misandry

Definition

Misandry is ordinary English with a settled meaning: "the hatred of or prejudice against men or boys". ^[1] Unlike most entries in this glossary, the word was not coined by any online community, and using it is not by itself a sign of anything. The manosphere-specific usage is a matter of scale. In men's-rights and wider manosphere spaces the word stops naming an individual attitude and becomes a diagnosis of society — the claim that law, institutions and culture are systemically prejudiced against men. UN Women's glossary of manosphere language records that systemic version — the claim that society is misandrist, or prejudiced against men — in its coverage of manosphere vocabulary. ^[3]

Origin

The word is a 19th-century coinage from Greek misos (hatred) and aner/andros (man): "misandrist" appears in an 1871 Spectator article, and the Oxford English Dictionary's first known use of "misandry" dates to 1885. ^[1] Its modern prominence comes from somewhere else entirely. The idea of feminism as threatening towards men, encapsulated in this term, forms "a core part of the vocabulary of the manosphere", and men's-rights activists and other masculinist groups have criticised modern laws on divorce, domestic violence and the treatment of male rape victims as examples of what they call institutional misandry. ^[1]

What researchers say

The research argument is not about whether hostility toward individual men exists — the dictionary word names something real. The dispute is about symmetry: whether misandry is the mirror image of misogyny. Anthropologist David Gilmore, surveying the historical record, found hatred of men as men to be extremely rare, and argued that what is called misandry typically targets machismo or rigid male roles rather than men as such, whereas misogyny targets women whatever they believe or do — on that basis he treats the two as non-equivalent. ^[1] Researchers who study manosphere language, including Marwick and Caplan, describe the internet-era wave of misandry accusations as an outgrowth of misogyny and antifeminism, and men's-rights activists have been criticised for promoting a false equivalence between the two terms. ^[1] A frequent target of the accusation got a direct test in 2024, when Hopkins-Doyle and colleagues examined the stereotype that feminists hold negative attitudes toward men across six studies: feminists' attitudes toward men were positive in absolute terms and did not differ significantly from non-feminists' — a result summed up in the paper's title, "The Misandry Myth". ^[2]

What it signals

On its own, almost nothing — the word appears in ordinary argument and in mainstream writing, and someone using it may simply be describing a specific unfairness. The direction of travel is the tell, as with most men's-rights vocabulary. Naming a concrete grievance is conversation; asserting that society runs on misandry, or that misandry is the counterweight that cancels misogyny, is the movement frame — and the research above is precisely about why that equivalence does not hold up. The honest middle position is available to anyone: individual prejudice against men exists and can be named, without signing up to the system-level claim the manosphere attaches to the same word.