Politics & Power Quote by Robin Morgan

Morgan’s line is designed to shock you into noticing what polite politics tries to hide: that oppression isn’t just a bad vibe, it’s a structure with beneficiaries. By yoking “man-hating” to the language of “honorable” and “viable,” she drags a supposedly private emotion into the public arena and dares critics to admit the real target isn’t civility, but power. The move is rhetorical jujitsu: what’s dismissed as irrational “hatred” becomes, in her framing, a form of clarity - a refusal to soothe the oppressor with moral good manners.

The subtext is less about individual men than about “men” as a ruling category, a class position. Morgan borrows the grammar of class struggle to argue that resentment can be politically intelligible when the playing field is rigged. It’s a preemptive strike against the perennial demand placed on the oppressed: be articulate, be forgiving, be palatable, and maybe you’ll be granted incremental change. She’s saying anger isn’t a failure of politics; it can be the fuel of it.

Context matters. As a second-wave feminist voice, Morgan was writing in an era when women’s liberation was caricatured as bitter, anti-male, and unserious. The quote turns that caricature into a weapon, insisting that “hatred” can function like boycott, strike, or refusal - not a personal pathology, but a collective response to systemic harm. It’s also deliberately hazardous: by framing “man-hating” as legitimate, she courts misunderstanding, forcing readers to confront whether they’re defending humanism or defending the comfort of the dominant class.