Any man who thinks it’s OK to live in a household where the woman does the overwhelming majority of all the housework, childcare and family admin is a woman-hater.
Thus does Bidisha toss the best part of mankind into a veritable Hades of the hateful.
If he weren’t, it would agonise him to live in such an unequal and exploitative setup.
Not – I suspect – the most valid of dichotomies. Some women choose to endure the housework, as do a lot of men. One can hardly charge their partners for respecting that. Others have it foisted on them, yes, and that’s damn shame. Why need there be “hate” involved, though? Women have been tasked with housework since the dawn of, er – houses. In some cases, even now, it’d be expected of them. This betrays a poverty of thought but no twisted loathing. One can love, like or just be mildly indifferent to another without recognising their needs or desires.
If people hated quite as much as our discourse suggests, whole lives would be spent in twitching, febrile enmity. If you don’t hate girls and gays then you loathe the Yanks and Yiddish speakers. And, as we’ve explored, mere critics are now “haters” too. I’ve thrown out this charge myself: accusing, say, opponents of gay marriage rather than engaging with their – y’know – arguments. I suspect, however, that few people really hate. All of us hold prejudices – many are quite bigoted – but true, passionate abhorrence has to be a rarer thing. Michel Houellebecq had a point when he sighed that, “You need more motivation than [misogyny] to write a novel“. We’re conflicted, egotistical and self-aggrandising; generally too flighty for the single-mindedness of hate.
Must we diminish our extremities of feeling? Just as Bill and Ted-ish teens have reduced awe to mild approval, petty charges trivialise hate’s violent resolve. So, I might claim to “hate” George Lamb but it’s really just a vague distate; I don’t sit by the television, festering with rage. It’s like dumping all forms of attraction into the catch-all “love”. It’s also the ideal argument-ender. If your opponent “hates” – with unreason that’s always implied – they’re beyond the reaches of discussion: their opinions too ingrained; hostile; dangerous, even. It goes beyond mere prejudice, let alone disagreement on the internet.
August 9, 2010 at 7:22 pm
I’d didn’t think I was going to agree with this – but actually I think you’re right. Just thought I’d let you know.
August 9, 2010 at 8:00 pm
Cheers, Jim.
August 9, 2010 at 10:45 pm
[...] argues that our overuse of ‘hate’ simply diminishes its [...]
August 10, 2010 at 11:07 am
Hate can be good though, the kind of blistering, bile-fuelled rage that yells ‘I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna take it any more’ and then actually gets you off your arse to do something about it, instead of sitting festering in blind fury. As the name of my humble site implies, I’m all for that kind of thing.
Wasting pure hatred on E4 presenters is, I accept, a futile gesture, best avoided. They can be dealt with by a swift ‘despising’.
August 10, 2010 at 11:14 am
Oh, I quite agree. When used as a descriptor, though, it’s typically pejorative.
Agreed on Lamb, as well. It’s better to conserve one’s hate for this year’s X-Factor.
August 17, 2010 at 2:03 am
When I was preparing for my O level (yes showing my age), Mrs. Williams, my English teacher enjoined her class to avoid using the words ‘good’ or ‘bad’ because “they are extremes, they cannot be qualified – overuse diminishes their impact”
“Hate” is a strong word.
August 17, 2010 at 10:02 am
It’s like the word ‘wrong’.
I remember the one time I used the word in a political (organising) meeting (Something like ‘I think if we do this we would actually be *wrong*’). Because I’m generally much more nuanced than that you could actually see the ripple of shock that went round the room.
It was a good lesson for me that if you’re always careful about how you speak people really take notice when you use these more powerful words – someone who always leaps to the extremes of language just doesn’t have any words left when they actually need to bring out the big guns.
August 19, 2010 at 2:29 pm
Good point. There’s a touch of “boy who cried wolf” to some. (Even if the “wolf” was still a fairly threatening creature – a large dog, perhaps.)
November 15, 2010 at 2:08 pm
[...] to realise that people can do, say or hold things you’re not altogether fond of and still avoid being a rancid gob of Satan’s phlegm. [...]
December 11, 2010 at 1:49 pm
[...] misunderstood Hitchcock; claimed that JK Rowling’s underrated and ambitiously if indirectly accused John Stuart Mill, Richard Pankhurst and just about every man who’s ever lived of hating women [...]
February 22, 2011 at 1:24 pm
[...] s0 the outrage it’s companioned by depicts the vaguest prejudice as fevered bigotry. For Bidisha almost every man in the history of everything has hated women. For India Knight Muslims are [...]
December 5, 2011 at 11:34 pm
[...] Guardian columnists claiming to spy baneful trends within our society on the basis of no data. Like others who share her platform, Johnson follows this by imputing dark motives to thousands of people [...]