When Women Are Misogynistic

Why & how women willingly help the patriarchy

Caravaggio: Madonna and Child with St. Anne

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Confession: I’m a rape victim advocate and wannabe feminist writer who reads very few contemporary feminists. Too much modern feminism is, I think, designed mostly to make women feel good about themselves. Born of social media, it’s that type of modern feminism that avoids the hard stuff, and stays in the shallow end of the pool. Instead of punching the reader in the gut with the reality and deepest fears of misogyny — sexual, physical, emotional abuse; abortion, rape, abject racism, homophobia, ableism, classism, and other oppressions, it soothes. Reassures women of their goodness and moral superiority.

Troublingly, it leans into a binary of good versus evil; women versus men. That dichotomy, positing two genders as opposing forces — inadvertently centering cis-gendered heterosexuality and ignores true intersectionality. I get it, get why making things simple is better for the internet era, get how our attention spans and memories have shortened and weakened. I think that type of writing is better to attract an audience, because it doesn’t challenge that audience, nor does it ask that audience for accountability or change.

Now, I understand that men are the origin of the patriarchy. They’ve at once, its architects, manservants, and beneficiaries. They’ve built good old boys clubs, locked the rest of us out. They’ve learned to protect each other from the rest of us, especially when it comes to abuse and rape.

Who exactly is the “rest of us”? Do white men in America stand up for Black men accused of rape? Sometimes, I’m sure. Too often, though, as feminist writers such as Angela Davis and Amia Srinivasan have pointed out, that the reality of rape is quite different. That white men and women will stand together against Black men and men of color. That white women like Susan Brownmiller will describe Black men as inherently violent. This creates a reality in which Black women, indigenous women, Asian-American women, Latina women…we are conflicted between our oppression by men of racial/ethnic group, and an understanding of how the powers that be also oppress those men.

We know too many white, liberal/leftist, middle class feminists view our men as violent, as rapists, as oppressors, as more dangerous than their men. We know that those white, liberal/leftist feminists never see our men as caring fathers who sacrifice and leave their home countries and families behind so that their daughters may have a better life in the West Too many do not see men of color as as dreamers, as doers, as poets, as workers, too. Those are the feminists that see women of color as too oppressed to speak for ourselves, too downtrodden to know ourselves, too victimized by our violent, misogynistic men to be as strong as we truly are. Too many of those feminists fail to see that they are also oppressed, fail to see how their homeland uses women’s corpses to birth children, their endemic child marriage problem, that the rate of rape is estimated to be higher in the U.S. than in so-called backward, misogynistic countries like the one of my ancestry.

And so, I write to challenge my readers to think about more than intersectionality, to be inclusive. And so, I write here, recently renaming my project feminism for all, in the hopes of bringing everyone into feminist movements. For example, how feminism benefits men, too. Because for feminists, especially the man-hating variety, the oppressions imposed by men are obvious, written and discussed and dissected. We know that most women who are murdered are killed by men, we know that most women who are sexually assaulted or sexually harassed by men, and we know that far fewer women kill or abuse men. But we don’t talk about how within the context of feminism, we need to look at the full spectrum of how gender-based oppression disproportionality affects women who are already subject to racism, the lingering effects of colonialism, homophobia, transphobia, classism, prejudice against the disabled.

In writing about intersectional feminism, I challenge you, reader, to think about something we talk far less about: how too many women too only pay lip service to feminism and intersectionality. That too many women become the willing handmaidens of the patriarchy, work against other women, and why they chose to do so.

Why & How Women Become The Handmaidens of the Patriarchy

Andrea Dworkin, photo originally shared online by her husband

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In an earlier essay, I wrote this about why women align themselves with the patriarchy:

What the right offers to women is: a vision of male violence as unpredictable and uncontrollable. Since women live in a world they have by in large not built, the world and its machinations become mysterious, better to allow someone else to handle them for you. Allowing that someone else gives the world definition, it reigns in the chaos and confusion, it gives ignorance a shape, and it insulates against the violence. When men offer these women love, that love symbolizes order, stability, mutual accountability. Love from a man is earned through her obedience, sexual submission, and childbearing.

