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Summary: The article explains that sexism is the belief system that positions men as naturally superior and women as subordinate, while misogyny is the active enforcement and punishment of women who challenge that hierarchy.
Have you ever heard the statement that a man is superior to a woman, or that women come second to men? Most people do not hear this as an insult; they hear it as fact, something obvious, something that explains how things already work. That acceptance is not accidental; it is the foundation of sexism.
Sexism is discrimination based on sex, but it works as an ideology long before it looks like discrimination. It is the belief that men are naturally suited for leadership, authority, and control, while women are naturally meant to support, assist, and submit. Introduced early and repeated constantly, it stops looking like opinion and starts looking like reality; people grow into it and live inside it.
One of the most common excuses for this ideology is the appeal to physical strength. Men are physically stronger than women on average, so strength becomes the standard for superiority, authority is framed as logical, leadership becomes masculine, and submission becomes feminine. What is rarely questioned is why physical strength is treated as the most important form of strength. Women outperform men biologically in other ways—they have stronger immune systems, live longer, recover differently from illness, and give birth to life, an extremely painful experience—but these forms of strength are dismissed because they do not serve the hierarchy. Strength only matters when it keeps women beneath men.
That selectiveness shows sexism is not biology; it is power. When men perform better, the rules harden. When women perform better, the rules quietly change. The hierarchy remains intact.
This is easiest to see in everyday spaces. In a university setting, sexism might look like the assumption that a woman cannot be president of the student union. It is rarely stated directly. Instead, people say women are too emotional, too soft, too distracted. The belief does not need to be spoken plainly. It is understood. Misogyny follows. Misogyny is refusing to vote for a woman regardless of her qualifications, dismissing her campaign ideas, scrutinising her personal life, while ignoring her competence. Sexism draws the rule, misogyny enforces it.
The same pattern appears in workplaces. Sexism says leadership suits men better. Misogyny undermines women who lead, questions their authority, gossips about their tone, and labels them difficult. Sexism draws the boundary. Misogyny punishes those who cross it through harassment, threats, humiliation, and even sexual violence, reminding women of the cost of disobedience.
What makes sexism hard to confront is how acceptable it is. Remove sex from the structure and replace it with another identity, and the injustice becomes obvious—the belief that one group is naturally inferior, that dominance is justified by biology, culture, or divine order. These ideas are widely condemned when applied to race or ethnicity. People protest, resist, organise. But when applied to women, it is defended as normal. Everyone seems comfortable with sexism.
Religions often support this. Religious teachings frame women as emotionally weak, spiritually subordinate, or naturally submissive, thereby giving sexism moral authority. When inequality is presented as God’s design, challenging it becomes rebellion rather than self-respect. These interpretations shape how women are treated in families, schools, and institutions.
Because sexism is so embedded, many women internalise it. They defend systems that harm them, excuse behaviour that limits them, and blame themselves when punished for stepping out of line. This is not ignorance; it is adaptation. Silence feels safer than resistance.
This is why sexism is difficult to recognise at first. As Alix Kates Shulman observed, sexism goes so deep it feels like reality itself, not because it is natural, but because it has been rehearsed for generations.
Feminism exists to disrupt that illusion. It does not invent women’s dissatisfaction. It names it. It connects personal experiences to a wider structure, explains why so many women share the same struggles in different spaces, and asks why oppression is easy to recognise everywhere except where women are concerned.
Sexism survives because it is treated as acceptable. Once it is recognised as ideology rather than truth, it becomes harder to defend, and neutrality stops being an option.
