Xindi Sun | First published July 2025 · Revised 2026
Originally published on RedNote in July 2025.
The original post received 141,000 views, 32,700 likes, 3,200 comments,
and a combined total of 1,500 shares and saves before being taken down by the platform in August 2026.
Introduction: When Misogyny Is Renamed as Misanthropy
"I'm not a misogynist. I just hate people."
In discussions of gender inequality on the Chinese internet, we frequently encounter variations of this statement: "I don't hate women or men. I just hate shitty people." "I hate everyone equally."
These remarks often carry an air of worldly detachment. The speaker claims to side with neither men nor women, having supposedly seen through what is commonly described as "gender antagonism". From this perspective, the problem is not gender. Some people are simply unpleasant, regardless of whether they are men or women.
The linguistic structure of these expressions is worth examining. In Chinese, yànnǚ (厌女, misogyny) and yànrén (厌人, misanthropy) differ by just one character. By replacing 女 (woman) with 人 (person), the speaker recasts an aversion directed at a particular group as a universal attitude towards everyone.
A similar relationship exists in English: misogyny and misanthropy share the Greek root miso- (hatred), while gyn- refers to women and anthrop- to human beings. In Chinese, however, the substitution is particularly direct: replacing a single character turns an aversion towards women into an apparently universal aversion towards humanity.
Similarly, the claim "I just hate shitty people" replaces gender distinctions with a judgement of individual character that appears to be independent of gender.
But this is precisely where the problem lies. Does claiming to hate everyone equally mean that one's standards of judgement are free from gender prejudice? When a statement directed at women is criticised, does explaining it as a general dislike of people actually address the original criticism?
This essay is not concerned with every expression of misanthropy, nor does it object to judging people by their conduct rather than their gender. What interests me is how these apparently gender-neutral declarations, when used in response to specific criticisms of misogyny, can turn questions about social relations and structures of power into discussions of personal feelings, character, and attitude.
A person may sincerely believe that they dislike everyone equally while still participating, through their everyday conduct, in the reproduction of inequality.
1. Misogyny Is Not Simply a Personal Feeling
In everyday language, misogyny is often understood as a dislike of women or an explicit hostility towards them. Yet reducing misogyny to a personal feeling cannot adequately explain why certain forms of denigration, humiliation, and punishment directed at women continue to uphold the existing gender order, even when no overt hatred is expressed.
In Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017), the philosopher Kate Manne develops a social and political framework for understanding misogyny. She examines it as a mechanism through which patriarchal social arrangements are maintained and enforced, focusing particularly on the hostility, punishment, and social exclusion experienced by women who fail to conform to established gender expectations.
From this perspective, misogyny is no longer simply a question of whether someone psychologically dislikes women. We must also examine what their words and actions do within particular social relations.
For example, someone may have no objection to women receiving an education, pursuing careers, or earning their own income, yet subject them to additional moral scrutiny when they refuse traditional expectations of emotional care, openly express sexual desire, or challenge male authority. Such judgements do not necessarily involve a general hatred of all women. They may instead be directed specifically at those who fail to conform to established gender expectations.
A person may respect certain women, maintain intimate relationships with women, and even endorse some principles of gender equality while continuing to participate in gendered forms of denigration and punishment in particular situations.
In Onna girai: Nippon no misojinī (Misogyny in Japan, 2010; Chinese translation published in 2015), the Japanese feminist sociologist Chizuko Ueno examines how misogyny contributes to the formation of masculine subjectivity and relationships among men through the gender order and male homosocial relations. Within this structure, women are not merely objects of male desire. They may also become a medium through which men evaluate, compete with, and affirm one another. This perspective further demonstrates that misogyny does not necessarily take the form of direct hostility towards all women.
A person may praise women, pursue them romantically, or even declare an intention to protect them while helping to maintain prescribed feminine roles and gender norms. When women continue to be judged according to how well they conform to established gender expectations, apparent affection and structural denigration are not mutually exclusive.
