to define her life and
career still now because we're still talking about it. And
we went back and read the initial report of the
(16:36):
shooting in the Village Voice, and the headline was the
shot that shattered the velvet underground and war Hal. You know,
it is like rush to the hospital. There is just
a media frenzy as you would imagine, and he is
in critical condition. I mean she she got him good. Um. Meanwhile,
(16:59):
so Honest goes to the police department a few hours
later and turns herself in, and of course there was
a throng of press there too, and Salanis tells them,
if you want to know why I did this, you
need to read the scum manifesto. Excellent guerilla marketing. I
(17:20):
know she was such a self promoter to the extreme um.
But of course the media, you know, took scum manifesto
and we're like, oh what here is a man hating
feminist and media reports on her described her as a
man hater and mannish. Yeah, so outside the norm. And
(17:44):
another thing that really riled her up, of course, is
that not only did Andy Warholn not die, but when
he recovered, he was very understanding forgiving and sympathetic towards her,
which just enraged her because she thought that it was
another way of controlling her and trolling the narrative. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean, he was deeply, deeply traumatized by the shooting,
(18:06):
not surprisingly, but he urged the criminal justice system to
really take it easy on Salonism, which you know, she
was charged with felonious assault and possession of a deadly weapon.
And I don't have her final sentence in front of me,
but I want to say she served what three years
(18:26):
in a psychiatric hospital. Yeah, so she didn't do like
hard prison time or anything. She went to some psychiatric hospitals,
which that was another thing that enraged her. She wanted
to do the hard time. So meanwhile, like as the
cases getting off the ground, radical feminist and chapter president
of the National Organization for Women, Tie Grace Atkinson urges
(18:52):
the organization at large to defend Salanis, Like, y'all, we
need to step up. This woman has followed through on
the rage that so many of us have been experiencing. Yeah,
and she was not alone in this sentiment of like,
let's circle the wagons around our rag feminist sister. There
were several accounts of several women, one who was even
(19:15):
living in Cuba at the time and she's like, oh,
I gotta get back to the States, And she ended
up founding was it Cell sixteen, which is another rad
fem group. Uh and listeners, if you have any more
information about them, I'd love to hear it. Um. But
there were a lot of women who just felt this
is the bat signal, like we need to be in
the States, We need to be in New York where
(19:35):
all of this is happening, Like we've gotten the rag
feminist man hating call, let's do this now. Meanwhile, of
course Betty for Dan, who was at the head of now,
was like, no, she didn't want to touch the lonest
with a ten football. In fact, she sent a telegram
(19:55):
at one point stating like, do not in any way
associate Valorie Salanas with the National Organization for Women. We
have nothing to do with her. And I'm sure Salanas
was like, yeah, thank you, right, because for Betty. For Dan,
she saw salonas who was a queer woman, as first
of all, a quote unquote lavender menace, which we have
(20:18):
a whole episode on that if you want to learn more.
But for Dan referred to lesbians as the lavender menace,
a menace potentially to the credibility of the National Organization
for Women, because she and others were terrified that this
whole stereotyping of feminists as lesbian man haters would just
(20:41):
ruin their chances of being taken seriously and getting feminist
legislation passed. Yeah, and so the trial starts and Salonis
actually waves her right to counsel. She wants to represent herself,
but she brings on the fabulous and incredible Florence Kennedy
as her legal advisor, and basically Kennedy argues that Salonis
(21:07):
is not insane, she's a feminist activist. And while Salonis
is like, yeah, no, I'm not insane. I meant to
do this, She's also like, no, no, I'm not doing
this out of feminist rage. I'm doing this because I'm pissed. Yeah,
I mean she it was more like an activist on
behalf of herself because she wanted her play to be produced. UM.
Also side note, Uh, Florence Kennedy was known for her
(21:33):
outrageous outfits. She would wear and buy outrageous. I just
mean she would. She wore a signature cowboy hat and
lots of vests and pants and pants, and those pants
not the cowboy hat. They riled up the judge who
reprimanded Florence Kennedy for her unladylike courtroom appearance. UM, and
(21:58):
I just wanted to pass that into to give a
little flavor for what what life was like back in
in the seventies. Kennedy and Hie Grace Atkinson and others
sort of recognize this, for they took the bat signal
rather literally, and they took this as, uh, the moment
(22:19):
to sort of move in. This was a great moment.
This is a great moment for me to wear pants
in the courtroom and talk back to the judge. This
as a great moment for all of us to circle
up and start the revolution and bring feminism regardless of
Salonis is true, um motivations. This is a great opportunity
for us to put feminism front and center on the
(22:40):
front page of the newspaper. So there was some some
feminist theater in a way going on. Um. But the
thing is, again like salanis considered feminists schmucks, and some
of this back and forth that you see of her,
you know, allowing Kennedy to come in as her legal
advisor and to some degree, um, working with Tie Grace Atkinson.
(23:05):
She would very quickly write them off and sometimes even
uh have violent outbursts against them because she had no
interest in contributing to a collective feminism. She was only
out for herself. And now obviously like a lot of
her erratic behavior was a product of U her schizophrenia. Um.
(23:27):
But at the time, I mean, it's just it's I
did not know about this chapter in second wave history
because it's it's it's bizarre, um, and kind of unthinkable
to rally around a woman because she shot a male icon,
you know, like like I'm not cool with gun violence. Um.
(23:51):
But clearly, I mean this is just sort of the
tenor of what was going on, and so it's no
surprise that there is a conversation then going on nationally
about man hating and about feminism, because if you are
far removed from the movement and don't know what's going
on with feminism or feminists, And all you see are
(24:12):
feminists aligning themselves with a woman who shot a man
and is a so called man hater and his managed
and she's unrepentant for shooting him too. Yeah, then you
might start to think, oh God, are they coming for me?
Are the women coming for me with pitchforks and torches?
So while Salanis did nothing but but probably burnish Warhol's
(24:36):
reputation even more, she ended up causing a schism within
the National Organization for Women and the women's lib movement
at large, kind of between the tie Grace Atkinson's and
the Betty for Dance, who were like, not, y'all, this
is is not what we are about. Um. And and again,
(24:58):
I mean, like, the the tragedy of it is that
this woman was mentally unstable. She was schizophrenic, and police
later nicknamed her scab Lady because this is after she
was kind of in and out of psychiatric wards and
she ended up homeless and she would pick at her
skin obsessively, and she died in poverty at fifty two.
(25:24):
So I mean, she's she's a tragic figure for sure, um.
And yet she has become the embodiment of this, this
idea of the man hating feminist, even though yes, she
hated men, but she wasn't a feminist, right, But that
doesn't matter really, it seems to anyone on any side
(25:44):
of this event, because she symbolized what people wanted her
to symbolize. Yeah, and we're going to get into how
Salonis's legacy reverberates still today. When we come right back
from a quick break now, before we get to modern
(26:15):
day feminism and the rise of ironic miss indry like
those mugs that say like male tears and things like that. Um,
we want to talk about this piece published in The
Village Voice in nineteen seventy two, written by Joanna Russ,
who was writing this in the post Salonis era. So
(26:36):
Salonis had happened, all of this panic about misndrist feminists
had been stoked, and she writes this essay called the
New miss Injury. And I gotta tell you, Kristen, I
had never even though this piece circulated um a lot
back around twenty eleven, so around the same time that
(26:57):
you see that uptick in the use of the word missing,
which had not previously been used a whole time, I
never read it and uh reading it yesterday before we
came into the studio. UM, I read it a couple
of times because her writing and her concepts are beautiful,
um and and sad uh and tragic, because of course
(27:20):
she's talking about missinry, but its counterpoint is misogyny, and
she talks about one quote, for instance, is our men
are brought up to hate us, we are brought up
to love our men. In other words, of course, when
a woman, whether it was a suffragist back in the
day or a second waiver right now, um, at the
(27:42):
time that Russ was writing that piece, if a woman
steps out of the traditional norm and fights against men
as people would view it, of course she's a man hater.
