female chauvinist

noun

1. a female who patronizes, disparages, or otherwise denigrates males in the belief that they are inferior to females and thus deserving of less than equal treatment or benefit.

Other Word Forms

• female chauvinism noun

Word History and Origins

Origin of female chauvinist¹

First recorded in 1970–75

Example Sentences

In 2005, the year I graduated college, Ariel Levy’s Female Chauvinist Pigs came out.

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With the scales between men and women tipping towards equality, author Ariel Levy explains in "Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture" that in a hyper-sexual post-'90s America, many women performed their sexuality boldly, brashly for male pleasure.

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The boxes of them recently cleared out of my mother’s attic and my undergraduate thesis — on Cosmopolitan, Ms., and Playboy magazines in the 1960s and ‘70s — prove it. My feminist awakening was, like many others’, peppered with gateway drugs like that: Ariel Levy’s “Female Chauvinist Pigs,” the HBO series “Cathouse,” and, of course, Jezebel — the groundbreaking women’s website, which current owner G/O Media unceremoniously shuttered Thursday after more than 15 years, and where I worked from 2013 to 2017.

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“Because of a spiteful female chauvinist rule,” he wrote, “male coaches are not allowed on the floor, and so it is like a science-fiction movie of a time when women have taken over. The judges are all women, as are the assistants, the messengers. The only men on the premises are the piano players — men being built for that sort of quiet work — who huddle together on a bench by the baby grand.”

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In 1972, Friedan famously called Abzug and Steinem “female chauvinist boors.”

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Related Words

• male chauvinist 
• misogynist 

When To Use

What does female chauvinist mean?

A female chauvinist is a woman who disrespects or behaves condescendingly toward men because she believes that men are inferior to women.Female chauvinist is used disapprovingly, especially in cases where the speaker believes a woman consistently and openly mistreats men and acts as if she and all women are superior to women. The term is often used to criticize feminists who are perceived as hating all men (even though feminism is the advocating of equality for women, not superiority).Example: If you say you hate all men, you’re not a feminist—you’re a female chauvinist.