misogyny is not a male-only attribute

It is impossible to be feminist and not be appalled by the complicity of women in their own oppression.
But it is impossible to be a woman and not have some knowledge of how this works.
If one grows up in a culture in which one’s self-worth is measured primarily by one’s desirability to men, then your energy is consumed into this horizontal competition with other women that can never be totally won. 

For power is never simply a possession but an exercise; power is about how we understand ourselves. Feminism seeks to unpick all the tiny ways in which we are bound.
Everywhere we look, there are women hating other women for business or pleasure: those who don’t want a female boss; who don’t want positive discrimination; who like strip clubs and porn as much as the boys; who don’t want to worship in churches with female priests; who want to force other women to give birth to children they don’t want; who say FGM is “cultural”; and who get off on body shaming.

On and on it goes.
How can we be surprised that misogyny is not a male-only attribute?

Far from it.

As the American satirist HL Mencken defined it,
a misogynist is “a man who hates women as much as women hate one another”.

Which is immeasurably.



Suzanne Moore
in, The Guardian