She's a miss interest because women are taught to love
their men and and hold them as their protectors. And
because of that, she says, to be a misdrest a
(28:04):
woman needs considerable ingenuity, originality, and resilience. A misogynist requires
no such resources, obviously because patriarchy. And she brings up
an excellent point that while there's not a presumption that
misogynists want to kill all women or maim all women,
(28:25):
there is this bizarre connoting of blood lust with miss injury.
Maybe it's because of periods. I don't know, but things
get bloody really quickly. When we come for you, the
elevator doors will open like in the shining Yes. Um,
but she says, quote as if there were no difference
between feelings and acts, which, hello, hysteria, you know, so
(28:49):
so it makes sense, um. And then she lays out
these eight steps that really summarize sort of the gas
lighting effect of this man hating rhetoric. Yes, and she talks.
She basically explains the concept of the oppressed being expected
(29:11):
to be the ones who are saintly and pure and
well behaved and not complain about their oppressor. And this is,
you know, a similar kind of argument made by James
Baldwin and other people at the time who um during
the Civil rights movement were um tired of people of
(29:33):
color being expected to remain not violent, you know, whereas
white people turning violent is somehow okay. Yeah. So what
are what are these steps that Russ talks about. One
you do something nasty to me too, I hate you.
Three you find it uncomfortable to be hated for you.
(29:54):
Think how nice it would be if I didn't hate you? Five,
you decide I ought not to hate you because hate
is bad. Six. Good people don't hate seven because I
hate I'm a bad person. Eight. It is not what
you did to me that makes you hate me. It
is my own bad nature. I not you, am the
(30:14):
cause of my hating you. Yeah. It's like the apologies
of like, well, I'm sorry if that made you feel bad. Yeah,
I'm sorry if if you got offended, the backhanded apology exactly,
and so is that why? Sort of in a nutshell,
men's rights activists are so upset when you drink out
of a male tears mug, like when you're trying to
(30:35):
make light of a situation and they're like, no, you
can't not like me. I'm going to kill you now.
Oh I don't even want to start to try to
get inside the head of a men's rights activist. I mean,
you could say they don't get the joke, or they
don't think the joke is funny. Um, they're yeah, there
(30:59):
are a lot of a lot of things that could
be said. Um, but I had really never considered how
the whole man hating thing, calling women man haters, calling
feminist man haters in particular, is really used as a
red herring. It's such a loaded charge that really gaslights
you because if you're a man hater, like what what
(31:23):
a what an what an odious person? And no, I'm
not like saying like I mean because it's cool to
hate men, um, but just how that specific language is
has such a chilling effect. Yeah, that you should want
to still be under that norm of loving men and
keeping them on their privilege pedestal. Sure, yeah, it's I mean,
(31:46):
because there's like a threatening edge to it too. It's like, well,
I mean, if because if you're a man hater, you know,
like no one's gonna like you, You're not no one's
gonna want to sleep with you and find you pretty, etcetera.
Is just like that that Joann arrusts essay, I think
just did a phenomenal job, especially considering the time to
(32:08):
like kind of reading it in the mindset of nineteen
seventy two as much as someone who wasn't alive, then
can um really offered some deeper perspective on what's usually
just like a knee jerk label. Yeah, and it makes
sense then that some men and women both are uncomfortable
(32:29):
with miss injury. She writes to accept miss injury is
to perceive what dreadful messes are made of our lives,
even if we are lucky enough to escape the worst
effects of our social structure. There are two kinds of
women who never hate men, the very lucky and the
very blind. So that's a lot to say, and I
would imagine that if you're a guy listening to that, Um,
(32:52):
that's a lot to hear. So I'm curious what what
made you want to read the essay a number of times?
And really what jumped out to you? Like, what what
do you feel about like that blunt of a statement? Um, Honestly,
it was just the the overarching feeling of it that
I got reading it, which, like I said, was one
(33:14):
of like power in naming it, but also just the
sadness of like, guys, we are living in the dark, Like,
let's turn the lights on. Nobody has to hate each
other like, but we have to have some real talk
with each other. We have to look each other in
the eye and recognize, like you do act out from
(33:36):
a position of privilege. I am not up on that
pedestal with you. I am the oppressed, and you still
expect me to love you because of my oppression, and
I just thought that it was sort of a brilliant
and I especially loved it because it was in the
context of N two, but it's still so relevant today.
(33:58):
I just thought it was a beautiful ease of writing
that summed up the feelings on both sides of Listen,
I'm mad at you for oppressing me, I'm tired of
being oppressed, and then the attitude of well, no, you
should stay oppressed otherwise I hate you. Mm hmm, yeah,
I mean. And so that leads us into this uh
(34:20):
digital ironic feminism um that has been cropping up more
in like fourteen. I feel like it's kind of faded
a little bit. Um. But there was a terrific piece
by Jillian Horowitz, which is how we ended up on
that Village Voice essay from seventy two. Um. But Jillian
Horowitz over at Digital America wrote an essay called collecting
(34:44):
Male Tears, miss Injury and Weaponized Femininity on the Internet.
Love the idea of weaponized femininity, I know, I know. Um.
So she cites Joanna Russ as describing ironic miss injury
as a form of creative radical feminism, and I was like, oh,
tell me more Jillian Horowitz for the feminist who wants
(35:07):
major structural change, and it's like, wait, how can we
achieve major structural change by using like pink glittery gifts
of a spinning thing that says miss andry r male
tears or something. But she argues that it is that
super cute, hyper feminine packaging that weaponizes that feminist anger
(35:27):
and the devalued trappings of femininity. Yeah, and and to
back up for a second, like these days m r
A types men's rights activisty types contend that feminism in
particular has rendered white American men in particular an oppressed
minority because miss indry, yeah, miss indry being quote an
(35:51):
institutional enshrinement of man hating, as she puts it. And
so when we then deploy ironic miss injury in the
pace of that as a response to uh men's rights
activists crying oppression um and doing it in that package
of weaponized femininity, it's basically saying that, hey, sexist dudes,
(36:18):
your objectification suggests that women are nothing more than these harmless,
cute objects here for your pleasure. But in fact, in
the core of it, you see this right here, we
are mad, and we despise everything that you are standing
for right now. Um. And and that is also like
(36:39):
why I prefer to respond to um, rude dudes on
the internet who who come on say the stuff I've
never told you Facebook page and say ridiculous, uh, make
ridiculous allegations of miss injury with the manicure emoji just
saying I have no time just painting my nails. You're
not going to disturb me. And also the cuteness of
(37:03):
a lot of the ironic miss and dream media makes
it impossible to land an effective comeback, like it's punching
a pillow. Yeah, and I mean it's it's kind of
a way to troll the trolls, to total the misogynists,
because it's like what you can't you can't just laugh
at me using a male tears mug like I'm laughing
(37:25):
at you, and that gets to you. The Margaret Atwood
quote of men are afraid that women will laugh at them.
Women are afraid that men will kill them. Um. But
the gift that it has been rolling around in my
head now for the past fifteen minutes is the clip
from nine to five when Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and
(37:46):
Lee Tomlin are dressed as like like yie old maidens
and are cheers in their goblets, and the gifts as
miss injury, as beautiful pink font as they as they cheers. Well,
it's also sort of a take on like, why do
you think that women just celebrating womanhood and being feminists
(38:07):
automatically means that we hate men? Like That's it's calling
out the ridiculousness of assuming that all women who are
feminists are just out to kill men and manhood. Well,
and for me like that, that gift is so joyful, okay.
