Having recently heard a review that included a plot synopsis of the 2023 film Barbie, it’s a bit striking how much the film is genuinely misandristic. The thing I want to talk about is how genuine mysandrists also hate women, just as genuine misogynists also hate men.

(For those who don’t know, misandry is the masculine form of misogyny; andros coming from the Greek meaning “male” and gymnos from the Greek meaning “female.” Anthropos refers to all human beings and was the equivalent of the English “man” until we dropped “were.” “Were” was pronounced “vehr”, similar to the Latin “vir” from which we get words like “virile”. You can still see “were” it in the world “werewolf.”)

It is no accident that people who hate one sex will hate the other; it’s actually unavoidable. A person can start out only hating one sex but then they come up against the fact that whichever sex they start out not hating is complementary with the other sex. At this point they’re faced with a choice; they can either give up their hatred (which is unlikely) or they can start hating the other sex too. As a practical matter they will always hate only a large subset of whichever sex it is they just discovered needs its complement. In general they will find some unhealthy sub-set of their preferred sex and call that the real or true version of that sex and hate all of the members who are healthy. You can see this is man-hating feminists who also hate mothers, or red-pill misogynists who call fathers who marry the mother of their children fools (usually with more colorful slang). In both cases they may even hate the member of their own sex who violates their hatred more than they hate the opposite sex.

People whose lives tend to be defined by hatred tend to be alike. It is, I think, a natural consequence that a person who closes himself off to much of what is human cannot have much variety. Anyway, you will tend to observe in both mysandrists and misogynists the same tendency toward a deification of what they hate within their demonization of it. Misandrists hold that males have throughout all of history brutally oppressed women; misogynists tend to hold some version of women using men and spitting them out like the husks of sunflower seeds. Both varieties of this remind me of the reaction one has to an antisemite explaining how the Jews secretly rule everything—really, if they’re this much smarter, stronger, cleverer, cooperative and just generally better at winning than everyone else, they deserve to be in charge.

You can see what I mean, by the way, in the language that’s often used around power. It’s talked about as if power is something someone hands out to people, and it’s complained that it’s been handed out unfairly. This is to entirely miss the point of what power is: power is the ability to compel people to do things against their will.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Life is not about power, but about love. God pours being into us to the point of overflowing and we, in immitation of Him, pour this abundance into each other. That’s why we’re here in the same time and space and able to influence each other: in order to love each other. (Oversimplifying, of course.) If a person is worried about power, he’s missed the point and is guaranteed to be unhappy. (Again, overismplifying.)

But, that said, power is a coherent concept, and can be discussed on its own terms. And on its own terms, power is never something that can be shared. Power is force. It is strength. Someone can’t share their strength with you. You either have your own strength or you don’t. To complain that an enemy soldier who is trying to shoot you isn’t sharing his power with you is nonsense. Shooting you is his power.

You can coherently claim that women are as powerful as men, but for most of history wanted different things and so used their power to achieve different (possibly complementary) aims. That may be true or false, but it at least doesn’t contradict itself. You cannot claim that women are as powerful as men but men have always and everywhere oppressed women. If women were oppressed, by definition they were not as powerful. Similarly, you cannot claim that men are smarter than women and also that women constantly use males for their resources without the males realizing it. If women are always fooling men, it means that men aren’t as smart. (“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.” Fool me a hundred million times…)

In a competition, a good competitor can have a bad day. He can even have a few bad days. What a good competitor cannot do is always lose. If he always loses, he’s a loser.

There are exceptions, but a huge number of haters are in this weird position of claiming that their preferred group are losers who deserve to win by some merit other than the ability to win, while simultaneously claiming that they’re also not losers. Usually (when pressed) this is by claiming that they’d win if the other side would forfeit. Which is true enough, but also completely pointless. The stronger will only help the weaker out of love and if you’re appealing to love, you’re in a completely different framework where complaining about power makes no sense.

Of course, it is not a surprise that people who are using a false framework end up incoherent. If you start from a lie, you will inevitably contradict yourself. Still, it’s curious how it happens, and how often it happens the same way.