This paper is an examination of misogyny in North American society and its effects on women, including the role that religion has played both in supporting misogynistic tendencies and in helping society to reject the hatred of women. Misogyny has roots in a variety of social forces and is especially prevalent in male-dominated cultures. It is rooted in distrust and fear of the unknown; women are seen as "the other," necessary for procreation and the satisfaction of sexual drives, but different enough to be feared. While the problem is primarily a male fear (no equivalent concept has evolved for the hatred of men, except perhaps for the term "male bashing"), women are sometimes subject to hatred of other members of their own sex. Religion, especially various forms of Christianity, has attempted to battle the kinds of fundamental human fears and hatred of which misogyny is one form, but the church's paternalistic roots tend to make the job difficult. Misogyny is a pervasive and subversive undercurrent throughout much of Western society. Understanding the subtle ways in which it finds expression is just the first step in attempting to overcome this powerful fear of half the population by the other half.
Misogyny is the hatred of women, usually by men. Joseph H. Pleck describes one of the commonly accepted explanations for this fear:
The male child, the argument goes, perceives his mother and his predominately female elementary school teachers as dominating and controlling. These relationships do in reality contain elements of domination and control, probably exacerbated by the restriction of women's opportunities to exercise power in most other areas. As a result, men feel a lifelong psychological need to free themselves from or prevent their domination by women. The argument is, in effect, that men oppress women as adults because they experienced women as oppressing them as children.
According to this argument, dom...