And it's also the weaponizing of our like feminine and
(38:30):
feminist joy, not only our rage okay, but really weaponizing
feminist joy because we are supposed to be scared as
women of an allegation that we are man haters, Because
what is worse than being undesired by a dude called
ugly or fat or whatever? Yeah, if we're speaking in
like patriarchal terms, So by flipping that on its head
and saying, oh, yeah, I hate all of this like
(38:55):
patriarchal garbage, and look I'm hanging with miladies and and
cheers in because you all are are now terrified of
us apparently. Um so, yeah, there there's some interesting layers
to it that don't sit well with everyone, of course,
because really it's the Internet. Does anything sit well with everybody? Answer? No? Um.
(39:17):
Chelsea Fagan, for instance, over at thought Catalog argues that
ironic miss injury smacks of privilege because it's collapsing all
male identities into the one like white, supremacist, capitalistic, but patriarchal,
so on and so forth. But does it? Is it
(39:40):
not just a like a quote unquote joyful reaction to
the toxic masculinity that oppresses women. It's not like it's
not like I'm drinking my coffee out of my male tears,
mug at my male friends or my boyfriend, you know,
like men that I love and who's you know, men
(40:01):
that I love and who have a wonderful place in
my life. Like well, and it also misses the point
that argument, like, like I get that for sure, like
there are many male identities that are absolutely marginalized in
our society. Um, but that idea that it's bad because privilege,
(40:22):
I think is missing the point that, Um, this ironic
miss injury isn't about shaming individual people, but rather just
trying to dismantle or simply like, live within a patriarchal
society and still laugh at the end of the day.
Otherwise we will cry female tears. Yeah. I mean, as
(40:43):
as Amanda Hess points out in August, guys were not
actually bathing in male tears, were not individually trying to
go from house to house laughing at men and kicking
them in the shins and bathing in their tears. It
all a sarcastic and ridiculous response to actual patriarchy and misogyny. Yeah.
(41:07):
I mean, you have all sorts of sarcastic hashtags that
have popped up, um, not all men, which we absolutely
overuse on this podcast, but I stand by it. Um.
Also the hashtag masculinity so fragile um. And someone could
easily say, well, all right, it's a joke, but let's
flip the gender script. What if the joke was about women?
(41:31):
And the answer is that is not a joke. That
is patriarchy. But when we do talk about these mis
indry jokes, Amanda has talked to a co founder of
The Toast who is now um I believe she's a
contributing editor at The Establishment, Nicole Cliff, who is just
(41:51):
brilliant and if you don't follow her on Twitter, you
absolutely should. Um. Yeah, she and Nicole Cliff is the
reason I'm watching Pole Dark now and PBS. It's a
terrible show, but I can't stop watching it. I've never
been heard of it. We'll talk later, all right, So,
Has asked her, Um, you know about ironic miss injury
and the joke, because The Toasted has made a lot
(42:12):
of brilliant satire around that theme, and Cliff essentially said, listen,
if we over analyze this, it ruins the joke. And
half of the fun is just the fact that uh
m r as can't stand it, can't stand it makes
them real mad, and um, sometimes it can. It can
(42:34):
be fun to troll the trolls, and that it's it's
funny that it's pushing the idea of this vast underground
anti male conspiracy that we're all in like Dr Evil's Layer, underground,
like bathing ritualistically every morning in male tears, Like that's
funny because guys seriously really like it's all right? Well,
(42:54):
and Has also and I agree with this. She thinks
that it offers some relief from the intensity sometimes of
self identifying as a feminist, particularly on the Internet, and
also the critique that that can invite not from m
R a s but from other self identified feminists. UM
(43:17):
and Hess rights it can be freeing then to instead
adopt an ironic stance that allows women to identify against
what they are clearly not a cartoonish man hater bent
on total male destruction. Yeah, and heth friend uh just
Zimmerman who calls herself a professional misundrest, which is also
(43:39):
part of the joke. UM responded to this article in
which she was heavily quoted, and she also clarifies that like, Hey,
my ironic miscendry that I like make a living around
writing about it doesn't mean that I want to kill
all men. But my ironic miscendry is pointed at killing
the concept of math scalinity that breeds all of the
(44:03):
stuff that women have seen during the election, for instance,
I mean she was writing, but I would say that
everything she's saying is also really valid for us right now,
because you have people like Donald Trump, who sort of
helped open the door to even more online abuse, if
that's even possible. He's opened the locker room doors wide open,
(44:25):
and uh for listeners listening to this episode in the future.
We're recording this about what two weeks away from the elections,
so we are wound up tight, and you know, Zimmerman
and her piece does point out that like, hey, I
have all of these guy friends who think it's hilarious,
like they get it, and they consider themselves quote unquote
(44:47):
miss and drifts as well. It's it's almost a way
of separating like the cool guys who get it and
support what women and feminists are doing from the guys
who clearly, maybe along the mar a lines, don't get it,
and that she does want to reassure all of her
dude gro friends that she's not trying to kill any
of them. Share your thoughts with us listeners. Mom Stuff
(45:12):
at how stuff works dot com is our email address.
You can also tweet us at man Hater's note at
mom Stuff podcast, or messages on Facebook. And we've got
a couple of messages to share with you when we
come right back from a quick break. All right, I've
(45:34):
got one from Hillary In response to our episode Oprah
was Not Built in a Day, she says it was
a truly great podcast. I very much appreciate your willingness
to question the concept of failing fast, and to suggest
that this sort of failure is a luxury reserve for
those few who have a very large and soft safety net.
I've been a corporate lawyer from more than twenty years,
working first in a large national law firm dominated by
(45:56):
upper middle class white men. Now I serve as in
house counts and the only woman in the C suite
at a tech startup. In my view, fail fast is
a new business self help scheme that is as helpful
to personal happiness as the Secret is to true spiritual enlightenment.
As Oprah would say, Here's what I know for sure.
One those who fail fast don't fail, not in the
(46:20):
way that the populace would define failure. Failure does not
put their lives or livelihoods in peril. To be fair,
they have no real experience with failure. It is a
distant and theoretical concept that has no place in their
one percent rarefied reality. Like minimum wage and community college too.
For those who fail, quote unquote fail failure has no
(46:42):
tangible consequence. Losing money is a demerit, not a disaster.
They don't get the highest grade in the class or
the winningest score on the tennis court, losing money is
a version of humiliation, not real loss. After all, the
money lost wasn't made flipping burgers for fifty years at Wendy's.
It wasn't even theirs to lose. It was their corporate rations,
funds and debts and dollars. And that money is not gone,
(47:03):
not really. They can always get more, and not from
payday loans or the local loan shark, but from a
variety of sources, from friends and family. Yes, this is
a real term used in the financing community to bridge financing.
Another term of art put simply the fake failure. Rottie
won't worry about bus fair, they don't ride the bus,
(47:23):
they won't scrape together rent, they already own their house,
and they certainly won't go hungry unless it is part
of the latest cleans. Three. Failing fast is a turn
of phrase that literally turns bad choices into premeditated strategies.
In all of the deals I've done, from publicly traded
companies to startups that thrived and startups that died, I
have never seen any leader of a new company or
(47:46):
product line or tech offering have a clear, crisp and
consistent strategy against which failure could be identified, measured, and
quantified without a rubric for success. Failure is a fuzzy
and a morphous thought that can't be captured sept in retrospect.
Don't get me wrong, there is no need for rigid
rules and specific strategies in the world that I work in.
(48:07):
Businesses art not science, So the absence of scientific method
is appropriate and necessary. But for those who want to
make business into something magical and knowable only to a
small group of wizards, well you have to believe in
the Emerald City and dismiss the idea that a few
smart people made some educated guesses who were also lucky
and had timing on their sides. In other words, you
(48:28):
have to believe in alchemy and wizards and revisionist history.
