men, please don't hate yourselves

radicals are destroying boys. stop letting them.

I teach kids at my synagogue’s Hebrew school. Over the last year or so, one boy has told me that he hates many features of his body. He’s humiliated that he has to get braces, he hates what he perceives as his bad hairline, and he resents that he will probably end up shorter than the average man. He’s nine years old.

I don’t know where he’s getting any of this. He’s a sweet kid but spends a lot of time online. I wonder if he’s stumbled on the manosphere, many years before even becoming a man. I worry that, like many boys and young men I’ve observed, he hates himself already. He’s nine.

We all know that boys and men can suffer from eating disorders and body dysmorphia. Men’s eating disorders might conceal themselves as fasting and fitness but eating disorders they are nonetheless, regardless of the thin veil of health buzzwords. I worry this boy at Hebrew school is going to go down that path of destructive mirror-gazing.

Male self-hatred is all over the right-wing internet now, but dare we forget the more stereotypical self-hating male Pickmeisha of the Left? (Pickmeisho?) It seems like misandrists of the left-wing internet and “men are trash” pop feminists are at least more honest about what they want out of men: self-hatred, ego-annihilation. They aren’t posing misandry as empowerment. They’re blunt. I would know, I was on this team for years. I don’t really blame men for being self-loathing at this point. Misandry is coming at them from many angles and they have incentives to cave.

We don’t need to attempt a dick/clit-measuring contest over who’s more affected by what, as men or women, to condemn misandry. We can simply see the issue of radicals encouraging male self-hatred and push back. We can see how it’s affecting boys and men and we should not stop to question whether the harm is politically convenient to address. We should make misandry uncool on the Right and the Left, because right now all the cool, cruel kids are high on it.

I’ve played a small part in two deleterious social movements associated with two different wings of the culture wars: the alt-lite and misandrist extremist feminism. At the same time. They aren’t so different, after all, when it comes to their perspective on the male of the species. The Right can say, “Well that’s just the way men are. Naturally brutish, primitive. Uncontrollably lustful and aggressive. Boys will be boys.” And the misandrist extremist on the other “side” can say: “So true bestie! All men are like that. You should hate them for it.” Men on the Right are vulnerable to self-hatred, usually of the manosophere kind, not the Pickmeisho kind, but still — internalised misandry. I was there for it, in whichever sense one might intend that phrase.

It guts me that one or another of my old, anonymous posts might be lurking in some boy’s mind, having seen it shared around belatedly. Or that it lives rent-free in a man’s mind years later. But I can’t reverse any of what’s happened on either side, whether nu-radical-feminist misandry or the far right, let alone what’s happened to individual men or boys because of them. Because, to a small extent, of me.

I’m writing this because I’m mad that this boy I’ve taught is learning, somewhere, that he should be humiliated by his body, and because I can’t do anything about it, and I suspect his parents can’t either. Whoever has their claws in him, they’re going to be hard to extract. It’s hard to shake self-hatred and excessive self-consciousness about one’s body. I never made misandrist content aimed at kids but I was part of the online world of feminist man-haters and right-wingers who have led us to wherever we are now, and that contributes to my anger, because I know firsthand that misandry is not necessarily coming from a place of mental wellbeing. We are letting deranged people’s ideology destroy boys.

I love men, now. Please don’t hate yourselves because of misandry among online feminists or because of the thinly veiled misandry of the manosphere. Most women, including most feminists, don’t want you to hate yourself. The world would be worse for it. If you aren’t motivated to ditch self-hatred on your own behalf, think about the boys in their single-digit years who absorb the messages they pick up, often from other men, about their worth.

I used to be annoyed that, relative to the rest of my small audience, the audience for my anti-misandry content is almost always largest. However, I think there just isn’t much anti-misandrist content coming from anyone who isn’t throwing women under the bus. Hierarchy should not be necessary for self-esteem. I think many of us know this, instinctively. Misogynist anti-misandrist content makes us feel gross, and rightly so. I hope I am doing some small service to the world I once helped make worse for boys.