Misogyny

• 1. Introduction

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  Misogyny is one of the oldest and most widely documented forms of prejudice in recorded human history. It is, at its core, the hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women and girls. Yet that simple definition turns out to hide something far more complicated. Why do cultures that depend on women for survival so often turn against them? Why do some men who love their mothers, sisters, and daughters still act in ways that punish or diminish women as a group? And how does a prejudice that predates most formal religions manage to survive inside all of them?

  The word itself comes from ancient Greek: misos, meaning hatred, and gune, meaning woman. It entered English through a remarkable path. An anonymous play from 1620 gave the word its first traceable English appearance. That play was a critique of an anti-woman writer named Joseph Swetnam, and the character created to mock him was named Misogynos. The word then sat quietly at the margins of the language for more than three hundred years. It took a feminist publishing wave in the 1970s, and specifically Andrea Dworkin's 1974 book Woman Hating, to bring misogyny into common usage. A 2012 speech by Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard then took it global, landing the word on front pages in every country.

  What the documentary ahead will examine is not just what misogyny is, but where it comes from, how it has been justified by philosophers and religious traditions, what forms it takes today, and why defining it precisely turns out to matter enormously.

• 2. A System, Not Just a Feeling

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  Philosopher Kate Manne draws a sharp line between misogyny and sexism that changes how both words work. Sexism, in her framework, is the theoretical arm. It justifies a system of power called patriarchy by alleging differences between men and women, sometimes beyond what evidence supports. Misogyny is something different. Manne calls it the "enforcement arm" of patriarchy. It does not explain the hierarchy; it polices it. As she writes: "Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts."

  That framing has practical consequences. Manne argues that the traditional definition of misogyny as a simple hatred of women is too narrow. It fails to explain how a man can love his mother or his daughters and still engage in misogynistic behavior toward other women. Under her model, misogyny rewards women who accept subordinate roles and punishes those who reject them. It distinguishes not between men and women, but between women it considers "good" and women it considers "bad".

  Sociologist Michael Flood at the University of Wollongong adds a further layer. He notes that misogyny is practiced not only by men but also by women against other women and even against themselves. Internalized misogyny can appear as a tendency to minimize women's contributions, mistrust other women, or accept the terms that misogyny sets. Flood identifies it as an ideology with thousands of years of institutional support. He cites Aristotle's claim that women exist as "natural deformities or imperfect males" as a founding statement in a tradition that has never fully ended.

  Sociologist Allan G. Johnson at the same time places misogyny at the center of sexist ideology. He argues it is "a central part of sexist prejudice" and that its manifestations run from jokes to pornography to violence to the self-contempt that some women are taught to feel toward their own bodies. The scholar Rhea Ashley Hoskin adds one more distinction: the academic term femmephobia identifies oppression targeted at feminine gender expression specifically, a form of contempt that can be directed at anyone seen as feminine, not only at women.

• 3. Origins in Bronze Age and Myth

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  Anthropologist David D. Gilmore places the origins of misogyny roughly three to five thousand years ago, at the start of the Bronze Age, which he ties to the emergence of patriarchal social organization. His explanation for why misogyny arose is not a simple one. He argues that men hold conflicting feelings toward women: a deep existential dependence on them for procreation and emotional sustenance, combined with a fear of the power women hold in men's moments of vulnerability. Gilmore calls misogyny a "near-universal phenomenon" and argues that no male equivalent exists at the same scale.

  Angela Saini adds a darker historical origin. A large proportion of women in ancient societies were, she writes, kidnapped brides taken from other cultures. Many were forced to marry men who had killed their families. Misogynistic suspicion in ancient Greece and elsewhere can partly be traced, she argues, to male anxiety that these women might one day revolt against those who had enslaved them. Saini links the emergence of patriarchy and gender stereotyping directly to the rise of the state.

