I recently came across an article with a rather alarming headline:

“Nearly One in Five Australian Men Say Violence Against Feminism Is Legitimate, Study Finds.”

That certainly got my attention. Nearly 20 percent of Australian men think violence against feminism is legitimate? That’s a lot of men. So I decided to look at the study. I’m glad I did.

The research comes from the University of Melbourne and was published in 2024. The researchers surveyed 1,020 Australians about misogyny, racism, and violent extremism. The 19.4 percent figure is real. But when you look at the question that produced it, things start getting interesting.

The men weren’t asked:

“Do you believe violence against feminists is legitimate?”

They weren’t asked:

“Is it acceptable to physically attack feminists?”

They were given this statement:

“Feminism is damaging to our society and should be resisted by force if necessary.”

That is what produced the 19.4 percent. Do you see the problem? There are several things going on in that one sentence. First, it says feminism is damaging to society. That’s one question all by itself. Then it says feminism should be resisted “by force.” What does force mean? Physical violence? Political force? Legal force? Economic force? Civil disobedience? We don’t know. And then come the two little words that really caught my attention:

“if necessary.”

What does that mean? Those words ask the respondent to imagine circumstances in which force might become necessary. Most people believe there are circumstances in which force is justified. Self-defense is an obvious example. Protecting another person is another. Resisting tyranny might be another. But none of that is explored. Instead, agreement with this rather strange question eventually becomes:

“Nearly One in Five Australian Men Say Violence Against Feminism Is Legitimate.”

That’s quite a journey.

​Here’s a screenshot of the questions they used to determine if violent extremism existed and to what degree. Can you find the question(s) that did not have the word violence in any form in them? Can you find the question(s) that concluded by saying “if necessary?” They abbreviate violent extremism with “VE.” Here’s a clue….look at the last question very carefully and then compare.

Where’s Waldo?

 

Can you see how they have sculpted things? Which got the highest scores? The one without the word violence and justified by saying “when necessary.” Then you make claims, even in your own paper, the same one that relied on that questionable question that​:

 

Now they call it anti-feminist violent extremism! No need to ask the question with the word violence in it? Nope.

Then I Looked at the Other Questions

This is where things became even more interesting. The study includes a table with the heading:“Frequency of Respondents Agreeing with Permissibility of Violence Against Women.”

Okay. If we are going to measure whether people think violence against women is permissible, what should we ask? Fortunately, the researchers give us a couple of good examples. One question says:

“A male partner would be entitled to use physical force (pushing, slapping, punching, kicking, choking) if his female partner argues with him, or refuses to obey him.”

That’s pretty clear. No ambiguity there. Do you think a man is entitled to push, slap, punch, kick, or choke his female partner because she argues with him or refuses to obey him? 5.5 percent of the men agreed. Another question asks whether a father or brother is entitled to use physical force or violence against a daughter or sister for bringing dishonor on the family. Again, very clear. 4.5 percent of the men agreed. Those are troubling numbers. I would prefer they were zero. But notice what happens when the researchers ask clear questions about whether violence against women is actually permissible. We get 5.5 percent. We get 4.5 percent. Now look at some of the questions that produced the big numbers.

Is This Really a Question About Violence?

Here’s one:

“Women often make sexual assault accusations as a way of getting back at men.”

48.6 percent of the men agreed. Nearly half! But wait a minute. What does that question have to do with whether violence against women is permissible? A man could believe that false sexual assault accusations are common and at the same time believe that violence against women is absolutely wrong. Whether his belief about false accusations is correct is another question. We can investigate that. But believing something about false accusations does not mean you approve of violence. Here’s another:

“Women going through custody battles often make up or exaggerate claims of domestic violence in order to improve their case.”

51.2 percent of the men agreed. There’s the biggest number on the page. But again, where is the approval of violence? This is a question about whether women sometimes make false or exaggerated claims during custody disputes. You can think that belief is right. You can think it’s wrong. But it still isn’t a question about whether hitting women is okay. Yet there it sits under the heading:

“Permissibility of Violence Against Women.”

How did we get there?

Another Curious Question

Then there is this one:“Sometimes a woman can make a man so angry that he hits her when he didn’t mean to.”

