Last week, Twitter blew up with the hashtag #MisandryInPublishing. Apparently some poor, hapless (male) soul posted that he believed it to be a real problem and women. went. nuts.

Oh man, the hate on Twitter. It’s mind-blowing how nasty people can be sometimes. But I digress…

The poor soul was obliterated by one cat-scratch after another—women on the man hate rant about how the entire concept of misandry in publishing is laughable at best.

I read through the banter. I wondered as to the fate of humanity for a moment. And then I stated my peace and moved on.

Yes, I am a female author. And yes, I believe misandry in literature is a real thing today.

It’s everywhere. Almost every modern novel I’ve read of late is chock full of man hate in one form or another. Oh no, it’s usually not blatant hatred. It’s subtle and clever. It’s portraying men like they are slaves to their instincts. Like wolves on the prowl. It’s portraying men like chest-beating Neanderthals who roam about looking for a broodmare. It’s portraying men like video game obsessed, Cheeto-slamming drunks with smoking hot wives who run the household. It’s portraying men like hapless, hopeless fools when a woman leaves them.

It’s misandry, and that’s all there is to it.

I’ve blogged about this sort of thing before (there’s one article on this site that I wrote years ago and it still gets several hits a day. It blows my mind.). Back then, I wrote about how men needed to step up to their roles as husbands and fathers. I saw an epidemic of man-boys who couldn’t bring themselves to put down their video game controllers long enough to run the household. I confess, I see things a little differently now. Yes, those men exist. And yes, ladies, Neanderthals exist, too. I’m not disagreeing. But I’m beginning to see that it’s not so much that the world is riddled with sex-crazed man-boys as it is that we women have decided it is. In our perhaps good intentions of vying for equality, we’ve lost sight of what the word means to begin with. And we’ve decided men are to blame for our problems.

We women yelled for equality in the ‘70s when we burned our bras. We shouted for equality in the ‘80s when we demanded better pay in our jobs. We screamed equality in the ‘90s when we insisted that “it’s a man’s world.” And here we are still crossing our arms and stomping our feet claiming that men have all the fun.

Ladies, when are we going to put on our big girl panties?

I read an article the other day about women (once again on the hate fest we call Twitter) tweeting under the directive “describe yourself as a male author would.” It was sickening, what women think men think of them. It’s embarrassing that we’ve boiled down men into nothing but sexual machines who cannot think past the next breast they’re going to ogle.

Ladies, I don’t know what men you’re surrounded by, but my husband, my father, even my son, are NOTHING like that. They’re men. They’re strong. They’re kind. They’re grounded. They’re gentlemen who open my door. They’re fathers who kiss their babies. They’re men who aren’t afraid to cry. They’re soldiers guarding their own homes.

My husband is the kind of man who is as tender as he is fierce. He is as passionate as he is strong. He is as kind as he is fearsome. He defends his family with valiant passion, loves his God with unwavering devotion, sacrifices for his wife without second thought. That’s a man. That’s masculinity. And any woman who would be threatened by such a thing needs to take a long look in the mirror.

It does not make a man Neolithic that he should be a visual, sexual creature. It does not make a man domineering that he should wish to open a door for a woman. Women scream for gender equality, but if you ask me, what they’re really screaming for is female superiority.

No, thanks.

It’s a big enough deal to me that we figure out this whole gender equality thing, that I wrote an entire book about it. I wanted, for once, to read a love story about people who stick together. I wanted to read a love story about a man and a woman who embrace their inherent gender roles, work together, and face the world arm in arm, not one in front of the other. Gender equality—true gender equality—is about embracing what makes women inherently feminine (and NO, that’s not pink lace and glitter), and what makes men inherently masculine (again, that’s not chest beating and gun toting). Femininity is at its heart, about the inherent empathy of our sex. It’s about embracing our natural instinct to nurture and love. And masculinity, at its heart, is about men embracing their God-given instinct to protect. Both are rooted in love. And neither have anything to do with pink or blue or glitter or camouflage or the length of your hair or the length of your shorts or any of the nonsense we associate with gender.

So ladies, let’s stop pretending like we’re screaming for equality when we call men Neanderthals for being exactly how they were designed to be. Maybe one of these days we’ll finally figure out that gender equality—TRUE equality—is exactly how God intended it. He is, after all, both male and female.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.