Misogyny Song

aka: Misandry Song

"Violence on women tends to reflect how they are treated across society. Attitudes, therefore, matter. India's film and music industries, for example, should stop depicting men who assault women as macho heroes."

— The Economist, "India's women" (January 2013)

The Misogyny Song is a song solely or primarily about the hatred or degradation of women. Often from the viewpoint of a deliberately psychopathic jerkass, and often to Lyrical Dissonance, of some sort. Quite a few fit the mold of "bitches and hos" Gangsta Rap songs, or are parodies thereof.

The counterpart, about hatred or degradation of men, is the Misandry Song ^note which redirects to this page .

Misogyny Songs tend to rely heavily on Stay in the Kitchen, "Not If They Enjoyed It" Rationalization, Black Comedy Rape, Domestic Abuse, heavy use of the Double Standard, and similar tropes. They may also rely on Intercourse with You and/or be Stuffy Old Songs About the Buttocks. (Although it is possible to do both without being a sexist jerk.) If it's a sexist man insulting an individual women or group of women for sexist reasons, it overlaps with The Diss Track.

Please avoid Natter and Complaining About Songs You Don't Like.

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Examples:

Parodies, Aversions, Subversions from all genres

• "Girls! Girls! Girls!" is Emilie Autumn's chilling Deconstructive Parody of this kind of song.
• Clawfinger's "I Need You" is a subversion: The protagonist has this perspective, but it's quite clear that the singer isn't on his own persona's side. The band uses this kind of "Villain Protagonist" structure in many other songs as well.
• Parodied by Jon Lajoie in his "Show Me Your Genitals" songs. MC Vagina claims women are only good for three things: Cooking, Cleaning, and Vaginas. He later amends this by adding Their Sisters' Vaginas.
• Minion Comics features a Teddy Ruxpin-esque stuffed turtle singing a rap song entitled "Punch Your Bitch In The Mouth" advising schoolchildren about how to treat their girlfriends.
• Radiohead's "Nude" is a scathing attack on (or arguably, a deconstruction of) misogyny songs.
• The Amateur Transplants' "Northern Birds" and "Nothing At All" play this for laughs.
• Weezer's "No One Else" was described by Rivers Cuomo as "the jealous obsessive asshole in me freaking out over my girlfriend". However, they don't condone this behaviour since on The Blue Album it's followed by "The World Has Turned And Left Me Here", which is "the same asshole wondering why she left". Weezer have also recorded other songs that on the surface are Misogyny Songs but criticise these attitudes with varying degrees of subtlety instead of condoning them, such as "Devotion", "Hot Tub" and "Why Bother?".
  • "Hot Tub" in particular subverts it in a humorous way by giving the narrator an Ignored Epiphany - the bridge has the singer realizing all his womanizing just leaves him feeling empty and unfulfilled... but the last lines of this section are "I admit this is a problem /to be solved another day", and then he goes right back to trying to convince the subject of the song to sleep with him.
• This attitude gets blasted on Nine Inch Nails' "Big Man With a Gun".
• The Stone Temple Pilots' "Sex Type Thing" condemns this using a similar Villain Protagonist structure as the Clawfinger example, as the lyrics are written from the point of view of a rapist.
• The Adventures Of Duane And Brando have "The Carpet is Lava" which starts with Duane forcing his wife to do housework, until Michael Crane comes in to chastise him... for not abusing her physically enough. The song ends with the wife calling the police and getting told by the policeman that her being beaten was her fault for not obeying the men.
• Lupe Fiasco's Food & Liquor II has a deconstruction of this kind of song in "Bitch Bad", which demonstrates how hearing this kind of music affects the way little boys view women and little girls view themselves.
• Gaston's song "Me" from the stage version of Beauty and the Beast.
• Similar to the Clawfinger and Stone Temple Pilots examples above, Sonata Arctica's "Don't Say a Word" is a Villain Song that depicts the narrator as a dangerous Yandere whose obsession and simultaneous disdain for the subject of the song is unsettling to say the least. ^note  The story is expanded upon in a later SA song "Caleb," which further establishes the narrator as a profoundly messed up individual.
