Misogyny () is hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women or girls. It is a form of sexism that can keep women at a lower social status than men, thus maintaining the social roles of patriarchy. Misogyny has been widely practised for thousands of years. It is reflected in art, literature, human societal structure, historical events, mythology, philosophy, and religion worldwide.
An example of misogyny is violence against women, which includes domestic violence and, in its most extreme forms, misogynist terrorism and femicide. Misogyny also often operates through sexual harassment, coercion, and psychological techniques aimed at controlling women, and by legal or social exclusion of women from full citizenship. In some cases, misogyny rewards women for accepting an inferior status.
Misogyny can be understood both as an attitude held by individuals, primarily by men, and as a widespread cultural custom or system. Sometimes misogyny manifests in obvious and bold ways; other times it is more subtle or disguised in ways that provide plausible deniability.
In feminist thought, misogyny is related to femmephobia, the rejection of feminine qualities. It holds in contempt institutions, work, hobbies, or habits associated with women. It rejects any aspects of men that are seen as feminine or unmanly. Racism and other prejudices may reinforce and overlap with misogyny.
The English word misogyny was coined in the middle of the 17th century from the Greek 'hatred' + 'woman'. The word was rarely used until it was popularised by second-wave feminism in the 1970s.
Definitions English and American dictionaries define misogyny as "hatred of women" and as "hatred, dislike, or mistrust of women".
In 2012, primarily in response to a speech in the Australian Parliament, the Macquarie Dictionary (which documents Australian English and New Zealand English) expanded its definition to include not only hatred of women but also "entrenched prejudices against women".
Distinctions from other terms The American Merriam-Webster Dictionary distinguishes misogyny, "a hatred of women", from sexism, which denotes sex-based discrimination, and "behavior, conditions, or attitudes that foster stereotypes of social roles based on sex".
Philosopher Kate Manne distinguishes these terms: Patriarchy — a system of power Sexism — a theory justifying that system, and Misogyny — the "enforcement arm" of that system.
Manne defines misogyny as the attempt to control and punish women who challenge male dominance. She finds the traditional "hatred of women" definition of misogyny too simplistic, noting it does not account for how perpetrators of misogynistic violence may love certain women; for example, their mothers. Instead, misogyny rewards women who uphold the status quo and punishes those who reject women's subordinate status. Manne distinguishes sexism, which she says seeks to rationalise and justify patriarchy, from misogyny, which she calls the "law enforcement" branch of patriarchy:
Femininity researcher Rhea Ashley Hoskin dinstinguishes between oppression based on female gender, and oppression based on feminine gender expression. The academic term for the latter is femmephobia.
In sociology and psychology Social psychology research describes overt misogyny as "blatant hostile sexism" that raises resistance in women, as opposed to "manifestations of benevolent sexism" or chivalry that lead women to behave in a manner perpetuating patriarchal arrangements.
According to sociologist Allan G. Johnson, "misogyny is a cultural attitude of hatred for females because they are female". Johnson argues that:
Sociologist Michael Flood at the University of Wollongong defines misogyny as the hatred of women, and notes:
Other forms of the word Misogynous and misogynistic can both be used as an adjectival form of the word. The noun misogynist can be used for a woman-hating person. The counterpart of misogyny is misandry, the hatred or dislike of men. Marc A. Ouellette argues in International Encyclopedia of Men and Masculinities that "misandry lacks the systemic, transhistoric, institutionalized, and legislated antipathy of misogyny". Anthropologist David Gilmore argues that misogyny is a "near-universal phenomenon" and that there is no male equivalent. The antonym of misogyny, philogyny—love or fondness towards women— is not widely used. Words derived from the word misogyny and denoting connected concepts include misogynoir, the intersection of anti-black racism and misogyny faced by Black women; transmisogyny, the intersection of misogyny and transphobia faced by trans women and transfeminine people; and transmisogynoir, the confluence of these faced by black trans women and transfeminine people.
Origins Misogyny likely arose at the same time as patriarchy: three to five thousand years ago at the start of the Bronze Age. The three main monotheistic religions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam promoted patriarchal societal structures, and used misogyny to keep women at a lower status. Misogyny gained strength in the Middle Ages, especially in Christian societies. In parallel to these, misogyny was also practised in societies such as the Romans, Greeks, and the tribes of the Amazon Basin and Melanesia, who did not follow a monotheistic religion. Nearly every human culture contains evidence of misogyny.
Anthropologist David D. Gilmore argues that misogyny is rooted in men's conflicting feelings: men's existential dependence on women for procreation, and men's fear of women's power over them in their times of male weakness, contrasted against the deep-seated needs of men for the love, care and comfort of women—a need that makes the men feel vulnerable.
Angela Saini notes that a large proportion of women in ancient societies were kidnapped brides from other cultures. Such a woman was often forced to marry a man who had killed her family. Misogynistic suspicion in ancient Greece and elsewhere is to some degree explained by male anxiety that women would some day revolt against their captors. Saini argues that patriarchy and gender stereotyping emerged at the same time as the state.