  In Greek mythology, Jack Holland's book Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice points to the story of Pandora as a founding example. In Hesiod's telling, the human race had lived in peace as companions to the gods before women existed. When Prometheus stole fire, Zeus decided to punish humanity with an "evil thing for their delight". That evil thing was Pandora, the first woman. She carried a jar, not a box as the story is usually misrepresented, and when she opened it she released labor, sickness, old age, and death into the world. The message was direct: women are the source of human suffering.

  The three major monotheistic religions, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, all promoted patriarchal structures and used misogyny to maintain women at lower social status. Misogyny gathered particular force in the Middle Ages, above all in Christian societies. But it was also practiced independently in the societies of the Romans, the Greeks, and tribes of the Amazon Basin and Melanesia, none of whom followed a monotheistic faith.

• 4. Philosophy's Long Record

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  Aristotle wrote that women are "deformed males" and declared in Politics that "the male is by nature superior and the female inferior, the male ruler and the female subject". He claimed women had fewer teeth than men. He described them as more mischievous, more deceptive, more impulsive, and less capable of reason than men. Sociologist Michael Flood notes that Aristotle's assertion that women are "natural deformities" continues to shape Western culture's internalized attitudes, including women's own perceptions of their bodies.

  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, writing centuries later, argued that girls should be "thwarted from an early age" and exercised in constraint "so that it costs them nothing to stifle all their fantasies". In his treatise Emile, he advised that women should be "closed up in their houses" and receive "the decisions of fathers and husbands like that of the church".

  Arthur Schopenhauer's essay "On Women" drew the attention of philosopher Tom Grimwood, who in a 2008 article in the journal Kritique argued that Schopenhauer's misogynistic writing had largely escaped critical attention despite being more explicit than that of other philosophers, including Nietzsche. Schopenhauer called women "childish, frivolous, and short sighted" and denied that women possessed any real beauty independent of male sexual desire.

  Friedrich Nietzsche, in Beyond Good and Evil, stated that stricter controls on women were a condition of "every elevation of culture". In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, a female character delivers the line: "You are going to women? Do not forget the whip." Scholars continue to debate whether these statements represent settled conviction or deliberate provocation. Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right held that women "regulate their actions not by the demands of universality, but by arbitrary inclinations and opinions", placing them outside the scope of philosophical and scientific life. A roster of influential Western thinkers that also includes Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Hume, Freud, Weininger, Spengler, and Lucas have been characterized by feminist scholars as contributors to a continuous tradition of misogynistic thought.

• 5. Religion and Sacred Texts

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  The fourth chapter of the Quran is called "Women," or an-nisa. Its thirty-fourth verse is the most debated verse in feminist scholarship on Islam. The verse identifies men as women's protectors and maintainers on the basis of God-given advantages, and instructs that disobedient wives may be admonished, separated from, and struck. Reza Aslan, professor at the University of Southern California and author of No god but God, argues that "misogynistic interpretation" has attached itself persistently to this verse because commentary on the Quran "has been the exclusive domain of Muslim men". Taj Hashmi, writing in Popular Islam and Misogyny: A Case Study of Bangladesh, draws a distinction between Quranic texts and what he calls the "corpus of avowedly misogynic writing and spoken words by the mullah having very little or no relevance to the Quran".

  Christian traditions have been deeply divided. Katharine M. Rogers, in The Troublesome Helpmate, argues that the foundations of early Christian misogyny rest in Paul's epistles. K. K. Ruthven cites Rogers and adds that this legacy was "consolidated by the so-called 'Fathers' of the Church, like Tertullian", who described a woman as "not only 'the gateway of the devil' but also 'a temple built over a sewer'". Women are formally excluded from the Mount Athos region of Greece and from the governing hierarchy of the Catholic Church. John Knox, in The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstruous Regiment of Women, argued on religious grounds that women should be barred from secular government.

  Counter-arguments within Christianity also have scholarly weight. Biblical scholar David M. Scholer of Fuller Theological Seminary identifies Galatians 3:28, in which Paul writes that in Christ Jesus "there is neither male nor female", as "the fundamental Pauline theological basis" for equal partnership across all church ministries. Catholic scholar Christopher West states that "male domination violates God's plan and is the specific result of sin".

