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Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny: Manne is a philosopher; this book makes a series of very fine distinctions about misogyny that are probably only interesting to people who really like definitional discussions. But it’s also full of snappy phrases and sharp observations (as well as those that are perhaps too clever by half, like “himpathy” for the phenomenon in which we as a society extend our concern to white male perpetrators instead of to their victims). For example, Manne notes that, given the incentives patriarchy puts in place, it would be odd to encounter a misogynist who doesn’t like at least one woman who has treated him as more important than she is; defining misogyny as hating all women is missing the point. Instead, misogyny is about treating men as entitled to care and deference from women, and lashing out when that doesn’t occur—often by treating some women as stand-ins for the specific women who’ve denied a man the loving attention to which he feels entitled, as with Elliot Rodger’s crimes. Refusals of deference are often treated as revealing a flaw in a woman’s chracter—she has broken a promise, lied, failed to live up to her side of the bargain. Manne argues that this was a big reason why so many people thought that Hillary Clinton was untrustworthy.
Misogyny is not thinking that women aren’t people; one doesn’t expect deference, as such, from non-people. One doesn’t generally want to humiliate and demean non-people. People, indeed, can pose a particular kind of threat—recognizing that a woman is human makes her potentially dangerous to a man’s status in ways that non-people aren’t. She is not a human being, but a human giver, “a woman who is held to owe many if not most of her distinctively human capacities to a suitable boy or man, ideally, and his children, as applicable.” You can’t insult an animal by calling it an animal. Instead, misogyny is punitive: it is the whip hand of patriarchy. Misogyny is believing that women are a kind of people who owe deference and deserve punishment when not deferential in various ways. Misogynists take it personally when women fail to defer or give them loving care, the latter of which, as she points out, is actually a good thing, and understandable to want, which is part of what makes the idea of women owing it so appealing. Misogyny happens when a woman “errs as a giver—including by refusing to be one whatsoever—or he is dissatisfied as a customer, not least because a personalized giver fails to materialize.”
I liked some of the in-depth distinctions she made, such as her rejection of the argument that misogyny is really about insecurity. Manne points out that this is also probably a big driver of anti-Semitic and other racist hatreds, but those people are still anti-Semites and racists. “The fact that the people who are liable to channel misogynist social forces have various anxieties and other psychological and social adjustment problems is hardly surprising. How is this supposed to mitigate the problem facing women though? When one’s effigy is one’s body, one burns right along with it.”
Thus, Manne argues, we should think of misogyny from the perspective of its targets/victims, not from the perpetrator’s perspective. Misogyny isn’t a matter of day to day attitudes; it’s a set of active maneuvers that put women in their place. Instead of being about beliefs, misogyny is about desires “that ask the world be kept or brought in line with a patriarchal order.” Thus women’s refusals to submit are viscerally disgusting. Misogyny “transforms impersonal disappointments into embittered resentment,” and also drives misogynists to treat relationships with women unknown to him as intimate ones (thus authorizing his disgust and other punitive responses).
Sexism makes distinctions between men and women; misogyny distinguishes the good women from the bad ones for the purpose of punishing the latter. “Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts.” I also loved her later point about presuming that discrimination is the cause of differential outcomes: “You speculated we didn’t belong in the room, while we were in it. We ware within our rights, having stayed, to posit theories that you may find discomfiting.” Trump, then, offers the example of misogyny without necessarily having sexist beliefs about women’s capabilities. He doesn’t underestimate them, but he needs to control them.
Manne also has a really powerful discussion of men who murder their families as feeling an entitled shame that leads them to want to destroy the eyes of those who (they imagine) might look on them as failed men. They often kill themselves afterwards; she suggests that they thought that the admiration of their families, especially “their” women, was necessary to their survival, and then they enacted that belief.
Owing men care makes lots of things harder for women, whether it’s competing with them for the presidency or college teaching (where women are penalized for not caring enough about students as individuals and men aren’t, and Manne points out tha the bigger the class, the harder that individualization is). In teaching evaluations, female professors are more often rated as “mean, nasty, cold, unfair, and above all fake” than men are.
