I recently read a study titled “Women Who Hate Men: A Comparative Analysis Across Extremist Reddit Communities.” It caught my attention for an obvious reason: it attempts to examine something that is rarely acknowledged in mainstream research—the existence of hostility toward men. That alone makes it worth looking at.
To its credit, the study does arrive at an important conclusion. It finds that gender-based hostility online is not confined to one direction. Both misogynistic and misandric communities show similar patterns of negativity, and in some cases, the levels of expressed “hate” are comparable—or even higher—in feminist spaces. In fact, one of the more striking findings was that the mainstream Feminism subreddit, not the more radical GenderCritical group, showed the highest “hate” levels in the study’s user-level emotional analysis, while the incel group skewed more toward sadness. That’s not a small finding. For years, the dominant narrative has been that hostility flows primarily from men toward women, while negative attitudes toward men are either minimal, reactive, or insignificant. This study quietly challenges that assumption.
But as I read through the paper, I found myself struck by something else. The conclusion may be balanced, but the path getting there is not.
The Framing Is Not Neutral
One of the first things that stood out was how much time the paper spends describing the dangers women face from misogyny. There are detailed references to harassment, violence, abuse of female public figures, and the broader cultural impact of anti-female hostility.
But there is no parallel effort to explore the harms faced by men. There is little discussion of male victimization, little acknowledgment of anti-male stereotypes, and almost no examination of how cultural narratives might shape hostility toward men and boys. So even in a study that claims to look at both sides, the starting point is not neutral. It begins from a familiar position: misogyny is the established problem. Misandry is something newer, something less understood, something that needs to be “added” to the conversation. That framing matters because it subtly positions one form of hostility as primary and the other as secondary.
The “Manosphere” Problem
Another moment gave me pause. The paper describes the “manosphere” as:
“a network of websites and social media groups that promote misogynistic beliefs.”
That’s not a finding. That’s a definition, and definitions matter. If you begin by defining a category as misogynistic, then study that category, you are not really testing whether it is misogynistic. You have already assumed the answer.
Now, to be fair, some spaces within what is often called the “manosphere” are openly hostile. Anyone who has spent time online knows that. But the term itself is broad. It includes a wide range of spaces—some focused on anger, yes, but others focused on fatherhood, men’s mental health, legal concerns, relationships, or simply trying to make sense of a changing world. To define all of that as inherently misogynistic collapses important distinctions. It turns a complex landscape into a single, pre-labeled category, and once that happens, the analysis begins to feel circular.
Reaction or Expression?
As I continued reading, I noticed something more subtle. Feminist spaces in the study are often framed—implicitly—as reacting to misogyny. The idea seems to be that negative attitudes toward men are, at least in part, a response to harm. That may sometimes be true, but it is not something the study actually tests.
Interestingly, the data itself complicates that assumption. When the researchers looked at emotional patterns—particularly expressions of “hate”—the feminist subreddit showed some of the highest levels at the user level. That’s a striking finding, because it suggests that hostility toward men is not always merely reactive. It can be active. It can be sustained. And in some cases, it may be as intense as the hostility it is presumed to respond to. The study reports this, but it does not fully grapple with what it means.
The Problem with Measuring “Hate”
The paper relies heavily on computational tools to measure toxicity and emotion. That’s understandable. Large datasets require some kind of automated analysis. But these tools have limits. They tend to detect what we might call explicit hostility—insults, threats, and dehumanizing language.
What they struggle to capture is something more subtle: generalized suspicion, moral framing, one-sided narratives about harm, and the steady pathologizing of a group. Hatred does not always announce itself clearly, and it does not always use harsh words. Sometimes it sounds like concern. Sometimes it sounds like analysis. Sometimes it even sounds like virtue. And that kind of hostility can be harder to measure—but no less real.
The Charts That Don’t Quite Clarify
I’ll admit something simple as well: the charts didn’t help much. There were clusters of colors, distributions, and visual patterns—but very few clear numbers that would allow a reader to easily compare groups. How much more hate? How much less? It was difficult to say.
The visuals looked scientific, but they didn’t always make the findings clearer. They gave an impression of precision without always delivering clarity.
An Important Step—But Not the Whole Picture
So where does that leave us? I do not think this is a bad study. In some ways, it is an important one. It takes a step that many researchers have been unwilling to take. It acknowledges that hostility toward men exists, that it can be measured, and that it should not be ignored. That matters.
At the same time, the study reflects the broader environment in which it was produced—an environment that still tends to treat men as the default source of harm, and women’s hostility as something more contextual, more explainable, or more justified. Because of that, the analysis feels uneven. The conclusion points toward balance, but the framing leans away from it.
And that, to me, is the most revealing part of all. The study is valuable not only for what it finds, but for what it unintentionally exposes about the culture surrounding the research itself.
The Deeper Issue
In the end, what struck me most is this: we are beginning to see evidence that hostility toward men is real and measurable, but we are still not willing to face it directly—not with the same seriousness, the same clarity, the same moral urgency, or the same willingness to question the stories we have been telling ourselves for decades.
If researchers truly want to understand gendered hostility, they cannot stop with fringe Reddit communities. They need to look at the media, the schools, the therapeutic world, public health messaging, and other major cultural institutions and ask a very simple question: Who is being portrayed as dangerous? Who is being treated as defective? Who is being blamed, pathologized, mocked, feared, or morally downgraded? Men or women?
That would be a far more revealing study. Because the most powerful forms of hatred are not always loud, crude, or obvious, and they are not always found in anonymous online forums. Sometimes they are found in respectable institutions. Sometimes they are taught in classrooms, repeated in headlines, embedded in therapy language, or smuggled into public discourse under the cover of compassion and progress.
And that is precisely what makes them so powerful. When contempt for men is framed as insight, when suspicion of men is framed as wisdom, and when the steady belittling of men is framed as moral sophistication, it becomes very difficult even to name what is happening.
Until we are willing to examine that honestly, we will keep misunderstanding the problem. We will keep measuring only the crudest forms of hate while ignoring the more polished and socially approved forms. We will keep pretending that hostility toward men is mostly reactive, incidental, or harmless, when in many settings it has become normalized.
And when a culture cannot honestly recognize the contempt it directs at half the human race, it does not become more just. It becomes more blind.
Men Are Good, as are you.
Coppolillo, Erica In: Scientific reports, 2025 Apr 22, volume 15, issue 1, page 13952
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-81567-9
