Misogyny - Feminist Theory

Feminist Theory

In the late 20th century, second wave feminism theorists claim that misogyny is both a cause and result of patriarchal social structures.

Traditional feminist theorists describe many different attitudes as misogyny. According to feminists, in its most overt expression, a misogynist will openly hate all women simply because they are female.

In feminist theory, other forms of misogyny may be less overt. Some misogynists may simply be prejudiced against all women, or may hate women who do not fall into one or more acceptable categories. Subscribers to one model claim that some misogynists think in terms of the mother/whore dichotomy, where they hold that women can only be "mothers" or "whores." Another variant model is the one alleging that certain men think in terms of a virgin/whore dichotomy, in which women who do not adhere to an Abrahamic standard of moral purity are considered "whores".

The term misogynist is frequently used in a looser sense as a term of derision to describe anyone who is considered to hold a prejudiced view about women as a group. Therefore, someone like Schopenhauer who proposes that women are naturally subservient to men, has been criticised by some scholars as a misogynist. As another example, a man who is considered by many to be a "womanizer", is often regarded as being misogynist. Examples of this type of man would be Giacomo Casanova and Don Juan, who were both reputed to have had many libertine affairs with women.

In feminist theory, misogyny is a negative attitude towards women as a group, and so need not fully determine a misogynist's attitude towards each individual woman. The fact that someone holds misogynist views may not prevent him or her from having positive relationships with some women. Conversely, simply having negative relationships with some women does not necessarily mean someone holds misogynistic views. The term, like most negative descriptions of attitudes, is applied to a wide variety of behaviors and attitudes.

Feminist theorist Marilyn Frye claims that misogyny is phallogocentric and homoerotic at its root. In Politics of Reality, Frye analyzes the alleged misogyny characteristic of the fiction and Christian apologetics of C.S. Lewis. Frye argues that such misogyny privileges the masculine as a subject of erotic attention. She compares the alleged misogyny characteristic of Lewis' ideal of gender relations to underground male prostitution rings, which allegedly share the quality of men seeking to dominate subjects seen as less likely to take on submissive roles by a patriarchal society, but in both cases doing so as a theatrical mockery of women.

In comparing misogyny with misandry, sociologist Michael Flood, at the University of Wollongong, has argued that "misandry lacks the systemic, transhistoric, institutionalized, and legislated antipathy of misogyny."

Camille Paglia, a self-described "dissident feminist" who has often been at odds with other academic feminists, argues that the Marxist-inspired interpretation of misogyny so prevalent in second-wave feminism is seriously flawed. In contrast, Paglia argues that a close reading of historical texts find that men do not hate women but fear them.