Fear of Women

How the word's use has grown

The Oxford English Dictionary gives one meaning for gynophobia and dates its earliest known use to 1886, in the writing of Oliver Wendell Holmes, physician, teacher of anatomy and author.

Its frequency table runs the opposite way to most words in this catalogue. Where topophobia and philosophobia flatten or decline, gynophobia rises in every single decade recorded:

• 0.0006 occurrences per million words in the 1880s and 1890s
• 0.001 by the 1930s
• 0.003 by the 1970s
• 0.0056 by the 2010s That is roughly nine times its starting frequency, climbing steadily for thirteen decades.

The dictionary still rounds the whole of that to fewer than 0.01 occurrences per million. A word can multiply ninefold and remain rare.

Where the manual puts it

ICD-11 lists gynaephobia as an inclusion term under social anxiety disorder. An inclusion is not a diagnosis of its own; it is a name the manual recognises as belonging inside a diagnosis, which means a clinician using that term is understood rather than corrected.

That is more standing than nearly anything else in this catalogue has. It also settles where the fear belongs: not among the specific phobias with the animals and the heights, but among the social fears, alongside the fear of being judged.

The classification carries a claim with it. If a fear of women is a social anxiety, then the object is what women might think or do rather than what women are, and the parallel is with the fear of speaking in public rather than with the fear of dogs.

Which distinction the sources insist on

Gynophobia should not be confused with misogyny, which is hatred, contempt for and prejudice against women, though the encyclopedic account concedes that some people use the terms interchangeably when discussing the social rather than the pathological side of negative attitudes.

The vocabulary around it is unusually complete. Misogyny has an antonym, philogyny, the love and respect of women. Gynophobia has one too, gynophilia. Androphobia is the analogous fear of men, and caligynephobia, the fear of beautiful women, is a subset of gynophobia with almost no literature of its own.

Feminophobia is given as a hyponym, and the archaic Latin term is horror feminae.

That a language has this many words for the territory, and antonyms for two of them, indicates a subject people have needed to be precise about for a long time.

Where gynophobia is actually used

Rarely, and often knowingly. Wiktionary's citation is from a Financial Times column of January 2012 in which David Tang confesses to both: gynophobia, the general fear of women, and in particular venustraphobia, the fear of beautiful women.

That is a writer using two phobia names about himself in a newspaper, in a piece about the treatment of women. The words are doing rhetorical work rather than describing a condition, which is the usual position of a phobia term outside a clinic, with the difference that this one has a place inside one too.