  Bernard Faure, professor at Columbia University and author of The Power of Denial: Buddhism, Purity, and Gender, concluded that Buddhism is "paradoxically neither as sexist nor as egalitarian as is usually thought". He acknowledged that many feminist scholars have emphasized its androcentric nature, but argued that the term Buddhism covers a number of doctrines, ideologies, and practices, some of which tolerate or even cultivate difference at their margins. In Sikhism, scholars William M. Reynolds and Julie A. Webber credit Guru Nanak, the faith's founder, as a fighter for women's rights who was in no way misogynistic, even as they observe that unconscious misogynistic attitudes in Sikh men have since reduced women's power within the community.

• 6. Violence and Online Escalation

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  Femicide is the intentional killing of women or girls on the basis of their sex. It is classified as a hate crime. Since 2018, counter-terrorism professionals at organizations including ICCT and START have tracked misogyny and male supremacy as ideologies driving terrorism, describing this form of violence as a "rising threat". Among the attacks designated as misogynist terrorism are the 2014 Isla Vista killings and the 2018 Toronto van attack. Several of the perpetrators identified with the incel movement, a community of men who describe themselves as involuntary celibates and who believe they are systematically denied sexual access to women. Misogyny is documented as a common feature among mass killers even when it is not identified as the primary motive.

  Online misogyny has grown more aggressive over time and now encompasses both individual harassment and coordinated collective action. Vote brigading and the Gamergate harassment campaign are documented examples of the latter. Kim Barker and Olga Jurasz, writing in the Journal of International Affairs, describe how online abuse creates obstacles for women attempting to participate in public and political spaces on the internet. Swatting, the practice of making false emergency reports to bring armed police to someone's location, was used during Gamergate to extend digital attacks into the physical world.

  Among those who publicly documented misogynistic attacks they received are Anita Sarkeesian, Laurie Penny, Caroline Criado Perez, Stella Creasy, and Lindy West. Jude Doyle, also a target, described the "overwhelmingly impersonal, repetitive, stereotyped quality" of the abuse. A 2016 study by the think tank Demos found that on Twitter, the majority of messages containing the words "whore" or "slut" were advertisements for pornography. Of those using the terms as insults, roughly half came from women and half from men. A 2021 study presented at the meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics found that online misogyny varies markedly by language: Spanish discussions show stronger dominance themes, Italian discussions feature more stereotyping and objectification, English discussions most frequently involve discrediting women, and Danish discussions primarily express neo-sexism.

• 7. Law and Institutional Recognition

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  In 2016, Nottinghamshire Police launched a pilot project to record misogynistic behavior as hate crime or hate incidents in England. Over the two years from April 2016 to March 2018, the scheme produced 174 reports. Of those, 73 were classified as crimes and 101 as incidents. The project sparked a national conversation about whether misogyny should be formally added to the list of aggravated factors in criminal sentencing.

  In September 2018, the Law Commission was directed to conduct a review into whether misogynistic conduct, along with hostility based on ageism, misandry, or membership in groups such as goths, should be treated as a hate crime. That same October, two senior police figures, Sara Thornton, chair of the National Police Chiefs' Council, and Cressida Dick, Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, publicly urged forces to prioritize more serious crimes such as burglary and violent offences rather than recording incidents that were not themselves criminal. Thornton acknowledged that treating misogyny as a hate crime was a priority for "some well-organised campaigning organisations" but argued that police forces "do not have the resources to do everything".

  In September 2020, the Law Commission proposed that sex or gender be added to the list of protected characteristics. At that point seven police forces in England and Wales were already classifying misogyny as a hate crime, though the definition had not been adopted nationally. A Home Office spokesperson in October 2021 stated that forces had been asked to record any crime the victim believed was driven by hostility to their sex. Economist Deniz Kandiyoti's concept of the "patriarchal bargain", developed in the late twentieth century, offers one structural explanation for why institutional change moves slowly: colonial powers historically offered conquered men complete control over women in exchange for cooperation, promoting the most misogynistic men to leadership and reshaping colonized societies around their values.