Pauline Harmange hasst Männer
Gewalttätig, egoistisch, faul - so sind sie, die Männer. Jedenfalls findet das Pauline Harmange in ihrem Essay "Ich hasse Männer". In Frankreich haben die deutlichen Worte der 25-Jährigen zu einem Aufschrei geführt.
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Violent, selfish, lazy - that's how they are, men. At least that's what Pauline Harmange thinks in her essay "I hate men". In France, the clear words of the 25-year-old caused an outcry.
The boys hate the girls and the girls hate the boys. That was how it was in the schoolyard. That there was of course not really hated, but at best circled skeptically - for free. You grow into gender roles. This is dangerous because it restricts everyone's freedom of development. And it's dangerous because years later the boys have become men who at times really hate women. Misogyny has many facets with different risk potential. The spectrum of violence ranges from cyberbullying to murder. The term hatred of men, on the other hand, conjures up the fairy tale of joyless emancipation, but is rarely found in reports relevant to criminal law.
The French author Pauline Harmange is preparing to make the hatred of men socially acceptable, at least the subject of the debate about equality. "I hate men" is the title of her essay, which has now also been published in German. In it, Harmange recommends countering misogyny with misandry, i.e. hating women and men. With a clear conscience, precisely because one cannot be compared with the other. Action, reaction: Hatred of men according to Harmange means resistance. In her home country, France, she started a heated debate. Shortly after publication, an advisor from the Ministry of Equality threatened to take legal action against the publisher. That only made Harmange's essay even more popular. So why the fuss?
Harmange describes the male species as violent, selfish, lazy and cowardly. Already clear, not all men are like that. Perhaps it is also just secondary to permanently protect oneself against suspicion of generalization in advance obedience. After all, women should also laugh when someone has not maneuvered the car properly into the parking space. You don't have to feel directly addressed, they say. If the game is played the other way around, it borders on high treason. Hate men may sound radical at first, and Harmange's theses can certainly be deconstructed in their polemics. But she has one point: Perhaps feminist argumentation needs to be phrased less gently in places.
Advocacy of non-men
You just have to imagine how much energy is lost in formulating your own attitude and not only thinking about the affront directly, but averting it preventively. Harmange quite rightly observes a tendency within the feminist discourse to hang out with men to be on the safe side and to woo them as allies, emphasizing their own humor and being nice. In fact, this tactic often leads to a dead end.Of course, the clout would be different if all genders were united in the struggle for equality. But that seems rather utopian. It is worth conducting a survey among self-proclaimed progressive gentlemen in your circle of friends: Who would be willing, let's say six months, to take parental leave - and not just a few overlapping weeks? Or who would take the partner's last name? And even those who are enthusiastic about such points: Don't they maybe need a beer in bed after every dishwasher? Or at least a high five? Almost worse than men who openly carry their misogyne attitude in front of them are those specimens who, above all, want to be assured that they, yes, precisely them, are on the right side of the story.
In Harmange's sense, hatred of men can simply mean not including men in your own considerations from the outset. "Misandrie scares men because it signals to them that they have to earn our attention first," she writes. It demands more respect and effort from them in the equality debate. Just because a discourse dispenses with a specific mode of addressing men, that does not mean that they are not allowed to gather behind the political goals of the actors. Harmange writes that she understands misandry as a negative feeling in relation to the entirety of the supposedly stronger sex. Perhaps one can initially interpret this as a healthy distrust of a group of people from whom, according to experience, cannot be expected consistently assert the interests of non-men. Hatred of men is therefore a pure precautionary measure.
Not Ingo or Jürgen
"I notice that behind every man who at least partially reflects his male privilege, there are several women who have worked hard to open his eyes," writes Harmange. Only hardly anyone admitted that. You can get angry for a moment if you realize that women - often in addition to their job - not only do the household chores, do most of the care work in family and friends and take on the mental load for their environment right away, but also devotedly push the man into catharsis. She runs up to top performance, he is completely enough in his mediocrity. Can this lead to an accusation against individual men? Hardly likely. But it's also about systemic criticism of the patriarchy and not about Ingo or Jürgen."Not liking men means embodying anger that goes beyond individual sensitivities; it means provoking confrontations," says Harmange. And of course that is exactly what the author does with the title of her essay. But it reads much more balanced than the headline suggests. Harmange's hatred of men works as a critical practice, an antidote to passivity. Her essay sensitizes for wasted energies and mobilizes for sisterhood and lived men-free spaces to think, to organize or just to be.
Whether hatred towards men in reverse leads to love for women, as Harmange suggests, can and should be debated. You don't have to unite behind the concept of misandry, but you can use it as a vehicle for deconstructing the current state. What can it look like, the political masses for whom men may not play a role at all at first? "I hate men" is Harmange's invitation to think old debates from a new perspective.
