Memo to angry dudes: Not all the women who hate you are feminists

Disdainful women: Not always feminists.

Given how much of their time they spend attacking feminism and feminists, manosphere dudes can be surprisingly incompetent at telling just who is and who isn't an actual, bona-fide feminist; they've got terrible fem-dar.

Case in point: Last Saturday, annoying social conservative polemicist Kay Hymowitz published a piece in the Wall Street Journal taken from her new book "Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys," in which she argues that young men today have degenerated into puerile pre-adults, led astray by an assortment of villains including, but not limited to, Maxim magazine, Comedy Central, Seth Rogan and, if the subtitle of her book is any indication, rising women. You may vaguely remember her first rehearsing this general argument in a similarly annoying City Journal piece a couple of years ago called "Child-Man in the Promised Land."

To point out a simple fact that should be evident to all but the most hardened manosphere misogynists: not everyone who says critical things about men is therefore a feminist. Indeed, many of those who say the worst things about men aren't feminist at all.

And in fact, as should be very clear to anyone who actually sits down to read her work, Hymowitz is no feminist. If the reference to "the rise of women" as a villain in her book's subtitle isn't enough of a clue, let me point you to several of the many articles she's written attacking feminism -- for example, accusing feminists of ignoring the precious wisdom of Evolutionary Psychology, going "AWOL on Islam," and just generally being "obsolete."

But the basic fact of Hymowitz' antifeminism seems not to have penetrated the consciousness of many of her critics in the manosphere, where her latest WSJ has produced a flurry of angry denunciations from dudes who take her stale tranditionalist bromides as the latest in evil feminazi-ism.

On Happy Bachelors she's derided as a "typical second-wave hag feminazi." On The Spearhead, one commenter dismisses her as "yet another smug, AA-promoted female token who can’t grasp what she and her feminist sisters have done to men." On MGTOWforums.com, yet another misguided commenter snidely asserts that  "Jewish feminists do not age well."

Blogger Rex Patriarch, meanwhile, proclaims her op-ed to be a "a typical feminist rant about how wonderful women are and what disappointment men have become," and accuses her of sour grapes:

That’s right ladies do us men a favor, go away and keep telling yourselves you don’t need any sour grapes.

You ladies are the ones that need to grow up and face reality. Wanting both the full benefits of feminism and marriage without any responsibilities is understandable. I would take that deal if I could get it too but since I can't I exercise my natural right to not participate in the stacked deck you have to offer. That deal means jumping through the endless and ever increasing hoops of expectations it's going to take to just get to the break even point in a sham marriage with an entitlement princess that western women have become.

Thanks but find some other sucker to be your jumping poodle, I will take video games instead.

As a fellow video gamer and something of an overgrown child-man myself,  I've got nothing against anyone offering a good sensible critique of Hymowitz' basic thesis; unfortunately, so far all I've seen on the topic from MRAs and MGTOWers have been little more than crude misogynist (and sometimes anti-Semitic) insults, most far cruder than the remarks I've quoted here. 

But here's a hint: you can't really offer much of a critique if you start off assuming that she's driven by an ideology she actually hates.

EDITED TO ADD: Speaking of good sensible critiques of Hymowitz, here are a couple from actual feminists. ECHIDNE of the snakes takes on Hymowitz' "extreme definition of masculinity," which seems to suggest that "Men can only be men if women remain girls." Meanwhile, Jill at Feministe notes that life is not really much like Judd Apatow movies and makes the point that what Hymowitz derides as "extended adolescence" is in fact "an intelligent and fair reaction to a new economy and new gender models."

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