Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

by Kate Manne

There’s no doubt that, in these milieux, much progress has been made with regard to gender equality, following feminist activism, cultural shifts, legal reforms (e.g., laws against sex discrimination) and changes in institutional policy (e.g., affirmative action, whose chief beneficiaries in the United States have tended to be white women). Gains for girls and women in education have been especially impressive. And yet, as will emerge in these pages, misogyny is still with us.

The problems that persist, with some arguably on the rise, raise questions that are thorny, puzzling, and urgent. I believe that moral philosophy has a valuable role to play here—although, ultimately, it will take a village of theorists to gain a full understanding of the phenomenon. My hope in this book is to make a contribution to understanding the nature of misogyny, both in terms of its general logic, and one (though only one) of its key dynamics in practice. This involves men drawing on women in asymmetrical moral support roles. (I restrict myself to the cultural contexts mentioned above, although welcome others to generalize, or amend and adapt, beyond this.)

The picture I develop will hence often involve joining dots well-drawn by other theorists. In other cases, I will embroider on background pictures or adapt them for my own (I hope not too nefarious) purposes. And some of what follows will pick up on previous work of mine on the nature of moral thinking and the social foundations of morality in the area of philosophy known as metaethics.

My argument in this book is that, in milieu like mine, for comparatively privileged women like me, e.g., me, our humanity is perfectly well-recognized in general. I think it likely has been for quite some time.5 This is reflected in the fact that misogyny often involves what P. F. Strawson ([1962] 2008) calls “the reactive attitudes,” such as resentment, blame, indignation, condemnation, and (for the first-personal analogues) guilt, shame, a sense of responsibility, as well as a willingness to accept punishment when one is held to deserve it. The second-personal and third-personal reactions are supposed to be restricted, at least in the first instance, to our dealings with others who are recognized as “fellow human beings.”6 Moreover, we only tend to have these morally laden and broadly juridical or legalistic reactions to other presumptively reasonable and reasonably mature persons, who we are willing and able to remonstrate with regarding their behavior. Strawson says we take the objective stance, in contrast, to young children, the severely intoxicated, people having a psychotic break, and those who are “not themselves,” more or less temporarily. We may instead try to manage, treat, educate, or simply avoid, someone to whom we take the objective stance. And we may also take the objective stance as a “refuge” from the “strains of involvement” with those we could but choose not to relate to interpersonally ([1962] 2008, 10, 13, 18). We may be too exhausted—or lazy, or ove...

Privilege is prone to confer an inaccurate sense of one’s own proprietary turf, epistemically and morally.

It follows that misogyny is a self-masking phenomenon: trying to draw attention to the phenomenon is liable to give rise to more of it. This makes for a catch-22 situation. But, as far as I can tell, there is no way around this.

It also emerges that the failure to recognize women as human beings need not, and often will not, underlie misogyny. For misogyny may target women in ways that presuppose a sense of her as a fellow human being. The key contrast naturally shifts to the second part of the idiom instead. Women may not be simply human beings but positioned as human givers when it comes to the dominant men who look to them for various kinds of moral support, admiration, attention, and so on. She is not allowed to be in the same ways as he is. She will tend to be in trouble when she does not give enough, or to the right people, in the right way, or in the right spirit. And, if she errs on this score, or asks for something of the same support or attention on her own behalf, there is a risk of misogynist resentment, punishment, and indignation. So a woman’s recognized humanity may leave much to be desired by way of moral freedom. And her sense of obligation is then likely to be excessive, on the one hand, and lacking, in many others.

I felt morally embarrassed to look at the events with which I begin—the Isla Vista killings—from the perspective of the women who were targeted and killed. And I felt embarrassed, in a similar way, to dwell on them at all—as if I should be detached and cool where the female victims were concerned, rather than animated, as I in fact was, by moral horror and grief for them, and all of the other women killed in a similar spirit on a daily basis in America. I felt some pressure to turn instead to purely structural cases of misogyny, or else misogyny of the subtle or chronic and cumulative variety.

rare or exotic

We talk about waves of feminism in a way that strikes me as quite different from other areas of political discourse: why? There is, then, an inbuilt or assumed obsolescence for feminist thinking, rather than a model of amendment, addition, and new centers for new discussions.

