OJ Simpson and the Question of "Misogyny"

The death of OJ Simpson reminds me of something I've been thinking about for a long time: what his murder case says about the generalized notion of "misogyny." It used to be very common for feminists to attribute crimes like rape and spouse abuse to "misogyny" as if the problem were just that men hate women. I heard more than one person say that the murder of Nicole Brown Simpson was "misogyny." But OJ Simpson seemed to me like the perfect case of a man who actually loved women and ended up brutally killing one partly because he had loved her very much.

Anyone who ever watched OJ on "Wide World of Sports" saw his comfort with women on regular display. He was friends with all the black female runners and some of the white women as well. He could talk about women's issues like training after pregnancy and childbirth that left his fellow male reporters sitting in embarassed silence. Watching him one never got any sort of impression that he disliked women.

I think OJ killed Nicole because of a particular problem, the homicidal jealous rage that afflicts so many men.

What may be the oldest claim in the field we now call evolutionary psychology is an explanation of precisely this problem. Chimps don't have families in our sense. They have mother-child bonds, and bonds between female friends, and coalitions among males, but there are no relationships between males and females. No male chimp knows or cares if a baby is his. The argument goes that one of the crucial early steps in hominid evolution was the formation of the nuclear family, in which the father invests very heavily in the support of his offspring. He will only do this if he has good reason to believe the child is his. Hence, the jealous rage, and the thousands of years of men trying to control female sexuality.

This theory is a century old now but still hangs around because 1) we honestly have no clue how humans came to practice permanent pair-bonding and involved fatherhood, both of which are a lot more common in birds than mammals; 2) male jealous homicidal rage is such an ancient worldwide problem that it presumably has some explanation in terms of human fundamentals; and 3) the theory puts the nuclear family, which so many humans worship, at the center of our identity.

Whether it is true or not I won't hazard a guess; I don't think we know much about the events of two million years ago. I just mention this to point out that OJ Simpson-style murderous rage is a problem that humans have been pondering for a long time.

Changing directions: what is misogyny, anyway? There are men who just seem to despise women. This was always my idea of misogyny, the kind of guys who think women are crazy emotional wrecks you're better off staying far away from.

But maybe I'm wrong. Feminists have used the word in a lot of other contexts, for example, men who seduce lots of women. This one used to puzzle me; wouldn't men who hate women prefer to avoid them rather than spend a lot of time in bed with them? Or OJ-style murderers.

So maybe an alternative definition of "misogyny" might be, "a desire to control women and a refusal to treat them as free, equal people." This fits the problematic cases I have mentioned, and I think it probably gets closer to what most feminists have in mind than just disliking women.

The thing is, this is an awful explanation of male behavior. It takes a particular, emotionally intense situation and generalizes it to a species-wide problem of belief. "You killed a woman in a fit of rage, therefore you have a generalized view that women are inferior" is a terrible syllogism. After all, men kill each other even more than they kill women, and they presumably do not do this because of some general view that men are inferior. 

I maintain that there is no necessary connection at all between what a man believes and what he will do in a fit of violent rage. I think it is simply false to assert that what people will do in an extreme emotional situation is any kind of guide to what they are like the rest of the time. 

I want to push this generalization hard. These days the complaint, "I'm lonely and can't find a girlfriend" is likely to be met with, "you think women owe men sex." But the statement "I am lonely" is not in any way a statement about how women ought to act. It is a statement about a particular person in a particular situation and cannot be generalized into anything.

I want to fight this generalizing habit. I want to fight the notion that people who did one bad thing, even one terrible think like murdering your ex wife, are bad in every way. I think that nobody is bad in every way, or good in every way. I violently resist this way of understanding humans. That a man killed one woman says absolutely nothing about how he feels or acts toward other women.

I want to fight any kind of thinking that goes, "You did X, therefore you are Y." 

I would have sent OJ to prison, but not because he is a misogynist, whatever that means.