Misogyny Is Rising Along With Its Deeper Cause

A few decades ago, an essay in The Economist (“About Men”) asked the reader to imagine a neighborhood where all the women were unemployed. There would be flower gardens and well-kept homes. Then, imagine a neighborhood where all the men are unemployed. The image shifted to one more like that of an unsafe, depressed neighborhood. Whether or not these scenarios were accurate, the essay focused on the trends for increasing unemployment among men. High-income economies were in the process of shifting away from manufacturing and male-friendly jobs to more female-friendly jobs like information technology, services, and health care. Those trends are even stronger today.

Simultaneously while men in high income nations like the USA have been struggling, misogyny is on the rise. Are the trends related?

Dictionary definitions of misogyny include hatred of, contempt for, or prejudice against women or girls, which can be institutional, and can include the rejection of feminine qualities in males.

The Canadian Museum of Human Rights includes more groups in its definition: “Hateful or controlling attitudes toward women, trans and nonbinary folks, especially as expressed in harmful prejudices, barriers and behaviours.”

Some assume that misogyny has always been with us. But of course, those familiar with our hunter-gatherer past and present know this is untrue. Remember that most of humanity’s existence, however you count it, 300,000 (for homo sapiens sapiens) to 2 million years (for the hominin line)—95-99% of our existence, we lived in egalitarian hunter-gatherer civilization. In these societies, which still exist, there is no value ranking of people by gender.

Socio-political history indicates increasing misogyny in the shift to hierarchy, patriarchy, and female repression over the course of the last few thousand years as inequality increased. Particular socio-political changes can alter women’s status. For example, adopting herding within a community has been shown to alter intergenerational inheritance from matrilinear to patrilinear because males take charge of the herds, giving them greater material status than women. Over time, religious doctrines reinforced the hierarchy of male over female and drew up explanations for the lower status of women, sometimes with misogynistic rationalizations.

Thus, the reversal of patriarchal oppression of women and women’s achievements in the last fifty years is remarkable. In order to counter longstanding structural discrimination against women, programs and funding for women’s education and advancement proliferated. Today, more women than men attend and graduate from college and enter high paying careers. In multiple fields, structural discriminations like glass ceilings for female achievement have been breached. (Nevertheless, although women have moved into most formerly male realms of life, elite males still dominate at the top levels of hierarchies.)

At the same time that women overall have moved forward, most men have faltered. Statistics for male achievement are not keeping up and continue to fall behind that of girls and women. Men today, White non-elite men in particular, are feeling that they are not getting what is fairly theirs. While programs are helping the underprivileged non-males and non-Whites, many non-elite White males are feeling like they’ve been left behind by ‘those other people’ who are jumping the line for benefits they’ve been waiting or working for or feel entitled to. Where are the programs for flailing boys and men?

In his book, Of Boys and Men, Richard Reeves discusses views of men’s struggles. Generally, the political left puts the source of men’s difficulties on themselves (1) as individuals (individualism—the modernist cultural emphasis), (2) as men –viewing maleness as a pathology (partially founded on a misunderstanding of maleness and what boys need), (3) being wedded to male domination ideology that is resentful of women’s equity, or (4) embracing toxic masculinity ideals (e.g., domination, aggression, homophobia).

In contrast, the political right puts the blame of men’s struggles onto the uppity-ness of non-male, non-Whites. Women have abandoned their biological roles as submissive girlfriends, wives, and mothers, and/or have been lured into the pathology of feminism. In her book, Men Who Hate Women, Laura Bates dives into the manosphere in the UK. She raises concerns about the young men who are bored, unskilled, and socially isolated. They are the targets for misogynist groups expanding in the manosphere, including incels and even a group called Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW).

Reeves suggests that misogyny emerges from men’s frustrations. Boys cannot be boys in childhood and men’s ability to take up their former purpose as family bread winners is no longer needed as more women have been able to take on well-paid careers.

However, there is a deeper problem.

Over the course of history, at the height of patriarchal control, women were isolated in the household to raise children, but also to ensure that their children were the husband’s. Critically, this intensified mother-child dyadic time and undermined the cooperative child raising and female coalitionary control of men of human ancestry. Professional motherhood was born.

The move to professional motherhood undermined our species-typical communal evolved nest where babies and children were multiply attached and not dependent on one person for meeting their needs and feeling their value.

The rest of societal structures have not changed much since women left homemaking and flooded the workforce, so in the last 50 years childhood experiences have deteriorated. At the same time that there are more work opportunities for women, there are less healthy environments for children, seeding all sorts of health and social problems. This lack of appropriate nesting particularly impacts boys and I think plays a role in fueling misogyny. Let me explain.