"I don't hate all women" is therefore not, in itself, an answer to a criticism of misogyny. The question that needs to be addressed is whether someone's words and actions distribute respect, responsibility, shame, and social recognition according to gendered standards.
Misogyny does not always announce itself as hatred. It may also operate through affection, moral judgement, and seemingly unquestionable expectations about how women ought to live.
2. From Misogyny to Misanthropy: How Structural Problems Become Personal Attitudes
The response "I'm not a misogynist. I just hate people" works precisely because it changes the subject. When a statement is criticised as misogynistic, the criticism usually concerns the particular way it judges women and how that judgement relates to existing gender norms.
The appeal to misanthropy does not necessarily challenge any of these specific concerns. Instead, it redirects attention towards the speaker's emotional disposition: I feel the same way about men, so there is nothing gender-specific about my attitude. The discussion shifts from the social meaning of particular words and actions to whether the speaker's feelings are universal.
But even if someone holds similarly negative attitudes towards different groups, it does not follow that those attitudes carry the same meaning or have the same consequences in different social relations.
For example, someone may claim to judge everyone's appearance according to equally demanding standards. Yet if those judgements reinforce existing aesthetic expectations imposed specifically on women's bodies, they may still contribute to the additional regulation of women's appearance.
Similarly, someone may claim to dislike emotional displays in men and women equally. But if they repeatedly interpret women's anger as irrational while treating men's anger as an expression of authority or strength, their professed universal attitude cannot account for the difference in how they actually judge the two.
We need to distinguish between two separate questions: whether the speaker sincerely believes that they treat everyone equally, and whether the standards they actually apply contain gender-based distinctions.
The problem is not necessarily that the speaker is deliberately concealing their prejudice. They may genuinely believe that they treat everyone alike, without recognising that their supposedly universal standards of judgement may themselves contain particular gender expectations.
This rhetorical shift can be understood as a form of depoliticisation.
When a problem rooted in specific social relations is redescribed as a matter of personal feeling, character, or attitude, the institutional conditions and power relations that produce it can disappear from view. What originally required an explanation grounded in social relations becomes a question of individual psychology.
A critique of misogyny invites us to ask: Why are certain judgements about women socially acceptable? Why are women more readily punished for departing from particular gender expectations? Why is behaviour considered reasonable in men but treated as a moral failing in women?
The response "I just hate people" can replace all these questions with a much simpler explanation: I am merely someone who dislikes humanity. What matters in this shift is not whether the speaker genuinely dislikes everyone, but which questions their self-description allows them to leave unanswered.
Depoliticisation does not require the speaker to openly deny the existence of gender inequality. They may readily acknowledge that women experience certain forms of injustice while insisting that their own words have nothing to do with those inequalities, because they claim to hold the same attitude towards everyone.
Gender inequality can thus be acknowledged in principle while the speaker's own words and actions are excluded from the discussion of how that inequality is reproduced. In this context, misanthropy does not offer a deeper explanation of misogyny. Instead, an apparently universal personal attitude can take the place of the specific social relations that originally needed to be examined.
3. The Illusion of Neutrality: When Feminism Is Redefined as Another Form of Extremism
A similar rhetorical shift appears in another familiar expression on the Chinese internet:
"I'm neither one of those radical feminists nor a male supremacist. I'm simply against all forms of extremism." (我既不是女拳，也不是男拳，我只是反对一切极端。)
This statement appears to reject mutual hostility between genders and place the speaker in a neutral position above both sides. But how is this neutrality established?
First, we need to recognise that nǚquán (女权, feminism, literally "women's rights") and nánquán (男权, male dominance, literally "men's power") are not inherently symmetrical concepts.
In ordinary social and political discourse, feminism encompasses critiques of gendered power relations, social institutions, and cultural norms, alongside disagreements between different theoretical positions and approaches to political practice. The Chinese term nánquán, meanwhile, can describe social structures in which men hold dominant positions or refer to positions that seek to uphold male authority.