Historical usage Classical Greece
In his book City of Sokrates: An Introduction to Classical Athens, J.W. Roberts argues that older than tragedy and comedy was a misogynistic tradition in Greek literature, reaching back at least as far as Hesiod. He claims that the term misogyny itself comes directly into English from the Ancient Greek word misogunia (), which survives in several passages.
The earlier, longer, and more complete passage comes from a moral tract known as On Marriage (c. 150 BC) by the stoic philosopher Antipater of Tarsus.The editio princeps is on page 255 of volume three of Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (SVF, Old Stoic Fragments), see External links. pp. 221–226.
Misogunia appears in the accusative case on page 224 of Deming, as the fifth word in line 33 of his Greek text. It is split over lines 25–26 in von Arnim. Antipater argues that marriage is the foundation of the state, and considers it to be based on divine (polytheistic) decree. He uses misogunia to describe the sort of writing the tragedian Euripides eschews, stating that he "reject[s] the hatred of women in his writing" (ἀποθέμενος τὴν ἐν τῷ γράφειν μισογυνίαν). He then offers an example of this, quoting from a lost play of Euripides in which the merits of a dutiful wife are praised.38-43, fr. 63, in von Arnim, J. (ed.). Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta. Vol. 3. Leipzig: Teubner, 1903.
According to Tieleman other surviving use of the Ancient Greek word is by Chrysippus, in a fragment from On affections, quoted by Galen in Hippocrates on Affections.SVF 3:103. Misogyny is the first word on the page. Here, misogyny is the first in a short list of three "disaffections"—women (misogunia), wine (misoinia, μισοινία) and humanity (misanthrōpia, μισανθρωπία). Chrysippus' point is more abstract than Antipater's, and Galen quotes the passage as an example of an opinion contrary to his own. What is clear, however, is that he groups hatred of women with hatred of humanity generally, and even hatred of wine. "It was the prevailing medical opinion of his day that wine strengthens body and soul alike." So Chrysippus, like his fellow stoic Antipater, views misogyny negatively, as a disease; a dislike of something that is good. It is this issue of conflicted or alternating emotions that was philosophically contentious to the ancient writers. Ricardo Salles suggests that the general stoic view was that "[a] man may not only alternate between philogyny and misogyny, philanthropy and misanthropy, but be prompted to each by the other".Ricardo Salles, Metaphysics, Soul, and Ethics in Ancient Thought: Themes from the Work of Richard Sorabji, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2005), 485.
In the Routledge philosophy guidebook to Plato and the Republic, Nickolas Pappas describes the "problem of misogyny" and states:
Misogynist is also found in the Greek—misogunēs ()—in Deipnosophistae and in Plutarch's Parallel Lives, where it is used as the title of Heracles in the history of Phocion. It was the title of a play by Menander, which we know of from book seven (concerning Alexandria) of Strabo's 17 volume Geography,Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon (LSJ), revised and augmented by Henry Stuart Jones and Roderick McKenzie, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1940). Strabo,Geography, Book 7 [Alexandria] Chapter 3. and quotations of Menander by Clement of Alexandria and Stobaeus that relate to marriage. A Greek play with a similar name, Misogunos (Μισόγυνος) or Woman-hater, is reported by Marcus Tullius Cicero (in Latin) and attributed to the poet Marcus Atilius.He is supported (or followed) by Theognostus the Grammarian's 9th century Canones, edited by John Antony Cramer, Anecdota Graeca e codd. manuscriptis bibliothecarum Oxoniensium, vol. 2, (Oxford University Press, 1835), p. 88.
Cicero reports that Greek philosophers considered misogyny to be caused by gynophobia, a fear of women.Marcus Tullius Cicero, Tusculanae Quaestiones, Book 4, Chapter 11.
In summary, despite considering women as generally inferior to men, Greek literature considered misogyny to be a disease—an anti-social condition—in that it ran contrary to their perceptions of the value of women as wives and of the family as the foundation of society. These points are widely noted in the secondary literature.
English language
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word entered English because of an anonymous proto-feminist play, Swetnam the Woman-Hater, published in 1620 in England. The play is a criticism of anti-woman writer Joseph Swetnam, who it represents with the pseudonym Misogynos. The character of Misogynos is the origin of the term misogynist in English.
The term was fairly rare until the mid-1970s. The publication of feminist Andrea Dworkin's 1974 critique Woman Hating popularised the idea. The term misogyny entered the lexicon of second-wave feminism. Dworkin and her contemporaries used the term to include not only a hatred or contempt of women, but the practice of controlling women with violence and punishing women who reject subordination.
Misogyny was discussed worldwide in 2012 because of a viral video of a speech by Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard. Her parliamentary address is known as the Misogyny Speech. In the speech, Gillard powerfully criticised her opponents for holding her policies to a different standard than those of male politicians, and for speaking about her in crudely sexual terms. She was criticised for systemic misogyny, because earlier in the day her Labour Party had passed legislation cutting $728 million in welfare benefits to single mothers.