Why misogyny is always about sex, power, and the bodies they claim to despise
Warning for explicit content and language. References to sexual assault.
There’s a peculiar pattern in misogyny that deserves our attention, and it’s this: men who claim to hate women cannot, for the love of God, stop talking about our bodies, particularly our genitals. Every insult, every slur, every expression of contempt somehow circles back to sex. We’re sluts, whores, slags, cock-teases, frigid bitches, loose, used-up, riding the carousel, hitting the wall. The vocabulary of male disdain is a sexual thesaurus, and it reveals something rather telling about the relationship between masculine hatred and masculine desire.
It gets more interesting. Female public figures – politicians, journalists, actors, athletes, authors – report receiving messages so vile they’d make a sewer rat blush. Death threats, certainly, but death threats with a distinctly sexual flavour. Rape fantasies detailed with the care of a wedding planner. Descriptions of sexual violence so graphic and specific they carry with them proof the sender has given this considerable thought. These aren’t random acts of aggression, they’re carefully crafted missiles aimed directly at female sexuality, and they come from men who have, presumably, mothers and perhaps wives, girlfriends, and daughters of their own.
What is it about women that makes men reach for sexual degradation as their weapon of choice? Why is our sexuality both the thing they claim to want and the thing they use to destroy us?
The Madonna-Whore Complex (Or: Why You’re Fucked Either Way)
Freud, for all his cocaine-fuelled nonsense about penis envy, did stumble upon something useful: the Madonna-whore dichotomy. Men, he observed, struggled to integrate love and desire. Women could be pure, maternal, worthy of respect – or sexual, available, contemptible, but not both. Never both.
Modern research has confirmed what women already knew: this split is alive and well, and it’s exhausting for everyone involved. Studies show that men who strongly dichotomise women into “relationship material” versus “sexual objects” display higher levels of hostile sexism, sexual aggression, and a delightful tendency to punish women who fail to stay neatly in their assigned category.
The virgin is sacred. The whore is garbage. And the woman who dares to be sexual on her own terms? She’s broken the cardinal rule: she’s claimed ownership of the very thing men believe belongs to them.
Here’s where it gets psychologically fascinating. When a woman controls her own sexuality – chooses her partners, expresses her desires, refuses unwanted attention – she disrupts male sexual entitlement. She becomes living proof that female sexuality exists independently of male needs, and this is intolerable. The response is to punish her sexuality itself, to make it dirty, shameful, dangerous. To remind her that her body is not hers, that her desire makes her worthless, that her refusal makes her deserving of violence.
The sexual slur isn’t about sex. It’s about power. It’s about putting women back in our place by attacking the one thing patriarchy has always insisted must be controlled: our cunts. And I use that word with purpose and to reclaim it, since it was men – or more specifically the church – who made it ‘dirty.’
The Projection Problem (Or: He Who Smelt It, Dealt It)
Let’s talk about shame, shall we? Male sexuality comes wrapped in quite the package of cultural baggage. Boys are taught that desire is dirty, that their bodies are uncontrollable, that masturbation will blind them or grow hair on their palms or send them straight to hell. They’re given access to pornography, barely basic sex education, and told simultaneously that women are objects for their use and that wanting women makes them weak.
This creates a spectacular psychological clusterfuck. Men desire women but are ashamed of that desire. They want sex but have been taught that sexual need is degrading. They feel powerless in the face of their own arousal and resent the women who provoke it.
Enter projection: that delightful defence mechanism whereby we take feelings we can’t tolerate in ourselves and shove them onto someone else. Men who are ashamed of their sexuality project that shame onto women. She’s the slut, not him. She’s dirty, not him. Her sexuality is the problem, not his inability to handle his own.
Research on sexual disgust shows a fascinating pattern: men who report higher levels of sexual shame and guilt are more likely to denigrate sexually active women and to support sexual double standards. They’re also more likely to consume pornography while simultaneously condemning women who participate in it. The cognitive dissonance is stunning. She’s simultaneously everything he desires and everything he despises, and he resolves this by making her the repository of his shame.
The woman becomes the scapegoat for male sexual guilt. Every “slut” he calls carries the weight of his own self-loathing. Every rape threat contains his rage at his own powerlessness. He hates her because she represents everything he’s been taught to fear in himself.
The Desire-Disgust Nexus (Or: I Want To Fuck You, You Disgusting Bitch)
Here’s where it gets really interesting: desire and disgust activate remarkably similar neural pathways. They’re evolutionary cousins, both designed to make us approach or avoid. In a twisted bit of neurological irony, intense attraction can flip into intense revulsion with alarming ease.
Studies on ambivalent sexism reveal that hostile and benevolent sexism aren’t opposites – they’re partners. Men who put women on pedestals are often the same men who want to push us off them. The idealisation of female purity requires the denigration of female sexuality. You can’t have Madonna without whore.
Look at the incel phenomenon: men who claim to worship women while simultaneously wishing us dead. Their forums are full of contradictions – women are sluts who sleep with everyone except them, women are frigid bitches who won’t give them what they deserve. Women are simultaneously holding all the sexual power and being used up and worthless. The logical inconsistencies don’t matter because the underlying emotion is consistent: resentful, entitled desire mixed with absolute contempt.
