Misogyny in feminist theory
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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In the late 20th century, feminist theorists alleged that misogyny is both a cause and result of patriarchal social structures.
Traditional feminist theorists paint 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 alleged 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 holds a distasteful view about women as a group. Therefore, someone like Schopenhauer who proposes naturalistic reasons for various behaviors common to women is often regarded as a misogynist. As another, particularly striking example, man who is considered by many including himself to be "a great lover of women," is often regarded as being misogynist. Examples of this type of man would be Giacomo Casanova and Don Juan, who were both reputed for their 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 used as an epithet and applied to a wide variety of behaviors and attitudes - often as a personal attack.
As with other terms, the more antipathetic one's position is in regards to misogyny, the larger the number of misogynists and the greater variety of attitudes and behaviors who fall into one's perception of "misogynist". This is, of course, the subject of much controversy and debate with opinions ranging widely as to the extent and breadth of misogyny in society.
Feminist theorist Marilyn Frye alleges 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.
Michael Flood, an Australian sociologist at the University of Wollongong, has argued that "misandry lacks the systemic, transhistoric, institutionalized, and legislated antipathy of misogyny."