Women who are strangled rarely cooperate with the police (Resnick 2015). Often incorrectly called “choking,” non-fatal manual strangulation is inherently dangerous.

victims of a non-fatal attack of this kind have also been found to be some seven times more likely to become the victim of an attempted homicide by the same perpetrator

Strangulation is a prevalent form of intimate partner violence, in addition to sometimes taking place within other family relationships. It doesn’t appear to be limited to certain geographical areas; its existence tends to be confirmed wherever data are available. But for many countries, especially poorer ones, they have not been collected

In a large majority of cases of strangulation, the victims are female intimate partners—although children and infants are also disproportionately vulnerable. And in the vast majority of cases, the perpetrators are men, according to meta-analyses

strangulation is torture. Researchers draw a comparison between strangulation and waterboarding, both in how it feels—painful, terrifying—and its subsequent social meaning. It is characterized as a demonstration of authority and domination (Sorenson, Joshi, and Sivitz 2014). As such, together with its gendered nature, it is a type of action paradigmatic of misogyny, according to the account of it I develop in these pages. Also characteristic is the indifference or ignorance surrounding the practice, as well as the fact that many of its victims will minimize—or may, as I’ll go on to discuss shortly, be gaslit

There are many forms such denials may take. “Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the core”—is how the character of David Lurie, a fifty-two-year-old professor, describes the sex he takes from his student, Melanie, in J.M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. “As though she had decided to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the jaws of the fox close on its neck” (1999, 23). What does one call that? If not quite rape, then what?9

Particularly when you’re fighting the judicial system. . . It’s a very patriarchal system. These are good old boys. And they hang in there together and we are up against a major, major problem.

The turnaround, back toward her ex-husband, is startling. It’s not an explanation, but what logicians call a possibility proof: the possibility that a woman could write such an email having appeared on Oprah in disguise—as “Ann”—to speak the words in the passages just cited. In addition to this, Lisa Henning (as “Ann”) had elaborated: “Most men who are in positions like that don’t leave marks. The damage that I’ve sustained, you can’t see. It’s permanent, permanent damage. But there’s no mark. And there never was.” And there still isn’t. But the woman who said those words is gone, on the face of it. Read the earlier passages again. She tried so hard to hang onto a different focus and perspective: that of herself over her ex-husband. She found the words. She spoke the words. And, somehow, somewhere, she lost them—or was made to eat them.

Part of male dominance, especially on the part of the most privileged and powerful, seems to be seizing control of the narrative—and with it, controlling her, enforcing her concurrence. It is not exactly deference: rather, it closely resembles the moral aim of gaslighting, according to Kate Abramson’s (2014) illuminating account of it.11 The capacity for the victim’s independent perspective has been destroyed, at least when it comes to certain subjects. She is bound to agree with him; she may not only believe, but take up and tell, his story.

To form beliefs, we usually need arguments or evidence or some such: something that bears on the truth of what is to be believed, and not just the practical benefits of so doing. Whether we can truly change our minds on demand in this way or not (and I suspect this is, sadly and puzzlingly, possible), not only is his will law, but his word will be gospel.

I argue that we should think of misogyny as serving to uphold patriarchal order, understood as one strand among various similar systems of domination (including racisms, xenophobia, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and so on). Misogyny does this by visiting hostile or adverse social consequences on a certain (more or less circumscribed) class of girls or women to enforce and police social norms that are gendered either in theory (i.e., content) or in practice (i.e., norm enforcement mechanisms).

privileged. To put it simply and crudely at the outset, the misogyny of the most powerful white men—who are the least subject to moral and legal sanctions and, indeed, may inflict harm with impunity—clearly harms the most vulnerable women disproportionately. But it is we, as white women, who tend to enable it, in ways that may be more or less connected with the aim of self-preservation. The misogyny white women face arguably does disproportionate damage of one kind: moral damage (cf. Tessman 2005). I hence believe we need to get clear on this form of misogyny partly to understand how we err—and how to do better.