33.5 percent of men agreed. But what exactly are they agreeing with? That hitting her is justified? The question doesn’t say that. It asks whether someone can become so angry that he does something he hadn’t intended to do. Surely there is a difference between explaining how something happened and saying that it was acceptable. Interestingly, 21.7 percent of women agreed with this statement too. Are those women endorsing violence against women? Maybe. But the question doesn’t tell us. That’s the problem.

Look at the Pattern

This is what really struck me. The questions that explicitly ask whether men are entitled to physically assault women produce relatively low numbers: 5.5 percent. 4.5 percent. But questions about false accusations, custody battles, anger, and responsibility produce numbers of: 33 percent. 37 percent. 49 percent. 51 percent. And which numbers do you suppose make the story look more frightening? This is where I started thinking about the phrase sculpting the narrative. You begin with the raw material—the answers people actually gave. Then you decide what those answers mean. A belief that women sometimes make retaliatory sexual assault accusations becomes an attitude about violence against women. A belief that domestic violence allegations may be exaggerated during custody battles becomes an attitude about violence against women. Agreement that feminism should be resisted “by force if necessary” becomes support for violent anti-feminist extremism. And eventually a newspaper headline tells us: Nearly one in five Australian men says violence against feminism is legitimate. But that isn’t what the men were asked.

Why Does This Matter?

Violence against women is a serious subject. That’s exactly why the research needs to be good. If you want to know whether men approve of violence against women, ask them. The researchers clearly knew how to do this. Their own questionnaire proves it. Ask: Is a man entitled to hit a woman under these circumstances? They did. And they got 5.5 percent. Ask: Is a father or brother entitled to use violence against a daughter or sister under these circumstances? They did. And they got 4.5 percent. Those are legitimate findings. But if you ask men whether women make false accusations and then treat their answers as evidence of the permissibility of violence against women, you are measuring something else. And shouldn’t PhD researchers know the difference?

​I am aware that this is tough to believe so here is a screen shot from the research that shows the questions and the responses. Note that their highest responses were the ones that had little to do with violence against women.

 

​
From Survey Answer to Extremism

There is another step in all of this that bothers me. The study doesn’t stop with attitudes toward women. It connects these attitudes with violent extremism. The researchers report that anti-feminist violent extremism was the most prevalent form of violent extremism they measured. That sounds frightening. But remember the question that helped establish it:

“Feminism is damaging to our society and should be resisted by force if necessary.”

That’s it. Imagine changing the subject: “Racism is damaging to our society and should be resisted by force if necessary.” How many people would agree? Probably quite a few. Would we then conclude that those people support violent extremism? What about: “Nazism is damaging to our society and should be resisted by force if necessary.” Would agreement make you a violent extremist? Suddenly the problem becomes easier to see. The wording matters.

And Then the Media Gets Hold of It

By the time the research reached the media article I first read about this, most of these qualifications had disappeared. “Force if necessary” became violence. Agreement with a complicated hypothetical statement became believing violence is legitimate. An association between attitudes became a radicalization pathway.

​The researcher’s own university offered this headline:

 

​

​or this one from the Australian

 

​with pictures like this:

 

​Imagine being a new reader of this article. People tend to put their trust in the media and even more trust in “research.” How could they come away from this article with anything but the sense that a surprisingly large number of men are dangerous to women and to feminism? And yet when you go back and look at the actual questions, that isn’t what the research established. That’s how a narrative gets sculpted.​
​​
​The​ original story expanded to teenage boys, Andrew Tate, rape, women being killed, terrorism, and national security. That’s quite a sculpture. And somewhere underneath all of it are the actual survey questions. I don’t know the motives of these researchers, and I don’t need to. I’m interested in something much simpler. Did the questions measure what the researchers say they measured? When I look at this study, I have serious doubts. And perhaps the most revealing evidence comes from the researchers themselves. When they asked men directly whether a male partner was entitled to push, slap, punch, kick or choke a woman because she argued with him or refused to obey him, 94.5 percent did not agree. That seems like an important finding. Funny how that didn’t make the headline.

A while back, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Gabbi Wolfe, a therapist who specializes in male psychology. After our conversation, she read the second edition of The Way Men Heal and recently sent me this video.

I was blown away.

What makes this video so powerful is that Gabbi doesn’t simply tell us how men grieve and heal. She tells us a story.

