Reddit reviews The myth of the monstrous male, and other feminist fables
We found 2 Reddit comments about The myth of the monstrous male, and other feminist fables. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Used Book in Good Condition
OP is highlighting a tried-and-true tactic to bias opinions. Claiming this-trait-we-like is genetic, whereas this-trait-we-don't-like is learned.
Feminism successfully used this tactic to cast positive-female and negative-male traits as innate (nature), and cast negative-female and positive-male traits as learned (nurture).
John Gordon in his book "The Myth of the Monstrous Male" discusses this tactic and presents the following illustration.
Create four lists of adjectives to describe: (1) positive male traits, (2) negative male traits, (3) positive female traits, and (4) negative female traits. Gordon provides the following:
Feminism claims that M+ and F- are learned, whereas M- and F+ are innate. This is the source of bullshit like "if women ran the world, there would be no wars." Or "If women ran wall-street, we could have avoided our current economic meltdown".
If a man does something good, it's because some woman nurtured him well. If a man does something bad, it's because men are innately evil.
A lot of people believe this shit.
I'll quote Gordon further:
> ... if a mother nurses her baby, it's her doing; if she kills it, it's some doctor's [fault].
> ...
> You cannot continue the above lists very far without noticing that many of the permutations -- for instance from "adventuresome" to "reckless" (M+ to M-) or from "timid" to "prudent" (F- to F+) are just positive or negative terms for the same thing, no more objectively distinguishable than the difference between "sweet" and "too sweet." That is why language, as opposed to anything real, is so important to these people. As with Judy Chicago's Dinner Party, they believe that the issue is not so much what is in the picture as it is the frame around the picture and the label put on the frame: A pornographic painting or literary passage becomes transfigured when labeled as part of a show for the edification of women, or included in a book on the sins of male authors.
> The reverse applies equally. Take absolutely any page at all from the oeuvre of Andrea Dworkin, for instance, give it to a feminist literary critic as an example of the dialog of some male novelist's female character, and it will not take her long to identify this character Dworkin as a fourth-rate Molly Bloom illustrating all the sexist stereotypes -- the flow, the gush, the luridness and hysteria, the syntactic torpor and logical slobbishness and everywhere manifest all-around crappiness of mind. Then take away the homo fecit, and suddenly we have a leading feminist spokesperson, her excesses the mark of a noble soul hurt into anger, transcending male-imposed standards. So for all its fertile-Myrtle lyricism about woman as the source of everything living and everything real, modern feminism is often very close to the ultimate abstractness of total relativism: nothing true or false, good or bad, but thinking, and above all naming, makes it so. It accepts the substantiality of substance no more than it does the reasonableness of reason.
> It may be observed that [the above lists are] simply a logical outgrowth of the outline of history given [earlier in the book], the essential idea of which is that the "womanhood" originating in the state of nature (F+) degenerates into "femininity" (F-) when passing under the influence of maleness (M-). The corollary is that M+, such as it is, is is a partially redeemed extract of M-, savage man socialized by woman halfway to humanity, at the cost of her own happiness and purity.
> In other words, women are good for men and men are bad for women. (It is at this point that we are likely to hear of polls indicating that single women are happier than single men, and married men happier than married women, thereby showing that marriage is good for men but bad for women (!!) -- a set of figures that, if accurate, would lead to the conclusion that the traditional female attitude toward marriage is a sign of the most virulent masochism, or stupidity, or both.) Again, this may sound like a ridiculously reductive version of a wide and still-evolving range of ideas. And again, I can only say, look around.
"The Myth of the Monstrous Male" was published in 1982.
(!!) How many articles in magazines and newspapers since 1982 have claimed this exact result?
Thirty years ago, John Gordon's seminal MR book, Myth of the Monstrous Male, pointed out how middle/upper-class white women have usurped programmes (positive discrimination, affirmative action) rightly meant for blacks.
https://www.amazon.com/myth-monstrous-other-feminist-fables/dp/0872237583