Straw Feminist

We swear to purge this earth of disgusting male pigs!

There are now women politicians, women soldiers, women scientists, women astronauts. But our mission is only half-done: we still haven't prevented men from doing those things!

—April June, Chilly Beach

A character whose feminism is drawn only for the purposes of either proving them wrong or ridiculing them.

More likely to fight an imaginary male conspiracy rather than actually helping disadvantaged women, often being an out-and-out misandrist and often have exaggerated beliefs.

No real life examples, please; real people are not crafted for a specific purpose.

Examples of Straw Feminist include:

Anime

• Benio and the Zuka Club from Ouran High School Host Club are a troupe of lesbian actresses (parody of the real-life Takarazuka Revue) who advocate female superiority and at one point (pictured above) perform a Nazi salute against a backdrop of a red flag with the Japanese character 女 (onna meaning "woman") instead of a Swastika -- literal feminazis. Their radicalism is probably just a result of being headstrong teenagers who are just as silly as the Host Club, though, and at the end of the episode Haruhi, whom they'd been trying to recruit, tells them that she finds their viewpoint "interesting and unique" but doesn't feel like leaving her friends in the Host Club. In the original manga, the conflict is eventually resolved with the Host Club's apologetic invitation to one of the Zuka Club's performances, which everyone found very enjoyable. For some reason, probably because of the differences in the story this ending was replaced with banana peel jokes in Bones' anime adaptation.
• Armitage III. The Backstory is given in snippets, but a key plot element is that feminists have become political powerhouses equivalent to Greens. It is implied by the presence of an Earth "observer" that on Earth, women have gained status equivalent to modern-day South African whites - and few are willing to give that up just because Mars Needs Women. Space has been colonized, and Mars has been partially Terraformed, but has thus been unable to draw enough women to the planet to breed new Martians. Androids known as "Seconds" were created first as a source of labor, then upgraded to Ridiculously Human Robots as a immigration draw; come to Mars and leave the shrews behind for a sweet, willing conCeption Sex Bot! The long term solution was to build fertile women - the titular "Thirds"; robots so human that they can be impregnated. When the Straw Feminists find out about the plan, the threat to their power base pisses them off to no end, resulting in an ultimatum; scrap the baby machines or Mommy will come do it personally, along with as much of the landscape as necessary.
• Kaichou wa Maid-sama stars Misaki Ayuzawa, the first female Student Council President of an all-boys-turned-coed school, who initially fits this trope, causing her no end of trouble against the majority male student body. Her backstory—her father abandoning her, her younger sister, and their sickly mother to a huge debt—provides some justification, and soon Character Development forces her to face the fact that the boys' antagonism to her is but a reflection of her own antagonism against them. It soon becomes clear that, regardless, Misaki's dislike of injustice in any form is much stronger than her dislike of men.
  • What chapter or episode does she learn this?
• Aquarion Evol features MIX, a prudish redhead who deems boys inferior to girls in terms of combat potential, and is opposed to inter-gender interaction even after her school turned from gender-segregated to coed. She in particular despises Andy and his lecherous antics. This is partially justified by her father's affair with a woman he met at a hole-in-the-wall bathhouse (thus also contributing to her dislike of holes, which happens to be Andy's specialty). Soon, however, she starts defrosting to her male classmates and learns to cooperate with them.
• During the 'Til Death chapter of the Star Trek manga the Enterprise comes across a ruined planet, finding two sarcophagi on the surface. After beaming them back up the male and female crew begin acting hostile toward each other, at which point the women begin to behave as Straw Feminist and the men begin to act in a similar fashion. The sarcophagi open and Spock is able to determine that the planet was destroyed in a gender war, the leaders of which inside the coffins have been psychically influencing the crew.

Comedy

• The Capitol Steps' "Angry Feminist Nursery Rhymes."

Comic Books

• Taken to a ridiculous extreme in Frank Miller's All-Star Batman & Robin, in one issue of which Wonder Woman violently shoves a man out of her way while growling, " Out of my way, sperm bank!"
• The Cirinists and Kevillists in Cerebus the Aardvark are straw constructions of the second and third waves of feminism, respectively.
• Goldilocks from Fables seems to be this, but she's really cynically using her rhetoric as a tool to manipulate the people around her.
• Both used and subverted in Y: The Last Man, which contains both the insane, violent Amazons as well as other, rational feminists (both peaceful and not).
• Sarah Rainmaker of Gen 13 frequently yelled at Grunge for gawking at her and Bobby for being sexist. However, she had no problems objectifying women herself. In one issue she yells at Grunge for staring at her chest, but just a few pages before remarks that a Coda Warrior had a "Nice Ass."
• Although her pro-feminist stance was portrayed as a good thing in the '70s, by the Justice League Europe days of the late '80s, Power Girl was portrayed as an obnoxiously outspoken feminist; this may have been a reflection of the more conservative attitudes of the Reagan years. Today, her attitudes are portrayed in a positive light again (though the Fan Service has been dialed up a bit as well).
• Marvel Comics supervillain Superia wants to either eliminate, enslave, or feminize all men—and doesn't mind sterilizing 90% of Earth's women to make it happen. As Anaconda of the Serpent Society puts it, "What'samatter, you didn't get asked out to the prom or somethin'?"
  • Superia seems to have dropped this in her recent reappearance. She has both men and women in her employ and treats both her male and female mooks like crap and now mainly focuses on her own selfish goals. This is probably because her previous schemes usually were foiled with the help other female characters.
  • Marvel also has Man-Killer, whose name speaks for itself. Though she has something of an excuse since she was scarred by men.
• Diane Di Massa took this to the extreme in Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, who dreams of "a world without penises".
• The British adult comic Viz has Millie Tant, a fat, ugly and possibly lesbian extreme feminist who spouts a lot of S.C.U.M.-esque nonsense and many strips end with her turning out to be a hypocrite.
• Women from Thundra's future fit this trope to a 'T'. After their reality merged with its Spear Counterpart the result had both sexes living together in peace. Thundra later found another such reality, basically the copy of her original one, lived there for awhile and then came back to present leaving there a daughter Lyra who grew up into another Straw Feminist but for a number of reasons changed for better.
• Parodied in a Gail Simone issue of Wonder Woman, in a really bad movie of Diana's life (actually created by a villain):

Old Amazon: I say to you, that beast is man! See its lust for alcohol, and raw meat, and sex!
Wonder Woman (Thought Caption): Well, this is a diplomatic nightmare. Why do people think a belief in women equals a hatred of men?
Old Amazon: They love war! Them, and worse, their women! And worst of all...
Wonder Woman (Thought Caption): Please don't say it, please don't say it.
Old Amazon: They leave the toilet seat up!
Amazons: Kill the men! Kill the men!
Wonder Woman (Thought Caption): Urgh. Kill the scriptwriter.