The apparent symmetry of the two terms does not mean that they describe two forms of group hostility with equivalent social foundations and political demands.
More importantly, in this expression the character for "rights" or "power" (权) in 女权 and 男权 is replaced with the homophonous character for "fist" (拳), producing the derogatory terms 女拳 and 男拳. Although the pronunciation remains unchanged, the meaning shifts: concepts concerning rights and relations of power are repackaged as two opposing groups throwing punches at one another.
女拳 is a derogatory play on words that portrays feminism as aggressive or excessively militant. Its significance lies in the substitution of "fist" for "rights", which allows feminism to be presented as one side of a supposedly symmetrical conflict between two hostile groups.
Through this linguistic substitution, feminism as a whole can be portrayed as an aggressive position directed against men, while hostility towards women is placed in a formally symmetrical position opposite it. The two appear to be versions of the same extremism, differing only in gender and direction.
Once this symmetry is accepted, the discussion can shift away from gender inequality towards a different question: which side is more radical, more emotional, or more aggressive? A critique originally directed at social structures is thereby reorganised into an emotional conflict between two groups.
The speaker who declares their opposition to both sides seems to acquire a special position. Standing outside the dispute, they can judge who is being more rational, who has gone too far, and whether both sides should stop arguing, without first having to address whether their respective demands arise from comparable social conditions.
Neutrality here is no longer simply a personal decision not to participate in a particular dispute. It can become a rhetorical means of redefining what the dispute is about.
When a discussion of inequality is presented as an endless quarrel between two groups, the imagined solution changes accordingly. Rather than examining the social conditions that produced the conflict, we are asked to make both sides stop arguing and adjust their attitudes.
A similar mechanism can be found in the injunction "Don't pit men and women against each other" (不要男女对立). When this statement is used in response to a specific criticism of gender inequality, it can blur the distinction between two different questions: is identifying a social conflict the same thing as creating it?
When women draw attention to the unequal treatment they have experienced, they may instead be accused of creating gender antagonism simply by raising the issue of gender. The inequality that originally required an explanation is displaced by a debate over whether it was appropriate to speak about that inequality in the first place.
Why a particular social relation is unequal ceases to be the central question. Instead, the discussion turns to whether pointing out the inequality is too radical, whether it will intensify conflict, and whether it will disrupt the supposed harmony of society.
In this process, speaking about inequality may attract more criticism than the specific conditions of inequality being discussed.
This does not mean that hostility between groups should never be criticised, that every claim made in the name of feminism is inherently justified, or that everyone who describes themselves as neutral necessarily supports existing inequalities. The question we need to ask is what neutrality does in a particular discussion.
Does it allow different positions and demands to be fully understood and examined? Or does it require us to set aside the social conditions and inequalities of power that different groups face before the discussion can even begin?
Formal symmetry does not automatically establish equality in actual social relations. Nor does refusing to choose a side prove that one's judgements are free from gender prejudice. When a claim to neutrality requires structural critique and group hostility to be treated as the same kind of problem, it can become a rhetorical mechanism for avoiding structural questions altogether.
4. Rejecting the Label: Who Gets to Decide What a Statement Means?
The claim "I'm not a misogynist. I just hate people" raises a more fundamental question: when a statement is criticised, can its speaker determine its social meaning simply by redefining their own intentions?
Of course, people have the right to explain what they intended to say and to challenge accusations they consider inaccurate. But a speaker's account of their own intentions cannot exhaust the meaning of their words within particular social relations.
Suppose a woman points out that a particular remark demeans women in a gendered way. The response "I say the same thing about men" does not directly address her criticism.
Even if that response is factually correct, further questions remain. Does the remark draw upon existing stereotypes about women? Does it turn a particular gender expectation into a standard of judgement? Does it produce gendered forms of denigration or exclusion in the context in which it is made? None of these questions can be settled simply by giving the speaker's attitude a different name.
