Misogyny as a Villain Identifier

This post contains both spoilers for Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy and potential triggers relating to rape and sexual assault.

I recently heard a criticism of Stieg Larsson's  Millennium Trilogy (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Girl Who Played with Fire and The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest) that I haven't encountered before: specifically, that literally every villain in the series is a misogynist. This is pretty much true; for some of the characters, it's their primary motivation (such as the serial rapist/killer Martin Vanger from the first book, or Lisbeth Salander's court-appointed guardian, who sexually abuses and eventually rapes her), while for others, it's just icing on the asshole cake (Alexander Zalachenko is a gangster and a murderer, but he's also a wife-beater who traffics young women in appalling conditions; his son is a hitman whose internal monologue actually says "all women are whores" at one point).

When I first heard this complaint, I figured it was some whiny MRA-type thing ("Waahhhhh!! What about all the perfectly nice misogynists who AREN'T serial killers???"), but I can see a more reasonable grounds for complaint, if you think it's an oversimplification of the nature of bad people in general; to paraphrase Sirius Black, "the world isn't divided into good people and woman-haters". That's not to say I think any misogynist is a good person (or, sorry, "nice guy"), it's just that I'm sure there are all manner of really shitty people who don't have any particular problem with women. And in any other book series, that'd be a pretty valid point, but for the fact that the point Larsson is trying to make is how societal institutions punish women and give cover to people who are violent towards them. Lisbeth's guardian does what he does because he knows that his victim is not considered credible; Zalachenko is a highly-valued Soviet defector, and he beats his wife and daughters because his handlers have a vested interest in letting him do whatever he wants. And neither of them (nor Martin, for that matter) face punishment from any legal or governmental institution. Hopefully this doesn't count as a Godwin violation, but complaining that all of Larsson's villains are misogynists is like complaining that all the villains in Schindler's List are Nazis.

Joss Whedon is also fond of making a character a misogynist to identify them as someone we should root against. Take Burgess from the penultimate episode of Firefly, for instance; he's one of the most grotesque misogynists in the Whedon canon, who's obsessed with reclaiming "his" baby from the prostitute he impregnated, and, at one point, publicly raping another (his informant, no less). Again, this attitude is somewhat necessary to the plot; you can't very well have an antagonist who spends most of the episode terrorizing women have an enlightened attitude about them. And I, at least, get a very strong vibe from this particular episode of the show feeling a bit of guilt about its portrayal of sex workers, or at the very least wanting to show the other side; we know by this point that Inara is intelligent, independent and generally unafraid of men, and yet here comes this episode to show us that we shouldn't assume her existence is the norm in this story.

A much sneakier example is in the next episode, which centers around Jubal Early, the bounty hunter who comes aboard in search of River. At first, he seems like a "worthy adversary" type, a guy who's actively working against the interests of our protagonists but who we can still respect/think is cool. And then comes one of the most awful moments in the entire series, wherein Early threatens to rape Kaylee to find out where River is. He doesn't do it gleefully, or give any indication that he particularly wants to, but really, that makes it worse. He's so creepily nonchalant about the idea of sexually assaulting a woman, as an interrogation technique, no less. Moreover, the fact that Early really doesn't seem to be making this up as he goes would indicate that he's got some experience using rape as leverage. Early is not a misogynist because he would enjoy rape; he's a misogynist because it wouldn't affect him at all. (This scene does have an unpleasant whiff of Women in Refrigerators,  not to mention the uncomfortable implication that Kaylee being the most childlike and innocent of the crew means she's the least deserving of rape, but those are issues for another day). After this scene, Early's little side tangents and eccentricities don't make him seem like a Tarantino hitman in space any more; they make him seem like a really sick person who's amused by his own voice. We're far less hit over the head in this example; the misogyny is part of what establishes him as a bad guy, but it also essentially knocks us, the audience, on our asses re: our initial impression of him.

And of course, then there's the kind of misogyny that really doesn't seem to serve any narrative purpose other than to show another problem with the character; to go back to Whedon, in The Avengers, we already know  Loki's a crazy-ass mass murderer (his smile when he first appears is probably the scariest non-Joker moment a villain has yet had in a comic book movie), so it doesn't exactly throw us for a loop when he essentially calls Black Widow a cunt. As typically excellent as Whedon's character writing is for the film, this just seems a little lazy (and makes Loki's cult following among women who think Tom Hiddleston is hot even more inexplicable). The same thing is often done with race in films; sure, it's not exactly unrealistic for an Irish guy who grew up in mid-20th century Boston to be a racist, but do we really need Frank Costello in The Departed to casually refer to "niggers" in the opening montage to establish him as the bad guy when it's followed minutes later by him shooting two people in the back of the head and giggling about how one of them "fell funny"?

Okay, I can sense I'm running pretty long on this, so I'll wrap up, but yeah, I guess my TL;DR conclusion is that yeah, it CAN be lazy to use misogyny to establish someone as the bad guy, but there can still be sound narrative reasons to do it as well. Thanks for bearing with me, this being my first proper, non-introductory post and all