So I phoned a friend from the past. She is the head of certain areas in the field of women.

I couldn’t believe how much she had changed. She told me straight, “All men are rapists”.

She worked hard for her place and she studied 20 years. She was previously, prior to head of DV, a well respected counsellor helping families cope with death through the women’s hospital. She was also a counsellor for women and addiction.

It took me some time to snap her out of her way and she now visits the men who are the perpetrators in prison and tells of their horrid pasts. She even asks if women can complain about other high up feminists.

The thing is this: These women are surrounded by female victims all day and night long. They have barriers around them that keep them from the balanced world. They only know what they deal with.

They are isolated to only feminist thinking, only feminist study, only feminist research and only feminist work with women who are victims.

The brain and heart can only take so much. It makes a lot of sense to expect these women to hate men.

What’s it to you, Tom?

I think that’s a very, very odd question to ask, Ampersand. When transwomen protest against the way the group they belong to is traduced on “Women’s Space” do you ask them the same question: “What’s it to you?” I’d give the same answer that they’d give.

Hate propaganda” seems like a prejudicial term; it implies conscious conspiracies, a long-range, organized campaign, etc

“Propaganda” is merely what is presented for public consumption with the intention of affecting the public’s opinion in a particular way – without regard to objectivity or fairness. I contend that what Heart writes about men (and others groups she dislikes) falls into that category.

The reason that I brought in the “propaganda” element was that whereas it is difficult to prove what somebody or other is feeling it is relatively easy to discover what somebody is actually doing. And I did not suggest that Heart’s blog is exclusively given over to anti-male propaganda – merely that anti-male propaganda is one of its purposes. As you know, she has a series of posts, featuring awful things that men have done to women, entitled “Male Terrorism”, the obvious implication of which is that heterosexual rape, wife battery and so on are part of an organized campaign to subjugate women as a class. That is far too explicit and consistent a phenomenon to be the effect of a subconscious impulse. It’s the result of a policy: “men are to be presented in their worst light and by their worst examples”.

Heart has said she’s been seriously abused by multiple ex-husbands; if I went through that, maybe I wouldn’t like or trust men, either

Well, I’ve been beaten up several times in my life: each time, as it happens, by Arabs (it happened when I was living in a poor quarter of Montpellier). Which, naturally, would be no excuse for anti-Arab prejudice on my part – and no excuse for you to let such prejudice go unchallenged if you came across it.

It’s also untrue that Heart’s anti-male propaganda (I don’t think, by the way, that she hates men in real life) stems immediately from her bad experiences at the hands of violent males. Its immediate origin lies in her conversion to feminism, and the conviction that one way for a novice to achieve prominence amongst online feminists was to take as anti-male a stance as her stance had been anti-secular when she was a preacher.

I don’t understand your hunger to condemn her

I haven’t condemned her, merely pointed out, in response to your question “Do Feminists Hate Women?”, that – leaving their experienced emotions aside, because we have no access to them – that there are feminists important in that corner of the internet where we both, Ampersand, spend quite a bit of our time, who quite definitely promote the hatred of men. If I hadn’t named names, I’m quite sure you would have asked me to stop generalizing and produce some examples of feminists involved in hate prop. I merely pre-empted the request.

The feminist blogosphere is divided into a bunch of sometimes overlapping spheres that often ignore each other. The radical feminist blogosphere isn’t the same as the mainstream feminist blogosphere isn’t the same as the sex-positive feminist blogosphere. Heart’s blog is very important within her own sphere, but how many Feministing readers read it?

I really dislike the line of attack your set-up is suggesting, which is that the feminist blogosphere in general should be condemned for failing to condemn Heart/Twisty along the lines you prefer. It just seems like a sort of guilt by association.

I just glanced at her blog. The vast majority of the posts on her front page aren’t about men. They’re about women. And they’re often about important subjects, that people should be blogging about.

I don’t understand your hunger to condemn her, or to see other feminists condemn her. What’s it to you, Tom?

Does anybody want to take me up on this?

So I’m not the only one that has noticed this?

Does anyone want to deny my assertion that there are important, well-recognized feminists in blogland who hate men – and that they have lost little or no credibility amongst online feminists in consequence?

I don’t know what the goals for this blog are. Being a place for comments that don’t fit in at “Alas” is one purpose of it, but I’m open to seeing what else develops.

I don’t intend for the comments here to be a free-for-all, however; I’ll be deleting comments that seem to me to lack interest (due to incivility or stupidity) whenever it seems appropriate.

Of course, I’m not suggesting that either of these two bloggers admits to misandrist propaganda, just as I’m sure that Byrdeye doesn’t admit to being an antisemite. Hate propaganda rarely involves a confession of hatred on the part of the propagandist – in fact such a confession would give the game away.

The usual procedure is to present the people to be pilloried in the worst possible light, producing a plethora of examples of their bad behaviour, always associating that bad behaviour with their group membership, and generally equating a whole category: a race, a nationality, a sex, with the worst individuals belonging to it. Counter-examples are disallowed and ignored, and if by chance some member of the to-be-pilloried group (it might be a relative of the propagandist, for example) is found to be praiseworthy for whatever reason, then his/her good actions are never to be associated with group membership.

Does anybody want to take me up on this?

p.s. Ampersand, do you have any ambitions for this blog, or is it just a “bin” for comments considered too inflammatory for “Alas”?