Do you remember when pregnant women glowed? I do. I even remember seeing an episode of My Three Sons with an actually-pregnant actress playing a daughter-in-law who seemed to shine from the formation of a being in her body. Such a glow is a rare sight these days when mothers, expectant or otherwise, live highly stressed lives.

Old movies and shows also show how it used to be common for the community to attend to the wellbeing of expectant mothers—helping out with this and that, recommending that she relax and not stress herself. That seems to have gone by the wayside too. But such community wisdom is confirmed by scientific studies. An expectant mother’s stress has long term effects on the child’ temperament and wellbeing.

The fetal brain is significantly influenced by maternal experiences of stress:

“a chronically stressful and thereby growth-inhibiting intrauterine context produces an immature amygdala–HPA regulatory system with poor capacities for not only autoregulation of dysregulated states but also difficulty in entering into states of dyadic interactive regulation with the mother” (Nathanielsz, 1998).

High maternal cortisol (excessive stress) in late pregnancy is associated with more difficult behavior at birth and a “difficult temperament” in the first months, which includes greater crying, fussing, and negative facial expressions (De Weerth, van Hees, & Buitelaar, 2003). Lest the reader think that temperament refers to genes:

“Temperament at birth is a result of epigenetic mechanisms that have evolved prenatally and continue to be epigenetically shaped or misshaped by the postnatal socioemotional environment.” (Schore, 2017, p. 10). To be more explicit, the epigenetic framework for an infant involves their inherited genetic blueprint but mostly the dynamic interaction among:

• Fetal, birth and postnatal experience (physiological and social and emotional supports)
• hormonal exposure in the womb and at birth
• trauma and injury in the womb and at/after birth
• learning and memory in the womb and at/after birth
• trajectory

Significantly, not only do “epigenetic changes in the nervous system are emerging as a critical component of enduring effects” (McCarthy et al., 2009, p. 12815), but the epigenetic framework “determines risk and resilience to disease between the sexes” (Kigar and Auger, 2013, p. 1147).

Boys are more at risk.

Female fetuses and infants start out with more resilience and maintain a faster schedule of development –they are two years ahead during most of childhood, adolescence and early adulthood (Parents, please note and be kind to your clingy boys!).

Early in development, females have more autoregulation whereas males have less. Males need more external support to format their brain and body systems.

Boys need more sensitive mothering or nurturing. Male babies are more emotionally reactive and have a harder time regulating their emotional states than females. That it they are more demanding of social partners, relying on their co-regulation even more than girls.

Separation from the nurturer is a stressor for any baby, but especially for male babies. It causes an acute release of cortisol. High amounts of cortisol in the brain actually melt brain connections and prevents new ones from being formed at time scheduled for rapid expansion of connections based on social experience. Repeated separation from the nurturer results in hyperactive behavior, and “changes [in] prefronto-limbic pathways, i.e. regions that are dysfunctional in a variety of mental disorders” (Kunzler, Braun, & Bock, 2015, p. 862).  This has long term effects such as “impairments in behavioral flexibility, emotion processing and different aspects of executive control, which are mediated by the orbitofrontal and/or medial prefrontal cortex” (ibid, p. 866).

Infant circumcision is an extreme stressor as well, with potentially lifelong psychological and physiological effects. (More here.)

One of the most important discoveries in science is “the enduring impact of early maternal care and the role of epigenetic modifications of the genome during critical periods in early brain development in health and disease” (Leckman & March, 2011, p. 334). (Note that in contemporary research, the focus is on maternal care, instead of communal care, because of the patriarchal roots of today’s modernist society.)

Girls and women tend to self-regulate through relationships whereas males tend to rely on autoregulation. So if a male does not have the appropriate assistance early on—the co-regulation from mother or other carer to shape their systems for autoregulation—sensitive periods pass and the boy is left with underdeveloped brain areas, and dysregulation in multiple systems.

Let’s remember that boys mature more slowly in all sorts of ways. Girls are always ahead, months ahead in babyhood, years ahead in adolescence and early adulthood. In same age groupings, boys will feel less capable. But it is the babyhood and early childhood period before age 7 that is most critical.

So, what about day care? More and more babies (0-3.5) are being sent to day care settings where they do not receive the tender care expected. Day care piles on the stress for infants, again, impairing male babies more. Male infants may experience multiple stressors, first in utero, then with circumcision, then repeated separation from mother. To be put into early childcare settings adds insult to injury, with their shifting caregivers, high levels of noise, and frequent inattention from a low ratio of caregivers to children. (You can download a checklist of how much a child care center provides the evolved nest here.)

