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Paul Nathanson & Katherine K. Young, Legalizing Misandry: From Public Shame to Systemic Discrimination Against Men (Montreal & Kingston: McGill/Queen's University Press, 2006).
Dorothy E. Chunn*
This book is the second volume in a planned trilogy on how "ideological feminism" has fostered and entrenched misandry, or hatred of men, in Canada and the United States. The authors' central thesis is that these societies have replaced androcentrism with gynocentrism which has "institutionalized a new double standard" that not only favours women over men but also "has created many additional problems: psychological, political, and- above all - moral ones" 1. In the first volume of the series, they elaborated this argument in relation to what they described as the spread of misandry through popular culture.2 In volume two, they shift their focus to "the interface between popular culture and elite culture at the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twentyfirst"3 in order to illustrate the ways in which misandric attitudes generated in popular culture have been institutionalized in law and policy4. The discussion is framed by the use of two linked metaphors - litigation and revolution5 - the two means, according to the authors, through which "ideological feminism" has taken over both popular and elite culture.
Nathanson and Young clearly had very accommodating editors. Legalizing Misandry is an unusually lengthy tome of 657 pages: a short introduction (seven pages) followed by the main text (326 pages), 13 appendices (165 pages), including a response to critics of the first book, notes (126 pages) and index (29 pages). The main text is comprised of four parts, each of which reiterates the central thesis of the book in relation to a different topic and/or institutional site. In Part I, "Men on Trial: the Court of Public Opinion", the authors focus on journalism and the content of coverage in four heavily reported cases from the late 1980s and early 1990s- McMartin (child abuse, satanic ritual abuse), Bobbin (wife abuse), Hill-Thomas (sexual harassment of women), and the Montreal Massacre - that in their view collectively demonstrate how women were conceptualized as victims and men as oppressors who were presumed guilty "until or unless they could defend themselves"6. How was feminism implicated in these events? According to the...