• Bikini Kill's "White Boy,' a rare parodic inversion.
• The Prodigy's song "Smack My Bitch Up" was widely assumed to be one due to the rather blunt lyrics, but the band explained that it's actually a regional idiom meaning to do something with wild abandon. Their video addressed the subject by showing a first-person POV of a wild reveler who seduces women, drinks heavily, gets into fights, and turns out to be a woman.
• The Lassie Singers have a song called Mein Freund hat mit mir Schluss gemacht (My boyfriend broke up with me) which contains lines about how "dense, cowardly, and complicated" men are. Given the nature of their lyrics that use to spoof gender roles this is likely tongue-in-cheek.
• Mitch Benn's "Doctor Who Girl" mocks the sexism often associated with old-school Doctor Who. The singer longs for a subservient woman to feed his ego, like the stereotypical companion on the show.
• The experimental grindcore act Intestinal Disgorge are an odd example: While on the surface they banked heavily on this trope, to the point where every other song with comprehensible lyrics was about this, the band's primary musician Ryan Wilson has made it abundantly clear that the band's material was intended as a critical satirical response to the ubiquity of certain lyrical tropes in grindcore, using exaggeration to bring out the stranger implications in such subject matter and question why these tropes were so common in the first place. This... backfired somewhat, with most critics and a number of fans interpreting the band's work at face value, which ultimately led Wilson to abandon violent gross-out themes entirely and focus on abstract Lovecraftian horror instead.
• "All Men Are Pigs" by Studio Killers is a song about how All Men Are Perverts. However, one line reveals that the person talking is also a man. He's trying to hit on a girl by talking about how men but himself are pigs.
• The song "Männer sind Schweine" ("Men are pigs") by the German all-male band Die Ärzte is about how horrible men are and why any woman that marries one must be insane. All sung to a cheerful, happy tune. To cross the line twice, the music video has the band members being beaten up by none other than an animated Lara Croft.
• The Rammstein song "Pussy" parodies these songs, and German sex tourists (the last line of the chorus is "I can't get laid in Germany!") Just sexist bros in general, actually. You can tell when they're doing a parody because they sprinkle the song with English lyrics (and you know they're livid if they call their beloved country "Germany" instead of "Deutschland"). It's full of Unusual Euphemisms for the private parts of both sexes, most of which are the names of stereotypically German foods. Also many cross-linguistic jokes making full use of the cognates between German and English.
• A musical interlude on Radio Active featured comedienne Helen Atkinson-Wood performing a vicious parody of Annie Lennox' scathing "this-man-held-me-back-and-what's-more-he-was-a-total-bastard-with-no-talent" song Thorn In My Side. Only the parody version took the song's anti-men theme up a notch, went to the same tune, and was called Pain In My Arse.
• The Dutch song "Neem een ander in de maling" (Pull someone else's leg) from Ome Henk (Uncle Henk), a parody on Barbie Girl, is about an attractive Gold Digger trying to seduce the titular Ome Henk, only for Henk to sing how women are meant for housekeeping. Since Henk himself is generally portrayed as a horribly unpleasant person, this song only further emphasizes his horrible character.
• Eminem is notorious for writing misogyny songs, but usually from the perspective of his Anti-Role Model alter-ego, Slim Shady. This makes them ironic, pushing them into parody, deconstruction or (occasionally) horror. The degree of parody goes up and down over time, but he's never done a truly straight example.
  • In "Busa Rhyme", Slim Shady hits a pregnant woman in the stomach, then says "there's three things I hate - girls, women and bitches". Though the fact that the song plays it off like he's Missy Elliott's best friend/partner in crime/sex object makes it a lot more difficult to take seriously.
  • The Marshall Mathers LP:
