|
|
They are organized
"I'd rather hurt a man than love a woman."
The (partial) Spear Counterpart to Does Not Like Men. When one of a character's major defining traits is his hatred of women. Usually portrayed not just as mere sexism, but unreasoning hate of women. The Depraved Homosexual rarely exhibits this trait (this is the usual department of the Camp Gay and it's played for laughs).
This trope is played for laughs more often than not — often a part of the Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist or the Butt Monkey's personalities. In earlier works a character's outright fear of women was treated as a running gag. Dramatic protagonists who don't like women usually don't like other men that much more. Perpetrators in Crime Dramas will often have this as the root rationale for crimes against women.
Women who don't like men will more often than not be portrayed even less sympathetically, being written off as an "evil feminist", but members of this trope are usually just written as being bad from the start. Consequently, He Man Woman Haters are very often (but not always) Straw Misogynists while their Distaff Counterparts are much less likely to be Straw Feminists.
Interestingly, the actual Spear Counterpart to Does Not Like Men, sympathetic portrayal and all, does exist — a vast number of romance novel heroes are exactly that! However, most of the works that get represented on this wiki are designed for a different audience.
The Trope Namer in this case is The Little Rascals* , who (with the obvious exception of Darla) held meetings of the "He-Man Woman Haters Club" in their treehouse.
If the male in question hasn't hit puberty yet, that's Girls Have Cooties. Compare Celibate Hero, Licensed Sexist, Effeminate Misogynistic Guy and Straw Misogynist. Not to be confused with a (nonexistent) He Man And The Masters Of The Universe spinoff about the titular hero being an example of this trope.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Anime & Manga
Comic Books
- Jughead used to define this trope, until he started to mellow. Now he's just suspiciously indifferent to them.
- Ares from Marvel Comics doesn't...hate women exactly, but he thinks they're inherently weak and foolish, so much so he refused to allow his son's mother contact with the boy, as her influence would only weaken him.
- Rorschach from Watchmen dislikes women and all aspects of sex and sexuality. This is due to his rather disturbed childhood involving his abusive mother, who was a prostitute, and his rather over demanding sense of justice. Ironically, it is two heinous crimes against women that affect him most in his life (Kitty Genovese and Blair Roche).
- Rorschach sees women in black and white, as with everything else in his life. Specifically, he suffers from the madonna/whore complex, where women are either virgins powered with Incorruptible Pure Pureness or worthless evil sluts. Genovese and Roche were the sort of women he was able to idealize as the former, which is why he cared about them. Most of the other women in his life, not so much. The only woman in the story who receives actual words of approval from him is the fellow crimefighter Silk Spectre.
- Max from Sam & Max. He is always confused when he is occasionally attracted to one.
- Technically, the confusion is Sam saying, "You don't even like girls!" Much as people try to put him in one hole or another, Max is Max, and what he actually thinks about women will forever remain a mystery.
Film
- Eddie Dane from Miller's Crossing
- Tom Cruise's character from Magnolia. ("Respect the cock! Tame the cunt!")
- One of the first Three Stooges shorts was called Woman Haters in which the boys join a club that forsakes women. Famous in that all the dialog was in verse.
- The club—or a reasonable facsimile thereof—was revisited two decades later in the Shemp era, in "Gypped in the Penthouse" (195)
- In the Company of Men, played fairly straight.
- Marine counter-terrorism expert Rufus Excalibur ffolkes in North Sea Hijack (1980). Roger Moore deliberately took on the role of the misogynist old sea dog to escape his previous typecasting as the suave, womanising James Bond and The Saint.
- The title character in Ratmans Notebooks, which is fitting since the book seems to be loosely based on the real-life case of Ed Gein.
- The Kill Bill version of Pai Mei was said to hate women, although it's apparent that Beatrix Kiddo was an exception.
- Though to be fair, I always got the impression that Pai Mei didn't particularly like ANYBODY until they had proven themselves in his eyes.
- Averted by the main character in Deathstalker II: Duel of the Titans, who plays at being this while confronting a group of guards who are in the middle of harassing the heroine.
- "Ordinarily I don't mind seeing a woman get a good beating, if she deserves it..."
