Now that he has successfully defended his thesis, a good friend of mine is scurrying to make final revisions so that his advisor can sign off on it.  Although considerations of race and gender seem to be conspicuously irrelevant to his project—a relatively radical exposition of the Genesis creation accounts in which he argues against the traditional Christian idea of creation ex nihilo—this didn’t stop his advisor and “reader” from castigating him for failing to address the “misogyny” informing orthodox interpretations of the Bible (and, presumably, its very composition?). 

There is one scholar specifically who they seek to thrust upon him, and while I can’t recall the exact argument for her position that my friend relayed to me, I immediately recognized that it is but a variant on precisely the same line of reasoning that feminist scholars generally have been relying upon for as long as they have been in existence. 

The argument usually first turns on a word or series of words that supposedly reveals a “sexist” bias against women.  Whether the terms are those of a text the gender-neutral or feminine affirming meaning(s) of which are said to have been obscured by subsequent translations, or whether they are the vocabulary of spoken discourse, the point is always the same: the language that is inseparable from the very life of our civilization is infected with “sexism.”  And since our language is irredeemably “misogynistic,” so the logic runs, the same must be true of the civilization with which it is bound. 

This argument, though, is invariably supplemented by another.  To strengthen their conclusion that our civilization is rife with “misogyny,” not only do feminists examine our language, they also allude to contemporary statistics that reveal either an “underrepresentation” of women in the most lucrative and prestigious of professions or lower pay for those women who work in the same professions as their more handsomely compensated male counterparts.

Neither the manipulability of her logic nor the leftist’s obliviousness to this fact ceases to amaze me.  If not for being forever surrounded by colleagues whose thought is, for all intents and purposes, identical to her own, our leftist would (we should hope) recognize as readily as she recognizes the nose on her face that the arguments from language and statistics that she makes to reveal the “misogyny” of Western civilization can just as readily be employed to disclose its “misandry,” its hatred or “sexism” toward men.

As my friend pointed out, if the masculine terms used to describe God in the Bible are proof of its hostility toward women, then the masculine terms in which it characterizes Satan must be proof of its hostility toward men.  Yet we can go further: if the Bible is a piece of “misogyny,” then why is Wisdom, which Christians later identified with God, feminine?  The name of “Judas” has for 2000 years been synonymous with unspeakable treachery throughout Christendom; so horrible is it that in spite of having once been fairly common, it has been millennia since any parent in the Western world thought to curse his child with it.  Indeed, Judas, the apostle who betrayed Christ, is the Villain Extraordinaire in the Western imagination, and has been for thousands of years.  Why, we may ask, would the authors of a book (or collection of books) allegedly shot through with “misogyny” identify, not women, but men and male figures as the worst of monsters? Why would it not infrequently portray women as being the most loyal servants of God?

As for statistics, the task of demonstrating “misandry” or “anti-male ‘sexism’” is unrivaled for the ease with which it can be performed.  The feminist’s argument from numbers to substantiate the pervasiveness of “structural sexism” against women admittedly has an air of plausibility, but this is only because the statistics to which she alludes are divested of any and all context.  Numbers aren’t self-interpreting, and to paraphrase Hume, even the most patently erroneous theories can be made to appear plausible if they are sufficiently abstract.

Yet the numbers, or the number that we choose to select for our purposes, show that women, far from constituting an “oppressed” gender, are quite “privileged” relative to their male counterparts.  To put it another way, it would seem that it is men who are the victims of gender “oppression.” 

The most dangerous occupations like lumberjacking and coal mining consist solely of men, and men continue to constitute the front line in the slightly less perilous areas of fire fighting, law enforcement, and the military combat.  The high school graduation and college attendance rates of males are lower than those of their females, while their incarceration rate is exorbitantly higher, and the rate at which women fall prey to violent crime is but a fraction of that at which men are victimized. 

Most damning for the case for “misogyny” is the stone-cold fact that in the United States, men do not live as long as women. 

Of course, things are otherwise for women outside of the West—that is to say, among the world’s “people of color.”  But, though it should come as no surprise, the wrath of the feminist is reserved solely for men of European descent, a consideration that decisively establishes that her moral character is as weak as her logic.

Jack Kerwick, Ph.D.