    • "Kill You" is about Slim Shady raping and murdering his own mother, wife, effeminate rappers, and you. Though he breaks character towards the end of the song to inform us that it's only his way of venting his unhealthy emotions and fantasies ("know why I say these things? Because ladies' screams keep creepin' in Shady's dreams, and I don't want to pay these therapists 80Gs a week to say the same things tweece - twice, whatever, I hate these things...").
    • In a truly legendary act of Muse Abuse, "Kim" is a Murder Ballad in which Marshall drives his wife out into the forest, and slits her throat. The song is a satire of the pathetic nature of misogyny, though, since Marshall in the song is portrayed as an extraordinarily uncool fuckup doing a truly awful thing. Eminem raps his part in a nerdier voice than his natural one, and at one point bursts into Inelegant Blubbering while begging his wife "why don't you like me? You think I'm ugly, don't you?"
  • The Eminem Show:
    • "Drips" is about Eminem being stuck in an STD clinic due to having sex with 'bitches'.
    • "Superman" is about Slim Shady having superficially loving sex with someone — only for his subconscious to cut in things like "bitch, you make me hurl". The joke of the song is that Slim's On the Rebound after his divorce and is only pretending to not still be mad about it. Word of God claims it was inspired by his relationship with Mariah Carey.
  • In "Lady", Slim warns women that if they toy with his emotions and he actually falls in love with them, he'll be a Crazy Jealous Guy and abuse her, branding and tattooing her with his initials, forcing her to dress in full winter clothing in the middle of summer, and not letting her out of the house or talk to anyone.
  • In "Yellow Brick Road", Eminem apologises for a song from his youth which claimed 'black girls only want you for your money', claiming he wrote it because he was a stupid teenager, and then says "I was wrong. Because no matter what colour a girl is, she's still a - soooo let's go back, follow the Yellow Brick Road..."
  • Relapse
    • "Bagpipes from Baghdad" is a Celebrity Breakup Song in which Slim Shady expresses violent, drunken/pill-addled irritation about Mariah Carey's marriage to Nick Cannon. He lusts after her at first, but admits he doesn't want her any more and eventually wishes Nick 'luck with the fucking whore'.
    • In "Same Song And Dance", Slim murders a random hot woman (Tonya) while ogling her body, and telling her about his two previous victims - Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears, both of whom he had crushes on.
    • In "We Made You", Shady is a Loony Fan consumed with lust for every single female celebrity available, particularly drug-addicted trainwrecks and lesbians (who he cannot understand why they are not attracted to him). He's convinced they're all in love with him and expresses the love by physically assaulting them.
    • "Stay Wide Awake" is about Slim as a Serial Killer of women, cruising for victims in Manhattan.
  • In "Space Bound", Slim/Marshall is in love with a girl, but in the second verse, realises that having her doesn't make him happy because of how hollow a person he is. In the final verse, she leaves him and he snaps her neck, then shoots himself in the head.
  • In "Symphony in H", Slim's so misogynistic he can't even stand to look at overalls, because they're shaped like an H, which is the first letter of 'ho'.
  • SHADYXV:
    • In "SHADYXV" Slim announces he is a misogynist and then describes several absolutely ridiculous acts of misogyny, like how he uses a prostitute with mechanical arms that automatically dispenses lubricant, slapping Linda Ronstadt with a lobster, and how he's so immune to feminine charms that even when Ronda Rousey is naked, throwing condoms at him and showing him her butt, he can't tell the difference between her and the fat guy out of Slaughterhouse.
    • "Vegas" describes Slim rampaging in Las Vegas and tormenting women and female musicians in ridiculous ways. He compares them to dogs (asks a girl what race she is - "pit, rott, mixed?"), gets the woman to suck him off while he's taking a shit, then tells her to make him breakfast. He kicks a pregnant woman, abuses a woman into thinking she's sick, and attempts to Black Comedy Rape Iggy Azalea (Iggy did not see the funny side).

