Short answers, pulled from the story.
The word misogynist was born from a 1620 play titled Swetnam the Woman-Hater. The concept it describes stretches back thousands of years before the first English dictionary entry. The term entered the English language in the middle of the 17th century.
The philosopher Antipater of Tarsus wrote a moral tract around 150 BC that explicitly used the Greek term misogunia. Antipater described a hatred of women that he viewed as a disease running counter to Stoic beliefs. He argued that the tragedian Euripides wisely rejected this hatred in his writing.
Zeus created Pandora as an evil thing for the delight of humanity to punish men for stealing fire. The narrative established a foundational link between women and the introduction of suffering. This story served as a cultural mechanism to justify keeping women in a subordinate position.
Aristotle described women as deformed males and claimed that the female is matter yearning for form. Jean-Jacques Rousseau insisted that girls must be thwarted from an early age to submit to the will of fathers and husbands. Arthur Schopenhauer called women childish and short-sighted, while Friedrich Nietzsche warned men to remember the whip when going to women.
The Gamergate antifeminist harassment campaign of 2014 marked a turning point in online misogyny. Anonymous users used swatting and graphic threats to drive women like Anita Sarkeesian and Laurie Penny out of public discourse. This online misogyny evolved into a coordinated, global campaign of violence and intimidation.
In 2016, Nottinghamshire Police started a project that classified 73 of 174 reports as crimes and 101 as incidents. By 2018, senior police leaders argued that resources were better spent on burglary and violent offenses rather than on recording non-criminal misogyny. The Law Commission proposed in 2020 that sex or gender be added to the list of protected characteristics.