Silence is golden for the men who smother and intimidate women into not talking, or have them change their tune to maintain harmony. Silence isolates his victims; and it enables misogyny. So, let us break it.

This book begins by canvassing a common, dictionary-definition-style understanding of the notion of misogyny. On this “naïve conception,” as I call it, misogyny is primarily a property of individual misogynists who are prone to hate women qua women, that is, because of their gender, either universally or at least very generally. On this view, agents may also be required to harbor this hatred in their hearts as a matter of “deep” or ultimate psychological explanation if they are to count as bona fide misogynists. Misogyny is as misogynists are, then. And misogynists are agents who fit a certain psychological profile.

According to the positive proposal about misogyny I go on to develop in chapter 2, we should instead understand misogyny as primarily a property of social environments in which women are liable to encounter hostility due to the enforcement and policing of patriarchal norms and expectations—often, though not exclusively, insofar as they violate patriarchal law and order. Misogyny hence functions to enforce and police women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance, against the backdrop of other intersecting systems of oppression and vulnerability, dominance and disadvantage, as well as disparate material resources, enabling and constraining social structures, institutions, bureaucratic mechanisms, and so on.

misogyny’s essence lies in its social function, not its psychological nature. To its agents, misogyny need not have any distinctive “feel” or phenomenology from the inside. If it feels like anything at all, it will tend to be righteous: like standing up for oneself or for morality, or—often combining the two—for the “little guy.” It often feels to those in its grip like a moral crusade, not a witch hunt. And it may pursue its targets not in the spirit of hating women but, rather, of loving justice. It can also be a purely structural phenomenon, instantiated via norms, practices, institutions, and other social structures.

misogyny should be understood from the perspective of its potential targets and victims—girls and women. Misogyny is then what misogyny does to some such, often so as to preempt or control the behavior of others. Misogyny takes a girl or a woman belonging to a specific social class (of a more or less fully specified kind, based on race, class, age, body type, disability, sexuality, being cis/trans, etc.). It then threatens hostile consequences if she violates or challenges the relevant norms or expectations as a member of this gendered class of persons. These norms include (supposed) entitlements on his part and obligations on hers. She may also be positioned as the type of woman who is representative of those who are not playing their assigned parts properly or are trespassing on his territory.

I propose taking sexism to be the branch of patriarchal ideology that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order, and misogyny as the system that polices and enforces its governing norms and expectations. So sexism is scientific; misogyny is moralistic. And a patriarchal order has a hegemonic quality.

In this economy of moral goods, women are obligated to give to him, not to ask, and expected to feel indebted and grateful, rather than entitled. This is especially the case with respect to characteristically moral goods: attention, care, sympathy, respect, admiration, and nurturing. The flipside of this is his being entitled to take much in the way of these moral goods, including—it would seem—the lives of those who can no longer give him what he wanted in terms of moral succor. He may love and value her intrinsically—that is, for her own sake—but far too conditionally, that is, not on her identity as a person (whatever that amounts to) but her second-personal attitude of good will toward him.

Investigating the logic of misogyny often involves exploring what is entailed by such problematic or indeed flatly false assumptions, which exclude many people, and assume away legitimate and salutary ways of being embodied, living, and loving—and even some people’s very humanity or existence. But it can be useful to understand the inner workings of a system that upholds the status quo in intricate, and sometimes even morally gory detail, in order to see how best to combat it.

following the lead of the critical race theorist Charles Lawrence III (1987; 2008), this book primarily takes what he calls an “epidemiological” approach to matters of social justice. That is, I concentrate largely on moral diagnosis, or getting clear on the nature of misogyny, construed as a moral-cum-social phenomenon with political underpinnings. This is as opposed to making explicit moral prescriptions and characterological judgments, and effectively putting people on trial—and hence on the defensive.