And it’s a remarkable story—one that draws you in, takes a turn you probably won’t see coming, and, before you quite realize what’s happening, gets under your skin.

Through the life of one man, Gabbi shows us grief expressed not primarily through words, but through action. She shows us healing through challenge and purpose, and the extraordinary power of something very simple: men standing shoulder-to-shoulder with other men.

She also weaves some of my work into the story, including an excerpt from our interview and the metaphor from Swallowed by a Snake.

I think she did a remarkable job. But more importantly, she helps us see something about men that is very easy to miss when we look for grief only in tears and words.

This one stayed with me. I think it may stay with you, too.

I hope you’ll take the time to watch it.

My friend Fred Hayward wrote to me and asked if I had a list of misandrist books. He had seen one and wondered what I might know about it. I told him I didn’t have a list and couldn’t remember ever seeing one.

But I took Fred’s idea and went to ChatGPT and asked it to give me a list of misandrist books. It came back with numerous books and some ideas about the best way to present the material. It suggested using four categories, beginning with the most explicit and extreme anti-male material and moving toward books where the case for misandry was less clear.

It came up with 23 books and I asked it to write up its findings. This post is basically that write-up, followed by a conclusion I asked it to write. I didn’t tell it what conclusion to reach or how I wanted the books characterized. I did some editing along the way, and I gathered the book covers and made the main image.

I am familiar with many of the books it mentioned, but not all of them. I will be curious to hear from anyone who has read these books about how accurate the descriptions are. The books I am familiar with are portrayed accurately.

Here’s what GPT said:

Category 1 — Explicit Hatred, Elimination, Population Reduction, or Violence

 

These are the hardest examples to explain away as simply “criticism of patriarchy.” Here the hostility is not something we need to read between the lines to find. Men themselves—or the continued existence of men in anything approaching their present numbers—become the target.

 

SCUM Manifesto — Valerie Solanas (1967). This is probably the clearest example in the entire collection. Solanas doesn’t simply criticize male behavior or male-dominated institutions. She portrays the male himself as a biological mistake: an incomplete and defective female. From there, the manifesto launches into a sweeping indictment of men as emotionally crippled, egocentric, incapable of genuine empathy, and responsible for many of society’s evils.

And Solanas takes the argument much further than contempt. SCUM Manifesto envisions eliminating the male sex itself. That makes this qualitatively different from a book arguing that men possess unfair advantages or behave badly. Imagine a widely published manifesto describing women as biologically defective creatures and envisioning a future in which the female sex was eliminated. Would anyone hesitate to describe that as misogyny?

 

“The Future—If There Is One—Is Female” — Sally Miller Gearhart (1981/1982). Gearhart’s piece is an essay rather than a standalone book and was subsequently published in the anthology Reweaving the Web of Life: Feminism and Nonviolence. But it belongs in this collection because of the extraordinary nature of its proposal.

Gearhart argued that the proportion of males in the human population should be reduced to approximately 10 percent. This was not simply a prediction that technological change might eventually produce such a population. It was presented as part of a feminist vision for the future.

Think for a moment about what that means. Men currently constitute roughly half of humanity. If the female population remained roughly constant, reducing males to just 10 percent of humanity would mean a reduction of nearly 90 percent in the male population. If a male writer proposed that women should constitute only 10 percent of humanity, would we regard that merely as an eccentric political theory? Or would we recognize something profoundly disturbing in the willingness to imagine an entire sex reduced to a tiny reproductive minority?

 

I Hate Men — Pauline Harmange (2020). The title sounds as though it might simply be designed to provoke. But hatred of men is actually part of Harmange’s argument. She explicitly discusses misandry and attempts to rehabilitate it as a legitimate response to women’s experiences with men.

That distinction matters. This isn’t merely a book called I Hate Men whose contents turn out to be a nuanced argument against sexism. Harmange asks readers to consider whether women might actually benefit from disliking men and distancing themselves from them. Publishers Weekly summarized the book as arguing that misandry can be “healthy and joyful.”

Again, reverse the sexes. Imagine a contemporary book titled I Hate Women explaining why misogyny might be healthy, liberating, and joyful for men. Would a major publisher touch it? Would reviewers treat hatred of women as an interesting intellectual position?