- Billy in Buffalo 66 openly admits to not liking women, although he eventually ends up with one.
Literature
- Peaceable Sherwood of The Sherwood Ring by Elizabeth Marie Pope. His uncle/guardian got him enlisted as a soldier during the Revolutionary War (on the Brit side) specifically because Peaceable "refused to marry the half-wit he had selected for me." When his uncle pointed out that acting like a half-wit was the fashion for young ladies of the time, Peaceable said he'd rather die single, and refused to marry until he met a woman as intelligent as he was. In a Crowning Moment of Awesome, the sister of the soldier he's taken prisoner tricks him into drinking sleeping drops (that he knows she has on her at the time because (a) he saw them and (b) she even mentioned them in conversation!) because he finds it all too easy to believe that a woman would be dumb enough to try to pull that off. When he realizes what she's done after the drinking, he promptly proposes marriage before passing out!
- The Wizards of Discworld hold gynophobia as a proud tradition because if wizards breed, it can lead to the return of Sourcery. Or, as Rincewind describes it:
Conina: What have you wizards got against women, then?
Rincewind: We're not supposed to put anything against women. That's the whole point.
- Which adds an interesting dimension to the throwaway line about Rincewind having experienced orgasms, "Some of them even in the company of other people."
- Though keep in mind that Rincewind is a failed wizard who "takes to magic as a fish takes to fire", so it's entirely possible he doesn't need to abide by these rules.
- He may be a bad at magic but that doesn't mean he isn't still a wizard, as noted in The Colour of Magic and Sourcery. So his eight son could become a sourcerer.
- Though several books suggest this is treated by a few wizards as an optional guideline, rather than a rule.
- In Making Money, it is mentioned that many students turn to necromancy because the style is good for picking up women. They're prohibited from marrying, but, hey, marriage isn't what they're looking for, you know? (Genius Bonus: this is exactly how the rules of "celebacy" worked at Cambridge University in the 16th century.)
- It's not necromancy. It's Post-Mortem Communication.
- Lampshaded in Unseen Academicals in connection to the Ambiguously Gay Bengo Macarona:
"A lot of that sort of thing about, apparently (...) Besides, if you didn't like the company of men, you wouldn't come here in the first place."
- In a wonderfully spoofed Aesop at the end of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Sir Gawain says he's learned to stay away from women because they're all evil, manipulative bitches. Wrong! Let the Green Knight spin the ancient Wheel of Morality and illuminate you.
- Bunny, from The Secret History. Only his girlfriend counts as a real woman.
- Jed Lacey, David Drake's detective hero from Lacey and Friends, a convicted rapist whose punishment included such severe aversion therapy that he finds it difficult to talk to or even remain in the same room as a woman, let alone touch them. Then they made him a police officer, since it's a Crapsack World.
- Sir Bors is described as misogynistic in several retellings of the Arthurian legend, particularly T. H. White's The Once and Future King. But despite hating women, he still adheres to the code of chivalry and agrees to defend Queen Guenever's honour when she's accused of poisoning Sir Patrick.
- White subtly hints this stems from Bors being gay and in denial about it — apparently like White himself.
- Played painfully straight in Tehanu: Every unsympathetic man is one of these, especially the wizards. A special mention goes to Aspen, who enslaves the heroine just because she's a woman. That's it. Sure, he makes a slave of Ged too because he killed his master, but... yeah. Hell, Le Guin even strips previous characterization to use this trope to turn Cob, the Big Bad immortality seeker from the third book into one of these.
- It's worth noting that in Earthsea, women in general and witches in particular are considered suspect. Wizards are celibate because they fear contamination from women, even the sympathetic characters such as Ged.
- Nero Wolfe keeps a relentlessly male household, and appears to have little tolerance for women. His actual attitude is more complex; he hates stupidity and emotional outbursts, and women of mid-20th-century America were trained not to show off their intelligence or to be too unemotional (thought to be a sign of a "man-hating" woman). The few times he encounters a woman like that, he's genuinely polite and (for him) friendly.
