I try to use ‘plain English’ wherever possible, but some words unfamiliar to the general public carry a great deal of meaning in the field of gender politics. One such is ‘gynocentrism’. My Chambers dictionary – the latest edition – is 1,800+ pages long, and doesn’t include the word. Microsoft’s ‘Word’ spellchecker doesn’t recognise it. So what does the word mean? Wikipedia’s entry starts with the following:
“Gynocentrism is the ideological practice, conscious or otherwise, of asserting the female point of view on a wide range of social issues. The perceptions, needs, and desires of women have primacy in this approach, where the female view is the point of departure or lens through which issues are addressed or analyzed. The antonymic perspective to gynocentrism is androcentrism, where the male view is the central reference point.
Ideologically, gynocentrism prioritizes females hierarchically as the overriding focus, at the exclusion of all else; and as a result emulates or may be interpreted as misandry, the hatred and prejudice towards men. Katherine K. Young and Paul Nathanson claim that gynocentrism is a worldview based on the implicit or explicit belief that the world revolves around women, and is a cultural theme so well entrenched that it has become ‘de rigueur’ behind the scenes in law courts and government bureaucracies, which has resulted in systemic discrimination against men.”
[Note added 1.6.14: In 2011 AVfM published a series of landmark lectures by Adam Kostakis on the subject of gynocentrism, and they’re currently republishing the series. They’ve just posted lecture #7 The personal, as contrasted with the political which we thought would be of particular interest to followers of this blog.]
