[parenthephobia]

In my defence, that wasn't what the comment said when I replied to it. :) (What I quoted was the entire paragraph at the time.)

But, is a woman who criticises other women necessarily a misogynist? It's no more necessarily true of a woman than of a man who criticizes women. If a man criticizes other men, we don't immediately accuse him of misandry: of criticizing those men because they are men.

If a woman criticizes other women for, e.g., using their looks - and possibly more - to get ahead, is she really displaying hatred towards "women", or just those women?

I am, to be clearer than I really should have to be, not saying that women can't be misogynists, or that the only thing women criticize other women for is using their sexuality to get ahead. But women criticizing women isn't automatically misogyny: it may simply be criticism.

[jack-r-abbit]

> But women criticizing women isn't automatically misogyny: it may simply be criticism.

If only men were given so much benefit of the doubt.

[parenthephobia]

I can only speak for my experience...

In my work life, I see men criticizing women (and vice versa) all the time. There is never a hint of anyone thinking that man-to-woman criticism is being only given, or is only as pointed as it is, because of the sexes of the people involved. Maybe I'm just lucky that my co-workers are professionals. (It's about a 30/70 female/male split in my workplace, FYI.)

In my personal life, I really don't see much of people criticising anyone, except each other. Maybe I don't hang with the right people.

With one recurring exception, I cannot recall an instance from my "real life" in the past decade, say, where I've seen a woman criticised for something where a man wouldn't have been criticized in the same way. The exception being the automatic assumption many (but of course not all) drivers have that any bad driver must be a woman: whilst a man will still be criticized for bad driving, he is a bad driver because he is a bad driver, whilst a bad woman driver is a bad driver because she is a woman.

Online, I see (presumed) men criticising (presumed) women all the time. Naturally, said criticism is not necessarily very constructive. Perhaps it is just my bias, but criticism of women seems to far more often focus on her gender and sexuality than criticism of men does.

tl;dr In my experience, men are.