She goes on to say, um that failure, true failure,
not quote unquote failure never comes fast. It is so
very slow. So she says, my favorite women of the
podcasting world, let me confirm your suspicions. Oprah is the
definition of hard one success. There is not a thing
(48:50):
about her or her history that smacks of failure. Oprah
just found her path through trial and error. Mostly she
did the bravest thing a person can do, she let
herself be known well. Thank you, Hillary for all of
your valuable perspective. I have a letter here from Kate,
also in response to our episode on failing, and she writes,
I wanted to start this out by saying thank you
(49:12):
thanks for your podcast in general, which often helps me
organize my thoughts about social and political issues and gives
me ton of cool things to talk about with friends
and family, and thank you specifically for this most recent
episode on failure. Like you, A lot of these ideas
in this episode hit me really close to home. For example,
I recently had a conversation with my family in which
(49:33):
they were encouraging me to apply for a promotion at work.
My response was that I wasn't sure I would get it,
so I wanted to wait until next year when it
was more certain. I never realized this was such a
common refrain among women. I've only been with a company
for half a year, but I'm doing the same work
as folks who are one and two levels above me.
Thanks to your podcast, I've decided to face my fears
(49:54):
and bring this up in my performance review next month
and asked to be promoted if I get it. You
two will be directly responsible for helping a woman in
tech move up the leadership ladder. Hooray you. If I
don't get it, at least I tried and it won't
have to be quite so scary the next time. Okate,
that is so so great to hear, and I wish
(50:15):
you all of the best luck in that performance review.
And I will tell you, as someone who who works
in digital media, um, the more the more data you
can bring to to buffer your case, the better uh
data you know, you know. But Kate, that's that's awesome.
I'm so happy to hear that. And listeners share your
(50:36):
stories with us as well. Mom stuff at how stuff
works dot com is our email address and for links
to all of our social media as well as all
of our blogs, videos and podcasts with our sources. So
you can learn more about Missinjry, head on over to
stuff Mom Never Told You dot com for more on
(50:57):
this and thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff
works dot com
Welcome to Stuff Mob Never Told You from housetop works
dot Com. Hello and welcome to the podcast. I'm Kristen
and I'm Caroline, and I feel like we need some
hollow notes playing in the background for this episode. Man eater. Yeah,
(00:23):
not quite man hater, but the same sentiment. You could
also sing man eater as man hater. Oh, here she comes,
She's a man hater. Yeah, see it works. Yeah perfect. Also,
I know what our next career move is. Hollow notes
cover band. Yeah, feminist haller notates cover band maybe like
(00:44):
Holland Ovaries, Holland Yogurt, Holland Yogurt. All right, done, wait
for our tour information. It'll be coming out soon. So
speaking of man haters. Though, a little fun fact that
I discovered while researching for this episode, man hater is
(01:05):
an entry in the dictionary, the Merriam Webster Dictionary, but
it's not the gender specific noun that we're talking about
today in the podcast, which is man hater, as in
what some people assume feminists are. According to the dictionary,
a man hater is a person who just hates mankind.
So just a miss and throat. Yeah, like a more
(01:29):
literal man Hugh Man hater um. But when we get
into more specifics, uh, the word that we're really talking
about is miss injury. And there are a lot of
people who have never heard the word miss injury before,
even though once once you find out what it is
to be like, I'm going to get a black cat
(01:50):
and name it miss injury, or I'll name my first
daughter miss indury. So do show with our FAI listeners
what miss indry is. I mean based the hatred of men,
it's it's the counterpoint to misogyny, which is hatred of women.
And it turns out that etymologically, misogyny is way older
(02:12):
than miss indry. Yeah, yes, exactly. It goes hold of
the way back to the seventeenth century. The Oxford English
Dictionary actually says that the origin of misogyny goes back
to sixteen eighteen and that it was introduced by the
play Sweatnam The Woman hater Um. Apparently Sweatnam was like
(02:35):
a real life dude named Joseph Sweatnam who published this
super lady hating misogynistic pamphlet that ended up kicking up
a bunch of controversy and dissenting pamphlets. It's basically like
a Twitter twitter storm, pre um electricity. I was gonna
say pre internet, but it's like, you know, pre industrial Revolution,
(02:55):
and the main character was named misogynose, and of course
from misogyn knows we get misogyny, which got into dictionaries
by sixteen fifty six, which seems like a pretty swift
adoption since this is pretty like everything. Yeah, the hatred
of women was apparently pretty trendy enough to name it
in then dictionary ify it um. But miss indry doesn't
(03:22):
roll around as a thing that has a word until
the nineteenth century, actually in the late nineteenth century at that. Uh.
The Oxford English Dictionary says that the first use of
miss indry was in an eighteen eighty two magazine article
and the quote was no man whom she had cared
for had ever proposed to marry her. She couldn't account
(03:44):
for it, and it was a growing source of bitterness
of misogyny as well as miss injury. So she was
just more of a misanthrope. Yeah, she hated everybody and
was angry at everyone. And I mean there is some
pretty important context of the time, right, like we don't
get it the word miss indry meaning hating men, not
(04:05):
hating mankind, but hating men until the suffrage movement is
in swing. I mean, this is when you see the
word feminist switching from meaning feminine quality, so you know,
lady like to someone who's a proponent of women's rights,
and man hating just kind of went along with that.
(04:27):
I guess, well sure immediately, Well sure, because think about
all of the anti suffrage propaganda at the time, portraying
women as being of course ugly, but also wanting nothing
to do with men, while also emulating men like we're
going to be become men who wanted nothing to do
with men. We just wanted men to take care of
(04:48):
our babies while we went out to vote. We voted
every day. We're just gonna go out and vote every day,
every single day, whatever we can, whatever we can possibly
vote about. And uh, you know, the reason at Kristen
asked me to define miss injury is because still today
a lot of people aren't super familiar with the word,
(05:09):
and certainly it was not common in the decades after,
even after it was introduced in that magazine article, it
was not common. Yeah, So um in Ellen shown Brockman
wrote a piece in The New York Times kind of
digging into the origin of miss injury, and she cited
the first appearance in text, not in two but all
(05:33):
the way in ninety six in a British journal of
literary criticism called Scrutiny. And she she goes on to
note she and also Meryl Pearlman, who wrote about the
same thing over at the Columbia Journalism Review, that miss
injury rarely appears in print before you start saying, it
(05:55):
pop up online a lot in the well the tens,
which is also the same time you see the rise
of Portmanteau's like man splaining, there's like an Internet culture
war going on. Yeah, yeah, I mean because you also
to have um more community building among men's rights activists
(06:17):
who um are are all all about uprooting society's miss
injury and blame feminism for what they perceived to be
miss injury taking over our our world. But we did
have a blip during Women's lib when you might might
(06:38):
might might hear miss injury, but usually we were just
called man haters, and by we I mean feminists. You know,
Oh those women they're just they're just man haters. They
don't want to shave their under arms, they're all lesbians
and they just hate men. Well, so Brockman says this
thing that I don't entirely understand. She says that she
(07:00):
surprised that missinjury doesn't even make it into all the dictionaries,
considering how misindrous humor is now politically correct. What is
she just talking about the uptick in talking about it. No,
so Brockman is writing back in and she meant, we
are totally fine portraying men as adults. So think about
Tim the Jewelman Taylor on Home Improvement, who was like
(07:23):
the arch villain of my childhood because he bothered my
parents so much because he made men look like such idiots.
So um. And you also see that reflected in commercials
that are thankfully becoming much less common of the bumbling dad. Um.
