If I wasn't then why would I say I am?
In the paper, the news, everyday I am
Radio won't even play my jam"
Eminem - The Way I Am
Among my short story collections sits proudly the Science Fiction Writers of America's "Science Fiction Hall of Fame" Volume 1, covering the mid-20th century. Most of the 26 stories are true classics. There's Flowers for Algernon and The Roads Must Roll and Scanners Live in Vain and The Nine Billion Names of God and Mimsy Were the Borogoves and Arena and Nightfall and so on. Yet,
Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.
That Only a Mother reiterates several times the teratogenic effect of radiation, to provide a rationale for the mutation itself. The other half of the story warrants less than a paragraph of vague hints: "More infanticides all the time, and they can't seem to get a jury to convict any of them. It's the fathers who do it." And, at the end: "His hands, beyond control [...] His fingers tightened on his child" Despite devoting the entire previous page to a languid description of mother-daughter bath time, the author felt no need to flesh out her (obviously very intuitive) assertion that MEN ARE INFANTICIDAL AUTOMATONS. And of course they're all in on it together.
Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.
It doesn't need to make sense. As critics and Wikipedia remind us, this is "a woman's perspective" with the implication that any man who would dare question a woman's slander must be a filthy misogynist pig. The story's plot might remind us (not accidentally) of, say, The Screwfly Solution written in 1977 by James Tiptree Jr. a.k.a. Alice Sheldon, by which time feminism had upped the ante to have all men murdering all women across the globe. Interestingly enough, the story's titled after a method of pest control in which sterile males are introduced into an insect population in order to copulate (pointlessly) with females, denying them fertilization thereby decreasing the next generation preferably to zero. In other words, no murder needed. Sheldon, who at least conjured up a diabolus ex machina at the end of the story (unlike Merril) could have had her alien menace adopt that much simpler solution against humans instead of brain tampering... but then, that wouldn't have sold nearly as well as centering the action on women as innocent victims of GYNOCIDAL AUTOMATONS.
Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.
Never mind that in evolutionary terms, the husband from That Only a Mother would've been more likely to start murdering all the infants around who weren't limbless mutants than to turn on his own progeny. Never mind that murdering one's (potential) mate(s) incurs a much lower adaptive cost for females than it does for males, to the point of becoming adaptive, and this is a blatant case of psychological projection. Never mind that even a cursory look at human society would reveal that almost all of males' violence is directed against each other in contests to become the designated protectors of women and children. Don't think about it too hard. Just repeat the mantra.
The turning point for me, the moment when I realized that the abuse I'd had to put up with all my life was not just the work of a few bad apples but an intrinsic theme in the background noise of our society, came a few years ago. I enrolled in a university literature course on short stories. The course text was a collection already heavily slanted toward female-friendly drama, which the instructor (who bragged that all classes she taught were social justice courses) had further cherry-picked to equate masculinity, in turn, with each and every evil of the world. One male was a lazy brat, others petty thugs, others charlatans, another murders his wife for no reason... though it's hinted he was just emasculated by her ovaried awesomeness. Another story openly states that men can never experience the depth of emotion that women can, while equating men with oncogenic factory smoke. Another equates men with colonialism and women with conquered nations, despite the author serenely ignoring his own introduction in which his heroine deliberately abandons her comfortable old life to seek adventure and riches. In one story set on a sailboat, a woman is unhappy with her husband but luckily a female whale happens along to smash the boat to pieces so that the two females of different species can commune telepathically in mutual understanding and thanks for conveniently murdering a male. (Screwflies? Try a screw-whale solution!)
Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra.
There's a pattern to the very lack of pattern in such demonization, and "declaring men" is the best I can summarize it. Not merely "declaming" men as evil in a generic sense but constantly hunting for more and more specific evils to pile onto men's communal conscience, constantly fabricating more justifications for female moral supremacy. Profiteers and peddlers of self-justification need neither ground their accusations in observable reality nor remain consistent. It doesn't matter what you're declaring men as long as it's bad. At some point in such a story, women will be equated with everything good and men will be declared a threat, and the accusation left to stand at face value. Merril's mutant child from in That Only a Mother is idealized as superintelligent (a four-year-old's mental development at only ten months of age) and naturally, is born female in solidarity with her mother against the male menace. Her mutation is repeatedly implied to be the fault of the father for having worked near radiation... with no mention as to the necessity of such action or its harm to the man himself. Declare the man a murderous radioactive monstrosity. No need to analyze it further. Just repeat the mantra. The much more successful Margaret Atwood is hailed as a transcendent visionary for declaring men repressively anti-sexual... at the same time that she declares men rapists... uphill both ways through the snow!
Declaring men, anything, so long as it's bad, has been a sinecure for endless journalists, novelists and professors for the past fifty years, an easy route not only to social acceptability but to acclaim. The tactic, this flat, uncritical gnosis of male evil, transcends genre. It can sell anything from video games to the next great American novel, from tearjerker slice of life stories to ersatz futurism, YouTube channels to scientific papers, comic books to war propaganda. Imagine this being the mainstream consensus for any other demographic in the modern developed world. Imagine Disney founding entire cable channels dedicated to declaring... let's say Jews, to be infanticidal con-artists. Imagine university professors basing entire curricula around story after story after story of Amerindians as omnicidal terrors in league with alien menaces. Imagine endless scriptwriters writing every Italian in every TV show as nothing but greasy, stupid loudmouths, and all gays as rampaging pedophiliacs, and all Protestants as witch-burning fanatics.
Now imagine them all winning Nebula awards and Pulitzers. Imagine Robert Silverberg obligated to include at least one such diatribe in a 25-story collection to pacify the Inquisition. Imagine anyone who tries to argue against such a program of indoctrination being derided and ostracized as a bigot for defending nominal villains, and you'll get some approximation of the insanity of feminism.
Man bad, woman good. Repeat the mantra. But no other such mantra has ever gained the universality of innocent female characters being threatened by cackling male villains, decade after decade, century after century. We are instinctively susceptible to women's claim of a male threat, and it is that underlying bias toward female safety and well-being, our eagerness to lash out against any man declared [evil] in some opposition to femininity, which we need to address.
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