FROM MISOGYNY TO MISANDRY: THE PHENOMENON OF GENDER-BASED HATRED IN CINEMA

Abstract

Cinema has been one of the most prominent arts in terms of gender interactions and the way it deals with male and female roles is multifaceted and complex. Cinema includes lots of socio-economical and cultural attributions with its own contexts and it approaches transformations and alterations elaborately. In this regard, two of the theme’s cinema is particularly interested in are misogyny and misandry which are the issues containing hatred, violence, fear and death and are closely related to ideology and its extensions over women. At this point, the main concern of this study is to make out how cinema focuses on this gender-based hatred and to investigate its basic cause. Thus, I have chosen four American films whose names are “MS. 45" (1981), "Monster" (2003), "I Spit on Your Grave" (2010) and "M.F.A." (2017) containing misogyny and misandry at the same time have been selected and analysed them with a feminist approach with the aid of discourses and incident sequences and reviewed in order to grasp whether this ancient hatred stems from phallocentric and toxic masculinity. The films have been selected with purposeful sampling method and the themes have been reviewed in a detailed way. The analysis has indicated that the reason for misogyny is not one-sided and originally linked with patriarchal and heteronormative expectations, while misandry is like a revenge story and ensues from a masculine stance and its historical persecution towards women.