Firstly, this is a bit of a discussion/editorial, so if it's not allowed and the Mods want to move or remove it then I understand and I'm OK with it.

Feminists (and that whole post-modernist crowd) like to assert that language and word games have some form of objective meaning. It's odd how they can claim that physics is sexist and that 'mansplaining' is a thing with a straight face.

Taking them at face value, though, brings up a problem with a popular modern feminist buzzword. I'm nearly 50. I grew up in the 70s, the era of Dworkin et al.

I remember as a child hearing about chauvinism, undue partiality to a group. At the time THE feminist insult was Male Chauvinist Pig. So in the 70s, men preferred men over women.

In the 80s a new term began to become popular, sexism. Now, it wasn't the case that men preferred men, it was that they discriminated against women.

Today the buzzword is misogyny, that men HATE women.

On the face of it, if true this is a damning indictment of feminism; if the end result of 40 years of activism is shifting the culture from a preference for men to HATRED of women.

Maybe, just maybe, this buzzword is just total BS. The problem is that even in articles criticising feminism I see the author(s) accepting the word, trying to negotiate around it, explain it, deal with it.

There is enough peer-reviewed research showing that the empathy gap favours women, that society will twist itself in knots to accommodate women, that the EU attempted to brand criticism of feminism as hate speech, and that boys and men are being disadvantaged by the cultural shifts of the last 40+ years.

Can we not just reject the whole concept as a lie? Can we not just respond to accusations of misogyny with a challenge to prove it, rather than trying to work it into OUR narrative?

tl;dr Misogyny doesn't exist and we should "reject the premise" when debating feminists.