“Early childcare thus represents a particularly severe stressor to a high-risk male infant with a poorly developed right-lateralized HPA axis and consequent immature capacities for both interactive regulation and autoregulation…These males use a primitive coping mechanism, dissociative disengagement, to cope with chronic stress, and so they may not be behaviorally present with intense protest, yet are intensely homeostatically dysregulated…The long-term effects of early childcare in this group with insecure disorganized attachment is further expressed in adolescence in the form of a predisposition to conduct disorders (Yildirim & Derksen, 2012).” (Schore, 2017, p. 21)

When feeling out of sorts, boys and men tend to ‘externalize;’ they find something or someone else to blame. Patriarchal society focuses attention on mothers as THE nurturers and so they are blamed even though nurturing is a community responsibility, which everyone is too busy to do Plus, as Ian Suttie noted about the USA, we have a taboo on tenderness.

Thus, the lack of appropriate (nested) support of the male in early life is a contributing factor to misogyny. Unnested boys are more dysregulated. Dysregulation creates bad feelings physically, emotionally, socially. One searches for ‘why me’ and finds a manosphere of explanations.

Social structures contribute to the decreased support needed in early life. For example, those who make policy decisions about children and their care typically were successful in schooling. This makes them oriented to advocating for a similar life course to their own (e.g., literacy) with the idea that the sooner you can get a child to read, the better. Not. The data are contrary to this view. Even economists from London School of Economics concluded:

“The most important childhood predictor of adult life-satisfaction is the child’s emotional health, followed by the child’s conduct. The least powerful predictor is the child’s intellectual development” (Layard, Clark, Cornaglia, Powdthavee, & Vernoit, 2014, p. F720).

So we’ve got patriarchy’s primary caregivers (mothers) out of the home, and boys needing more nurturing but getting less than ever. So it is no surprise that men are out of sorts and misogyny is on the rise.

In conclusion, we could paraphrase the African proverb: The child who is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel warmth. Revision: In a patriarchal society where child raising is put into the mother’s hands alone and where nesting practices are missing, the baby who does not feel mother’s nurturing will resent women generally (misogyny).

 

References

 

Burchinal, M. et al. (2024). Unsettled science on longer-run effects of early education. Science, 384, 506-508. DOI:10.1126/science.adn2141

Berman, M. (2000). Wandering God: A study in nomadic spirituality. Albany: State University of New York Press.

De Weerth, C., van Hees, Y., & Buitelaar, J.K. (2003). Prenatal maternal cortisol levels and infant behavior during the first 5 months. Early Human Development, 74, 139–151.

Fry, D. P. (2006). The human potential for peace: An anthropological challenge to assumptions about war and violence. New York: Oxford University Press.

Holden, C.J., & Mace, R. (2003). Spread of cattle led to the loss of matrilineal descent in Africa: A coevolutionary analysis. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 270, 2425-2433. DOI 10.1098/rspb.2003.2

Kigar, S.L., & Auger, A.P. (2013). Epigenetic mechanisms may underlie the aetiology of sex differences in mental health. Journal of Neuroendocrinology, 25(11), 1141–1150.

Kunzler, J., Braun, K., & Bock, J. (2015). Early life stress and sex-specific sensitivity of the catecholaminergic systems in prefrontal and limbic systems of Octodon degus. Brain Structure and Function, 220, 861–868.

Layard, R., Clark, A.E., Cornaglia, F., Powdthavee, N., & Vernoit, J. (2014).What predicts a successful life? A life-course model of wellbeing. Economic Journal, 124, F720–F738. doi:10.1111 /ecoj.12170.

Leckman, J.F., & March, J.S. (2011). Developmental neuroscience comes of age (Editorial). Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 52, 333–338.

McCarthy, M.M., Auger, A.P., Bale, T.L., De Vries, G.J., Dunn, G.A. et al. (2009). The epigenetics of sex differences in the brain. Journal of Neuroscience, 29, 12815–12823.

Nathanielsz, P.W. (1998). Life before birth: The challenge of prenatal development. New York: W.H. Freeman.

Otto, H., & Keller, H. (Eds.) (2014). Different faces of attachment: Cultural variations on a universal human need. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Schore, A.N. (2003a). Affect regulation and the repair of the self. New York: W.W. Norton.

Schore, A.N. (2003b). Affect dysregulation and disorders of the self. New York: W.W. Norton.

Schore, A.N. (2012). The science of the art of psychotherapy. New York: W.W. Norton.

Schore, A.N. (2017). All our sons: The developmental neurobiology and neuroendocrinology of boys at risk. Infant Mental Health Journal, 38(1),15-52.  doi: 10.1002/imhj.21616

Suttie, I. (1935/1988). The origins of love and hate. London: Free Association Books.

Tronick, E. (2007). The neurobehavioral and social-emotional development of infants and children. New York: Norton.

Yildirim, B.O., & Derksen, J.J.L. (2012). A review of the relationship between testosterone and life-course persistent antisocial behavior. Psychiatry Research, 200, 984–1010.