 

The Seven Necessary Sins for Women and Girls — Mona Eltahawy (2019). Eltahawy is a more complicated case and should be represented carefully. Her book advocates seven qualities she believes women and girls need in resisting patriarchy, and one of those qualities is violence.

Most strikingly, Eltahawy imagines a scenario in which women begin systematically killing men until men are forced to negotiate with them. She presents this as a thought experiment rather than a literal program for exterminating men. That distinction matters, and we should make it.

But the thought experiment itself also matters. An author can use fantasy, satire, or hypothetical scenarios and still reveal something about which forms of rhetoric our culture is prepared to tolerate. Imagine a male author inviting readers to contemplate men systematically killing women until feminists agreed to negotiate. Calling it a “thought experiment” would hardly end the discussion.

For that reason, I would describe this as violent anti-male rhetoric rather than a literal proposal to kill men. That is both stronger and more accurate than exaggerating what Eltahawy actually claims.

 

Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist — Robin Morgan (1977). Morgan is particularly significant because she was not an obscure writer operating at the fringes of feminism. She was an important figure in the second-wave women’s movement and later became an editor of Ms. magazine.

The book chronicles Morgan’s development as a feminist activist and contains rhetoric about men and “man-hating” that deserves examination in its historical context. What makes material like this significant isn’t simply that an angry individual woman expressed hostility toward men. People of both sexes say ugly things. The more interesting question is how openly hostile ideas about men could exist within an influential political and intellectual movement without carrying the stigma that comparable statements about women would carry.

That question will recur throughout this collection.

Category 2 — Female Superiority / Male Inferiority

 

These works don’t necessarily advocate harming men, but they make arguments that would almost certainly be described as sexist if the sexes were reversed.

 

1The Natural Superiority of Women — Ashley Montagu (1953). Explicitly argues for women’s natural superiority. A publisher’s description of an earlier edition summarized its thesis as showing that “the superiority of women is a biological fact.”

 

The First Sex — Elizabeth Gould Davis (1971). Directly asks whether women are superior to men and argues toward precisely that conclusion. The publisher describes women being “the first sex” as the book’s “inescapable conclusion.”

 

Gyn/Ecology: The Metaethics of Radical Feminism — Mary Daly (1978). Develops an extraordinarily sweeping critique of male-created culture, religion, medicine, and language. Daly’s vocabulary includes concepts such as “phallocracy” and male-centered systems as destructive forces against women.

 

Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy — Mary Daly (1984). Continues Daly’s framework, contrasting female liberation with what she calls “Cockocracy,” the “Phallic State,” and a male “sadosociety.” That terminology comes even from the bibliographic description of the book.

 

Beyond God the Father — Mary Daly (1973). Presents male-centered religion and the male conception of God as expressions of patriarchal domination. This one is considerably less explicitly anti-male than Pure Lust or Gyn/Ecology, so I would place it lower on the severity scale.

Mary Daly may deserve a section of her own in a serious treatment of this subject. Her work doesn’t merely criticize particular male institutions; she develops an entire vocabulary in which male civilization is repeatedly associated with domination, pathology, and violence.

Category 3 — Men Collectively Portrayed as an Oppressor or Threat Class

 

Here I would stop using the uncomplicated label “hate literature.” These books are important because of their collective attribution of guilt, danger, or domination to males, rather than because they literally tell readers to hate men.

 

Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape — Susan Brownmiller (1975). Famously characterized rape as a process through which “all men keep all women” in fear. Whatever one’s view of the rest of this enormously influential book, that is an extraordinarily sweeping attribution to an entire sex.

 

Sexual Politics — Kate Millett (1970). One of second-wave feminism’s foundational texts. It interprets sex relations through a political structure in which men constitute the dominant class and women the subordinated class.

 

Pornography: Men Possessing Women — Andrea Dworkin (1981). Dworkin treats pornography as an expression of a much wider system of male domination, linking male sexual power with ownership, terror, and the subordination of women.

 

Intercourse — Andrea Dworkin (1987). Presents heterosexual intercourse within a structure of profound sexual inequality and domination. Importantly, though, the common assertion that Dworkin literally wrote “all sex is rape” is false; Dworkin herself explicitly denied saying that.

