They Call Women "Man-haters" For The Same Reason They Once Blamed Eve

The accusation was never meant to describe women. It was designed to stop people believing them.

Photo by ErnAn Solozábal on Unsplash

A man in my comments last week called me a man-hater.

I had not said anything about hating men. I had said something about accountability. I had said something about power. I had said something about the specific shape of the silence women are expected to maintain when the person who caused harm is someone the room likes.

And the word that arrived, right on schedule, was man-hater.

I used to feel the need to defend myself when that word came. To clarify. To list the men I loved, the men I admired, to prove that my critique was surgical and not wholesale. I don’t do that anymore. Not because I stopped caring about being understood. But because I finally understood what the word is actually for.

It is not a description. It is a manoeuvre.

Here is what this is about to do to you:

It is going to take a word that has been thrown at you — or at women you know, or at a movement you have been afraid to name yourself part of — and show you exactly what it was designed to protect. It is going to take you back to the oldest story ever told about a woman who named a man’s part in something. And it is going to ask you the question that has been sitting underneath all of this since the beginning.

The label was never a response to our hatred. It was a prevention. Deployed before we could speak, to make sure that when we did, no one would listen.

The label arrives before the accusation. That is the point.

Here is what I have noticed, across years of writing about women and power and the specific experience of being a woman who refuses to make herself smaller.

The man-hater label does not arrive after a woman says something hateful. It arrives the moment she says something true. It arrives when she names a pattern. When she refuses to soften an inconvenient fact. When she speaks about accountability in a room that has decided accountability does not apply here.

It does not matter what she actually said. What matters is that she said it clearly. And clearly said truths, when they implicate the people holding power, need to be discredited before they can be heard.

So the label comes first. Man-hater. Bitter. Angry. She has an agenda. She cannot be trusted. And now everything she says — no matter how careful, no matter how evidenced, no matter how true — arrives pre-contaminated. The jury has been briefed before the testimony begins.

This is not a new strategy. It is not even a modern one.

It is the oldest strategy in the recorded history of the world. And we have the receipts. We have had them for thousands of years. We just were not supposed to read them that way.

Eve was the first woman whose testimony was rewritten

He ate the fruit too.

That is the part the story moves past quickly. He was there. He ate. He made his own choice with his own hands and his own mouth. And when the accounting came — when the question arrived, what happened here? — he said: the woman gave it to me.

Not: we both chose. Not: I was there and I participated. The woman. She gave it to me. As though a piece of fruit, passed between two people who both reached for it, somehow travelled in one direction only.

And the story kept that version. The story has been keeping that version for thousands of years. Eve became the one who corrupted him. The one who introduced sin. The one whose desire was dangerous and whose voice led men astray. The first woman who named a man’s participation in something became, in the retelling, the cause of it.7

That is not a theological accident. That is a template.

Because if you can establish, at the very beginning of the story — at the origin point, at the foundation of the culture — that a woman’s account of events cannot be trusted, that her naming of what happened is suspect, that her testimony about shared wrongdoing is actually evidence of her own corruption — then you never have to deal with what she is actually saying.

You just have to make sure everyone remembers who started it.

We have been living inside that template ever since. Every time a woman names something clearly, the story shifts. She is the one who started it. She is the one with the agenda. She is the man-hater, the bitter one, the one who cannot be trusted to tell the truth about men because she is too angry at them.

The fruit is still in her hand. He is still pointing.

The men who need the lie most are the ones who sell it

Six studies. Nine thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine participants. The conclusion, published and peer-reviewed, is this: feminist women’s attitudes toward men are positive in absolute terms and do not differ significantly from non-feminists. The researchers called it the misandry myth — widespread, persistent, and false.

Feminists do not hate men. The data says so. But the data was never the point.

Because the men who need the man-hater story to be true are not the ones who genuinely believe it. They are the ones who profit from other men believing it. The ones who sell the idea that feminism is an attack on men — that the women naming the arrangement are doing so out of hatred, not out of accuracy. Because if men believed the women, they might start asking questions. And men asking questions is very bad for the business of selling them a simpler story.

Andrew Tate needs feminism to look like the enemy because feminism is the only thing clearly describing the cage he is also selling. Jordan Peterson needs feminism to look like a threat because feminism is the only movement that has consistently said: the version of masculinity you have been handed is also destroying you. The corporate structure that takes a father away from his children from seven in the morning to seven at night — feminism named that. The expectation that men must not need, must not feel, must not ask for help — feminism named that too.

We were not naming it to attack men. We were naming it because it was true. And truth, when it implicates the people selling a different story, has to be made to look like hatred before it can reach the people it might actually help.

The witness had to be discredited before she could testify

My cousin’s husband cried at the birth of his first child. He told me once, quietly, at a family dinner, that nobody had told him he was allowed to love being a father as much as he did. That the version of manhood he had been given had no room for that kind of love. That he had spent years pouring himself into a job that kept him away from the thing that turned out to matter most.

He is not an unusual man. He is what most men look like when the story they were sold stops working.

Feminism has been saying for decades that the story being sold to men is also a cage. That a world built on the assumption that women exist to serve and men exist to provide is a world that diminishes both. That when we fight for parental leave and flexible work and the right to care without penalty, we are fighting for fathers and sons and brothers, not just for ourselves.

But that message could not be allowed to reach men clearly. Because if it did, men and women might find themselves in agreement about who the arrangement actually serves. And then the people the arrangement serves would have a much larger problem on their hands.

So the witness had to be discredited first. The woman had to be made to look like she hated the man she was trying to reach. Eve had to be the one who started it. The feminist had to be the man-hater. The testimony had to be contaminated before it could land.

It is the oldest move available. It has been working for thousands of years.

We do not hate men. We are the only ones who have been honest about what is also destroying them. And that honesty is exactly why we had to be made to look like we did.

The man in my comments last week called me a man-hater.

I did not defend myself. I did not list the men I love. I did not soften the thing I had said or apologise for the clarity of it.

I just thought about Eve, standing in the oldest garden in the world, watching a man point at her and say: she gave it to me.

And I thought about all the women since then who have named something true and watched the story shift around them until they were the cause of the thing they were only describing.

And I thought about the men — the fathers, the cousins, the ones crying quietly at dinner tables — who never got to hear what we were actually saying because someone made sure the word man-hater arrived first.

What would have changed, do you think, if they had?