(07:44):
And so that's what she means in talking about misindrous
humor being politically correct. Um. But I have a pet
theory that it's also partly due to the fact that
women are the linguistic trend setters. This is the thing
we've talked about pretty extensively in the podcast. And this
goes all the way back centuries mean, back to the
(08:06):
day of misogynos on stage where women have usually forged
the slang and our ways of talking um that have
pushed things forward. And if that's the case, then it's
likelier that women would be talking about misogyny a lot
more than they would be talking about missindry. But that
(08:30):
again is just a theory. So the idea of man
hating and being a man hater, um, you know, it's
it's not a new concept to accuse a woman who
was fighting for women's rights or fighting to have a
voice at all. It's not. It's not a new concept
for her to be accused of hating men when all
(08:51):
she's trying to do is get up on the platform herself.
But an interesting little historical trip we took and preparing
for this episode was learning about the woman who sort
of became in the nineteen sixties and seventies a sort
of poster child for man hating. Oh yeah, and this
(09:11):
is something too that comes up in a lot of
YouTube comments style criticism from men's rights activist types. And
I say this anecdotally from what I have read on
the more than five videos on this stuff Mom Never
told you YouTube channel of um really uh, generalizing the
(09:36):
acts of one or two women, and Valerie Salonis was
really the first who puts some fuel in that fire
to say, see, feminists, feminists do hate men. Feminis really
really really hate men. And here is an example. It's like,
as long as they have one piece of evidence, then
that must mean then we're we're we're all s stable
(10:00):
too to catching this feminist plague. So Valerie Salanis is
one of the most fascinating people that I have read
about lately. She was a queer writer and the author
of something that we actually talked about in our podcast
a while back on radical feminism. It's this thing called
(10:22):
the Scum Manifesto. She wrote it in nineteen sixty seven originally,
but she would continually revise it. And Scum is an
acronym for Society for Cutting up Men, of which she
writes that she was its soul member. She wasn't really looking,
you know for like gal pals to join Scum. Salonis
(10:45):
was scum. Yeah, And she even advertised the Scum Manifesto
in The Village Voice as costing a dollar for men
and cents for women. Love it um, But don't think
she was trying to be a feminist hero and address
like the wage gap or anything. She even described feminists
as schmucks, dupes and no nothings. She was just like
(11:10):
she was the solo member of her group. Like that's
how she kind of saw life. She Valerie Salanis was
out for her own means and ends and really was
not interested in lifting up women with her as a group,
nor was she interested in lifting up menu which if
you read a little bit of the Scum Manifesto, you'll
(11:31):
quickly catch on to to her drift in it. She writes,
because no aspect of society is relevant to women, civic minded, responsible,
thrill seeking females should overthrow the government, eliminate the money system,
and eliminate the male sex, which is everything that men
who are afraid of women and feminists are afraid that
(11:53):
we are aiming to do. Yeah, we want to Lorena
bob at you. Yeah, and then send you to an island.
Although that sounds kind of nice, honestly, Yeah, I need
a vacation. But getting back to Salanas. Before she writes
the Skun Manifesto, she had graduated from the University of
Maryland with a degree in psychology. She grew up, you know,
(12:14):
in a in a fine middle class home. But when
she went for her masters, she ended up dropping out
because of sexism. She was just over it and she
ended up in After kind of bouncing around a bit,
she lands in New York and she is intermittently homeless.
(12:35):
She's not very good at like making consistent money. Um.
She is known as a hustler. And there was this
trick that she would do to men on the sidewalk. Yes,
so she would get their attention and say, hey, hey, buddy,
for a dollar, I'll tell you a dirty word. And
they'd be like, oh yeah, baby, and they'd give a
dollar and she'd say men. And she loved it. She
(12:56):
loved that trick. Joke never got old to Salanas. Yeah, exactly.
And we have to give a hat tip to brand
Faz and her two thousand four book Valerie Salanas, The
Defiant Life of the Woman who wrote Scum and Shot
Andy Warhol, at which point listeners unfamiliar with her bio
or like, what Andy Warhol? Yeah, And it is worth noting,
(13:18):
and we will explain this in just a second, Um,
but it is worth noting that briand Faz did not
want to include any reference to Andy Warhol, and the
title of this biography because Valerie Salana says, complex and
turbulent existence was much deeper, and her her existence just
(13:39):
extended beyond the borders of what history has placed her in,
which is the woman who shot Andy Warhol because she
was angry, well, and how ironic for her legacy to
be um attached to a man, you know, to be
interpreted through a guy, because this woman wrote Scum Manifesto exactly,
(14:00):
and so you know, while she's in New York playing
tricks on men in the street, Salonis ends up sort
of being befriended by Andy Warhol and the Factory crew.
She appeared in his film I a Man, and she
had begged Warhol to produce her scatological avant garde play
(14:21):
called Up Your Ass Um, but it was it was
too far out for him. And as fas rights, Up
Your Ass is definitely ahead of its time. Uh Still,
she argues Um and Salonas basically, because she would later
be diagnosed with schizophrenia, basically was under the impression or
delusion that Andy Warhol had taken control of all of
(14:45):
her all the rights to her writing um, including the
Scum Manifesto and also this play, and she was just
furious that he would not support the play or publish
helped publish the manifesto. Yeah, well, she she specifically wanted
him to produce Up Your Ass, and she gave him
(15:06):
a screenplay which he ended up misplacing, and that set
her off because she it fed into this idea that
he was just hiding it from her, that he was
selling it and going to make money off of it.
Um that she, you know, was losing all of her
rights to everything, which which wasn't the case. Warhol insisted,
(15:27):
like Valerie, I just cannot produce this thing. It is
really intense. Um. So on June three, Andy Warhol and
his pals are kind of hanging out and shooting the
breeze and Salanis walks in and shoots Andy Warhol three times,
(15:53):
and she also shoots a couple of the other people
who were there and basically said, like at one point
one of the one of the dudes like, please don't
shoot me. She had already shot war Hall, who looked
like he could have been dead, um, And he says,
please don't shoot me, and she says, I have to
do this bang and then she SCRAMs. But of course,
in that darkly ironic twist that act forever defines her
(16:16):
through a man and and she realized it, I mean
in her lifetime. She realized, like, I can't believe that
now I am linked forever. You know, this is a
thing that would go on to define her life and
career still now because we're still talking about it. And
we went back and read the initial report of the
(16:36):
shooting in the Village Voice, and the headline was the
shot that shattered the velvet underground and war Hal. You know,
it is like rush to the hospital. There is just
a media frenzy as you would imagine, and he is
in critical condition. I mean she she got him good. Um. Meanwhile,
(16:59):
so Honest goes to the police department a few hours
later and turns herself in, and of course there was
a throng of press there too, and Salanis tells them,
if you want to know why I did this, you
need to read the scum manifesto. Excellent guerilla marketing. I
(17:20):
know she was such a self promoter to the extreme um.
But of course the media, you know, took scum manifesto
and we're like, oh what here is a man hating
feminist and media reports on her described her as a
man hater and mannish. Yeah, so outside the norm. And
(17:44):
another thing that really riled her up, of course, is
that not only did Andy Warholn not die, but when
he recovered, he was very understanding forgiving and sympathetic towards her,
which just enraged her because she thought that it was
another way of controlling her and trolling the narrative. Yeah. Yeah,
I mean, he was deeply, deeply traumatized by the shooting,
(18:06):
not surprisingly, but he urged the criminal justice system to
really take it easy on Salonism, which you know, she
was charged with felonious assault and possession of a deadly weapon.
