Gynophobia

Three fears are named and they are not the same, which is why the definition lists them separately. Terror of women is the first. Fear of becoming or being cast as a woman, meaning as the negative image, is the second and does not require any feeling about women at all. Fear of losing patriarchal power is the third and is a fear about position. What unites them is that all three are fear rather than contempt, and Marsh insists on the distinction. Contempt produces simple erasure rather than hate, and you cannot hate what you do not fear, so the intensity of the historical response to women is evidence that something was feared rather than merely disdained. What she identifies as feared is life itself, since life emanated from women, which made them the source of the filial key to immortality and produced a persistent dread long preceding filiality. Setting the male as ideal and the female as the deviant, defective or lesser state is a deflection of that, and the requirement for magical rituals to accomplish women's sublation is her evidence that the sublation is not natural. Male endo-idealism created permanent endogroups in response to what was perceived as a permanent existential threat. The connection to an amputated core is the clinical end of the same account, and the familiar justifications for attacks on women, that she liked it, asked for it or should not have looked as she did, are guilt reversal performing its ordinary function.

Misogyny is the standard term and Kate Manne's account reframes it as the enforcement arm of patriarchy, punishing women who fail to provide what is expected, rather than as hatred of women as such. Psychoanalytic traditions have their own version, with Karen Horney writing on dread of women and Melanie Klein on the terrifying maternal figure. Feminist historians including Gerda Lerner have traced the deliberate construction of male authority over reproduction. Marsh's term picks the fear rather than the hatred as the root, which puts her closer to Horney than to Manne, and her explanation is unusual in locating the fear in life and reproduction rather than in social order or infantile experience.