Fear of Men

Why androphobia has no manual entry

Gynophobia is listed in ICD-11 as an inclusion term under social anxiety disorder, which means a clinician who writes it is understood rather than corrected. It is one of very few words in this catalogue with that standing.

Nothing in the material here puts androphobia in the same position. The Wikipedia article on gynophobia names androphobia as its analogue in a single clause, and the pairing is repeated in the dictionaries, but the manual entry is not repeated. The pair is symmetrical in the wordbooks and asymmetrical in the record.

That asymmetry is worth stating carefully, because it is a fact about documentation rather than about people. It says that the fear of men has not been written up under its own name, not that nobody has it.

What the printed encyclopedia gives it

The 2008 encyclopedia of phobias handles arrhenophobia in the space of a line. Its definition is three words long: fear of men. It records androphobia as a variant spelling, notes that the fear of women is called gynophobia, and sends the reader on to its general entry for men.

Wiktionary is slightly more generous, and slightly more revealing about the scope of the word. It defines androphobia as a fear of or aversion to men or boys, which folds a dislike and a fear into one term, and lists androphilia as the antonym and gynophobia as the counterpart. It has no entry at all for arrhenophobia.

So the word that the encyclopedia treats as primary is the one the dictionaries do not carry. This is the ordinary condition of the phobia vocabulary, where a term can be standard in one reference work and absent from the next, and it is the reason this catalogue records where each word was found.

Where the andro- words came from

The root is doing familiar work elsewhere in English, and a dictionary of unusual words puts three of its descendants together:

• androcracy, a government consisting of men
• androlepsia, the kidnapping of a person by a foreign government for political gain
• androphobia, a fear of men

The first two are about power and the state, which is where the root usually ends up. Wiktionary's related-terms list points somewhere else again, to anthropophobia, built on the root for a human being rather than for a man, and that pair marks the distinction the whole entry rests on: a fear of people in general is a different object from a fear of half of them.

The catalogue keeps two narrower fears nearby. Pogonophobia is defined by the same encyclopedia as a fear of beards or of men with beards, which quietly turns an appearance into a category of person, and caligynephobia is filed as a subset of gynophobia rather than as a fear of its own.

Why the political word was replaced

The fear has a political sibling with a better-documented history. Misandry, meaning hatred of or prejudice against men and boys, appeared in the late nineteenth century as an epithet aimed at first-wave feminism, drawing an equivalence with misogyny. It re-emerged in the 1980s in men's rights writing and in academic work on structural sexism, and it circulates now in online argument as a reply to accusations of misogyny.

The word was not felt to be sufficient. In 1997 the anthropologist David D. Gilmore coined viriphobia, on the grounds that misandry was little used and no accepted term existed for a hatred of men. His argument for the new word is the interesting part: terms like misandry usually refer to a hatred of machismo, or of the traditional male role, rather than to a hatred of men as men, which he says is extremely rare in the historical record. Misogyny, in his account, targets women whatever they believe or do, which makes the two words unequal rather than mirrored.

That is the same asymmetry the diagnostic record shows, arriving from the other direction. Two vocabularies were built as matching pairs, and in both of them the male half turned out to name something else.