User:Alastair Haines/Misogyny
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Misogynist redirects to this article.
Misogyny (/mɪˈsɒʤɪni/) is hatred (or contempt)[1] of women.[2][3] It is a form of sexism, parallel to misandry — the hatred of men. Misogyny is also comparable with misanthropy,[4] which is the hatred of humanity generally. The antonym of misogyny is philogyny, love towards women. Marcus Tullius Cicero reports that Greek philosophers considered misogyny to be caused by gynophobia, a fear of women.[5]
Misogyny is sometimes confused with the similar looking word, misogamy which means a hatred of marriage, hence the following error.[6]
- Any doubt he may have ever cherished in his misogamic breast concerning a woman's creative capacity. — Pall Mall Gazette, 7 January 1889
An example of correct use, from the same period is:
- He ... walked the banks apart, a thing of misogyny, in a suit of flannel. — Herman Charles Merivale, Faucit of Balliol, 1882
A clearer example of the sense, also from the same era but using the related word misogynist, is provided by Thackeray.
- Confound all women, I say, muttered the young misogynist. — William Makepeace Thackeray, The Virginians, 1878
Occasionally writers play on the similarity of sound between misogyny and miscegeny (mixed-race marriage).
- This psychosocial analysis of the murder of a white civil rights activist by her mulatto lover (Joe Christmas) is replete with themes of fate, free will, sociopathy, family violence, misogyny, miscegeny, and isolation versus community.
- — Karl Kirkland, 'On the Value of William Faulkner to Graduate Medical Education', Family Medicine 33 (2001): 664.
Many feminists have proposed that misogyny both generates, and is propagated by, patriarchal social structures.