• • Robot Chicken portrayed Wonder Woman this way for a parody of The Real World, where the raging feminist with a chip on her shoulder is practically a stock character. At one point, while comforting Catwoman, she remarks "Who needs men anyway?", and the sketch ends with her jumping up, shouting "THAT'S IT!" and beating the stuffing out of one of the guys because he coughed (politely) during dinner.
  • Played disturbingly straight in the New 52 reboot by the other Amazons. Every few decades they go out to sea to find ships crewed by men. They couple with the men, then kill them. Female children conceived this way become the next generation of Amazons, while the male children are given to Hephaestus to act as his labor force in exchange for his weapons. Diana is appropriately horrified by this revelation and immediately tries to liberate the males—she only stops when she sees that Hephaestus truly loves them as his surrogate sons and they in turn love him as their surrogate father.
• A Superman comic had Livewire cause every computer, camera, microphone, and the like to malfunction whenever men tried to use them. Justified in that most of the media of Metropolis was portrayed as misogynist douchebags, less so when completely innocent men were targeted as well.

Film

• In 100 Girls, the main character takes a Women's Studies class. Every time we see him in this class, the camera zooms in to the teacher's underarm hair with a dramatic sound effect. Towards the end of the movie, there's an Anvilicious scene where he tells the teacher that inequality doesn't exist and it's all just a case of men and women misunderstanding each other. The teacher replies by painting men as evil, but the entire class full of females breaks into applause for him.
• Katherine Watson (Julia Roberts) from Mona Lisa Smile. She encourages female independence, which is admirable, but not only are she and Elizabeth (Kirsten Dunst, who of course believes marriage is the only way to go) are quite the unlikeable bitches, at one point Katherine is an absolute bitch to her pet student Joan (Julia Stiles) and rudely lectures her for preferring marriage over graduate school (and at Stanford, no less)... during Joan's own wedding party. Thankfully, Joan gets a Crowning Moment of Awesome when she turns the tables on Katherine and tells her she's full of shit - because if women can choose to go to school and do as they wish, then certainly Katherine is an hypocrite for throwing a tantrum because she doesn't like what Joan herself decided to do with her life, huh?
• Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death: Played for every last laugh the scriptwriters can wring from it.
• The campy and stereotype-heavy Disney film Follow Me, Boys! has one named Vera Miles. She rants that men "are all alike, puffed-up lords of the universe". After the cheerful scoutmaster wins her heart, though, she has no quarrel with becoming a Housewife.
• Early in The Boondock Saints, the brothers show a rather butch female employee around their job (a meat-packing plant). The woman goes off on them for using the phrase "Rule of Thumb," citing the (apocryphal) origin of the term, and things soon escalate to the point where she kicks one of them, Connor, in the balls, followed by the other brother, Murphy, laying her out on the floor with one punch, leading to both of them getting fired for hitting a girl.
• Hayley and especially her mother in The Sandlot 2. The movie is set during the 2nd wave feminism and it does not let you forget it. Hayley's mom bitches at her husband for daring to call their daughter sweetheart since it's demeaning and later gives Hayley boy advice of "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." They even have a cat named Miss Susan B. Later we find out Hayley grew up to become both a baseball player and a model and her equally feminist friends became housewives.
• Parodied in Down With Love, in which Barbara, Vicki and most of the other female characters zigzag alarmingly between this trope and 'submissive housewife doll' mode, while the men also frequently veer wildly between stereotypical thoughtless pigs and over-sensitive new age guys. The movie ends with the main characters of both genders reaching an accommodation with each other and settling into happy and satisfying relationships based on equal terms.
• In Legally Blonde you have the character of Enid Wexlin, a lesbian who is probably the most annoying character in the film. One scene shows her going around with a clipboard to get people to sign a petition to change the word "semester" to "ovester" because she has come to the conclusion that semester comes from "semen" and is thus another form of male dominance. Elle puts her in her place later though.
• One of the Women's Studies professors in Sorority Boys, who also doubles as something of a Stern Teacher based on the absurd amounts of work she assigns. One shot during a montage shows her underlining "THE VAGINA IS ERGONOMICALLY SUPERIOR TO THE PENIS" in willy-shrivelingly huge letters on the chalkboard.
• A deleted scene in The Incredibles has a suit-wearing career-woman visitor to the Parr household criticizing Helen for being a stay-at-home mom, mainly so that Helen can shut her down; this trope is the reason it's not in the movie.
• The plot of the Polish Dystopia flick, Sexmission, is all about an underground society ruled completely by this trope.
• The "Womynists" in PCU.
• The Hairy Bird:

Odie: You hypocrite. I thought you hated boys.
Verena: I know, but I've been thinking, perhaps they are like dogs. If we don't take them in, they run wild and are a danger to society.

