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Notes -
To some extent I'm sorry I mentioned it, because I don't seem to have communicated what I was thinking with sufficient clarity. It is kind of like the debates about homophobia not being about fear, insofar as both words often misdiagnose the problem at hand, sometimes in ways that result in exactly the kind of fumbling non-solutions under discussion. What you and Mandalay are describing really is more like "gynephobia," particularly with some of the gay men I've known over the years. And what makes that more than a "boring semantic debate" is that you don't see gay men going on misogynistic murder sprees, so using the same word to describe the disdainful gay man and the seething incel looks like more than a merely semantic mistake.
This is where I probably should have said more: I don't object to the word "misogyny" in the sense that I don't think many of these men do hate women, such that the word is semantically appropriate. I was only trying to note that it is the kind of hate that is born of desire, not the kind of hate that is born of disdain--because once you notice that, you realize that you can't stop incel-style misogyny by teaching them to like women more. That's not the problem! The problem is that they do like women! If they didn't like women, they wouldn't hate women.
The contempt you describe is, I think, mostly separate from either the gynephobia of certain gay men or the misogyny of the isolated and unloved. Such men seem to follow the old Aristotelian style of viewing women and children as simply less than human (I can't think of a single example of the kind of man you describe who was contemptuous of women but not children--YMMV!). I don't think it would be a mistake to think of this as a species of sexism, but neither do I think it is merely a "boring semantic debate" to suggest that misogyny doesn't capture the phenomenon as well.
But, maybe it is just a boring semantic debate, and attempting to use different words to describe the different kinds of problems individual men have with women generally is a distraction. Certainly it was not the substance of my point; what I was mostly interested in pointing out is that gender eliminativists aren't in a position to provide "masculine" role models to anyone.
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