The Worse Half.

Spreading Misandry: The Teaching of Contempt for Men in Popular Culture, by Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young (McGill-Queen's University, 360 pp., $29.95)

Why do so many academics write so badly? Paul Nathanson and Katherine Young have some interesting and important things to say about the assault on men in contemporary culture, but too often their book reads as if it had been translated into English from some strange Teutonic language. The text is encumbered with far too many unnecessary hedges ("per se," "as it were"). The authors also have a tendency to belabor the obvious. "Considering the use made of myth in Nazi Germany," they inform us, "it seems clear that not all myths are of equal moral value. The Nazi myth promoted hatred and polarization, not love and reconciliation." I was also glad to learn that England is "a country renowned for its long theatrical tradition."

The thesis of the book -- that the anti-male philosophy of radical feminism has filtered into the culture at large -- is incontestable; indeed, this attitude has become so pervasive that we hardly notice it any longer. Even Hallmark, which is renowned for inoffensiveness, now offers anti-male greeting cards without provoking any outrage. One of its cards read on the outside, "Men are scum." Inside was the punchline: "Excuse me. For a second there, I was feeling generous." Hallmark pulled that particular card, but still sells one that says, "There are easier things than meeting a good man; nailing Jell-O to a tree, for instance."

There have always been "war between the sexes" jokes, but the authors identify something new here: an ideological hostility toward men. There is a kind of bitterness -- what Yeats called "intellectual hatred" -- that makes today's anti-male sentiments different from those of the past. Alice Walker's The Color Purple is probably the classic of the new genre. The authors describe the 1985 film version of Walker's book as "ultimately a battle between the forces of light represented by women and those of dark represented by men."

Because of misandry, the authors argue, a "radical loss of identity has become an urgent problem for men in our society." But the authors go too far: They compare the status of men today to that of the Jews in Europe's past. Shakespeare's famous speech in The Merchant of Venice -- "Hath not a Jew eyes?" -- is invoked as one of the epigraphs of the first chapter. "Why begin this book about men with these words about Jews?" Why, indeed. "Because in our time, surprising though it might sound, belief in the full humanity of men has been dangerously undermined by stereotypes based on ignorance and prejudice, just as that of Jews was." Does this mean the authors think feminists plan a Final Solution for men? There are many more references to the Nazis in this book, but the authors never carry this analogy to its conclusion; doing so would suggest -- quite correctly -- that this is a crackpot analogy.

The authors know a lot about popular culture and write about it with a degree of verve. All the usual suspects appear -- Walker's bad men and strong women, Fannie Flagg's androgynous women and brutal guys, man- fleeing desperadoes Thelma and Louise, single mom Murphy Brown, real- life feminist scribe Anna Quindlen -- but the authors do a convincing job of showing how drenched our society is with the "men are scum" and "women are superior" messages.

Where the going gets really rough is in the second half of the book, when Nathanson and Young try to explain how the philosophies of radical feminism led to this situation. There are some suggestive ideas here, but they are not developed. "Deconstruction has become the technique of choice among feminist ideologues," the authors note; a provocative point, but they say nary a word about these feminist ideologues and their use of this trendy academic method. Instead, there is a lengthy discussion of deconstructionism in general and Jacques Derrida, the father of the method, in particular. For those who can't get enough of Derrida, there's even an appendix on him. But what of the feminist ideologues who made use of deconstructionism? Nada.

Another interesting idea: "The ideological rhetoric of feminism is not palatable to all women, so a 'front' is required." What are some examples of this? The authors offer nothing more specific than a vague reference to "many Jewish and Christian feminists," who apparently are being duped by radical feminists who use them. Feminist legal scholar Catharine MacKinnon and feminist theorists Marilyn French, Andrea Dworkin, and Mary Daly are mentioned several times in passing, but that's it.

Though I like to brag that feminism is the only "ism" I didn't buy in my left-wing youth, even I am appalled at Nathanson and Young's sly attempt to paint feminists as racists. The evidence? Some early suffragettes were racists and "won the vote by playing to the nation's anti-Negro sentiments." Disingenuously noting that "not all suffragists were racists," the authors recall that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton "refused to lobby for the Fifteenth Amendment." It's clearly unfair to use this to taint contemporary feminism. And the authors' section on racism underscores another problem: It's the only part of the book in which the authors discuss particular feminists in any depth. Why didn't they tell us about the contemporary radicals who are supposedly mucking up manhood?

In sum, this is a book with a fascinating thesis that ends up doing little more than overpowering the reader with academic jargon. (One last favorite sentence: "Within every dualist, not surprisingly, is an essentialist.") But the real problem for the book may be timing. Manhood seems to be making a comeback since the September 11 attacks, when cops and firemen so splendidly demonstrated that society can't do without manly virtue.