Literature

• The character of Miss Western in the novel Tom Jones is a proto-feminist who believes women are men's equals. At first this seems to the modern reader to be a remarkably progressive expression on the part of the author, but reading further, it becomes clear that a contemporary reader would have found the idea to be very humorous and inherently ridiculous from the outset. As the novel progresses, it becomes clear that Miss Western is tyrannical and only feels this way because she doesn't have a man of her own.
• General Jinjur from The Marvelous Land of Oz plotted the overthrow of King Scarecrow because she thought the Land of Oz was ruled by men for too long. May have actually been an Affectionate Parody of the early women's movement, as L. Frank Baum was actually the son-in-law of one of the movement's prime movers. The Other Wiki has more on the subject.
• Edge of Apocalypse has the vice president.
• Akasha in Queen of the Damned by Anne Rice. Though she does not use politically correct terms, since she's supposed to be an ancient Egyptian, she believes all violence on Earth is caused by men. Her plan is to use her near-omnipotent powers as mother of all vampires to destroy almost all the world's males and create a utopia run by women, with herself as benevolent queen and goddess. In the end she is destroyed by female twin vampires Mekare and Maharet, for personal reasons as much as to stop her plot. She may or may not really be a straw feminist since it's unclear whether or not the author agrees with her (persistent Author Avatar Lestat seems very ambivalent).
• Sisera Catheter in Postmodern Pooh, who dissects Winnie the Pooh from the standpoint of "gynocritical discourse". Though the book is an obvious exaggeration, the footnotes quoting Real Life academic feminists suggest that Poe's Law applies to some extent.
• In Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, two such beings visit the library where Oshima works, explicitly to find how the organization of the library is unfriendly to female patrons. They are shocked into silence when Oshima gives them an interesting heart-to-heart.
• The title character in Tess Gerrittsen's "Rizzoli" series shows traits of this. She dislikes beautiful women (partly because she isn't) and is all too eager to assign a negative characteristic to them, and she often expresses disgust and contempt for the men who have fallen in love with them, dismissing them all as shallow and foolish. She also has a chip on her shoulder about being the only female detective in the homicide department and is quick to interpret all criticism—and praise, for that matter—as sexist. And in a scene where she visits a bar, she views nearly every man there as a potential rapist and every woman as an idiot willing to put herself in danger.
• Subverted in J. Courtney Sullivan's Commencement with a sympathetic portrayal of a radical feminist: April, one of the main characters, is a self-described MacKinnonite who sees organizations like NOW as "not doing enough." However, she's shown to be more of a Well-Intentioned Extremist, a good person who perhaps is a bit too idealistic which she's abandoned by the end of the novel after she learns the hard way that some people like to take advantage of wide-eyed young guns. (Even the de rigeur anti-male attitude is explained in April's case: her father abandoned April and her mom, and when April was 13 a middle-aged family friend raped and impregnated her.) The other three main characters, April's friends, each represent more moderate variations on feminism (one even works for NOW). April's Complete Monster of a boss, Ronnie Munro, could be seen as a straight-playing of the trope, if the novel didn't go out of its way acknowledge that her brand of "feminism" is far from the most prevalent or consistent one.
• In Half Moon Investigations, the third most crucial group to the plot is a group of pre-pubescent aged elementary schoolgoing midgets who worship some important woman and try to get as many boys as they can expelled from their school. They also are violent and not afraid to do illegal things, like locking the main characters up.
• Niklas from Jens Lapidus' Aldrig Fucka Up (translated "never fuck up") is a rare male Straw Feminist. He beats up his neighbours boyfriend for hitting her, stalks several men whose names he stole form a women's shelter, shooting one, and torturing another to death, and at the finale, blows up a Corrupt Corporate Executive who organizes orgies for the upper class. And this is only one of the Third Line, Some Waiting.
• Percy Jackson and The Olympians gives us Circe, who believes that all men are pigs, and...considering her powers, and the work in which she originally appeared, you can pretty much see where she's going with that (though for the sake of convenience, she currently uses guinea pigs). She believes that women are so oppressed that they can only achieve power through magic (a belief later expressed by her niece Medea in the sequel series The Heroes of Olympus). She's so bad that even Annabeth thinks she's a misandrist bitch.
  • The Hunters of Artemis are actually heroic versions of this. They still don't like men, and have sworn off any romantic relationships with them, but unlike Circe, they don't harm guys unless provoked. (Which isn't very reassuring, considering that Greek deities like Artemis are infamous for Disproportionate Retribution and often consider small, harmless, and usually unintentional actions to be legitimate "provocation." Artemis claims to have turned guys into jackalopes and other animals just for stumbling upon their camp.) Zoe Nightshade, the lieutenant of the Hunters, hates guys at first, but Percy's actions gradually cause her to respect them.
  • The original Amazon tribe is still around, as seen in The Son of Neptune. They appear to be this at first, but it's later shown that they like men just fine — they're just very matriarchal. Their boyfriends and husbands tend to be the ones in charge of the unskilled labor for the company they founded: Amazon.com. One of them even flirts with Percy at the end of the book.
• Katie from "The Fabulous Five" series shows hints of this. She sanctimoniously declares that she would never be a cheerleader, as she find it degrading to women (and doesn't give a crap that she's essentially insulting her two friends who are joining the cheerleading squad). When another friend gushes about her boyfriend, she haughtily insists that the boy's gentlemanly gestures (holding the door for her, etc) are in fact sexist and patronizing, but she later ends up with the most macho guy in school as her boyfriend.
• Haunted has Comrade Snarky, her feminist group, and possibly her mother. The mother caused her Freudian Excuse; as revenge against Snarky's father for getting joint custody, she described to Snarky in graphic detail all the horrible forms of sexual abuse her father might inflict on her. He never did and had never been going to, but it left Snarky unable to trust men at all. When she grew up and joined a feminist support group, the group somehow became convinced that a new recruit named Miranda was a Transsexualism - it's never made entirely clear whether she was or not, but the evidence suggests not. They demand she "prove" she's a "real woman", and it escalates until Miranda is effectively raped.
• Val from The Women's Room could be said to be one of these by the end of the book - particularly given the "all men are rapists, and that's all they are" quote - and although she's not written as an object of ridicule, judging by Mira's horrified reaction, it's clear she's gone too far. However, she's not without her reasons, having become thoroughly disillusioned with the patriarchal establishment after the rape of her daughter Chris, and Chris's subsequent treatment at the hands of police and lawyers. It doesn't end well for her.
• The title character of The Postman is caught between the Scouts (basically this trope) and the Holnists (straw masculists.) The Scouts come off better, but they're still slightly crazy.
• The Left Behind books has Verna Zee, the replacement chief editor for the Chicago office of Global Weekly, who basically presents herself as someone who doesn't outright adore Buck Williams.
• In the House of Night series, this is pretty much the defining trait of most of Aphrodite's friends in the first book. Vampiric society in general has shades of it, given that everyone cheerfully accepts that men are primarily suited for being consorts and warriors.

