Still, the core question warrants a dispassionate, substantive answer.
“Is it really so illogical to hate men?”
Yes, it is.
It is always illogical to hate an entire group of people for behavior perpetrated by a subset of its members and actively opposed or renounced by literally millions of them. It is every bit as easy, and more just, to assign collective rhetorical blame to groups that deserve it, like “murderers” or “rapists” or “domestic abusers” or “sexists.”
Indulging in collective hate validates hatred itself and the flawed premise of group rather than individual responsibility. It puts all groups at greater risk of suffering hatred, for there are bad individuals in any group and folks ready to hate every group. What’s more, any hate tends to harm the individual who harbors it.
Finally, group hate tends to make those who harbor it less able to see clearly, less likely to acknowledge nuance, and less able to improve the world, even as their wrongheaded ideas risk leading others into destructive errors.
For example, some of Walters’s less thoughtful readers might draw the conclusion that bad behavior by men damages women exclusively, and erroneously conclude that half the population—maybe their own half—has no strictly selfish interest in tackling the sundry forms violence that are mostly caused by men. But (for instance) men are wildly overrepresented among both homicide perpetrators and homicide victims—according to the UN, 78 percent of homicide victims are male. Even the most self-interested man has a stake in perceiving, studying, and trying to remedy most ills men disproportionately inflict.
Little wonder so many have tried so mightily to do so.
Less-thoughtful readers might mistakenly draw the conclusion, as well, that women need play no part in remedying the problem that Walters calls toxic masculinity. But insofar as socialization helps create some gendered ills, insofar as women participate in the socialization of infant and adolescent boys, and insofar as some of those women as surely as some men socialize them into “toxic” patterns of behavior, advising men, “don’t be in charge of anything” is inadequate.
Indeed, in the realm of fatherhood, where too much abdication of responsibility is a catastrophic societal problem, it would be deeply counterproductive. (If there’s a particular man out there really excelling at heading a cancer research lab or a project on carbon capture, perhaps he ought to stay on the job, too?) The overwhelming majority of feminists want equality, not male abdication of power and responsibility. In the name of feminism, Walters advocates for a future that few women want within a framework that mistakenly treats their project as zero sum.
There is much more to be said about the folly of hatred, and none of it best said by me. Martin Luther King Jr. believed that “darkness cannot drive out darkness: only light can do that,” and that “hate cannot drive out hate: only love can do that.”