That’s based on Andrea Dworkin’s Right Wing Women. Are women more misogynistic than men? Maybe. Maybe equally so. A 2016 study found that women use more misogynistic language online than men do (52% versus 48%)¹. That’s after Dworkin’s time, but she understood the phenomenon when she wrote:

Inevitably, this causes women to take the rage and contempt they feel for the men who actually abuse them, those close to them, and project it onto others, those far away, foreign, or different²

and

From father’s house to husband’s house to a grave that still might not be her own, a woman acquiesces to male authority to gain some protection from male violence.³

and

This sexual, sociological, and spiritual adaptation, which is, in fact, the maiming of all moral capacity, is the primary imperative of survival for women who live under male-supremacist rule.⁴

I knew this before I read Dworkin, I knew this phenomenon instinctively and have discussed it in my work as a rape victim advocate.

Dworkin’s writing, especially Right Wing Women, reads as prescient of our current political situation. More correctly though, the 2020s resemble the conservative 1980s, ten-x’d by the internet.

A lot of women writing on the internet blame men for the election of a U.S. president that’s been found liable for sexual abuse. That’s inaccurate: the reality is that NBC exit polls showed that a majority of white women (52%) also voted for that president, while 92% of Black women famously voted for Harris. And so, you see, we might also say that white women are conflicted about racism and sexism, too — that they align sometimes with whiteness over feminist concerns, too.

We see this more clearly with statistics around public opinion on abortion rights. According to Pew Research, 38% of men are anti-abortion, but a whooping 33% of women are, too. That’s a spread of only 5% — uncomfortably close if you ask me. 38% each of white and hispanic (Pew Research’s term) are against abortion, while only 24% each of Black and Asian-Americans are.

“We make the mistake of thinking this is a primarily male movement,” Karissa Haugeberg, author of Women Against Abortion: Inside the Largest Moral Reform Movement of the Twentieth Century, told DAME. “Really, when you get into all the different arms of the movement, women far outnumber men.” (source)

In the essay I quoted above,

Mona Eltahawy

wrote about Rachelle Ranae "Shelley" Shannon, who attempted to murder late term abortion provider George Tiller (who was after killed by an anti-abortion man). She attempted to set fire to abortion clinics in the West. Shannon’s daughter has sent death threats to abortion providers too.

It’s not just conservative women, though. I see it all the time amongst liberal and leftist women on the issue of rape, too: I’ve helped well over a hundred survivors. There’s always this pattern: that in over 99% of the stories I’ve heard, the serial rapists and abusers are men.

In a post-#metoo world, the liberal/leftist/progressive line is “believe women”, but that backslide almost immediately. I think saying “listen to woman, understand the patterns of rape, and you’ll find that there’s a 96 - 98% likelihood⁵ that she’s telling the truth” is more accurate, though not nearly as easy to hashtag. And yet, the pattern is that when a man is known, liked, familiar, and powerful…people are less likely to believe his victim’s story of rape. And you know what else? That’s also how rape becomes racialized: that because white men hold global systemic power, white men are more likely to credible, and more likely to get away with rape.

We know this on subconscious level: look at celebrities. There’s a reason Johnny Depp — an actor that many women found attractive, that was familiar, that people probably conflated his on-screen persona with who they thought he was in real life — there are so many reasons that he’s more credible than, say, Harvey Weinstein.

The Johnny Depp-Amber Heard defamation was a watershed moment in the anti-rape movement. In the beginning, it empowered survivors to speak up⁶. Then we saw a torrent of women jumping to support Johnny Depp online, and victims went silent. Once the decision against Heard came down, victims sometimes told by attorneys to stay silent because of the risk of lawsuits that speaking out entailed. It had a chilling effect.

What’s even more scary about the Johnny Depp situation and the women who were so quick to vilify Amber Heard? That many of them tweeted, wrote, said that they because they’d been abused, they knew abuse when they saw it. These were women who declared that women, too, could lie. Or, as one woman I know in real life said, that women abusers, too, could DARVO — deny, attack, reverse-victim-offender — and that Depp’s abuse was reactive to Amber Heard’s prior abuse.

That’s ludicrous, considering that Amber Heard was 23 to Depp’s 46, that he was much more powerful and successful, that Amber Heard had photographic evidence of bruises and friends who recalled seeing her chunks of hair missing, that he admitted to making a “huge mistake” via text when she said he “beat the shit out of her”, that he texted Paul Bettany that he wanted to violently kill her and rape her corpse, actress Ellen Barkin testified that she witnessed Depp’s violence toward others. But the public already knew about his violence: his history of substance abuse, tearing up hotel rooms, and beside that, Depp’s ex, model Kate Moss, defended him. The public knew all this, and still, persistently sided with the abuser. Still were quick to call the victim the abuser. And that’s also in part how the silence of victims works: anything they say (and do) can and will be held against them. Any reaction to the trauma of abuse is cited as evidence of insanity, being ‘troubled’, or as DARVO’d into calling her the abuser.