Live Action TV

• 30 Rock:
  • Liz Lemon uses feminism to cover for her insecurity about being single. She refuses to celebrate valentines day and tells Pete's daughter "I will buy some cookies, but not for Valentine’s Day. Instead, these cookies celebrate the February 14th birthday or Anna Howard Shaw, famed American suffragette. Happy Anna How Shaw Day to you, Evelyn. A happy Anna Howard Shaw Day to us all!"
• Marcy Rhoades (later D'Arcy) from Married... with Children was a proud feminist, but she only showed this side when she was around Al. Her constant bickering about women's rights eventually led him to start his own pro-male club called NO MA'AM.
  • Later after being Flanderised she is shown to be a constant Hypocrite of her own beliefs. Such as bad mouthing porn as a Male fantasy, only for the clerk to come up to her and tell her the videos she requested earlier had come in.
  • The worst case came during the season she was apparently pregnant, Al had turned his garage into a rec room for himself, only for Marcy and other pregnant women to take it over under the name W.O.M.B (Women Owe Men Bupkiss) by this point implying that simply being a women gave her the right to do whatever she wanted without any regard to men.
• There's a particularly dreadful example in the Doctor Who story "The Time Monster": Dr. Ruth Ingram spends most of her time complaining about men just for the sake of it, and being a hypocrite about it as well. A classic example of feminists being portrayed as just misandrists.
• Herman's Head had Handsome Lech Jay getting gut-punched by a butch member of WAMP (Women Against Male Persons), a feminist organization so radical they neuter gingerbread men.
• The West Wing:
  • If she's not written well, C.J Cregg in can sometimes border on this trope; fortunately, most of the time, she's written very well. Of note, however, is the episode 'The Women Of Qumar', in which C.J reacts very poorly the news of a US arms deal made to a Qurac-style country which has a poor record on women's rights; whilst the point the episode was making as a valid one, it unfortunately chose to make it by having C.J act in a very unprofessional, out-of-character and borderline Straw Feminist fashion.
  • Abby Bartlet also faces this risk at times, although like C.J, she is normally written well enough to avoid it.
  • The episode 'Night Five' features an intern with Straw Feminist tendencies who takes umbrage at a joke Sam makes towards Ainsley Hayes which sends him into a defensive frenzy all episode, and who eventually gets torn a new one by Ainsley herself by the end. Considering this was written not long after Sorkin's public spat with the moderators and commentators on the Television Without Pity boards, in which the possibility of sexism in his writing had been the topic of intense discussion, many have taken the existence of this character as a device to be torn down solely to show that his writing was not sexist. It doesn't help that, in the context of the episode, the woman kind of had a point.
• Lost in Space had an episode with this. The Straw Feminist villainess (who always got her Faceless Goons to do everything for her) agreed to take Dr. Smith as her consort (after checking his teeth!), and spent most of the episode forcing the males to be her slaves and the females to accept her cultish female supremacy. The result was not so much offensive as unintentionally hilarious.
• One of the episodes of House mocks this trope. The patient is the personal assistant of a woman whose mission in life is to basically "enforce" gender equality in workplaces. When House finds out what she does, he tells his team to apologize for him raping her. "You know, metaphorically, by having a penis." She's seen in the cold open entering a board room full of men and snidely asking them why they didn't even "pretend to put a female on the board" and saying that there were plenty of secretaries and stenos downstairs. This is a pretty rough strawman even for US television, since she came off as more of a bitch than an egalitarian. The fact that after said patient was committed for a couple of days at most, she fired her and hired someone else doesn't help matters.
• Lilith House, a feminist organization on campus in season 3 of Veronica Mars, leads a lot of angry protests against a serial rapist on campus who shaves the heads of his victims. After a Halloween party at a frat house, one of its members is herself raped and shaved. They then launch an all-out attack against the fraternity house to get them banned from campus. Once Veronica proves that the fraternity house is innocent of the rape, they get very angry at her for stopping the fraternity house from getting banned. Oh, and the feminist who was raped? She faked the whole thing.
• Dr. Janice Lester from Star Trek: The Original Series is one of these. She starts off frustrated that women can't be Starfleet captains, but quickly reveals herself to be an Ax Crazy who hijacks the enterprise in Kirk's body. Once she's in the captain's chair, she turns into a straight-up God Save Us From the Queen. Then, Kirk speculates that the real reason behind her actions is her hatred of being a woman.
• An episode of Quantum Leap had Sam leap into a woman whose daughter was involved in the second wave. Most of the conflict came from the head of the feminist group, who gradually becomes more radical and violent as the episode progresses, outright rejecting Sam's attempts to get them to follow the examples of Ghandi and MLK. At the end of the episode she leads a pointless protest^[1] tries to shoot the sheriff, who gets saved by Sam. Afterwards Al reports that the feminist gets out of jail in five years and becomes a well-respected womens' rights advocate (apparently having mellowed out and considered Sam's words in the meantime).
• That '70s Show:
  • Subverted where Donna Pinciotti is very passionate in her feminist beliefs yet she remains a very likable character.
  • Played straighter, and for laughs, with her Hot Mom Midge. She gets caught up in second-wave feminism and tries to prove to her husband that women are just as capable as men...but unfortunately, Midge is an idiot, so it doesn't really work.
• On ER, Dr. Anna DelAmico acted hell-bent on interpreting EVERY SINGLE THING a male co-worker said or did as sexist and patronizing and/or a come-on. When he called her by her first name rather than "Dr.", she ranted and raved at him for several minutes and all but accused him of hitting on her and/or trying to undermine her in front of her patients, and continued to do this even after he apologized and assured her that he meant nothing improper and often called the male doctors by their first name too. Later, when he offered her help with patients or advice on how to deal with them, she blasted him for being condescending. At no time did it ever occur to her that she was overreacting. What's worse, upon complaining to a coworker, the other woman also played this trope straight, automatically assuming that the man was in the wrong and that his supposed sexist treatment was because he had been unable to get her into bed—without ever hearing the man's side of the story.
• Granola Girl Topanga Lawrence from the first season of Boy Meets World. In an episode where the class is supposed to dress up as themselves as adults with future careers, Topanga shows up as the President of the United States, which isn't a prestigious job since women eliminated war by moving all men underground to use only for breeding. Fortunately, retconning gets rid of the misandry in later seasons.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Anya(nka) and Willow's mom. Anya is a misandrist who dedicated over a thousand years to punishing men. She eventually starts realizing some men are good after falling in love with Xander. It takes her a long time to start feeling guilty, though. Willow's mom is a shrink built on theory who doesn't pay any attention to her kid, and once ranted about the patriarchal content of the Mr. Rogers show. Because creator Joss Whedon is a feminist himself, these straw feminists are in a different context than others.

