As you critically look at misandry in modern day society, you will eventually pick up on suspicious similarities to other hate movements of the past and present. “Men are inherently dangerous perverts!” instead of “Gays are inherently dangerous perverts!” “Statistically, men commit the most violent crime, so we have to control them and their culture!” instead of “Statistically, blacks commit the most violent crime so we have to control them and their culture!” However, there is I think a fundamental difference that we need to address: modern misandry is far more sly and sneaky than these other movements: their language.

With these other hate movements, the bigots are at least very honest and blunt about what their words mean. When they use slurs against gay people or other races, they will freely confess that they hate these people. So when they use slurs against people and they’re accused of hating these people, they’ll simply say “yes”. This actually makes it quite easy to fight them: you’ve lain the terms of the debate down, the bigots are proven wrong, end of story.

Compare this with misandrist terms.The term “toxic masculinity“ has no set meaning, it has no good definition. Ergo, it becomes a catch-all term to demonise and vilify men. Yet, when you try to pin these people who use it down, when you try to point out masculinity is not inherently toxic, they will weasel out of it by saying “that’s not what toxic masculinity means!” And then present their own, highly specific, version of what they think it means.

The same phenomenon occurs with “incel”. Try and say that saying things like “all incels are toxic and worthless” might be offensive to men who haven’t done anything wrong, then they’ll come out and say “that’s not what incel means so those men are wring and irrational for being offended by it!”

This is not how language works. If you think that everyone will see these phrases and see them through your very specific, very personalised and individual lens, you are delusional. When the bigots are confronted, they won’t simply admit to the terms and let themselves be taken down by a rational argument. No; they’ll make some shit up to weasel out. When I call this tactic “slimy”, I mean it in quite a straightforward way. Slime is very difficult to nail down, if you try to grab hold of it and give it some definition, it will always find some way to slip through your fingers. Even the very word “feminist” has this slimy, slippery attribute: does it mean equality? Does it mean women‘s advocacy? Does it mean female supremacy? Does it mean male hatred? Depends on which feminist you ask: get 5 feminists in a room and find out five definitions of feminism.

This discussion is very similar to a quote from Lewis Caroll, which seems to be coming in handy for me more and more these days to the point I actually have it’s saved: “ ‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
’The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
’The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.‘ “