Misogyny: Definition, Opposite, & Psychology​

By Charlie Huntington, M.A., Ph.D. Candidate
Misogyny is hatred or contempt for women. This attitude drives so much violence and discrimination against women. Why is something so harmful so pervasive?
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Prior to graduate school, I spent a year delivering a sexual assault prevention program in high school classrooms across Rhode Island. At every school, I spent a period with all the boys in each class—a chance to try to get the boys to talk more frankly about sex and consent. Most of the time, the boys were very respectful, hesitant to offend the guest lecturer who seemed so earnest. 
But in one class, I ended up having a debate with a boy who, from deep within his hoodie, persisted in calling women and girls “bitches.” I could not convince this boy to change his mind about women, although I did insist that he not use that language in the classroom.

I have never understood how people can walk through the world thinking so much less of so many other humans—but many, many people do. And few identity-based hatreds could be more widespread, or more damaging, than the hatred of women. Let’s look at the psychology of misogyny to try to understand why this attitude is so pervasive.
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What Is Misogyny? (A Definition)​

According to the American Psychological Association (2020), misogyny is contempt or hatred for women. This usually takes the form of hostility, disrespect, and even violence toward women (Leone & Parrott, 2019).
 
Many people have written about whether the words misogyny and sexism are the same. According to Nina Aron (2019), we can think about misogyny as a negative attitude toward women and sexism as the ways that misogyny manifests in our culture, such as women receiving less pay than men, being perceived as less competent, or being taken less seriously when they tell medical professionals they are in pain.
 
In other words, misogyny might be the attitude that drives sexist discrimination and violence against women. But perhaps we can also see how instances of sexism in society can cause us to develop misogynistic attitudes too (Wrisley, 2023). I vividly remember discovering MTV when I was about ten years old. I was sitting there transfixed by a music video—Janet Jackson was singing and gyrating—when my mother came in and turned off the TV. She told me, gently but firmly, that I wasn’t ready to see women that way, that I didn’t yet understand how women being sexualized this way would affect me.
 
She was right; as much as my attitude toward women was influenced by my mother’s example, as well as that of the amazing women who have educated me as my teachers, friends, and romantic partners, so too was it influenced by Disney princesses, the raunchy sex comedies of the early 2000s, and eventually online pornography.​

Opposite of Misogyny​

There is a word that means love of women—philogyny. We might consider this the opposite of misogyny. In my experience of knowing and talking to men, I have observed that many of us experience both negative and positive feelings toward women, often at the same time. Perhaps the classic example for many men is when their partner or wife wants them to be more emotionally present. Men want to feel safe with their partners—and often have few other people in whom they can confide—but also fear their ridicule or judgment. Thus, opportunities to emotionally connect with their female partners often trigger feelings of love alongside negative feelings. 

Causes of Misogyny

Why are hatred and contempt of women so widespread? One viewpoint is that our society is set up to reinforce men having a position of dominance over women. This is called hegemonic masculinity, and it is maintained through a number of different social norms, behaviors, and expectations about how genders should behave and interact with each other (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). From this perspective, regardless of whether there are scientifically valid reasons for expecting differences between genders, we have come to expect men and women to behave in certain ways. And those expectations often contribute to a power imbalance, on the population level, between men and women.
 
One aspect of society that has been rightfully critiqued for promoting misogyny is organized religion (Haggard et al., 2019). The different roles for men and women that are outlined in religious texts such as the Bible have not been shown to actually reflect natural sex differences, but they remain incredibly influential in our culture, shaping the ways that many, many people come to live their lives. Most of the teachings in the Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Judaism, and Islam) describe patriarchy, or leadership and control of families and society by men, as the default or proper way to do things.
 
Certain personality traits may also predispose people to having misogynistic beliefs. For example, people who are lower in agreeableness and in openness to experience may have more misogynistic attitudes (Akrami et al., 2009). This makes sense to me: People who tend to have more rigid expectations of the world and who are less concerned with the well-being of others may have an easier time believing that some people are less worthy than others.
 
At this point, we don’t really know where the cultural misogyny that surrounds us comes from; it is so baked into our society that it often seems normal and natural (Banet-Weiser & Miltner, 2016). I grew up hearing jokes about violence against women, and while I eventually learned not to laugh at those jokes—and then to challenge those jokes—I was never confused about why people were making such jokes in the first place. I had learned from a very young age that boys and girls were different and that boys were better at the things that mattered than girls were. The message was everywhere, from books to movies to schoolyard interactions; it took me a long time to question any of it.​

Examples of Misogyny

Misogyny is an attitude that women can carry toward themselves and other women. Women who hold misogynistic attitudes seem to experience more psychological distress and have more experiences in which they are discriminated against (Szymanski et al., 2009). They are also more likely to self-objectify, or see themselves as an object rather than a human being. We can think of these traits as manifestations of internalized misogyny—women’s hatred of their own gender.