Misogyny is also not really reachable by sufficient empathy. I completely agreed with Manne’s criticism of Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, about rural Louisiana conservatives. “Listening and offering sympathy to those who are prone to shame-based misogynistic as well as racist outbursts is feeding the very need and sense of entitlement that drives them in the first place…. You can’t do much to help or give to someone who, yes, is in genuine pain and lashing out—but only because they feel too needy and illicitly entitled to getting such moral attentions to begin with.”
Misogyny is not thinking that women aren’t people; one doesn’t expect deference, as such, from non-people. One doesn’t generally want to humiliate and demean non-people. People, indeed, can pose a particular kind of threat—recognizing that a woman is human makes her potentially dangerous to a man’s status in ways that non-people aren’t. She is not a human being, but a human giver, “a woman who is held to owe many if not most of her distinctively human capacities to a suitable boy or man, ideally, and his children, as applicable.” You can’t insult an animal by calling it an animal. Instead, misogyny is punitive: it is the whip hand of patriarchy. Misogyny is believing that women are a kind of people who owe deference and deserve punishment when not deferential in various ways. Misogynists take it personally when women fail to defer or give them loving care, the latter of which, as she points out, is actually a good thing, and understandable to want, which is part of what makes the idea of women owing it so appealing. Misogyny happens when a woman “errs as a giver—including by refusing to be one whatsoever—or he is dissatisfied as a customer, not least because a personalized giver fails to materialize.”
I liked some of the in-depth distinctions she made, such as her rejection of the argument that misogyny is really about insecurity. Manne points out that this is also probably a big driver of anti-Semitic and other racist hatreds, but those people are still anti-Semites and racists. “The fact that the people who are liable to channel misogynist social forces have various anxieties and other psychological and social adjustment problems is hardly surprising. How is this supposed to mitigate the problem facing women though? When one’s effigy is one’s body, one burns right along with it.”
Thus, Manne argues, we should think of misogyny from the perspective of its targets/victims, not from the perpetrator’s perspective. Misogyny isn’t a matter of day to day attitudes; it’s a set of active maneuvers that put women in their place. Instead of being about beliefs, misogyny is about desires “that ask the world be kept or brought in line with a patriarchal order.” Thus women’s refusals to submit are viscerally disgusting. Misogyny “transforms impersonal disappointments into embittered resentment,” and also drives misogynists to treat relationships with women unknown to him as intimate ones (thus authorizing his disgust and other punitive responses).
Sexism makes distinctions between men and women; misogyny distinguishes the good women from the bad ones for the purpose of punishing the latter. “Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts.” I also loved her later point about presuming that discrimination is the cause of differential outcomes: “You speculated we didn’t belong in the room, while we were in it. We ware within our rights, having stayed, to posit theories that you may find discomfiting.” Trump, then, offers the example of misogyny without necessarily having sexist beliefs about women’s capabilities. He doesn’t underestimate them, but he needs to control them.
Manne also has a really powerful discussion of men who murder their families as feeling an entitled shame that leads them to want to destroy the eyes of those who (they imagine) might look on them as failed men. They often kill themselves afterwards; she suggests that they thought that the admiration of their families, especially “their” women, was necessary to their survival, and then they enacted that belief.
Owing men care makes lots of things harder for women, whether it’s competing with them for the presidency or college teaching (where women are penalized for not caring enough about students as individuals and men aren’t, and Manne points out tha the bigger the class, the harder that individualization is). In teaching evaluations, female professors are more often rated as “mean, nasty, cold, unfair, and above all fake” than men are.
Misogyny is also not really reachable by sufficient empathy. I completely agreed with Manne’s criticism of Arlie Hochschild’s Strangers in Their Own Land, about rural Louisiana conservatives. “Listening and offering sympathy to those who are prone to shame-based misogynistic as well as racist outbursts is feeding the very need and sense of entitlement that drives them in the first place…. You can’t do much to help or give to someone who, yes, is in genuine pain and lashing out—but only because they feel too needy and illicitly entitled to getting such moral attentions to begin with.”
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That is a *really* helpful way of framing it. I'll be reading this book, for sure. Thank you!
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