 

Woman Hating — Andrea Dworkin (1974). Describes male dominance as the fundamental political and cultural reality that must be abolished. Her introduction explicitly calls ending male dominance a revolutionary commitment.

 

The War Against Women — Marilyn French (1992). Perhaps one of the strongest examples in this category. The publisher describes French’s thesis as a male-dominated global society with an underlying aim of “destroying, subjugating, or mutilating women.”

 

The Dialectic of Sex — Shulamith Firestone (1970). Treats the biological sex distinction and reproductive family as the foundation of a sex-class system. Firestone proposes eliminating sex-class distinctions through radical changes including artificial reproduction. That is revolutionary gender theory, though not an argument for killing men, an important distinction.

 

The Demon Lover: On the Sexuality of Terrorism — Robin Morgan (1989). Links militarism, terrorism, patriarchy, and masculine systems of domination. I would include it as an example of the broader tendency to interpret large forms of human violence through masculinity.

Category 4 — Men as Privileged, Entitled, Dangerous, Defective, or Socially Problematic

 

These are substantially weaker candidates for the word misandrist, but they illustrate how negative generalizations about men became normalized in more mainstream literature.

 

Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women — Kate Manne (2020). Makes “male entitlement” a broad explanatory framework for phenomena ranging from interpersonal behavior to mass shootings and politics. Manne describes it as a pervasive social problem rather than merely the behavior of a few men.

 

Boys Will Be Boys: Power, Patriarchy and Toxic Masculinity — Clementine Ford (2018). Begins with boys themselves and treats their socialization through the framework of patriarchy and toxic masculinity. The publisher frames its central question as how to raise a son “to respect women.”

 

Men Explain Things to Me — Rebecca Solnit (2014). Helped inspire the concept of “mansplaining” and uses interactions with men to examine assumptions of male authority and women’s silencing. I would not call this a book advocating hatred of men, however; even Solnit has distanced herself from the term mansplaining.

 

Are Men Necessary? When Sexes Collide — Maureen Dowd (2005). The title plays deliberately with male dispensability, but the actual work is humorous social commentary about gender relations rather than a serious argument that men should disappear.

 

The End of Men: And the Rise of Women — Hanna Rosin (2012). Uses male decline and female advancement as its organizing conceit. But this really should not be represented as a hatred-of-men book; the book is socioeconomic reportage, and Rosin’s argument was about the decline of traditional male economic dominance.

Conclusion

What Would We Call These Books If the Sexes Were Reversed?

Looking at these books together leaves me with a very simple question: What would we call them if the sexes were reversed?

Imagine books titled I Hate Women, The Natural Superiority of Men, Are Women Necessary?, or The End of Women. Imagine a male writer proposing that women should make up only 10 percent of the population. Imagine another imagining women being killed until they agreed to negotiate. Imagine an entire body of literature describing women collectively as dangerous, defective, oppressive, entitled, or responsible for the world’s violence.

Would we have trouble finding a word for it?

I don’t think we would.

Now, these books are not all the same. That is important. SCUM Manifesto is vastly more extreme than Men Explain Things to Me. Some openly express hostility toward men. Others portray men collectively as an oppressor class. Still others simply use male privilege, entitlement, toxicity, or dominance as the lens through which they interpret relations between the sexes.

But when you stand back and look at them together, a pattern emerges.

Men can be described in ways that would immediately set off alarm bells if directed toward almost any other group. Male biology can be disparaged. Male sexuality can be treated as threatening. Men can be described collectively as oppressors. Hatred of men can even be defended as healthy or liberating. And proposals that would sound horrifying with the sexes reversed can sometimes be treated as provocative feminist thought.

Perhaps the most interesting question isn’t whether every book on this list deserves the label misandrist. Clearly they don’t.

The more interesting question is this: Why are we so reluctant to use that word at all?

We have become extremely sensitive to language that demeans women. I think that is a good thing. Hatred and dehumanization shouldn’t be encouraged.

But shouldn’t men receive the same consideration?

The book covers shown here are real. The words are real. The authors are real. And many of these works came not from obscure corners of the internet but from established writers, publishers, academics, and political movements.

Maybe the lesson isn’t that we should become less concerned about misogyny.

Maybe the lesson is that we should become equally concerned about misandry.