This is the lust-hate paradox in its purest form. These men want women desperately, obsessively. They think about us constantly. They build entire ideologies around their lack of access to our bodies. And because that desire has been thwarted – or more accurately, because no woman has materialised to solve all their problems with her magic vagina – the desire curdles into hatred. But it never stops being desire.
The female public figure who receives rape threats from men who clearly want to fuck her is experiencing this nexus in real time. He desires her, yet he resents his desire. He resents her power over him, yet he fantasises about her. But he hates that he fantasises about her, so he sends her a message that combines his sexual fantasy with violence, thereby asserting his power while indulging his desire while punishing her for provoking both.
The Violence Variable (Or: When Hate-Fucking Isn’t Just A Phrase)
Sexual violence isn’t about sex, we’re told. It’s about power. But this conveniently ignores the fact that power and sex have been bedfellows since the dawn of patriarchy. Men learn their sexuality in a culture that eroticises dominance and submission, that frames sex as conquest, that teaches that male pleasure is paramount and female pleasure is optional at best.
Research on sexual aggression shows that men who hold hostile attitudes toward women, who believe in sexual entitlement, who consume violent pornography, and who have peer groups that support aggression are significantly more likely to commit sexual violence. These factors don’t exist in isolation. They’re part of a cultural script that says female sexuality exists for male gratification and female resistance deserves punishment.
The rape threat isn’t an aberration. It’s the logical endpoint of a worldview that sees women as objects, sees sex as something men do to women rather than with them, and sees violence as an acceptable response to female autonomy.
When a man tells a woman journalist that he hopes she gets raped for writing an article he disagrees with, he’s not making a random threat. He’s reaching for the tool patriarchy has always used to control women: sexual violence. He’s reminding her that no matter how powerful she appears, she’s still female, still vulnerable, still reducible to a hole that exists for male use.
This is why sexual insults are so effective and so prevalent. They work. They remind women of our fundamental vulnerability under patriarchy. They tell us that no achievement, no intelligence, no talent can save us from being reduced to our sexuality and punished for it.
What You Must Have Done To Deserve It (Or: My Fucking Job)
I’ve been on the receiving end of these threats, attempted assaults, stalking, and near misses. Graphic messages detailing exactly what men would like to do to me, sent with the casual confidence of someone ordering a coffee. And do you know what the men I worked with said? “You must have done something to cause it.”
What did I do? My fucking job. I existed as a woman in a professional capacity. I had opinions. I refused to shrink. I didn’t smile enough or I smiled too much. I was competent, which is apparently provocative. I had the audacity to occupy space without apologising for it.
Because here’s the thing: it doesn’t matter what you do. Exist too loudly? You’re asking for it. Exist too quietly? You’re stuck up, you need taking down a peg. Be successful? You’re a bitch who needs reminding of your place. Struggle? You’re pathetic and deserve whatever you get. The bar for “warranting this shit” is so low it’s geological, and yet somehow we’re always tripping over it.
The male colleagues who suggested I must have provoked my own harassment weren’t outliers. They were following the script. Because if women don’t cause our own victimisation, if we’re not somehow responsible for male violence, then men would have to look at other men. They’d have to acknowledge that the threat doesn’t come from women’s behaviour – it comes from men’s entitlement. That the problem isn’t what we do, it’s what they think they have the right to do to us.
It’s easier to blame us. It’s always been easier to blame us. We’re doing something wrong – existing, apparently – and until we figure out how to stop doing that, well, what do we expect?
The Uncomfortable Conclusion
Men who hate women through a sexual lens – who reach for sexual slurs, who send rape threats, who attack female public figures with sexualised violence – aren’t suffering from a rare psychological disorder. They’re following a cultural script that’s been running for millennia. They’re using the tools patriarchy has always provided: sexual shame, sexual violence, sexual objectification.
The lust-hate paradox isn’t a paradox at all when you understand that under patriarchy, male desire and male contempt for women are two sides of the same coin. Men are taught to desire women while viewing us as lesser. To need us while resenting that need. To want access to our bodies while being disgusted by our sexuality. To feel entitled to us while being ashamed of that entitlement.
This isn’t about individual pathology. It’s about a system that raises boys to see women as objects and then wonders why they can’t seem to muster respect for us. It’s about a culture that eroticises domination and then clutches its pearls when that plays out as sexual violence.
The man who calls you a slut and the man who sends rape threats to female MPs are working from the same playbook. They’re using sexuality as a weapon because it’s the most efficient way to remind women of our place. They’re revealing the truth that patriarchy would rather keep quiet: that male contempt for women is inextricable from male desire for women, that the hatred is sexual because the control has always been sexual, that reducing women to our bodies and then punishing those bodies is the whole fucking point.
And until we name this, until we acknowledge that misogyny is fundamentally sexual and that sexual violence is fundamentally about power, we’ll keep pretending that rape threats are anomalies and sexual slurs are just words and that men who hate women have nothing to do with the men who claim to love us.
They’re the same men. That’s the point.
Mistress Mind 
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