- The Dead Man from the Garrett, P.I. series, whose character is a fantasy/noir homage to Wolfe, voices this attitude in the early novels. By the sixth or seventh book it's pretty clear that it's an affectation more than a deep-seated prejudice, plus a bit of sour grapes (because he is literally dead and hence misses out on a sex life).
- The Three Musketeers: Athos has a strong hatred of women, particularly blondes. Having your wife Miledy turn out to be a branded thief will do that to a man. She's even worse when they meet again.
- The planet of Masada in Honor Harrington has this as their hat. Their progenitor culture on the planet Grayson has a somewhat milder version when first introduced, which somewhat dissipates over the course of the series.
- The Obsidian Trilogy: While the entire city of Armethalieh might as well have its name changed to Misogynyville, Lycaelon Tavadon is a particularly extreme example even for them, especially in the first book.
- An alarming number of the characters in The Millennium Trilogy. The first book's Swedish title was Men Who Hate Women before being adapted to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo for the English version.
- In Death: There is one place called Jim's Gym in Visions In Death. Big, burly men go there, and it is no secret that the people there are he-men, and they dislike women intensely. Eve ends up having quite the conversation with the owner Jim. Jim has had a number of ex-wives, because he's such a charmer. To his credit, he was not happy to hear that one of the man going to his gym is a rapist and a murderer specifically targeting women. So he helps her out saying "I don't hold with rape. Worse than murder, you ask me." It's hard to argue with such a statement.
- Collleen McCullough gives the (real life) Roman renegade Quintus Sertorius this attitude in her Masters Of Rome series. Sertorius, a brilliant general whose life is soldiering has no time for women except his mother.
Live Action TV
Music
- Obviously, the song He Man Woman Hater by Extreme.
- Arguably, a lot of Gangsta Rap.
- "Bitches Ain't Shit" by Dr Dre being one of the most egregious examples.
- "Macho Insecurity" by Dead Kennedys (a commentary on the trope, not an example)
- Much of Anal Cunt's discography, such as 'Women: Nature's Punching Bag', 'Kill Women', 'You're Pregnant, So I Kicked You in the Stomach', 'I'm Glad I'm Not A Girl' and many more. In an inversion they also have a parody album called 'Picnic Of Love' which contains such gems as 'I Respect Your Feelings As A Woman And A Human' and 'I'd Love To Have Your Daughter's Hand In Marriage'.
New Media
- A common trope to be played straight on 4chan.
- Any woman who introduces herself on there will be greeted with 'Tits or GTFO'. There's also the belief that there are no girls on the internet.
- The comments, titles and descriptions on Porn 2.0 (YouTube esque porn sites) fit this trope as well. Even if the girl is just masturbating ( presumably what the person watching is doing as well), she will get called a "dumb whore" just because she's a girl. Not to mention the fact that many videos are possibly A). released without consent or B). taped with a hidden camera.
- Apparently quite common on the internet in general - the women who take the brunt of it, it seems, are women with any kind of blog to do with important issues like religion, sexuality or politics, or in male-dominated fields like video games and engineering. As detailed in this article, and several others, the abuse these women get is actually quite extreme,
 with threats of sexual violence and out-and-out murder.
Newspaper Comics
- The titular character of Lil Abner - though he may have just been spooked by the overly aggressive women in his life (Mammy, Daisy Mae, Sadie Hawkins) than any real fear of women.
- Sgt. Snorkel of Beetle Bailey
Tabletop Games
Theatre
- Professor Henry Higgins from My Fair Lady is very misogynistic, though he insists he's not. In fact, he's got two whole songs dedicated to whining about how much he dislikes women ("An Ordinary Man" and "A Hymn to Him" a.k.a. "Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?"). The end of the play may have helped him get over it, but again, it's up to viewer interpretation.
Real Life
- There were rather unsubtle hints that late serial killer Lawrence Singeton was following this trope when he started out assaulting women, which escalated in his rape of a 15 year old female hitchhiker, ending in him trying to murder her by hacking her arms just below the elbows with a hatchet and leaving her to die slowly in a culvert, not counting on the girl being a Determinator by struggling out and wandering near a roadway holding her nearly severed arms in the air to prevent blood loss before being found. After serving only eight years, he was arrested again in 1997 for the strangling of a prostitute in Tampa, Florida.
