Feminism, Misandry, and Romance Novels

by Zoe Winters

I write romance, so automatically I’m an optimist when it comes to the love potential between the sexes. While I recognize the validity of homosexual and bisexual love, I write heterosexual love. And quite frankly, men and women have a lot to overcome these days.

The general hatred and fear of the opposite sex that I’ve witnessed in others makes me honestly question how anyone manages to overcome the hurdles around them and their psyche in order to engage in consensual heterosexual sex.

I am not a feminist. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate SOME of what feminism has done. I think it’s nifty that women have more career options for those with those particular drives/ambitions in life. I think it’s swell that women are regarded as intellectual and moral equals of men. And I do prize my right to vote.

However, in the long run, I believe feminism on the whole has done more harm than good. I say this because of the huge divisiveness caused between the sexes. Everything is “misogyny,” even honest opinion that actually ends up being correct such as: “for the most part women aren’t suited to being firefighters.” They aren’t. That might burn your biscuits or whatever, but frankly men are physically stronger for the most part. If I’m trapped in a burning building I want a big burly man coming up after me, not a woman who got the job through an affirmative action lawsuit and lowering of the physical requirements for her entrance into the fireman boy’s club.

What is often overlooked is the HUGE amount of misandry floating around our culture. Misandry isn’t talked about that much, so in the event that you don’t know, it’s the fear and hatred of men. Hearing some of the rude, shameful, disrespectful and emotionally abusive bullshit coming out of women’s mouths toward men, and society doesn’t even blink…I have to say there is a lot of misandry.

And women in our culture are trained to fear men. Despite the fact that the biological drive for all but a very small percentage of men is to protect and care for women, not abuse or kill or rape them.

One thing that highly irritates me, enough to rant about it, is the social indoctrination I was raised with as a result of feminism and how highly devalued and degraded traditional female roles have become. Like its somehow beneath a woman to be a wife and mother. Now personally I don’t aspire to motherhood, but it doesn’t mean it’s not a role worth pursuing. I recognize I’m in the minority as a woman who doesn’t want children of her own. And because of that I would never dream to belittle another woman’s desire for children.

Further, while this isn’t always true…in many cases most women do the majority of the cooking, cleaning and child rearing. Now most of them have full time jobs as well. How is this liberation? Someone please explain it to me. I’m not sure how other women are wired, but frankly I just don’t have the DRIVE to work for other human beings that I’m not in an intimate relationship with.

But here is something maybe not everybody fully grasps. Mammalian heterosexual relations work as follows: Aggressive dominant display by the male. Submissive response by the female. Coupling. Game. Set. Match. Humans are the only mammals (to my knowledge, if I’m wrong on this, correct me with some backup research please. I’m willing to be wrong, but I expect actual documentation.), where the female will accept a weaker male.

This is evolution. Male dominance, female submission. This does NOT mean “all men” as a society should dominate “all women.” Nor does it mean abusive behavior is okay. Nor does it mean that people who naturally don’t fit these generalities should follow them. If you’re female and need to be the dominant party because that’s your GENUINE natural drive, and not something you were socially conditioned to think, fine. More power to you. Ya Ya!

It’s just that somehow, after millions of years of evolution, the feminist movement comes along and decides that nature is both shameful and imaginary. So we have the bizarre circumstance of a woman who wants to stay home and raise a family, who doesn’t want an outside career and who frankly is operating on the evolutionary biological norm…who has to “come to terms with” her “shameful” submissive nature. What the hell?

Seriously?

Somehow though, despite all the indoctrination….despite all the shame, and women feeling like they have to be exactly like men…somehow romance continues to be the bestselling genre. And romance mostly features dominant alpha males.

So this ends up being a guilty fantasy instead of any type of workable reality. And it’s sad. For those curious about why so many women end up with abuser after abuser…it can be summed up in what I said about mammalian mating habits. They’re instinctively looking for the “dominant display.” And since most American males have been socially conditioned to be more passive, the ONLY display they have to go on for the most part, is that of an abusive male, who will turn that power against them.

Are we really coming to the place socially where the only way anyone’s desires can be acted upon is through fiction?