A French Feminist Has Written a Book Called “I Hate Men”
And the Minister for Gender Equality already tried to ban it as hate speech. Here’s how that went.
Pauline Harmange is a French feminist activist. She is just 26 years old and lives a quiet life in the city of Lille in northern France with her husband and cat. Last year she wrote a long-form chaptered essay called I Hate Men, which was published in a tiny print run (450 copies) by a small nonprofit press, Monstograph. She was justifiably proud of her work, but she was realistic; she didn’t expect it to garner a large readership.
However, on the day that her book was released in August, France’s minister for gender equality — a man named Ralph Zurmely — ordered the publishing house to recall the book. He hadn’t read it, but based on its title and the publisher’s brief website summary, he believed it to be “an incitement to gender-based hatred” (which is a crime in France).
Naturally — for, surely, it was ever thus! Does nobody remember what happened with Lolita, or Lady Chatterley’s Lover? — this last-minute attempt to ban the book made it go immediately viral. Existing copies sold out instantly and the nonprofit couldn’t keep up with the reprints.
After a bidding war, a major publisher (Seuil) acquired the book instead, and as of November 2020 the rights had been sold to translate the book into 17 languages. An English translation hits the US next week, on 19th January.
Harmange’s head was spinning. She’d expected a gentle ripple, not this tempestuous splash. Suddenly thousands of eyes were on her work. And thousands of voices were coming at her. She received a lot of backlash, much of it horribly personal. Thankfully, she says that this has now died down, and she’s excited about the book’s wider reception.
So was Zurmely’s frenzied fear of Harmange’s words justified? The book grew from one of her 2019 blog posts, and at 78 pages, it’s still not a long read. The central theme of the book is misandry (man-hating), which Harmange defines as “a feeling many women experience, even if they don’t dare admit it, which consists in thinking that men in general aren’t people you can automatically trust”. Hence the clickbait title, which proved…
