Retired Feminist Professsor in WashPo: I 'Wish All Men Were Dead'

A retired history professor from Grinnell College and feminist announced that she wishes that “all men were dead” in a column for the Washington Post over the weekend.

Retired history professor Victoria Bissell Brown published a bizarre column in the Washington Post on Friday in which she detailed an outburst she had at her husband that included her wishing for the death of all men.

I yelled at my husband last night. Not pick-up-your-socks yell. Not how-could-you-ignore-that-red-light yell. This was real yelling. This was 30 minutes of from-the-gut yelling. Triggered by a small, thoughtless, dismissive, annoyed, patronizing comment. Really small. A micro-wave that triggered a hurricane. I blew. Hard and fast. And it terrified me. I’m still terrified by what I felt and what I said. I am almost 70 years old. I am a grandmother. Yet in that roiling moment, screaming at my husband as if he represented every clueless male on the planet (and I every angry woman of 2018), I announced that I hate all men and wish all men were dead. If one of my grandchildren yelled something that ridiculous, I’d have to stifle a laugh.

The column, which is entitled “Thanks for not raping us, all you ‘good men.’ But it’s not enough,” reads like a passive-aggressive rant from the type of unhinged ideologue that makes most rational people think twice before self-identifying with the “feminist” label.

Brown topped the insanity of her first paragraph with her second. In it, Brown berates her husband for doing exactly what feminists have repeatedly asking men to do over the past year: listen to women.

For a moment, it occurred to me to be grateful that I’m married to a man who will listen to a woman. The winds calmed ever so slightly in that moment. And then the storm surge welled up in me as I realized the pathetic impotence of nice men’s plan to rebuild the wreckage by listening to women. As my rage rushed through the streets of my mind, toppling every memory of every good thing my husband has ever done (and there are scores of memories), I said the meanest thing I’ve ever said to him: Don’t you dare sit there and sympathetically promise to change. Don’t say you will stop yourself before you blurt out some impatient, annoyed, controlling remark. No, I said, you can’t change. You are unable to change. You don’t have the skills and you won’t do it. You, I said, are one of the good men. You respect women, you believe in women, you like women, you don’t hit women or rape women or in any way abuse women. You have applauded and funded feminism for a half-century. You are one of the good men. And you cannot change. You can listen all you want, but that will not create one iota of change.

There is something deeply unsettling about Brown’s words. Perhaps it is the fact that she is so aware that it is inappropriate to take out the sins of other men on her husband. Perhaps it is that she was even able to find fault with her husband letting her berate him for no reason. Or maybe it’s the fact that the Washington Post published the rantings of a clearly disturbed individual and attempted to pass it off as relevant to America’s ongoing #MeToo conversation.

To make matters worse, this column appears to be just another in an ongoing series of “male hatred” in the Washington Post. In June, the Washington Post published a column entitled “Why Can’t We Hate Men?” which was penned by Northeastern Professor Suzanna Danuta Walters, who also serves as the editor-in-chief of the influential feminist academic journal Signs.

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