Let’s start with what these stereotypes actually are.

Generally, it all comes down to these three…

Feminists are all a bunch of lesbians
Feminists are physically unattractive
Feminists hate men

Let’s tackle these stereotypes about feminists one at a time…

Feminists are all a bunch of lesbians

This one is clearly bullshit. Most feminists, alas, are all-too-straight. They spend waaaay too much time whining about not being able to get a man to not be straight. They also spend way too much time going on about how they don’t need a man, which is just a weird psychological flipping around of the fact that they do need a man! You see, actual lesbians don’t waste time going on about how little they need a man, they just go out and get themselves a woman! I suppose the reason so many people believe that feminism is some sort of lesbian plot is the same reason so many right wingers believe Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and so many left wingers believe the Islamic Invasion is a good thing – most people are idiots, and idiots believe what their leaders tell them to.

Feminists are physically unattractive

This one is, for the most part, true. Which helps to explain why they can’t get a man that doesn’t need to be inflated. Sure, Naomi Wolf is pretty – a cow, but a pretty cow – and Steinem wasn’t too bad when she was young, but most feminists look like something out of a 1950s EC horror comic. Let’s face it, all you have to do is look at the profile pictures these people post on Facebook to realize that they are about as attractive as a moldering zombie or a tentacled alien from outer space. So the answer to our question when it comes to this one, is that people believe the stereotype because it is usually true.

Feminists hate men

People believe this particular stereotype for the same reason they believe shit is smelly and brown – they have seen, and smelled it, with their own senses and it makes them want to heave. For a couple of decades now, even people who don’t pay that much attention to gender politics have turned on their TVs to see cackling feminist hyenas blithering about how wonderful women are and how worthless men are. They have seen the joyous reactions to hate crimes like those committed by Lorena Bobbit and Catherine Kieu Becker. They have seen a torrent of newspaper and magazine articles celebrating the fact that boys are falling further and further behind girls in just about every way. They have seen feminists claim there is a rape epidemic going on when the evidence in their own lives tells them that rape is, thankfully, nowhere near as common as feminists would like it to be. They have seen feminists claim that virtually all victims of domestic violence are women, while also seeing men and children in their own lives victimized by…er… women. They have seen young men’s lives ruined by feminist witch-hunts fuelled by nothing more than a few malicious lies and rape hysteria, and then they have seen the false accusers let off the hook because feminists claim that prosecuting them somehow stops actual victims from coming forward!

And that’s just the people who aren’t paying much attention! The ones who really look into these matters find even more horrific evidence of feminism’s rabid man-hating. They see feminists calling for the abolition of women’s prisons in the UK! They see feminists setting up the White House Council on Women and Girls to improve female outcomes in education and health – areas in which females are already doing better than males! They see feminists opposing shared custody, making sure that rape continues to be defined as something a man does to a woman, having men fired for insulting them on social media, and even trying to jail them over mere disagreements!

So, overall, the answer to the question posed in the title is that people believe the stereotypes because at least two of them are true. Sure, feminists aren’t mostly lesbians – but they are hideous hags whose very existence seems to be all about shitting on men in every way they can.