In short: the other pattern is that the people that are supporting rapists, publicly, are too often women. I know this from my work. I knew this from my mentor. I know this from conversations I’ve had with other people who have worked directly with victims. I even know this from the occasional message I receive even here on Substack to that effect, from women who tell me that my writing on rape is comforting for them. Because years upon years of collecting stories, and that pattern of women backing rapists is one of the strongest I’ve seen.

And here’s something I don’t normally tell folks, because it’s so awful to think or say: that like the women defending Johnny Depp, a lot of the women who will defend abusers are usually survivors. What you saw so publicly with Johnny Depp was startling only if you didn’t already know that awful pattern. I’ve observed a strong correlation with victims of childhood molestation siding with abusers — I suspect doing so lies in some sort of emotional survival mechanism developed to survive something as awful as childhood abuse. It’s one of things that makes me feel helpless: a situation in which a hurt person passes their hurt onto others.

In this article, researcher Nicole Bedera hypothesizes that this is in part “just world” cognitive bias — that good things happen to good people, and bad things to bad people. That we get what we deserve. And if a woman is raped, then she must have done something that went against those gendered expectations. She must have made a mistake to bring the rape onto herself. It was her fault. If it was her fault, I’m not like her, I wouldn’t do that, so it won’t happen to me. In telling themselves this, women assure themselves that they have more control than they think — that being careful and guarded will save them from rape. It won’t.

It’s important for me — for all of us — to know this pattern: because women backing up a rapist helps silence rape victims in a way that men backing him does not. When we liberals and leftists hear a powerful man backing up a rapist — eg., take our current U.S. president, we shake our heads at how that’s so typical. How rapists band together. How men prop up the worst of other men. We know that, it’s not new nor it is news.

But when a woman does it? It lands as victim blaming for the victim, and it makes her doubt herself. It silences her. It throws her story into doubt for a lot of people. It makes those bystanders uncomfortable — how can I believe one woman over another? Why would a woman defend a rapist, well, maybe there’s more to the story of rape than I know. What that does is cast a sort of reasonable doubt over the victim’s story — and doubt’s too often good enough to make bystanders uncomfortable and exhausted enough to stop listening to or supporting the victim. No further action is taken, the rapist sticks around, and other stories and victims are silenced because they saw the first person who reported it get silenced.

This is one way I help in my advocacy: to repeatedly reassure the victim. If she wants it, I’ll speak to her community/workplace on her behalf, keeping her anonymous upon her request, and bringing in language honed through a study of the law and years of experience in having these conversations — to speak with authority and experience when she’s been silenced. I did this for years before I figured out another mentor gave me a name for it: accountability facilitator. As well as helping victims with direct emotional, logistically…whatever they ask within reason and ability…support, I also help by extending my work out into the world to make materials conditions better for victims.

I’ve heard so many of these stories:

• The woman whose boss drove her into the woods (literally) and raped her. And afterward, two woman coworkers supported him, calling her at all hours to silence her.

• The woman whose rapist threatened to commit suicide if she spoke, promoting several women to call her at all hours to tell her to stay silent or she’d be responsible for his death.

• The women raped by a powerful CEO who rapes a different woman every six to eight months — who was supported by a group of women when the stories came to light. His company has “solved” the problem by not hiring women. Or, well, they have one token woman, who’s career is impacted because she’s warned to never attend after hours events and to not take up opportunities for interesting research with higher ups.

• The woman who texted me to kill myself after my rape. Who, in a single year, tried to convince seven - seven - of the women I’d helped to “work with her” so that she could “mediate” the “conflict” between the victim and the rapist. I thank my lucky stars that I was able to convince all but one not to — that one victim later told me that that original woman had deeply traumatized her, too.

Now, I live in the bay area. A city where only 8% of registered voters are conservative — and that’s not an 8% that I’m in contact with. That’s not the 8% that these women defending rapists fit into.

Some of the women probably call themselves feminists. I know one woman who’s notoriously supported rapists and abusers time and time again is a big fan of Camille Paglia. Paglia urges women to learn about the “risk factors of rape” and so, lower the chances of being raped.