Video Games
- Adell, the main character of Disgaea 2, "does not like girls" because of an attempted childhood deal with a succubus gone south that left his face with a pair of Inigo Montoya-style scars and nearly killed him. He ends up making an exception for Rozalin in the end, but he's still a bit queasy around most women.
- Super Robot Wars Z gives us Reuben General of the Chimera squad. A seemingly dashing Bishōnen on the first glance, it turns out to be a mask and he quickly reveals his true self: an Ax Crazy woman hater, fueled with a certain Freudian Excuse, the only woman he trusted is his leader. Setsuko still thought of him in a quite high opinion, as even though he is a woman-hater, what he did couldn't match what Asakim did to her.
- Reuben's mostly a Jerkass in general though. He hates the male lead Rand just as much as he hates Setsuko. He basically hates everyone in the world except Edel his leader who he adores, and Shuran who's apprantly the only person in the world he's willing to hang out with.
- Miles Edgeworth of Ace Attorney isn't particularly misogynist but he absolutely does not understand his Chick Magnet nature and has no interest in taking advantage of it. This, combined with some of his attitudes towards Phoenix Wright and his dress sense, encourage some to believe he's either gay, asexual, or just doesn't care much about women.
- Issei Ryudou of Fate/stay night, who appears to be highly dismissive or flustered concerning women in general and considers the school idol Rin Tohsaka to be his arch-enemy, and also the spawn of the devil. He's not that far off about that, all things considered. On the other hand, he thinks Saber is practically angelic.
- This leads to a hilarious encounter with Ilya in Fate/hollow ataraxia.
- Kenji from Katawa Shoujo, with his belief in a vast feminist conspiracy that aims to Take Over the World and that his school (with a 6-4 female/male ratio) will be a prime battleground, probably qualifies.
- Interestingly, in one route he reveals that he once had a girlfriend, and clarifies that he doesn't actually hate women; what he hates are feminists. That said, he seems to assume that all women are feminists unless proven otherwise...
- While not outright hating women, Guy Cecil from Tales of the Abyss is absolutely terrified of them. This is at first played for laughs, but then it's shown to have stemmed from a highly traumatic incident in his past... after which it's played for laughs again.
- Tohru Adachi of Persona 4 shows some degree of this when he's revealed as the killer. Openly referring to women as "Bitches and Whores" (okay, he doesn't actually say that exactly, but you get the idea), his murders of Mayumi Yamano and Saki Konishi were motivated by a mix of lust and pure misogyny (with a bit of For the Evulz).
- Alvis of Velthomer of Fire Emblem: Seisen no Keifu has serious issues with the female gender. This is less about outright hatred and more as a consequence of a seriously Dark and Troubled Past. His much-hated father, Duke Victor of Velthomer, was a Jerkass who drove Alvis's beloved and idealized mother Cigyun into despair with his Casanova ways. When Victor raped Cigyun's lady-in-waiting and kicked her out of the court when she got pregnant (which would lead to his half-brother Azel's birth), the distraught Cigyun cheated on him with Prince Kurth of Grandbell; when Viktor found out about that, he killed himself, and Cigyun left Velthomer to never return. This drove Alvis to kick almost all the women out of the Velthomer court (save for Azel's mother) and to distance himself from women for many years... except for two women: his right hand woman Aida (and mother of Cyas, his Heroic Bastard son) and the girl he would marry - Diadora... Cigyun and Kurth's daughter and his half-sister, and Lord Siglud's wife. It's very, VERY complicated.
- James Tobin is implied to be at least this in the game In The 1st Degree. He had a divorce from his wife Helen, which apparently caused him to go on a downward spiral. He sleeps around, and was at least physically abusive towards his girlfriend Ruby. If you play the game right, you can ask him about the phone conversation he had with Zack. When Granger brings up the fact that Yvonne says that she witnessed a fight between him and her husband Zack, he'll end up claiming "She's lying! The bitch is lying!" Later on, Granger brings up Ruby, "the woman Tobin loved", at which point Tobin growls under his breath "That lying whore!" It becomes pretty clear that Tobin does not seem to like women very much.