Straight examples

Blues

• Swedish Blues/Reggae singer Peps Persson has a song named "Bom Bom - Sen blir det svart" (Boom Boom - Then it goes black) about how his woman has been missing since last night, and when he finds her... Well, that's the title.
• The song "Blues in the Night" popularized by Cab Calloway, is either a Misandry Song or a Misogyny Song, depending on the gender of the person singing. The protagonist's mother warns him/her not to trust women/men because they are "two faced" and will leave him/her with a broken heart.

Country

• "Break Up With Him" by Old Dominion, being an Entitled to Have You song, sometimes gets accused of being this.

Heavy Metal and Heavy Mithril

• "Pleasure Slave" by Manowar is about Happiness in Slavery, and contains the line, "Her only sorrow is for women who live with lies." Apparently, every real woman wants to be a sex slave for Manowar.
• The Mentors have dedicated their entire music career to promoting misogyny, sexism and rape - and no, that's not an exaggeration. Examples include "All Women are Insane", "On The Rag", "Sex Slave", and "My Erection is Over", just for starters. The band calls their genre of music "Rape Rock", and the singer appeared on many television shows (including Jerry Springer) to promote social acceptance of rape.
• Orjatar ("slave girl") by TeräBetoni. In Orjatar, the male narrator returns from the hunt successful, and reminds the female of her place, and expects sex in direct words. Her reward will be "divine pleasure".
• The Meatmen have "I'm Glad I'm Not a Girl", a song written in the typical Meatmen style (read: offensive to just about everything and everyone) about the singer being, well, glad that he doesn't face the same issues females do, including "that monthly rot", "not being able to choose [their] fuck, cuz some schmuck might beat [them] up", and "not wanting to sit to take a piss"
• "Playing Games" by Loudness. Lyrics here. Old Shame.
• "Menocide" by Otep, a female metalhead, is another example of a misandry song.
• Anal Cunt pretty much built their career on taking this trope up to 11, along with anything else they thought would offend people. Arguably a case of parody.
• Carnivore was Peter Steele's project before Type O Negative, and featured blisteringly misogynistic 80s thrash, including one outright named "Male Supremacy", set in a post-apocalyptic hellhole populated hypermasculine warriors. However, it was all satirical, as evident in the wildly over-the-top lyrics.

Hip Hop and Rap

• "Crank Dat" by Soulja Boy is a borderline example, because it's pretty obvious the woman in the song is simply a tool for the narrator's own pleasure.
• "She Swallowed It" and "Bitches Ain't Shit" by Dr. Dre are some of the original bitches-and-hoes rap songs. ("Bitches Ain't Shit" now has a ukulele cover by Pink Guy.)
• Nelly's "Tip Drill" is a particularly infamous example due to its controversial accompanied music video. It memorably included, amongst other things, Nelly taking a credit card and swiping it between the buttocks of a woman wearing a thong.
• Lil Wayne's "Love Me" (or rather, "Bitches Love Me"), all about how he just has a harem of women who only care about pleasuring him.

Pop

• "Just The Way You Are (Drunk at the Bar)" by Brian McFadden is a pro-rape song.
• "Girls & Boys" by Good Charlotte is less about overt hate and more about bitter stereotyping; its message is that girls are all Gold Diggers with an undertone of materialism correlating strongly with good looks, and boys put up with the financial cost for sex.
• "Girls" from Marina Diamandis's debut album The Family Jewels is an example from a Female Misogynist's perspective, which explains some of her subsequent Creator Backlash against that song.

Reggae/Ska/Dancehall/Calypso/Mento

• The song "Adam And Eve" by The Bleechers, which was notably covered by Bob Marley And The Wailers, describes the bible story in detail, noting that "Women are the root of all evil." It is unlikely it was meant to be misogynistic but it certainly comes off as being such.
• Peter Tosh's "Maga Dog," "Soon Come," and "Brand New Second Hand" are all attacks on certain women.
• "Who Let the Dogs Out?", most famously performed by the Baha Men, was described by original writer Anselm Douglas as a "man-bashing song", in particular men who catcall women.

R&B

• Bell Biv DeVoe's "Poison" is a mildly justified example: The song's writer and producer had written it to vent about an ex-girlfriend who had taken advantage of him; first as a letter, and later as a song; and gave it to BBD to record. Namely, it criticizes gold diggers, and warns men to be careful when kicking game to women (Or, rather, "never trust a big butt and a smile").
• Blu Cantrell's "Hit 'Em Up Style" is about a woman who gets revenge on her boyfriend or husband for cheating on her by spending down all his money and going on a shopping spree with his credit card until he winds up in horrible debt and encouraging other women with crappy boyfriends or husbands to do likewise.
• Robin Thicke described the theme of his song "Blurred Lines" (featuring Pharrell Williams and T.I.) as "what a pleasure to degrade a woman". However, he was quite upset by the backlash the song generated, insisting that it was all good, clean fun because he, Pharrell, and T.I. are all happily-married Nice Guys in Real Life. At one point, he even tried to spin the song as somehow feminist.