The problem with that? Why throw the onus on women to prevent rape, if men are the ones committing the rape? Shouldn’t we ask the actors to stop acting, instead of demanding that of the parties that acted on? And in the more practical sense, another problem is that most of those “risk factors” are often out of a victim’s control. Women of color are targeted for assault and harassment at higher rates than white women — we can’t change the color of our skin nor our so-called ethnic features. What we should change instead is racism, racial bias, and the racial hierarchies. Women who have been abused in childhood or have been raped before are also at higher risk, as are women who grew up in single parent or divorced households. Data coming from rapes that have been criminally prosecuted shows that the strongest correlation is that victims grow up in households with addictions. One pattern I’ve found is that women are often targeted when they’re going through a difficult time in their own lives — eg., they’re new in town, lost their job, or went through a breakdown. And of course, women are targeted in hierarchal workplaces and communities — for reasons that are so painfully obvious. Spaces where women are seen as second class citizens.

It Gets More Complicated

There have also been, always individual feminists — women who violated the strictures of the female role, who challenged male supremacy, who fought for the right to work, or sexual freedom, or release from the bondage of the marriage contract. Those individuals were often eloquent when they spoke of the oppression they suffered as women in their own lives, but other women, properly trained to their roles, did not listen⁷

I think, also, it’s too easy to say that women align themselves with men only for safety from male violence. I included a couple stories of women who were raped in the workplace for a reason — how many women supported the rapist in those situations not because the supporter was afraid of losing her job, but because she wanted to be aligned on the side of power? How many hoped that aligning themselves with power would result in promotions, or validation?

I cited abortion statistics earlier. Let’s look at a figure who is famously anti-abortion in the U.S.: SCOTUS justice Amy Coney Barrett. She was mentored by conservative Catholic justice Antonin Scalia. She clerked for another conservative judge, and she was appointed to a committee by the conservative chief justice. What happened when she voted against the U.S. president’s attempts to freeze billions in foreign aid? Conservatives began to bash her. “She is evil, chosen solely because she checked identity politics boxes. Another DEI hire. It always ends badly”. Over and over, she was labelled a DEI hire, because she’s a moderate/centrist conservative instead of the far right variety.

And how many women follow the status quo simply because they don’t want to incur the wrath of others? Women, too often, are held to high standards. Between women, we too often hold each other to too high standards.

As a woman who doesn’t conform to standards of feminine behavior, both women and men have tried to police my gender presentation. I’ve had women tell me that the reason “men take you seriously is because you’re not really a woman”. That’s code for: as a lesbian of color, you’re less a woman than I, a bisexual white woman in a relationship with a much older man, am. Lesbians, overall, are policed by non-lesbian women. I have these old newspaper clippings about my favorite artist, Romaine Brooks. In one of them, one of her biographers, Meryl Secrest, wrote:

“At some point in her childhood, she must have decided not to grow up as a woman. She had teenage crushes on older girls and women who she was in boarding school, and she never grew out of them….She formed the most enduring attachment of her lifetime in 1915, at the age of 41…” An attachment that lasted fifty years, nonetheless dismissed as a childish crush. In an essay in her White Album, Joan Didion wrote similarly of lesbians: of childish, that somehow lesbians were fragile and childish because they sought the softness of sexuality with women. That somehow, these women thought it was more adult, more womanly, to put up sex and relationships with men.

That enforcement of gendered norms more clear than on abortion. In The New Mommy Wars, Jessica Valanti (a modern feminist writer I do like) wrote about this through discussing conservative women who look down on women to seek abortions of nonviable or seriously, irreparably unhealthy fetuses:

Like the ‘mommy wars’ before it, this deliberately-stoked discord serves a purpose: distracting from conservatives’ dangerous and unpopular abortion bans. What better way to deflect than by once again turning a serious public policy and health issue into a competition over who’s a good mother?

Valorizing women who carry doomed pregnancies also lets Republicans reframe their cruel laws as a good thing. They’re not forcing women into suffering—they’re giving them the chance to be the ultimate mothers!

Women who keep doomed pregnancies get something in return, too: permission to judge those who don’t make the same choice.

As I wrote earlier, 33% of American woman surveyed oppose abortion. Those women, I’m sure, get to feel morally superior to women to chose abortions. Women who seek abortions, of course, could be accused of so many non-gendered behaviors: “sleep around”, “slut”, “nympho”. She could also be unwomanly because she prioritizes her career: “competitive”, “assertive”, “aggressive”, “unfit”, “manly”, “thinks she’s a man”, “will die alone”. Mostly, the data suggests that a lot of women seek abortions because they cannot afford a child — that, of course, is too often ignored. Many women who have abortions are already mothers, but the stereotype remains a young, unwed woman, a college girl, a Black woman, a career woman. The decision isn’t easy, the process is harrowing. Read Annie Ernaux’s The Happening, or this beautifully told anonymous story posted months ago here on Substack.

