68.2

My husband and I were discussing over breakfast today everything from deaths of childhood friends to breakfast tomorrow. Somewhere he came up with the statement, “ There are words for things we don’t like, like “racism”, “ageism”, “misogyny,” “sexism”,……what’s the word for “hatred of men?” I scrambled for a minute and replied, “There’s “misanthropy” but that’s really hatred of mankind. Then we looked it up on our phones and found “misandry.” Neither one of us had ever heard the word “misandry.”

The next step was to look it up on Wikipedia and there I found a long discussion, which included the following statement:

Anthropologist David D. Gilmore also argues that misogyny is a "near-universal phenomenon" and that there is no male equivalent to misogyny (my boldface)….He argues that misandry is "different from the intensely ad feminam aspect of misogyny that targets women no matter what they believe or do". (Proper citations are in the Wikipedia article under “Misandry.” Go look it up.) In other words, hatred of maleness (“mis” + “andro”) is specific, whereas hatred of femaleness (‘mis”+ “gyno”) is generalized to everything about being female.

No male equivalent to misogyny.

In other words, hatred of maleness (“mis” + “andro” is specific, whereas hatred of femaleness (“mis” + “gyno”) is generalized to everything about being female. “Girly” is an insult; “boy-y” doesn’t exist.

So we’ve been talking for 150,000 years (another Wikipedia nugget) and nobody before this morning said, “What’s the word for “hatred of men?” Should I annotate Wikipedia to say “My husband and I were discussing over breakfast today….”?

“Some believe that institutionalized misandry doesn't and can't exist due to patriarchy.” Now this is an interesting idea. It too was found on the internet -- with no citation -- but it’s still worth thinking about. Patriarchy doesn’t allow for misandry because patriarchy cancels it out. Patriarchy allows no room for hatred of male, because patriarchy itself is defined by maleness. It would be like saying “God doesn’t and can’t exist due to the fact that we’re human.” Well, that is what I believe, so I guess the patriarchy statement is also true.

It also gets males off the hook. It’s not individual males’ fault if patriarchy does not allow hatred of men. I believe that, too. I also believe that mistaken thinking needs to be named and to be called out. That’s what we have language for.

Don’t bother getting familiar with the word “misandry”. It doesn’t even pronounce well. Adding more categorical bias words to our vocabulary is not productive. But just out of curiosity I looked at the website Urban Thesaurus for slang equivalents for “misandry” and came up with the best words ever: “purple poodle.” And not only that, but the definition was hidden for vulgarity. Here’s the definition:

“A male being who serves feminism without ever questioning its validity. (What’s wrong with that?) The purple poodle loves putting women above himself and lacks any form of self respect (Still no problem.)….Thus, he kowtows to the very women who humiliate and domesticate him. (I can imagine that.) Purple poodles even applaud when a feminist spews open misandry and toxic lies. (The majority of white women who voted for Trump!)”

Now if that isn’t a misandric definition of misandry, I don’t know what is. Just to finish the intellectual exercise, I checked to see whether there is a comparable pink poodle, and there isn’t.

So to this end I propose a new word: mismisogyny, from the Greek, hatred of hatred of females. Use it.