Misanthropy, in this sense, can become more than a description of personal feeling. It can also serve as a means of claiming interpretive authority. By emphasising that they hold the same attitude towards everyone, the speaker attempts to establish their own account of their intentions as the definitive basis for understanding what they have said.
The terms of the discussion then change. A statement that originally needed to be examined is redefined as a personal attitude, and those who criticise it are expected to accept the speaker's account of that attitude before anything else can be discussed.
This means that the person raising the criticism must not only explain why a particular statement is misogynistic, but also demonstrate why the speaker's account of their intentions is insufficient to end the discussion.
When the speaker's self-description is granted decisive interpretive authority, those affected by the statement may find their ability to challenge its social meaning diminished.
They may point out how a particular expression draws upon familiar gender stereotypes, repeats specific expectations imposed on women, or contributes to women's denigration and exclusion. Yet all these experiences and observations can be dismissed as irrelevant to the statement's meaning on the grounds that the speaker "didn't mean it that way".
The speaker's subjective intentions thus become a means of setting the limits of legitimate criticism.
More importantly, this rhetorical shift does not require the speaker to openly deny gender inequality. They may acknowledge that women experience discrimination while insisting that their own words should remain outside the scope of misogyny as a form of critique.
The dispute then ceases to concern how a particular statement participates in gendered power relations. Instead, it becomes a question of whether the speaker has the authority to decide which category their own words belong to.
This is the question of interpretive authority: when the meaning of a statement is contested, whose interpretation can serve as a basis for public discussion? How should the speaker's subjective intentions, the recipient's experiences, and the social relations in which the statement occurs be taken into account?
The speaker's intentions cannot automatically settle the matter. Nor can the recipient's feelings, taken alone, determine everything a statement means. A judgement about misogyny must still be grounded in the language used, the context in which it appears, and the social relations through which it acquires meaning.
Yet the speaker's right to explain their intentions does not grant them exclusive authority to determine the full social significance of their words.
A person has the right to explain what they meant. They cannot, on the strength of that explanation alone, determine how others must understand their experience.
Conclusion: Rejecting the Name While Refusing to Confront the Reality
The problem with "I'm not a misogynist. I just hate people" is not whether the speaker genuinely dislikes everyone. It is whether that claim of universality is being used to evade criticism of specific gendered relations.
The appeal to misanthropy can shift attention from social practice to personal feeling. The appeal to neutrality can recast structural inequality as a symmetrical conflict between two groups. And the appeal to personal intention can allow the speaker to claim priority in determining the meaning of their own words.
These rhetorical strategies are not identical, but they can have similar consequences: the social relations and gender norms that originally needed to be examined gradually disappear from public discussion.
A person may sincerely believe that they dislike everyone equally, reject gender-based hostility, and regard their own intentions as entirely free from prejudice. Yet none of these self-descriptions is sufficient to establish that their words and actions are socially neutral.
A critique of misogyny must therefore go beyond asking whether someone psychologically dislikes women. It must also examine how particular judgements, expectations, and practices operate within existing gendered relations of power.
The point is not to attach a moral label to every expression of personal dislike, nor to deny anyone the right to explain their own intentions. It is that we cannot allow a declaration of personal feeling to take the place of an examination of specific social relations.
When someone invokes their dislike of everyone as a reason not to address the gendered judgements in their own speech, they are asking for more than an acknowledgement of their feelings. They are asking for those feelings to be accepted as grounds for ending the criticism.
What this position avoids is not merely the moral accusation carried by the word misogyny. It avoids the scrutiny that the concept demands: a reconsideration of social relations, gender norms, and one's own participation in their reproduction.
Unwilling to bear the name of misogyny, and unwilling to face its reality.
References
Manne, K. (2017). Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford University Press.
Ueno, C. (2015). 厌女：日本的女性嫌恶 [Misogyny in Japan] (Wang Lan, Trans.). Shanghai Joint Publishing Company. (Original work published in 2010 as 女ぎらい：ニッポンのミソジニー [Onna girai: Nippon no misojinī].)