This post is my brief summary of Kate Manne’s book Down Girl: the logic of misogyny and a gentle nudge for you all to go read it. In this post, I will primarily focus on what I take to be the core of Manne’s view. If you’d like to see her arguments and real-world case analyses, you gotta read the book. (It’s also on Audible, which is how I “read” it. Highly recommend for audio-processers!)
What misogyny is
Manne argues that misogyny should not be understood, as its etymology “hatred of women” suggests, as a psychological experience of hatred that some people experience towards half of humanity. Understood this way, 1) very few people would qualify as misogynists, and 2) it’s almost impossible to prove whether someone is a misogynist. Similarly, misogyny should not be understood as a dehumanizing of women. Although women (and racial minorities) are sometimes dehumanized, dehumanization, understood as “genuinely believing someone to be sub-human”, cannot explain behaviours like rape, since people tend not to rape animals. Very often, dehumanizing language is used to “put down” someone whom the speaker clearly understands to be human. This is important because it means that efforts at “helping people see each other as humans” might not be enough to deter misogyny and racism.
Instead, Manne understands misogyny as the “law enforcement wing of patriarchy”, where patriarchy is a social structure imposed on humans (of which women, as humans, are a part). The core structure of the patriarchy is that there are certain things – which Manne calls “moral goods”, such as attention, admiration, care – certain people are supposed to (more or less exclusively) take, and certain others are supposed to (more or less exclusively) give. Unsurprisingly, men mostly belong to the former, women to the latter (hence the word “patriarchy”). This general trend, of course, interacts with race and ability and other social statuses in expected ways.
When someone “steps out of line”, i.e., withholds what she’s “supposed to” give or asks for what she’s “not supposed to” take, misogynistic forces – people or institutions who are committed to protecting the law and order of the patriarchy – take action. In some sense, almost all of us have misogynistic lapses; we have been trained this way pretty much since birth, after all. In order to keep the word “misogynist” useful, Manne proposes to reserve it for those who have gone “above and beyond” their duty to serve the patriarchy. Manne also emphasizes that it is often not fruitful to understand misogyny exclusively as individual responsibility and moral wrongdoing, but instead as also including structural and social forces.
What this means is that misogyny often does not feel like a personal grudge against or pathological phobia of women. Instead, it feels righteous. One of Manne’s examples is especially illuminating: a customer going into a restaurant expects certain levels of attention and service from the waitress because that’s how a restaurant “works”. If instead of offering service, the waitress demands service from the customer, the customer would feel angry. He feels wronged and entitled to revenge. Once such revenge takes place (e.g., having the manager fire the waitress), he feels self-righteous and morally praiseworthy. This is how misogynists often feel when they put down women who are taking what they “aren’t supposed to take”, such as political power, epistemic authority, attention, care, sympathy, etc.
What misogyny does
Manne uses her account of misogyny to explain a variety of phenomena in society. I will briefly review three: silencing, himpathy and victim-blaming, the difference between sexism and misogyny.
In addition to the various social silencing (such as testimony injustice and talking over women) we are all so used to in everyday life, Manne also presents a detailed analysis of the phenomenon of family annihilation as an extreme form of silencing. Family annihilation is a form of mass murder where a perpetrator (almost always a man in a hetero relationship) murders his children and wife before committing suicide. Long story short, it seems that motivation often involves a kind of fear of losing her admiration or presumed shame in her eyes. This highlights a certain entitlement that these men feel towards women’s admiration, as well as the internalization where a lack of admiration = personal failure.
Himpathy refers to our tendency to always sympathize with dominant men over their victims. Through a detailed analysis of what “victimhood” means, Manne argues that to claim victimhood is to claim (perhaps unintentionally) a moral spotlight. It is to call attention to one’s condition and to ask for support and sympathy. However, attention, support, and sympathy are exactly the kind of moral goods that women are “supposed to” give to men, not ask of them. Consequently, when women claim victimhood, they are often suspected of lying for personal gain, faking their condition, and/or greedy and nondeserving. People who are so unsettled by her “stealing” of “his” moral spotlight will even turn the moral table around, claiming him as a victim of her scheme. Indeed, this is very common in public discussions of sexual assault cases.
Finally, Manne distinguishes sexism and misogyny in that sexism involves (more or less) dispassionate beliefs whereas misogyny is often very passionate. Importantly, sexism often (though not necessarily) involves beliefs where women, evaluated on the same dimensions as men, score worse than men, but misogyny often shifts the goalpost against women. For example, while women may have to perform twice as well as men to be perceived as equally qualified (a consequence of sexism), women who are undeniable as qualified as men tend to be perceived as mean, cold, selfish, or generally dislikeable, often on no basis whatsoever (e.g., by people who have not even met this woman). This shows that the patriarchy is not as simple as [men and women pursue the same roles but women are valued less for them], but rather that [men and women are expected to pursue different roles and will be punished by any and all means if they deviate].
Some reflections
As I finished writing this post, I realized how much more interesting ideas I couldn’t include in this summary due to length constraint. So many little things that occur every day, but always appear just a little bit strange, are accounted for by Manne’s analysis of the inner workings of the patriarchy.
On my part, I’ve always been baffled by why some men feel so entitled and even so passionate to teach women how to behave in situations where there does not seem to be a direct conflict of interest at all. I once had a couple of men whom I met only slightly early passionately argue with me why my casual remark of not ever wanting children is irresponsible and that I will certainly change my mind in the future, and that I am being unfair to my future partner. It wasn’t a romantic situation where I was potentially depriving them of their children, and yet they argued passionately as if I was. It was so very strange.
A somewhat unrelated point: one of Manne’s examples of how men and women are evaluated along different dimensions is the evaluation of professors in higher-ed. She mentions this amazing project (linked below) that allows you to search for word frequencies used in ratemyprofessor.com comments, broken down by gender and discipline. For someone who has known of gender-differences in student assessment for some time now, the consistencies of these differences are still surprising to me. To give some examples: men are more likely to be described as “funny”, “boring”, “genuine” in all disciplines except one for “genuine”; women are more likely to be described as “mean”, “caring”, “unfair” in all except one for “unfair”. It is worth noting that, as explained in a method post of the project, the question of “statistical significance” is not exactly appropriate here, because the data contains the population, rather than a sample. I will end the post with this link:
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