femophobia

English

Noun

femophobia (uncountable)

1. Fear or disavowal of one's own feminine qualities.
   • 2008, Keith W. Swain, Dynamic Duos:

     In truth, my client couldn't afford to pay for their dinner at the fancy restaurant his date had suggested, but in his attempt to overcome his own "femophobia," he ended up paying for them both, feeling put out, and not seeing the guy again.

   • 2008, B. Lingard, W. Martino, M. Mills, Boys and Schooling: Beyond Structural Reform, →ISBN, page 3:

     In contrast, pro-feminist politics is built on a male alliance with women in addressing misogyny, sexism, homophobia and femophobia, with the additional requirement for men to engage in some reflexivity about their complicity in an oppressive gender order.

   • 2011, K Sciurba, Reading and seeing themselves: Boys of color and textual (non-) connection:

     Such misinterpretation may inadvertently condone homophobia, xenophobia, and/or femophobia by implying that there is a prescribed set of attitudes, behaviors, emotions, and actions that belong to normal (ie aggressive) boys.

   • 2012, Jackson Katz, Leading Men: Presidential Campaigns and the Politics of Manhood, →ISBN:

     As Stephen Ducat explains, homophobia has its roots in femophobia, or men's fear of their own femininity.

2. Fear or avoidance of meaningful relationships with women.
   • 1980, Robert N. Whitehurst, Gerald V. Booth, The Sexes: Changing Relationships in a Pluralistic Society, page 4:

     Their foremost expressions of love were for young boys and prostitutes (Hunt, 1959:27). There was a transitoriness in the Greek male's relationships with women, one that has been called femophobia (Whitehurst, 1971:3).

   • 2002, Wayne Andersen, Picasso's Brothel, page 145:

     Since Freud's 1910 book on Leonardo da Vinci's sexuality, art history has not let up on artists' homosexual proclivities, as if art making was a form of parturition and birth-giving, the artist not just inspired (impregnated) by the studio muse but incorporating her femininity to the degree that every man is feminine but some more so than others. There may never be an end to Van Gogh's severed ear lobe handed to a prostitute, to Cezanne's femophobia, or to Picasso's venereal infection.

   • 2009, Stuart Rosenbaum, Pragmatism and the Reflective Life, →ISBN, page 89:

     We likely find repulsive such saints as St. Louis of Gonzaga, whose search for purity was indistinguishable from a pathological femophobia, and Mary Margaret Alacoque, whose spirit of adoration for God became a swooning incompetence; and we likely find attractive St. Francis, St. Paul, George Fox, and Walt Whitman.