The initial introduction of 'vengeance demons' implied that they were all, like Anya, devoted exclusively to punishing men for wronging women. Later episodes introduced more diversity while establishing that this approach was largely born from Anya's own personal issues.

• Parodied in Big Wolf on Campus episode, "The Pleasantville Strangler". Stacy attends a feminist rally in honor of "Abigal B. Abbernacky", who was the town's first feminist. Tommy attends the rally as well (mostly as an excuse to cozy up to Stacy). Midway through, Stacy is possessed by the ghost of the titular strangler and begins to wrestle Tommy to the ground, causing the rally leader to shout "Show the man who has the power!" and one of the girls to exclaim "I didn't know this was going to be an anti-men thing!" Before all of this goes down, the girls all seem to just be calling for equal pay.
• Ally McBeal played with this trope a fair bit - many of the cases the team handled were accusations of sexual discrimination of some kind, and had an opposing lawyer, plaintiff or witness with a straw feminist argument to back it up. Ally (or, more frequently, her colleagues) would counter with a far more reasoned response along the lines of 'normal' feminist views, based on equal treatment for men and women alike. It's worth noting they didn't always win, mind...
• To some extent, some of the female characters from Degrassi Junior High and Degrassi High might qualify, due to their tendency to generally look down on boys and deem anything where the woman is the victim or otherwise not the hero "sexist". For example, Lucy calls Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho sexist...because the person who gets stabbed in the shower is female. Lucy even creates a movie where the gender roles are reversed to make a "statement" about feminism. Her classmates were too busy laughing at the movie to get the statement (male and female).
  • However, this is justified to a degree given the time period both shows take place in (the eighties, fresh out of the feminism modern movement). They are teenagers most likely beginning to learn about feminism, and may have skewered perceptions on certain aspects of feminism, making them look like Straw Feminists. But they all did get the very basic concept (women deserve the same rights as men) about right.
• Law & Order:
  • During the early years, recurring defense attorney Shambala Green alternated between being this and Malcolm Xerox, depending on whether her client was female or a racial minority (the writers never gave her a client who was both, perhaps fearing they might achieve Straw Critical Mass).
  • Babs Duffy, the militant lesbian leader in the Law & Order: SVU episode "P.C." And how. There was nothing that character couldn't turn into an anti-gay, misogynist expression of patriarchal blah blah blah.
    • And it even turns out she likes MEN!
  • On Criminal Intent, Eames will often play this role while being the bad cop.
• Inverted once in Sliders episode named "The Weaker Sex" where women rule the world. Initially it was described as positive - there were no wars, there were no class differences except; Men were considered the inferior sex, suffering the same injustices faced by women today like sexual harassment in their jobs (if they have any time from housecare), and not suitable for anything remarkable such as becoming a leading political or religious figure (even the Pope was female). Arturo becomes a somewhat unwilling figurehead for a men's rights movement in an election for becoming a Mayor.
• An episode of The Cosby Show played this out. Theo offers to plan a bachelor party for Denise's husband Martin. When he offers to get Martin a stripper, Martin tells him "no". Well, this apparently isn't good enough for Denise, who, egged on by her sister Sondra, starts screaming at Martin for not being offended and disgusted at the idea of having a stripper. The scenario degenerates into a "battle of the sexes", with the women basically denouncing everything the men say or do as sexist and patronizing, while the men actually make several valid points about the women overreacting, and their blatant Double Standard—Sondra outright dismisses male stripping as "different", while continuing to denounce female stripping as degrading and refuses to explain exactly WHY there's a difference. Keep in mind that this all happened after Martin said "No" to having a stripper, meaning there was no reason for the argument to start in the first place.
• Glee: In-universe, Sue Sylvester sometimes makes it out like the only reason men don't like her is because she's a strong woman trying to succeed in a patriarchal culture, never mind that she's outrageously evil. And she doesn't mind delightfully shoving Will and taunting "Can't push a woman?"
  • The episode The Power Of Madonna has Quinn (who ironically embodied the WORST stereotype of woman in the first 13 episodes, what with her use of The Baby Trap) AND Finn (who says 'It's easy to be a dude' before the guys perform 'What It Feels Like For A Girl'. Um no Finn, not at all. But then again, Finn's not so bright...) by the end of the end of the episode, with Dogged Nice Guy Artie as the Straw Misogynist.
• Nightstand, the 1990s parody of daytime talk shows, had the recurring Straw Feminist guest Dr. Sans-Peen. A man-hating lesbian, the one time she agreed with her male chauvinist counterpart was wanting to see a nubile female guest jump up and down some more.
• Played with and ultimately averted with the character of Dana Foster (Staci Keanan) on the 1990s sitcom Step by Step. A Smart Blonde, Dana was proudly feminist and was not afraid to say so. This was portrayed both positively and negatively over the course of the series, with the writers making Dana by turns a You Go, Girl!, a Deadpan Snarker, a Magnificent Bitch, and (very occasionally) a Butt Monkey. One episode had her signing herself and her sisters up for a self-defense class, and they all take to the training quite well. Another, though, has Dana absurdly claiming that women can do anything men can do - even if they lack the physical strength for it - and getting called out for this by her sisters. Overall, Dana was one of the more competent and likable characters on the show in spite of her flaws, and even got some Character Development by lightening up in the later seasons and getting a boyfriend who was healthily macho - and, remarkably, all this without running afoul of the usual pitfalls.
• Charmed gives us Penny Halliwell who claims that men are "utensils" that can be disposed of when they're finished. This attitude probably comes from the fact that she was married four times (and engaged twice more) and she even states that something must have gone wrong when the Chosen Child is a boy. She gets a little better though.
  • In "Battle of the Hexes," Billie all of a sudden cops this attitude. When she inadvertently puts on the Girdle of Hippolyta, this attitude gets turned Up to Eleven.
• Often parodied on Community with Britta Perry, who has a tendency to deliver Straw Feminist pronouncements along with her general Granola Girl attitude. It usually involves her getting outraged at the flip of a coin, exposed as a bit of Hypocrite and generally ends up with her making herself look foolish.
• Rare male example with Georg in Naeturvaktin, who passionately insists he is a radical feminist despite having basically no idea what radical feminism is. He insists the progenitor of feminism was not Mary Wollstonecraft but Karl Marx, and displays obvious misogyny towards women, which, when called upon, he argues is because "there are women, and there are hags". This is eventually revealed to be the result of his Dark and Troubled Past, being raised by a domineering radfem mother who psychologically and sexually abused him.
• Samantha Carter had some shades of this during the first couple of episodes of Stargate SG-1, the crowning moment of which came during the pilot (her infamous "reproductive organs" speech). Amanda Tapping actually complained to the writers that "women don't talk like that". The speech was later cut from the pilot's re-release as a DVD movie, and Carter proceeded to spend the rest of the show kicking ass and taking names without making a fuss over her gender.
• Jessie Spano in Saved by the Bell