And it’s enforced by women who police women’s appearance. Police her clothing for not being revealing, or being too revealing, police her for wearing make up, or wearing too much make up. Amongst women of color, there’s colorism — where lighter skin is considered more beautiful. I’ve heard from women who grew up in the American south that they feel a lot of pressure to be blond.

Nothing, though, nothing can compete with the pressure put on women to be thin. It’s there in movies, television, magazines, and social media. Any woman’s who been a teenager can tell you the pressure that she felt from directly other girls in being as thin as possible.

A few years ago, I had to kill about twenty minutes so I went to a tea shop. I remember how my blood ran cold overhearing the teenage girls sitting next to me: four girls, high schoolers. I think they were about fourteen or fifteen, barely out of childhood. These girls spent the whole twenty minutes assessing their girl-classmates by weight. “She’s not as skinny as she thinks she think is,” sniffled one. “She shouldn’t dress like that.” “She’s too fat to wear what she was wearing today.” You get the idea, I’m sure. I think about that, about the pressure I, a shy, bookish, nerd who didn’t date at all in high school, felt to be skinny. It’s amazing that girls make it out alive.

Though they have different tactics and tones, like their cohorts in the manosphere, they play with the idea that calling women fat or ugly is fun and transgressive – framing it as part of a virtuous quest to rid society of woke, feminist ideals⁸

Where Do We Go From Here

Now, I suppose reading this, you could say that I’m also holding women to some pretty high standards. And you could say that I’m holding women to higher standards than I’m holding men.

Well, not exactly. In this essay, I’m holding women to the same standards that feminists hold men. And what’s more, women — who have the lived experience of sexism and misogyny, who have experienced oppression — I’m more puzzled when they, too, dominate and/or oppress others.

You could also say that pointing out that past victims disbelieving and further traumatizing victims of rape and abuse is something that should be pitied and understood. And yet, I can hold victims in compassion while also believing that victims cannot and should not interact with other victims or interfere in situations of rape and abuse if they cannot handle it. In fact, I’d urge you not to unless there’s a very good reason for you to do. Not everyone needs to have an opinion, not everyone needs to share that opinion every single time.

One of the reasons that I originally began victim advocacy is that I noticed that the women who disbelieved me, who gossiped about me, who told others I was destructive, manipulative (et al all the gendered adjectives thrown at women to wreak their reputations) were themselves survivors. And I didn’t want to become that — I didn’t want to carry that pain in that way. For me to face rape and help others gave me back some much-needed semblance of control — I, too, felt healed in being able to make a difference.

To be an advocate is means I have to face the ugly realities of rape, all the time. And make no mistake: rape is one of the most ugly, dark parts of humanity.

As Andrea Dworkin wrote about feminism:

Many women, I think, resist feminism because it is an agony to be fully conscious of the brutal misogyny which permeates culture, society, and all personal relationships.

Women, I think, too often become willing handmaidens of the patriarchy as a response to the oppression and domination by the patriarchy. They side with the power of the patriarchy, hoping it will spare or empower them. They support it because they do not want to admit, even to themselves, that they are oppressed. If you speak to rape victims, you will notice this, too: that it takes most victims weeks to months to admit to themselves that they were raped — takes weeks and months to come to terms with their victimhood. And yet, admitting to rape, and also, to gender-based oppression is the first step in fighting back against it. It’s a necessary step in healing and building a more just world.

If you read through this essay — thank you. You might have noticed something: I’m less interested in the why of women behave misogynistically toward each other, and more damning of the fact that they do. That, I think, should be a crucial part of the fight for feminism.

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1. The study controlled for “casual” language, eg., “b!tch please” wouldn’t be considered misogynistic.

Laville, Sandra. Half of misogynistic tweets sent by women, study finds. The Guardian. May 26, 2016. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/may/26/half-of-misogynistic-tweets-sent-by-women-study-finds

2. Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. Republished New York: Picador, 2025)

3. Dworkin, Andrea. Right Wing Women. (New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1983. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p. 4.

4. Ibid p. 9.

5. Studies at U.S. universities, including conservative red-state universities, such as the University of Utah, and through Britain’s NIH, show that only 2 - 4% of accusations are false. This means that 96 - 98% of accusations are true.

6. I say this as part of the anti-rape movement.

7. Dworkin, Andrea. Woman Hating. (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1974. Republished New York: Picador, 2025.) p. 9.

8. Silman, Anna. Now comes the ‘womanosphere’: the anti-feminist media telling women to be thin, fertile and Republican. The Guardian. April 24, 2025.