Rock (Includes Alternative Rock, Hard Rock, Progressive Rock, Goth Rock, Glam Rock, etcetera

• Guns N' Roses "Used to Love Her", a lovely acoustic Murder Ballad about a man "had" to kill his girlfriend and bury her in his backyard because, well, she "bitched" so much. Slash did say it was actually about Axl's dog, and Izzy Stradlin claimed the song was written as a joke to mock a song he was annoyed by on the radio about "some guy whining about a broad who was treating him bad".
• The Rolling Stones had quite a run of these in The '60s, including "Play with Fire," "Under My Thumb," "Stupid Girl," "Out of Time," "Yesterday's Papers," and "Back Street Girl." Mick Jagger's justification is that the songs aren't about women in general, they're about specific relationships that annoyed him. So if he were gay, or a straight woman, he'd be writing the same songs about men.
• Theory of a Deadman's "Bitch Came Back" and "Gentleman". Both of which were co-written by a woman, Kara DioGuardi. (And it can be argued that "Gentleman" insults men at least as much as it insults women.) The music video for "Bitch Came Back" seems to imply an interesting twist to the song; the "Bitch" in question is a psychopath who was jilted by her jerkass boyfriend, and proceeds to systemically stalk and kill off the boyfriend and his friends.
• Glassjaw has a lot of them, with lyrics about past experiences and heartbreaks, and Daryl's tremendous use of the word "whore", along with the occasional "cunt." See "Lovebites and Razorlines", "Hurting and Shoving (She Should Have Let Me Sleep)", "Pretty Lush", etc.
• The Knack received a lot of their backlash partly as much of their lyrics resembled (or seemed to resemble) this trope.
• F.E.A.R.'s "The Mouth Don't Stop (The Trouble With Women Is)" says all you need to know in the title.
• Blue Öyster Cult had a sort of dark humor song called "Mommy", which appears as a bonus track in recent versions of the Secret Treaties CD. It talks about how he hates his mother, wife, and daughter and thinks of ways to kill them:
  My wife is a hippo, she's as big as a house.
  I'm gonna feed her a poisonous mouse.
  I hate my daughter, I hate my Mom.
  Their clothing's a mess, I hope they buy a farm.
  I gotta run away, I'd like to use a bomb.
  • And in the end, singer Eric Bloom shouts out "I hate them dames!"
• Steel Panther has the tongue-in-cheek song "That's What Girls are For" which is about a man whose late father told him women are only good for doing housework and having sex with you. The Deliberate Values Dissonance is lampshaded with the singer saying he's "stuck in 1955."
• In Eddie and the Cruisers II, Eddie Wilson (in actuality, John Cafferty and The Beaver Brown Band) performs "Garden of Eden", a song about how women have been duping men to get their way since "the beginning of time." It's mainly about how men want something simple, but women always make it complicated by wanting to think it over and holding out for a commitment, apparently out of sheer perversity ^note  instead of, you know, because they might get pregnant and nobody wants to be a single mom or get an abortion. This shows that the narrator either doesn't care at all about women's welfare, or is really just too stupid to realize that she has a good reason for acting the way she does. Women actually do look for commitment in relationships, and it's understandable why that can sometimes be annoying: but there are practical reasons for it.
  (chorus): Eve said to Adam, "Catch me if you can"
  It's been the same old story ever since the world began.
• Brazilian band Raimundos had plenty of Intercourse with You songs that demeaned the woman, or outright were mocking portraits of oversexed women - one had a lyric that could be translated as "Did S.A.T.'s for whore, got a Ph.D in dick!"
• Mark Grondin of Spectrum Pulse has assessed Fall Out Boy's comeback album Save Rock and Roll as a Misogyny Album, largely due to subtext and the music videos. Not only did the album's Take That, Audience! themes exist alongside the fact that the band's '00s fanbase had been comprised mostly of teenage girls, but every woman in the album's Young Blood Chronicles videos/film is presented as a villain, especially with the casting of Courtney Love, a major Yoko Oh No fixation of Nirvana fans, as the Tipper Gore-esque leader of an evil cult of women who hate music. What's more, a strong Rock is Authentic, Pop is Shallow streak runs through the album, from its very title to its aggressive assertion of a more hard-edged rock sound, which Mark saw as a response to both the Indie Pop boom of the early '10s and their own dismissal in the past as a glorified Boy Band rather than "real" musicians. Reading between the lines, it's not difficult to see Save Rock and Roll as the band railing against their female fans as fickle killjoys who wrecked their careers by abandoning them for the new shiny object on pop radio.