And I don't have her final sentence in front of me,
but I want to say she served what three years
(18:26):
in a psychiatric hospital. Yeah, so she didn't do like
hard prison time or anything. She went to some psychiatric hospitals,
which that was another thing that enraged her. She wanted
to do the hard time. So meanwhile, like as the
cases getting off the ground, radical feminist and chapter president
of the National Organization for Women, Tie Grace Atkinson urges
(18:52):
the organization at large to defend Salanis, Like, y'all, we
need to step up. This woman has followed through on
the rage that so many of us have been experiencing. Yeah,
and she was not alone in this sentiment of like,
let's circle the wagons around our rag feminist sister. There
were several accounts of several women, one who was even
(19:15):
living in Cuba at the time and she's like, oh,
I gotta get back to the States, And she ended
up founding was it Cell sixteen, which is another rad
fem group. Uh and listeners, if you have any more
information about them, I'd love to hear it. Um. But
there were a lot of women who just felt this
is the bat signal, like we need to be in
the States, We need to be in New York where
(19:35):
all of this is happening, Like we've gotten the rag
feminist man hating call, let's do this now. Meanwhile, of
course Betty for Dan, who was at the head of now,
was like, no, she didn't want to touch the lonest
with a ten football. In fact, she sent a telegram
(19:55):
at one point stating like, do not in any way
associate Valorie Salanas with the National Organization for Women. We
have nothing to do with her. And I'm sure Salanas
was like, yeah, thank you, right, because for Betty. For Dan,
she saw salonas who was a queer woman, as first
of all, a quote unquote lavender menace, which we have
(20:18):
a whole episode on that if you want to learn more.
But for Dan referred to lesbians as the lavender menace,
a menace potentially to the credibility of the National Organization
for Women, because she and others were terrified that this
whole stereotyping of feminists as lesbian man haters would just
(20:41):
ruin their chances of being taken seriously and getting feminist
legislation passed. Yeah, and so the trial starts and Salonis
actually waves her right to counsel. She wants to represent herself,
but she brings on the fabulous and incredible Florence Kennedy
as her legal advisor, and basically Kennedy argues that Salonis
(21:07):
is not insane, she's a feminist activist. And while Salonis
is like, yeah, no, I'm not insane. I meant to
do this, She's also like, no, no, I'm not doing
this out of feminist rage. I'm doing this because I'm pissed. Yeah,
I mean she it was more like an activist on
behalf of herself because she wanted her play to be produced. UM.
Also side note, Uh, Florence Kennedy was known for her
(21:33):
outrageous outfits. She would wear and buy outrageous. I just
mean she would. She wore a signature cowboy hat and
lots of vests and pants and pants, and those pants
not the cowboy hat. They riled up the judge who
reprimanded Florence Kennedy for her unladylike courtroom appearance. UM, and
(21:58):
I just wanted to pass that into to give a
little flavor for what what life was like back in
in the seventies. Kennedy and Hie Grace Atkinson and others
sort of recognize this, for they took the bat signal
rather literally, and they took this as, uh, the moment
(22:19):
to sort of move in. This was a great moment.
This is a great moment for me to wear pants
in the courtroom and talk back to the judge. This
as a great moment for all of us to circle
up and start the revolution and bring feminism regardless of
Salonis is true, um motivations. This is a great opportunity
for us to put feminism front and center on the
(22:40):
front page of the newspaper. So there was some some
feminist theater in a way going on. Um. But the
thing is, again like salanis considered feminists schmucks, and some
of this back and forth that you see of her,
you know, allowing Kennedy to come in as her legal
advisor and to some degree, um, working with Tie Grace Atkinson.
(23:05):
She would very quickly write them off and sometimes even
uh have violent outbursts against them because she had no
interest in contributing to a collective feminism. She was only
out for herself. And now obviously like a lot of
her erratic behavior was a product of U her schizophrenia. Um.
(23:27):
But at the time, I mean, it's just it's I
did not know about this chapter in second wave history
because it's it's it's bizarre, um, and kind of unthinkable
to rally around a woman because she shot a male icon,
you know, like like I'm not cool with gun violence. Um.
(23:51):
But clearly, I mean this is just sort of the
tenor of what was going on, and so it's no
surprise that there is a conversation then going on nationally
about man hating and about feminism, because if you are
far removed from the movement and don't know what's going
on with feminism or feminists, And all you see are
(24:12):
feminists aligning themselves with a woman who shot a man
and is a so called man hater and his managed
and she's unrepentant for shooting him too. Yeah, then you
might start to think, oh God, are they coming for me?
Are the women coming for me with pitchforks and torches?
So while Salanis did nothing but but probably burnish Warhol's
(24:36):
reputation even more, she ended up causing a schism within
the National Organization for Women and the women's lib movement
at large, kind of between the tie Grace Atkinson's and
the Betty for Dance, who were like, not, y'all, this
is is not what we are about. Um. And and again,
(24:58):
I mean, like, the the tragedy of it is that
this woman was mentally unstable. She was schizophrenic, and police
later nicknamed her scab Lady because this is after she
was kind of in and out of psychiatric wards and
she ended up homeless and she would pick at her
skin obsessively, and she died in poverty at fifty two.
(25:24):
So I mean, she's she's a tragic figure for sure, um.
And yet she has become the embodiment of this, this
idea of the man hating feminist, even though yes, she
hated men, but she wasn't a feminist, right, But that
doesn't matter really, it seems to anyone on any side
(25:44):
of this event, because she symbolized what people wanted her
to symbolize. Yeah, and we're going to get into how
Salonis's legacy reverberates still today. When we come right back
from a quick break now, before we get to modern
(26:15):
day feminism and the rise of ironic miss indry like
those mugs that say like male tears and things like that. Um,
we want to talk about this piece published in The
Village Voice in nineteen seventy two, written by Joanna Russ,
who was writing this in the post Salonis era. So
(26:36):
Salonis had happened, all of this panic about misndrist feminists
had been stoked, and she writes this essay called the
New miss Injury. And I gotta tell you, Kristen, I
had never even though this piece circulated um a lot
back around twenty eleven, so around the same time that
(26:57):
you see that uptick in the use of the word missing,
which had not previously been used a whole time, I
never read it and uh reading it yesterday before we
came into the studio. UM, I read it a couple
of times because her writing and her concepts are beautiful,
um and and sad uh and tragic, because of course
(27:20):
she's talking about missinry, but its counterpoint is misogyny, and
she talks about one quote, for instance, is our men
are brought up to hate us, we are brought up
to love our men. In other words, of course, when
a woman, whether it was a suffragist back in the
day or a second waiver right now, um, at the
(27:42):
time that Russ was writing that piece, if a woman
steps out of the traditional norm and fights against men
as people would view it, of course she's a man hater.
She's a miss interest because women are taught to love
their men and and hold them as their protectors. And
because of that, she says, to be a misdrest a
(28:04):
woman needs considerable ingenuity, originality, and resilience. A misogynist requires
no such resources, obviously because patriarchy. And she brings up
an excellent point that while there's not a presumption that
misogynists want to kill all women or maim all women,
(28:25):
there is this bizarre connoting of blood lust with miss injury.
Maybe it's because of periods. I don't know, but things
get bloody really quickly. When we come for you, the
elevator doors will open like in the shining Yes. Um,
but she says, quote as if there were no difference
between feelings and acts, which, hello, hysteria, you know, so
(28:49):
so it makes sense, um. And then she lays out
these eight steps that really summarize sort of the gas
lighting effect of this man hating rhetoric. Yes, and she talks.
She basically explains the concept of the oppressed being expected
(29:11):
to be the ones who are saintly and pure and
well behaved and not complain about their oppressor. And this is,
you know, a similar kind of argument made by James
Baldwin and other people at the time who um during
the Civil rights movement were um tired of people of
(29:33):
color being expected to remain not violent, you know, whereas
white people turning violent is somehow okay. Yeah. So what
are what are these steps that Russ talks about. One
you do something nasty to me too, I hate you.
Three you find it uncomfortable to be hated for you.
