Misogyny is not a meaningful term [revised may 22, 2026]

fter sixty years of feminist insults and anti-male vitriol, we now supposedly have a backlash of men claiming to hate women and vowing to have nothing to do with them. Feminists don’t like that one little bit, and it’s driving some of them mad.

This article has been revised to reflect additional thinking on the topic.

Recently an article by a feminist named Josephine Bartosch showed up at The Critic claiming that misogyny and antisemitism are the same. Males are misogynist for liking women too much and also misogynist for not liking women enough. And antisemitic people hate Jews so, she claims, they are the same. She goes further: for some unknown reason she blames “right-wingers.”

Okay, you might say, just another piece of outrage bait off the internet. But assuming Bartosch is a real person and not just another Titania McGrath, this appears to be a widely held point of view, so it merits comment. Is there any scientific basis for it?

The answer appears to be no. Despite the fact that most biologists are now women, out of 40 million or so scientific articles on PubMed there are only 70 with “misogyny” in the title. Most are editorials in politicized journals like Nature or articles in low-profile journals like Int J Group Psychother and J Couns Psychol. The latter has an article titled “Development and initial validation of the measure of internalized misogyny with cisgender U.S. women”.^[1]

That journal is so badly organized their website goes into one of those eternal Captcha loops, so we can’t even find out whether it’s paywalled or not, let alone read it to find out what this test entails. The abstract says the authors —two women—have invented a “one-factor scale” that will tell them whether someone has “internalized misogyny,” whatever that means, so they can now find out how much there is of it.

By contrast, there are only three articles about misandry. One is about bacteria, one is about Reddit communities, and one just mentions it along with misogyny as factors to be excluded from statistics. Talk about bias!

Right wingers are not misogynistic

Through a cruel accident of fate, I happened to end up in an area populated with right-wingers. The vast majority are not only not antisemitic but strongly pro-Israel. They are the ones most strongly opposed to men being housed in women’s prisons. They are the ones who most strongly oppose “gender-affirming treatment,” i.e. drugs and surgical mutilation, for children. Right-wingers may be a tad religious for my taste; and judging from the sudden disappearance of that pack of stray dogs in my neighborhood, some of them may be extraordinarily proficient with firearms, but they are also are the least misogynist group you will ever find.

Unless, of course, you define misogyny to mean being opposed to abortion, which some right-wingers believe to be a form of murder; or to the government forcing companies to discriminate on the basis of sex, which right-wingers believe violates the premise of equal treatment for all.

The problem here is that misogyny can mean anything a feminist does not like. Of course there are many factions of feminism, some of which include people who rarely use the M word. But what this extremist faction evidently hates most is anyone pointing out that the ideology that says women should delay or avoid having children is the leading suspect for our depopulation crisis.

Genetic programming

Feminists blame ‘males’ for violence. But the problem is not males who are violent or females who select for violent males. The problem is that violence is the result of human genetic programming. For proof, read up on the brutal eight-year-long civil war currently underway among chimpanzees, one of the closest living relatives to humans. Violence must provide some survival benefit or it would be rapidly extinguished from the genome. In Darwinian terms, if it increases a species’s fitness to the environment, it is preserved by natural selection regardless of whether we like it or not. In simple terms, without ‘toxic masculinity’ humans would all have been eaten by wooly mammoths. We would be extinct by now.

Anything that a guy says about it is brushed off by feminists as misogyny. But the real problem is that political activists divide the population into mutually antagonistic groups. In their quest for power, activists pit generations, sexes, races, and nations against each other. It is the human tribal instinct that lets this happen.

I grew up as the only male in a female-only family, so you might think I’d be sympathetic to feminism. Wrong. Every day I heard them tell each other that males invented the atomic bomb and Hitler was a male, so males are the cause of every problem in the world. Nietzsche was wrong: that experience didn’t kill me, but it didn’t make me stronger either. All it did was convince me that humans are idiots and everything they say can be safely ignored.

I credit women for that insight. I owe much of my career success to my ability to ignore whatever anyone says. The idea about human intelligence has also been substantiated repeatedly by both sexes over my lifetime. But it is not their fault. Human intelligence is the product of evolution. Evolutionary forces determine how much or how little of it exists.

The sole function of the human brain is to keep a person alive. If knowing the truth keeps you alive, it will give you truth. If lying to you keeps you alive or if the truth threatens you in any way, your brain will lie to you. Maybe that means it sucks being a human, but misogyny and the lack of it don’t even enter the equation.

may 07 2026, 7:40 am. revised may 22 2026