Visual Kei

• "Sadistic Desire" and "Vanishing Love" by X Japan. As well as the album covers for Vanishing Vision (which is not safe for sanity, much less work) and for Jade (which is simply NSFW and far less bloodily violent but still a bit objectifying of a woman... and makes even less sense since it has absolutely nothing to do with the song)
• "Fuctrack #6" by Zilch may fall under this due to having the female vocal singing the lines she does and being the "submissive." On the other hand, though, it may not because the male lyrics seem almost self-loathing and craving punishment as the song ends.

Theatre

• Stephen Sondheim:
  • "In Praise Of Women" sung by Count Carl-Magnus Malcolm in A Little Night Music, which treats women as the possessions of men. The count is an unabashed Straw Misogynist who openly cheats on his wife.
  • "Ladies In Their Sensitivities" from Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, which is the Beadle's advice to Judge Turpin on how to better attract his ward Johanna. Beadle and Turpin are outright sexual predators, making these double as Villain Songs.
• Kiss Me, Kate has both the misandrous song "I Hate Men" (sung by a woman) and the misogynous song "(I Am Ashamed That) Women Are So Simple" (also sung by a woman). Whether the latter is meant to be sarcastic is up to Alternate Character Interpretation.
• Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady gets two: "I'm an Ordinary Man" (in which he declares that he'll never fall in love with a woman because they're obnoxious wastes of time who bring out the worst in him) and "A Hymn to Him" (in which he laments that his relationship with Eliza isn't as simple as his friendship with Pickering).
• In Hello, Dolly!, Horace Vandergelder sings about how "It Takes a Woman" to do all the nasty tedious chores that make a man's homelife comfortable.

Other

• The Clement Peerens Explosition has "Foorwijf" and "t is altijd iets met die wijven".
• "If You Want to Be Happy for the Rest of Your Life" by Jimmy Soul. Heavy stereotyping, suggesting that an ugly girl is easier to tame than a pretty one, and that her place is in the kitchen. Although this may be less a case of Misogyny, and more a case of straight up Values Dissonance. (And since it's actually an old Jamaican folk song, Jimmy Soul can't be blamed.)
• Dean Martin and Nat King Cole recorded a duet called "Open Up the Doghouse (Two Cats Are Comin' In)", in which they lament their troubles with their respective wives and conclude that "we gotta slap 'em" and "show 'em who wears the pants". It's clearly Played for Laughs, though.
• Russian singer Vladimir Vysotsky's song "Your eyes are like knifes" tells us a story about a man whose girlfriend continuously escapes their home to go clubbing. He threatens to shave her hair the next time she does it.
• Most of the songs of the Mexican bolero singer Paquita La Del Barrio seems to always bash male misogyny, but despite the fact that her songs are NOT Played for Laughs, due to her exaggerated way of how she sings many people listen her songs mostly for the kitsch value of her lyrics.
• This one is at least a hundred years old, played on many a Victrola back in the day:
  Oh when I was single, oh then
  Oh when I was single, oh then
  Oh when I was single
  My pockets did jingle
  And I wish I was single again
  • The narrator goes on to describe in the first verse how he regrets marrying, in the second how his wife died, "and I laughed till I cried," but then strangely in the third verse he hadn't learned his lesson:
  I married me another
  The devil's grandmother
  And I wish I was single again
  • The Fiery Furnaces pulled The Cover Changes the Meaning in their adaptation of the song, "Single Again": Eleanor Friedberger sings the same lyrics but with all the female pronouns changed to male, as set to a menacing synthesizer riff - while most other versions are played for Black Comedy, theirs comes off as an unsettling song about a woman being traumatized by multiple abusive relationships.
• "Woman In Chains" by Tears for Fears is an inversion, being a feminist song, but it's about misogyny. Still a guaranteed Tear Jerker.

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