Machinima

• Played for laughs in Red vs. Blue. When Donut is possessed by O'Malley, he mouths off about how bad patriarchal society is.

Music

• Nellie McKay's song "Mother of Pearl" mocks the attitude behind this trope via Unreliable Narrator: the opening line is "Feminists don't have a sense of humor" and it continues on from there.

Mythology

• The original Amazons from Classical Mythology may be the Ur Examples. They were a tribe of all-female warriors who, Depending on the Writer, either killed their sons, enslaved them, or killed some and enslaved the others. The Amazons managed to keep their tribe going by having sex with neighboring men (in versions where they killed all the boys), or their male slaves (in versions where they enslaved them). They were likely created to justify the Greeks' Stay in the Kitchen philosophy--"Well, we're only oppressing our women because if we don't, they'll rise up and oppress us even worse!"
  • Fun fact: since the original Amazons were a horror story about women who would forsake femininity, they did a lot of things to drive this fact home which were lost in later, Fan Service-laden adaptations, such as cutting off one of their breasts (so they could shoot bows without the string whacking against it). Think about that the next time you read about some literal Hot Amazons.

Opera

• Gilbert and Sullivan's Princess Ida (adapted from a poem by Tennyson), the Girl Graduates of the women's college at Castle Adamant learn that "Man is Nature's sole mistake." That's right, folks, women's education Played for Laughs. Of course, when the younger students actually encounter a Man, they find him quite attractive, and even Ida is resigned to her Arranged Marriage when she realizes that if women never marry, there won't be any children.

Radio

• Royal Canadian Air Farce did a bit called "Man Bash", a mock Game Show featuring a Straw Feminist host who made the male contestant's life hell, while overly praising and helping the female contestant.

Tabletop Games

• GURPS Transhuman Space features an all-female colony that edges this trope, especially with some of its members experimenting with genetic engineering to make males unnecessary for reproduction. It's pointed out in the books that it is in fact obsolete within the context of the setting, as transhumanity has achieved true gender equality by 2100 when the game is set.
• In Werewolf: The Apocalypse, the all-female Black Furies fit this trope to some extent. While some are into the spirituality of womanhood and/or seek gender equality and reproductive freedom, others are on a sacred quest to castrate every male they come across. But even the more well-rounded Furies have the Tribal Weakness of an easier time frenzying against men due to pent-up frustration against them. They eventually became more well-rounded with later editions, going from man-hating Amazons to a mystical cult of warrior women that worshiped Gaia in her guise of Artemis and provided the Garou Nation with necessary prophecy.
  • In Apocalypse, the guidebook that dealt with the end of the world for W:tA, there's a chapter that discusses the possibility that the Apocalypse may begin when another entire tribe of the Garou falls to the Wyrm. The suggested scenario for the corruption and fall of the Black Furies involves all of them changing into... the most stereotypical possible version of the tribe, out to cull the human race by murdering most of the men.
• A more concrete example comes with the New World of Darkness Vampire: The Requiem. The Circle of the Crone is a covenant that is rather feminist in its leanings, but not to the point of straw—except for one faction within the covenant, the Daughters of the Goddess, who use for public example of their valuing men and not being misandrist a ritual where they sacrifice a male vampire, ritualistically called the Oak King. This is the only ritual where male vampires are allowed any sort of prominence, and they may only be the Oak King. Needless to say, the other covenants, and indeed most other factions within the Circle, ain't buyin' it.
• The third-party D&D 3e book The Slayer's Guide to Amazons. Quite-literal Hot Amazons who view men as only good for siring daughters (and for sacrificing to their goddess after the fact), bash in the skulls of any unlucky sons, have estrus cycles like bitches, and are classified as Neutral Evil Evil Is Sexy? Not even the fact that they're portrayed relatively sympathetically compared to a Straw Misogynist nobleman really redeems this culture from coming off rather like a sexist matriarchy. And their canonically Stripperiffic outfits, and the phrase "hell hath no fury" on the back cover, really don't help.