(29:54):
Think how nice it would be if I didn't hate you? Five,
you decide I ought not to hate you because hate
is bad. Six. Good people don't hate seven because I
hate I'm a bad person. Eight. It is not what
you did to me that makes you hate me. It
is my own bad nature. I not you, am the
(30:14):
cause of my hating you. Yeah. It's like the apologies
of like, well, I'm sorry if that made you feel bad. Yeah,
I'm sorry if if you got offended, the backhanded apology exactly,
and so is that why? Sort of in a nutshell,
men's rights activists are so upset when you drink out
of a male tears mug, like when you're trying to
(30:35):
make light of a situation and they're like, no, you
can't not like me. I'm going to kill you now.
Oh I don't even want to start to try to
get inside the head of a men's rights activist. I mean,
you could say they don't get the joke, or they
don't think the joke is funny. Um, they're yeah, there
(30:59):
are a lot of a lot of things that could
be said. Um, but I had really never considered how
the whole man hating thing, calling women man haters, calling
feminist man haters in particular, is really used as a
red herring. It's such a loaded charge that really gaslights
you because if you're a man hater, like what what
(31:23):
a what an what an odious person? And no, I'm
not like saying like I mean because it's cool to
hate men, um, but just how that specific language is
has such a chilling effect. Yeah, that you should want
to still be under that norm of loving men and
keeping them on their privilege pedestal. Sure, yeah, it's I mean,
(31:46):
because there's like a threatening edge to it too. It's like, well,
I mean, if because if you're a man hater, you know,
like no one's gonna like you, You're not no one's
gonna want to sleep with you and find you pretty, etcetera.
Is just like that that Joann arrusts essay, I think
just did a phenomenal job, especially considering the time to
(32:08):
like kind of reading it in the mindset of nineteen
seventy two as much as someone who wasn't alive, then
can um really offered some deeper perspective on what's usually
just like a knee jerk label. Yeah, and it makes
sense then that some men and women both are uncomfortable
(32:29):
with miss injury. She writes to accept miss injury is
to perceive what dreadful messes are made of our lives,
even if we are lucky enough to escape the worst
effects of our social structure. There are two kinds of
women who never hate men, the very lucky and the
very blind. So that's a lot to say, and I
would imagine that if you're a guy listening to that, Um,
(32:52):
that's a lot to hear. So I'm curious what what
made you want to read the essay a number of times?
And really what jumped out to you? Like, what what
do you feel about like that blunt of a statement? Um, Honestly,
it was just the the overarching feeling of it that
I got reading it, which, like I said, was one
(33:14):
of like power in naming it, but also just the
sadness of like, guys, we are living in the dark, Like,
let's turn the lights on. Nobody has to hate each
other like, but we have to have some real talk
with each other. We have to look each other in
the eye and recognize, like you do act out from
(33:36):
a position of privilege. I am not up on that
pedestal with you. I am the oppressed, and you still
expect me to love you because of my oppression, and
I just thought that it was sort of a brilliant
and I especially loved it because it was in the
context of N two, but it's still so relevant today.
(33:58):
I just thought it was a beautiful ease of writing
that summed up the feelings on both sides of Listen,
I'm mad at you for oppressing me, I'm tired of
being oppressed, and then the attitude of well, no, you
should stay oppressed otherwise I hate you. Mm hmm, yeah,
I mean. And so that leads us into this uh
(34:20):
digital ironic feminism um that has been cropping up more
in like fourteen. I feel like it's kind of faded
a little bit. Um. But there was a terrific piece
by Jillian Horowitz, which is how we ended up on
that Village Voice essay from seventy two. Um. But Jillian
Horowitz over at Digital America wrote an essay called collecting
(34:44):
Male Tears, miss Injury and Weaponized Femininity on the Internet.
Love the idea of weaponized femininity, I know, I know. Um.
So she cites Joanna Russ as describing ironic miss injury
as a form of creative radical feminism, and I was like, oh,
tell me more Jillian Horowitz for the feminist who wants
(35:07):
major structural change, and it's like, wait, how can we
achieve major structural change by using like pink glittery gifts
of a spinning thing that says miss andry r male
tears or something. But she argues that it is that
super cute, hyper feminine packaging that weaponizes that feminist anger
(35:27):
and the devalued trappings of femininity. Yeah, and and to
back up for a second, like these days m r
A types men's rights activisty types contend that feminism in
particular has rendered white American men in particular an oppressed
minority because miss indry, yeah, miss indry being quote an
(35:51):
institutional enshrinement of man hating, as she puts it. And
so when we then deploy ironic miss injury in the
pace of that as a response to uh men's rights
activists crying oppression um and doing it in that package
of weaponized femininity, it's basically saying that, hey, sexist dudes,
(36:18):
your objectification suggests that women are nothing more than these harmless,
cute objects here for your pleasure. But in fact, in
the core of it, you see this right here, we
are mad, and we despise everything that you are standing
for right now. Um. And and that is also like
(36:39):
why I prefer to respond to um, rude dudes on
the internet who who come on say the stuff I've
never told you Facebook page and say ridiculous, uh, make
ridiculous allegations of miss injury with the manicure emoji just
saying I have no time just painting my nails. You're
not going to disturb me. And also the cuteness of
(37:03):
a lot of the ironic miss and dream media makes
it impossible to land an effective comeback, like it's punching
a pillow. Yeah, and I mean it's it's kind of
a way to troll the trolls, to total the misogynists,
because it's like what you can't you can't just laugh
at me using a male tears mug like I'm laughing
(37:25):
at you, and that gets to you. The Margaret Atwood
quote of men are afraid that women will laugh at them.
Women are afraid that men will kill them. Um. But
the gift that it has been rolling around in my
head now for the past fifteen minutes is the clip
from nine to five when Dolly Parton, Jane Fonda and
(37:46):
Lee Tomlin are dressed as like like yie old maidens
and are cheers in their goblets, and the gifts as
miss injury, as beautiful pink font as they as they cheers. Well,
it's also sort of a take on like, why do
you think that women just celebrating womanhood and being feminists
(38:07):
automatically means that we hate men? Like That's it's calling
out the ridiculousness of assuming that all women who are
feminists are just out to kill men and manhood. Well,
and for me like that, that gift is so joyful, okay.
And it's also the weaponizing of our like feminine and
(38:30):
feminist joy, not only our rage okay, but really weaponizing
feminist joy because we are supposed to be scared as
women of an allegation that we are man haters, Because
what is worse than being undesired by a dude called
ugly or fat or whatever? Yeah, if we're speaking in
like patriarchal terms, So by flipping that on its head
and saying, oh, yeah, I hate all of this like
(38:55):
patriarchal garbage, and look I'm hanging with miladies and and
cheers in because you all are are now terrified of
us apparently. Um so, yeah, there there's some interesting layers
to it that don't sit well with everyone, of course,
because really it's the Internet. Does anything sit well with everybody? Answer? No? Um.
(39:17):
Chelsea Fagan, for instance, over at thought Catalog argues that
ironic miss injury smacks of privilege because it's collapsing all
male identities into the one like white, supremacist, capitalistic, but patriarchal,
so on and so forth. But does it? Is it
(39:40):
not just a like a quote unquote joyful reaction to
the toxic masculinity that oppresses women. It's not like it's
not like I'm drinking my coffee out of my male tears,
mug at my male friends or my boyfriend, you know,
like men that I love and who's you know, men
(40:01):
that I love and who have a wonderful place in
my life. Like well, and it also misses the point
that argument, like, like I get that for sure, like
there are many male identities that are absolutely marginalized in
our society. Um, but that idea that it's bad because privilege,
(40:22):
I think is missing the point that, Um, this ironic
miss injury isn't about shaming individual people, but rather just
trying to dismantle or simply like, live within a patriarchal
society and still laugh at the end of the day.
Otherwise we will cry female tears. Yeah. I mean, as
(40:43):
as Amanda Hess points out in August, guys were not
actually bathing in male tears, were not individually trying to
go from house to house laughing at men and kicking
them in the shins and bathing in their tears. It
all a sarcastic and ridiculous response to actual patriarchy and misogyny. Yeah.
