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Notes -
I agree with @To_Mandalay. I think the “misogyny = hating women” definition allows for all kinds of weaseling around what exactly ‘hate’ means, kind of like how “homophobia” always gets debated by people who don’t like gay men who declare that they’re “not scared” of homosexuals in the way that the literal meaning of phobia colloquially implies if you don’t also use the other meaning of aversion etc. It’s a boring semantic debate.
I also agree with you that a substantial proportion of people who have a fundamental problem with women are women, because the way that women’s intra-gender social organization works involves a strict, often unspoken hierarchy of labor, deference and gestures of status that a substantial minority of women find impossible to accept and which then leads to issues with women in general.
But there are many male misogynists. And it’s no more obvious - as Mandalay says - than among gay man, where there are some men who like women and who spend a lot of time with women, have predominantly female friends etc, and some men (and I’ve known a number) who have nothing to do with women, are entirely uninterested in them, and openly consider them lesser - indeed contemptible - in almost every way imaginable.
In straight men this is typically subsumed by the fundamental biological impulse to fuck, to have children, to raise a family. But it does slip out. Often it’s relatively mild (most misogynists don’t ‘hate’ women, hence the comparison to x-phobia), but it’s things like whether a guy likes talking to his wife or whether they spend dinner sitting on their phones, whether a man is genuinely interested in conversation with women, that kind of thing. I find I can tell a lot of the time.
Likewise I have met many women who were genuine misandrists. Mostly, though, they’re not chubby lesbian radfems; they’re hot, skinny BPD chicks, and men love them until they get burned.
To some extent I'm sorry I mentioned it, because I don't seem to have communicated what I was thinking with sufficient clarity. It is kind of like the debates about homophobia not being about fear, insofar as both words often misdiagnose the problem at hand, sometimes in ways that result in exactly the kind of fumbling non-solutions under discussion. What you and Mandalay are describing really is more like "gynephobia," particularly with some of the gay men I've known over the years. And what makes that more than a "boring semantic debate" is that you don't see gay men going on misogynistic murder sprees, so using the same word to describe the disdainful gay man and the seething incel looks like more than a merely semantic mistake.
This is where I probably should have said more: I don't object to the word "misogyny" in the sense that I don't think many of these men do hate women, such that the word is semantically appropriate. I was only trying to note that it is the kind of hate that is born of desire, not the kind of hate that is born of disdain--because once you notice that, you realize that you can't stop incel-style misogyny by teaching them to like women more. That's not the problem! The problem is that they do like women! If they didn't like women, they wouldn't hate women.
The contempt you describe is, I think, mostly separate from either the gynephobia of certain gay men or the misogyny of the isolated and unloved. Such men seem to follow the old Aristotelian style of viewing women and children as simply less than human (I can't think of a single example of the kind of man you describe who was contemptuous of women but not children--YMMV!). I don't think it would be a mistake to think of this as a species of sexism, but neither do I think it is merely a "boring semantic debate" to suggest that misogyny doesn't capture the phenomenon as well.
But, maybe it is just a boring semantic debate, and attempting to use different words to describe the different kinds of problems individual men have with women generally is a distraction. Certainly it was not the substance of my point; what I was mostly interested in pointing out is that gender eliminativists aren't in a position to provide "masculine" role models to anyone.
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