Theater

• A lot of people think that The Vagina Monologues are this trope. Actually invoked at one point, where a character admitted that she felt like she was "betraying" women by needing a man's attention to find herself beautiful.
• Lashings of Ginger Beer parody the stereotype of lesbian separatist straw feminists in their song Vagina Dentata Warning: this link is not suitable for work as it contains strong language.

Video Games

• One interviewee on the talk radio channel in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City was one of these, contrasting with hip, somewhat stupid '80s girl Amy. The key comedy aspect in that interviewee was that she'd just spent a year "undercover" as a man and written a book on her findings. Moreover, the interviewee mentions learning various things about men over the process of being disguised as one, including how men find sports interesting, like looking at pictures of naked women, ear hats and smoke cigarettes. She's a pretentious Straw Feminist to boot, lambasting "half-hearted bra burners" in her interview. In a strange turn of events, this later happened in real life.
• In Baldur's Gate:
  • Edwin briefly becomes one of these thanks to some Applied Phlebotinum that he covets.
  • Shar-teel from the first game is a defining example of this trope.
• One radio transmission in The Conduit has a feminist blaming the countless civilians deaths and mass destruction on an oppressive, male-run government instead of the invading aliens, who she insists "come in peace".
• In Comic Jumper, the boss of the Silver Age "Improbable Paper Pals" stage is feminist super-villain Mistress Ropes, who is sick of being talked down to all the time. Smiley tries to be sympathetic at first, but eventually gets fed up with her over-sensitivity to sexist (or even remotely sexist) remarks and decides to beat the crap out of her.
• Tachyon the Fringe has Lakita Ramos, a wingman from the GalSpan plotline that you can hire after defeating her in a competition. She treats you like an idiot in dialog because the Player Character is male. The flavor text attempts to justify it by saying she got tired of being hit on in spacer bars.

Web Comics

• Susan in El Goonish Shive is introduced as a misandrist female supremacist. A cringeworthy portrayal by itself, but luckily she gets some Character Development later on starting with the uncomfortable realization that her general prejudice against men may be serving as a backhanded excuse for her father's infidelity (as in "all men are creeps so Daddy couldn't help it"), as well as a transference of her mother's own issues against men resulting from this onto her.
• Jade from PvP once qualified as a Straw Feminist. This was most notable when she left PvP to start up her own women's gaming magazine, where she even drove her fellow female writers insane.
• No stranger to Strawfolk, Nip and Tuck has Hortense, perpetually angry lizard womyn (although she seems to exist less to potshot Feminism, as to piss off the local Troglajocks so Tuck can swoop in play the badass, and to give Tuck's girlfriend Thelma someone to look good next to).

Tuck: What? Feminism has double standards? Y'don't say...

• The Wotch has D.O.L.L.Y. a militant feminist terrorist organization led by Ms. Natasha Dahlet who want to eradicate men from the world. Not by killing them, but by turning them female via Magitek. They try to recruit Anne who is well known for using her magic for gender bending. While a physical personification of Anne's anger does join them, Anne herself turns the tables on them by turning many of the members of D.O.L.L.Y. male. Notably, most the members of the group are actually brainwashed, only really Natasha and her Dragon (of sorts) Cory are really committed to the "cause". The author actually precedes the arc with a strip where she appears and explains that there really isn't suppose to be any political message or anything.
• The Japanese Beetle has the New Order of Women, a fusion of the real NOW and the NWO - literally, since the members were all combinations of feminists and wrestlers, like "Hollywood" Dworkin. In their initial appearance, they attempt to put Die-Agra, a "male potence cure", in the city's water supply. At one point, they're beating on the Beetle (whose pained cries make it sound like they're raping him), as the two leaders look on and nod approvingly.
• Space Moose brutally parodies some of the University of Alberta's organizations with this trope. He then faced down expulsion, fines, and boundless criticism for his "Take Back the Night" Space Moose strips.
• Violet Oaks, the titular character of Coming Up Violet, has a run in with this trope when she inadvertently causes a social trend of girls randomly giving boys wedgies after giving one to resident pretty boy. This inevitably leads to them discovering the true meaning of feminism.
• Torio has the overwhelmingly straw M'Kystral, who's a feminist, a vegan, an atheist, and a political activist. She really only mellows a bit when compared to her friends in said communities.
• Precocious: Suzette, who more often than not proves to be an easily agitated womyn who always seems to have a speech ready. Particularly noticeable in the earlier strips.
• Talia/Jen in Geebas On Parade and Jen in The Devils Panties.

Web Original

• Kitty Ledbetter from the webgame The Goat in the Grey Fedora is revealed to be one of these when Bounty discovers that she murdered her father in order to get the deeds to a salt mine, which she was going to use to spread a chemical that would paralyze men worldwide.
• Hippolyta in the Whateley Universe is defined by this trope, to the point of calling Hank a 'traitor' for transforming into a male.
• Played for laughs with Germaine from the Foamy Cartoons. Course, she's not as extreme as others on this page, but that's most likely because it's being played for laughs.
• The Nostalgia Chick plays it for laughs in Kickassia when she became Nostalgia Palin. She blames the fact that everyone thinks she's a complete idiot now on the prejudice women face in politics.^[2] Plot-wise, it also had to do with the fact that she was trying to establish herself as a Magnificent Bitch in Sheep's Clothing, but Santa Christ proved to be the Spanner in the Works for that one.