Perhaps another manifestation of misogyny is the negative attitudes held toward women’s bodies and sexuality (Berberick, 2010). Women are simultaneously told to be chaste but also sexy, independent but also available to partners. Misogyny is often expressed if a woman is not enough of any of these things—or too much of any of these things. And women can internalize these messages, sometimes developing eating disorders, seeking cosmetic surgery, or generally organizing their lives around their appearance and how others perceive them (Berberick, 2010).

In the last decade or so, perhaps the most striking example of misogyny has come from the incel movement (Williams et al., 2021). Incel is a neologism that combines the “in” from “involuntary” and the “cel” from “celibate”—it is a label used to describe men who are not sexually active but would like to be so. In the online communities organized around this identity, men blame women for not being sexually available to them. Casting themselves as victims, they express hatred and contempt toward the women around them—in other words, misogyny.
 
This misogynistic stance is rooted in the assumption that women should be readily available to men as sexual partners. Often, men in these spaces lean on arguments related to patriarchal traditions to justify their sense of victimhood and their anger at women for not meeting these expectations. And some of these men go so far as to intentionally perpetrate large-scale acts of violence against women in their communities (Williams et al., 2021).
 
While the example of incels may seem extreme or like an outlier, there are also many smaller everyday manifestations of misogyny. The video at the link below highlights some examples of these more mundane moments when hatred and contempt for women are expressed.​

Video: Misogynistic Microaggressions

Misogyny and Narcissism​

It has been noted that narcissistic men, especially political leaders, often voice misogynistic attitudes and promote gender inequality (Kaul, 2021). It has been suggested that they do this for a couple reasons (Kaul, 2021). First, these leaders use language that aligns themselves with other men and with masculinity. Second, as a complementary strategy, it enables them to position their political opponents as feminine (and therefore inferior, from the misogynist’s viewpoint).

Misogyny Etymology

The word misogyny is Greek and may have been inspired by a Greek myth in which the god Zeus chose to punish the people of Greece—who were all men up to this point—after one of them, Prometheus, attempted to steal one of Zeus’s powers (Srivastava et al., 2017). As punishment, Zeus introduced a woman, Pandora, into their midst, who brought with her a box that, once opened, unleashed all sorts of illness and pain into the world.
 
To me, this myth has some eerie parallels to the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden. Across both stories, the woman is guilty of introducing sin and other negative experiences into the world. It is easy to see how these stories, told over millennia, could help create a misogynistic culture.​

Psychology of Misogyny

When women internalize misogyny, they embrace self-objectification—the seeing of oneself as an object more than a human being—and the highly gendered roles they have been taught are normal for men and women (Dehlin & Galliher, 2019). There is ample research documenting both how automatic and unconscious this internalization process is and how harmful the process is for women.  
 
It also appears that internalized misogyny is more common in the United States among women who vote Republican or hold conservative beliefs than among women who vote Democrat or hold liberal beliefs (Dehlin & Galliher, 2019). In this same study, an association between women’s internalized misogyny and lower romantic relationship quality was also found. At the same time, misogynistic beliefs are so common that they often are voiced by people who do not see themselves as having any prejudice and who would not closely identify with any political party (Tileagă, 2019).​

Quotes on Misogyny

  • “The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: that wild country, the being of women.” — Ursula K. Le Guin
  • “Misogyny comes naturally to a young man in his late teens; it is a function of the powerful homosocial impulses that flower along Fraternity Row, that drove the mod movements of the middle sixties and late seventies, that lie at the heart of every rock band formed by men of that age.” — Michael Chabon
  • “At their core, misogyny and racism are very similar modes of thinking. Both diminish and disrespect a class of people based on a trait that is wholly distinct from their ideas, their carriage and their conduct.” — Dessa Darling

Articles Related to Misogyny

​Want to learn more? Check out these articles:

Books Related to Misogyny

If you’d like to keep learning more, here are a few books that you might be interested in.

Final Thoughts on Misogyny​

Misogyny, like racism and other identity-based prejudices, is quite common and often hard to notice within ourselves. I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that all of us have laughed at a joke that demeans women or a movie scene where a woman is humiliated. And plenty of us have said those kinds of things ourselves, whether as children or much more recently. That doesn’t make any of this okay—just painfully common.

How do we push back on misogyny? Some people would say that it is best to try not to see others in terms of gender. I think this is a difficult goal that ignores the gender differences that do naturally exist. Instead, I hope we can adopt more of a “different but equally good” attitude toward gender differences—and especially toward differences between people within versus outside the gender binary too. While there do seem to be, on average and across entire populations, some significant gender- and sex-based differences, none of these have to make one gender better or worse than another.​

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