Nevertheless, each writer’s reflection on the public distancing by straight women from the objects of their desire rests on the belief that these displays reflect women’s feelings about their attachment to men as a stable category—disappointment or shame—rather than their feelings about their attachment to women as a stable category—fear that this category is becoming politically obsolete.
The thing is, the popular misandrist left discourse, perpetuated by straight women, has almost nothing to do with sexuality, but everything to do with gender. Like political lesbianism, this Political Heterosexuality is not concerned with actual, felt sexual orientation or relationships—it’s concerned with the reifying of binary categories at the expense of a nuanced analysis of gender that accounts for race, class, and transition. [...] While the decrying of men by Political Heterosexuals is less overtly bio-essentialist—tending to focus on men’s emotional immaturity, commitment-phobia, poor sexual skills, lack of hygiene, or failure to own a real, off-the-ground bed—it still relies on an implicit or explicit comparison with women, and thus, a binary. What makes these men men is that they are not women; what makes these women, then, women is that they are not men. In my view, professing hatred of men online is not exclusively or even often reflective of individual disappointment or in service of individual absolution; it is in service of the desire to continue to define the political category of “women” by a clean-cut opposite, in a time when it is no longer politically correct to do so. [...]
Good feminists do indeed acknowledge the impossibility of lumping women together as a discrete group with legible, united needs; over is the heyday of white second-wave feminism, claiming all women—regardless of race or wealth—as equal in their second-class citizenship. But, even as progressive women dutifully point out the failure of the universal, acknowledging that the universalizing of the category “women” nearly always reeks of white supremacy and transphobia, many of those same women continue to fervently desire a universal, whether or not they’ll say it out loud. And the loophole, championed by Political Heterosexuality, is to affirm that men constitute a political class—the silent foil being, then, that women still do, too.
By rehearsing the view that ‘men are the worst’ while continuing to pursue romantic and sexual attachments with them, we perform an othering gesture that shores up the purity or innocence of our own identities. We may love men, we declare, but we barely enjoy it, okay?; we are embarrassed; we are not contaminated by them; we are not they. In other words, we get to continue to be ‘women’. Perhaps, semi-unconsciously, we had worried that the very category of ‘women’ had become untenable. If we can only continue to reproduce the category ‘men’ loudly enough, then, we wager, the category ‘women’ might stay safe. (Note, while a majority of heterofatalist misandrists online today seem to think they are trans-affirming, their position not only requires erasing trans men altogether, but also all trace of trans women’s lived experiences as men, regardless of those women’s own self-understanding. Indeed, misandry, as I see it, can never reliably be prevented from collapsing into transphobia.)
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