Western Animation

• Beavis and Butthead get maced by some of these after the dimwitted duo misinterpret (as only they can) a speech at a feminism rally as a come-on line.
• Daria had Ms. Janet Barch, oddly enough for a girl-positive program. Is the type that broad?
  • It's apparently got something to do with a previous husband; she often goes on rants about wasting "twenty-two thankless years" with him, and at times will literally start screaming at other men as if they were actually him. She eventually mellows out a bit...at least with Mr. O'Neill.
  • Ms. Barch is actually less extreme than a lot of fictional examples on here, and the show took care to contrast her attitudes with other forms of feminism. This was a show watched by high school students: Some Anvils Need to Be Dropped.
• Futurama gets in a quick shot in one episode; after Old Man Waterfall (a bisexual Satanic polygamist hillbilly lawyer) dies under the foot of the MobileOppression Palace, his granddaughter loudly proclaims him (in a fake female voice) "another victim of the malecentric male-ocracy!" She returned for the fourth movie and lead the other female characters in an (oddly more environmental than feminist) crusade against the Wong family. She's killed off by a Running Gag about the Waterfall family.
• The Powerpuff Girls had Femme Fatale, a man-hating criminal who only stole Susan B. Anthony coins and convinced the girls to not help men and not arrest her because she was a woman. Her flawed logic was countered by the more mainstream equality-based feminism of Sara Bellum and Miss Keane who convinced them otherwise. Not helping Femme Fatale was the fact that women were also hurt by her actions and that she didn't even know who Susan B. Anthony was (though it did lead to a very good Shut UP, Hannibal and subsequent beatdown by the girls).
• Yin Yang Yo has Saranoia, who is an unstable misandrist sorceress and wants to exterminate Yang but likes Yin. Her hatred seems to be based on her feelings towards her own brother, Mark, she indicates she was The Unfavourite growing up. She has a tendency to call Yang Mark.
• Parodied in The Venture Brothers when a parody of the Scooby Gang (the originals, not Buffy and pals) show up in the episode "Viva Los Muertos!" Parody-Velma (a Valerie Solanas Expy) is constantly spouting this talk, going so far as to actually tell Parody-Daphne that men are "walking abortions". Of course, Parody-Fred is a sociopathic gang leader in the Manson mold, Parody-Daphne was kidnapped 30 years ago and is so stupid she still thinks Parody-Fred is going to take her to visit her parents, and Parody-Shaggy is a murderous lunatic who needs to take his "Groovy Treats" to make the dog stop telling him to kill everyone.
• Despite being the source of the opening quote for this page, Chilly Beach's April June is mostly a parody of this portrayal of feminism.
• An episode of Justice League had a rogue Amazon taking her people's views of "Man's World" to its logical extreme by developing a plague that will wipe out every creature with a Y chromosome. It's eventually learned that she's not really an Amazon (just a regular human girl granted haven and raised by the Amazons), and her deep hatred of men stemmed from the military coup that drove her from her homeland and washed her up on Themyscera (she balked after learning a man sacrificed his life to save hers, claiming the good deeds of one man couldn't salvage the crimes of males altogether). The incident, ironically, taught her fellow Amazons (who, including Wonder Woman, had displayed tendencies towards Straw Feminism themselves up to this point) to not too soundly preach the inferiorities of men and their own superiority. This trope is lampshaded when Wonder Woman wonders if men are that necessary and Hawkgirl tells her "don't knock it 'till you've tried it, Princess!".
  • Also, IIRC Superfriends had a one-time villainess who brainwashes all the women in the world (including Wonder Woman and Jaina of the Wonder Twins) to turn against males.
• Family Guy:
  • In an episode where Peter is forced into sensitivity training... He was so trained that he himself did a feminism equivalent of the Heel Face Turn and became an extremely fluffy combination of this and a cookie baking, bridge playing young biddy that blames all the ills on men. He ends up falling in with one-shot Straw Feminist character Gloria Ironbox, who implies that Lois' choice to be a wife and stay-at-home mother is the reason Peter doesn't respect women and that her children are screwed. And what does Lois do? After shutting down her arguments, she beats the shit out of her. The Cat Fight manages to return Peter to normal.
  • Peter once accuses Lois of being a feminist, however he considers that a sexy part of her.
• The Simpsons:
  • The episode "Homer Badman" averts this. The character of Ashley Grant (who falsely accuses Homer of sexual harassment) initially appears to be one of these, but by the end of the episode she concedes that she jumped to the wrong conclusion and apologizes to Homer.
  • Rare male example in the Simpsons as well. In one episode Marge is shown to have gone out with one of her college teachers. He is very much a Straw feminist, not liking LIGHTHOUSES because "anything phallic is wrong."
  • In another episode, Homer and Marge go to a feminist convention because they think Lisa is there. One scoffs "How typically male!" at a news report about an erupting volcano. When they learn that Lisa is at the volcano, Homer says to Marge "I'll go, you stay here" and gets booed; when he says "Okay, you go and I'll stay", he gets more boos, and finally asks "What do women want?!"
  • Then there's the episode where Flanders coaches a kids' football team. Lisa arrives for tryouts not because she wants to play, but just because she wants to show up everyone for thinking a girl can't play football. Flanders immediately deflates her pretentions by showing that there are already four girls on the team.
• Haley of American Dad! was something like this. She originally believed that women at strip clubs were being exploited. However, when the (female) strip club owner claimed that it was the male customers who were exploited, Hayley seemed to have no problem with that and ended up working as a stripper. But it is, of course, Played for Laughs, and it seems implied that most of the other strippers aren't really emotional stable...so, Zig-Zagging Trope?
  • Also counts as Showing Their Work, as that basically sums up the contrasting positions of sex-negative and sex-positive feminists, respectively.
• Wendy Testaburger in South Park can sometimes be this, depending on how Parker and Stone portray her in an episode (combined or not with her already being a Soapbox Sadie). This trope also can apply to portrayals of the other female characters, though Wendy is usually the only one you see mentioned as one by certain fans not fond of the character. But when she's not a Straw Feminist? She's portrayed too "sickeningly weak and girly" for fans.
• Numbuh 86/Fanny from Codename: Kids Next Door came off as this in her first few appearances, where she would blame any problems on the boys and refused to share credit with them. Later episodes revised her characterization to be less sexist and more just generally unfriendly.
  • The first episode she appeared hinted that Numbuh 362 - the leader of the organization - might be the same, but that turned out to be untrue. Of course, seeing as Numbuh 86 made the claim...

1. ↑ A sit-in at a mens' club, with Sam pointing out that they jumped right to protesting without even trying normal methods first
2. ↑ Of course, this wasn't so much as mocking feminism than it was slamming Sarah Palin.