(41:07):
I mean, you have all sorts of sarcastic hashtags that
have popped up, um, not all men, which we absolutely
overuse on this podcast, but I stand by it. Um.
Also the hashtag masculinity so fragile um. And someone could
easily say, well, all right, it's a joke, but let's
flip the gender script. What if the joke was about women?
(41:31):
And the answer is that is not a joke. That
is patriarchy. But when we do talk about these mis
indry jokes, Amanda has talked to a co founder of
The Toast who is now um I believe she's a
contributing editor at The Establishment, Nicole Cliff, who is just
(41:51):
brilliant and if you don't follow her on Twitter, you
absolutely should. Um. Yeah, she and Nicole Cliff is the
reason I'm watching Pole Dark now and PBS. It's a
terrible show, but I can't stop watching it. I've never
been heard of it. We'll talk later, all right, So,
Has asked her, Um, you know about ironic miss injury
and the joke, because The Toasted has made a lot
(42:12):
of brilliant satire around that theme, and Cliff essentially said, listen,
if we over analyze this, it ruins the joke. And
half of the fun is just the fact that uh
m r as can't stand it, can't stand it makes
them real mad, and um, sometimes it can. It can
(42:34):
be fun to troll the trolls, and that it's it's
funny that it's pushing the idea of this vast underground
anti male conspiracy that we're all in like Dr Evil's Layer, underground,
like bathing ritualistically every morning in male tears, Like that's
funny because guys seriously really like it's all right? Well,
(42:54):
and Has also and I agree with this. She thinks
that it offers some relief from the intensity sometimes of
self identifying as a feminist, particularly on the Internet, and
also the critique that that can invite not from m
R a s but from other self identified feminists. UM
(43:17):
and Hess rights it can be freeing then to instead
adopt an ironic stance that allows women to identify against
what they are clearly not a cartoonish man hater bent
on total male destruction. Yeah, and heth friend uh just
Zimmerman who calls herself a professional misundrest, which is also
(43:39):
part of the joke. UM responded to this article in
which she was heavily quoted, and she also clarifies that like, Hey,
my ironic miscendry that I like make a living around
writing about it doesn't mean that I want to kill
all men. But my ironic miscendry is pointed at killing
the concept of math scalinity that breeds all of the
(44:03):
stuff that women have seen during the election, for instance,
I mean she was writing, but I would say that
everything she's saying is also really valid for us right now,
because you have people like Donald Trump, who sort of
helped open the door to even more online abuse, if
that's even possible. He's opened the locker room doors wide open,
(44:25):
and uh for listeners listening to this episode in the future.
We're recording this about what two weeks away from the elections,
so we are wound up tight, and you know, Zimmerman
and her piece does point out that like, hey, I
have all of these guy friends who think it's hilarious,
like they get it, and they consider themselves quote unquote
(44:47):
miss and drifts as well. It's it's almost a way
of separating like the cool guys who get it and
support what women and feminists are doing from the guys
who clearly, maybe along the mar a lines, don't get it,
and that she does want to reassure all of her
dude gro friends that she's not trying to kill any
of them. Share your thoughts with us listeners. Mom Stuff
(45:12):
at how stuff works dot com is our email address.
You can also tweet us at man Hater's note at
mom Stuff podcast, or messages on Facebook. And we've got
a couple of messages to share with you when we
come right back from a quick break. All right, I've
(45:34):
got one from Hillary In response to our episode Oprah
was Not Built in a Day, she says it was
a truly great podcast. I very much appreciate your willingness
to question the concept of failing fast, and to suggest
that this sort of failure is a luxury reserve for
those few who have a very large and soft safety net.
I've been a corporate lawyer from more than twenty years,
working first in a large national law firm dominated by
(45:56):
upper middle class white men. Now I serve as in
house counts and the only woman in the C suite
at a tech startup. In my view, fail fast is
a new business self help scheme that is as helpful
to personal happiness as the Secret is to true spiritual enlightenment.
As Oprah would say, Here's what I know for sure.
One those who fail fast don't fail, not in the
(46:20):
way that the populace would define failure. Failure does not
put their lives or livelihoods in peril. To be fair,
they have no real experience with failure. It is a
distant and theoretical concept that has no place in their
one percent rarefied reality. Like minimum wage and community college too.
For those who fail, quote unquote fail failure has no
(46:42):
tangible consequence. Losing money is a demerit, not a disaster.
They don't get the highest grade in the class or
the winningest score on the tennis court, losing money is
a version of humiliation, not real loss. After all, the
money lost wasn't made flipping burgers for fifty years at Wendy's.
It wasn't even theirs to lose. It was their corporate rations,
funds and debts and dollars. And that money is not gone,
(47:03):
not really. They can always get more, and not from
payday loans or the local loan shark, but from a
variety of sources, from friends and family. Yes, this is
a real term used in the financing community to bridge financing.
Another term of art put simply the fake failure. Rottie
won't worry about bus fair, they don't ride the bus,
(47:23):
they won't scrape together rent, they already own their house,
and they certainly won't go hungry unless it is part
of the latest cleans. Three. Failing fast is a turn
of phrase that literally turns bad choices into premeditated strategies.
In all of the deals I've done, from publicly traded
companies to startups that thrived and startups that died, I
have never seen any leader of a new company or
(47:46):
product line or tech offering have a clear, crisp and
consistent strategy against which failure could be identified, measured, and
quantified without a rubric for success. Failure is a fuzzy
and a morphous thought that can't be captured sept in retrospect.
Don't get me wrong, there is no need for rigid
rules and specific strategies in the world that I work in.
(48:07):
Businesses art not science, So the absence of scientific method
is appropriate and necessary. But for those who want to
make business into something magical and knowable only to a
small group of wizards, well you have to believe in
the Emerald City and dismiss the idea that a few
smart people made some educated guesses who were also lucky
and had timing on their sides. In other words, you
(48:28):
have to believe in alchemy and wizards and revisionist history.
She goes on to say, um that failure, true failure,
not quote unquote failure never comes fast. It is so
very slow. So she says, my favorite women of the
podcasting world, let me confirm your suspicions. Oprah is the
definition of hard one success. There is not a thing
(48:50):
about her or her history that smacks of failure. Oprah
just found her path through trial and error. Mostly she
did the bravest thing a person can do, she let
herself be known well. Thank you, Hillary for all of
your valuable perspective. I have a letter here from Kate,
also in response to our episode on failing, and she writes,
I wanted to start this out by saying thank you
(49:12):
thanks for your podcast in general, which often helps me
organize my thoughts about social and political issues and gives
me ton of cool things to talk about with friends
and family, and thank you specifically for this most recent
episode on failure. Like you, A lot of these ideas
in this episode hit me really close to home. For example,
I recently had a conversation with my family in which
(49:33):
they were encouraging me to apply for a promotion at work.
My response was that I wasn't sure I would get it,
so I wanted to wait until next year when it
was more certain. I never realized this was such a
common refrain among women. I've only been with a company
for half a year, but I'm doing the same work
as folks who are one and two levels above me.
Thanks to your podcast, I've decided to face my fears
(49:54):
and bring this up in my performance review next month
and asked to be promoted if I get it. You
two will be directly responsible for helping a woman in
tech move up the leadership ladder. Hooray you. If I
don't get it, at least I tried and it won't
have to be quite so scary the next time. Okate,
that is so so great to hear, and I wish
(50:15):
you all of the best luck in that performance review.
And I will tell you, as someone who who works
in digital media, um, the more the more data you
can bring to to buffer your case, the better uh
data you know, you know. But Kate, that's that's awesome.
I'm so happy to hear that. And listeners share your
(50:36):
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you can learn more about Missinjry, head on over to
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(50:57):
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