- Kotaro Fuuma of Onimusha 2: Samurai's Destiny has a deep distrust and dislike of women, and is openly hostile to Oyu, mainly for being a woman. It is later revealed that his dislike stems from his belief that his mother abandoned him. Depending on Kotaro's friendship values with Jubei, Kotaro will end up mortally wounded, and as he dies he finally realises that his mother never abandoned him - she actually died protecting him. It is also worth noting that Kotaro is portrayed a lot more sympathetically than many other characters who qualify for this trope.
Webcomics
- Vincent from My Life in Blue, despite the fact that his best friend, Alison, is female.
- Stunt from Dominic Deegan, to an almost ridiculous degree. Tends to be played up a lot more when he's acting as an authorial punching bag.
- Wrecking Paul of Everyday Heroes, who's clumsy Affably Evil persona was actually a Masquerade to hide the fact that he was a serial killer who targeted women. He's not discovered until he kills one of his teammates - because the female hero he'd targeted (under the guise of robbing the building she was guarding) was replaced with a male.
- Psycho Mantis from The Last Days of Foxhound. The Video Game incarnation's dislike of human sexuality is basically flanderized into describing all women as 'whorebags' and having a violent reaction to being approached by them — at one point he would rather fall to his death than let Sniper Wolf pull him to safety.
- Conrad of Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name is a pretty prickly guy in general, but he harbors a startlingly violent terror/hatred of women in particular, for reasons unknown.
- In his defense, the first couple women we see him interacting with are Hanna's terrifying landlady, and then the female vampire who beat him up, drove him out of his house, and sired him. So, that's understandable. And he doesn't seem to mind Toni.
- Hunter of Code Name: Hunter. Flashback comics have implied that Hunter was a severe gynophobe, to the point where his inability to work with female agents was threatening his job. Current comics show that he got better (implied to be due to being forced to pair with Gypsy - they were each other's last chance). Now he's simply painfully shy around women who aren't Gypsy.
- Jack of Mayonaka Densha fits this trope well. While he doesn't care too much for humanity as a whole, he seems to have something against women in particular for no discernible reason besides a slight hinting that he may have had some traumatic experience during his childhood.
Web Original
Western Animation
- Averted in He Man And The Masters Of The Universe, despite the name.
- Plane Daffy, a Wartime Cartoon in the Looney Tunes series had Daffy Duck as a woman-hating messenger bird being used to get a secret past a spy who had been seducing messengers.
- According to the website, Kung Fu Panda's Mantis does not like hanging around with female members of his own species. Considering their mating habits, this is a very Justified Trope.
- Murderface from Metalocalypse is labeled as a "classic woman hater" by the band and calls women "soul murderers", and he's only ever nice to them when he wants them to sleep with him, which almost always backfires.
- Maybe there's a little bit of FridgeBrilliance there if his advances are always rejected.
- In at least one other episode he tries to portray himself as a protector of women from unwanted harassment. His bandmates call him out on White Knighting his way into their pants and remind him that they KNOW he is a misogynist despite his attempts to demonstrate otherwise (they are in fact correct).
- Grumpy in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. He begrudges having Snow stay in the Dwarves' home and teases the others for giving in to her charms so easily. He softens up eventually, however, and when word comes that she might be in danger, he's the one who leads the charge.
- Cotton Hill on King of the Hill enjoys aspects of women (them cooking, cleaning, and fucking them), but anything other than that annoys him and he generally acts with hostility to women he meets (especially Peggy).
- His major Pet the Dog moment is when he helps her regain her ability to walk and take care of herself after her skydiving accident, by becoming her personal Drill Sergeant Nasty.
- He also helps her get her job back when she was fired for spanking a student, though it was more from his belief in spanking.
- The only woman he truly loved was a Japanese nurse named Mihiko. He developed a relationship with her after the end of World War II and since soldiers were not allowed to have relationships with the locals they hid their love, and he was sad when his fleet took off and tried to delay them as long as possible. Years later they reconciled and he apologized for his actions but he unknowingly fathered a son with her named Junichiro and it took quite a bit of his trust to accept him as a father.
|
|