So trying to fight misogyny primarily using juridical moral notions is a bit like trying to fight fire with oxygen. It might work on a small scale—we do manage to blow out matches and candles, after all. But, when we try to scale up the strategy, it is liable to backfire. We would be trying to put out a fire while feeding right into it.

“Misogyny” is a loaded word. And its prevalence in news headlines has been increasing recently.1 But so has disagreement about its meaning and its reference. “I can’t be the only man confused about misogyny,” wrote Tom Fordy in The Telegraph (London), on July 2, 2014.2 Fordy is clearly right. But men are not the only ones who are grappling with the notion. At stake is how many girls and women are grappling, in various ways, with the actual phenomenon. “Is there a misogynist inside every man?” Fordy wondered, bleakly. And are all women really subject to misogyny in some form, as was seemingly the premise of the #YesAllWomen campaign on Twitter?

This chapter is devoted to the meaning, use, and point of the notion of misogyny. These are issues about which analytic philosophers—feminist and otherwise—have said little to date.3 But they turn out to be philosophically rich, psychologically complex, and politically important. For all of these reasons and more, I believe it is high time we started paying misogyny more attention. By the end of chapter 2, I’ll have proposed a constitutive account of it.

you might think that the question “What is misogyny?” has a simple answer. According to a common, dictionary definition–style understanding of the notion, which I call the naïve conception, misogyny is primarily a property of individual agents (typically, although not necessarily, men) who are prone to feel hatred, hostility, or other similar emotions toward any and every woman, or at least women generally, simply because they are women. That is, a misogynist’s attitudes are held to be caused or triggered merely by his representing people as women (either individually or collectively), and on no further basis specific to his targets. Such a representation, together with the agent’s background attitudes toward women as, for example, disgusting, loathsome, fearsome, or mindless sexual objects is supposed to be enough to trigger his hostility in most, if not all, cases (i.e., admitting of only limited exceptions, such as for those few women who somehow manage to dispel his hostility). Misogynistic attitudes are thus unified by their psychological nature and basis—that is, their “deep” or ultimate psychological explanation. And a culture will be misogynistic to the extent that it co...

misogyny is primarily a property of social systems or environments as a whole, in which women will tend to face hostility of various kinds because they are women in a man’s world (i.e., a patriarchy), who are held to be failing to live up to patriarchal standards (i.e., tenets of patriarchal ideology that have some purchase in this environment).

My proposed feminist analysis of misogyny hence aims to ameliorate the concept by highlighting misogyny’s political dimensions, rendering it psychologically more explicable, and supporting a clean contrast between misogyny and sexism. The analysis also yields an extension for the term “misogyny” that dovetails nicely with usage patterns among feminists. This limits the extent of my ameliorative proposal’s revisionism, and also suggests that this pattern of usage has a theoretical unification, rather than being ad hoc.

To many feminist commentators, the Isla Vista killings seemed a very clear instance of misogyny in action—along with whatever else it might have been, additionally. And many saw it as a dramatic manifestation of a wider cultural pattern—namely, misogyny of a kind that often festers beneath the surface in America today, among other parts of the world sometimes alleged to be post-patriarchal.

Ameliorative (or “analytical”) projects hence require actively making decisions about what to mean with our words. Familiarly, if we want to change the world, we may need to conceptualize it differently. This is particularly the case when it comes to social activities and practices: as social and self-conscious creatures, we are liable to conform to norms enshrined by our basic concepts, categories, and schemas. And when it comes to other people, we are prone to enforcing norms and expectations of which we are uncritical. For all of these reasons and more, ameliorative projects can be important for social progress.

Making charges of misogyny very difficult to prosecute would have another important, albeit less obvious, cost. It would make it very difficult to do justice to those accused of being misogynists who are genuinely innocent. If even an Elliot Rodger is off the hook, then a “not guilty” verdict (so to speak) would cease to be very meaningful. The defense would almost always be successful, since the relevant offense is so inscrutable—and peculiar.

By the lights of the naïve conception, misogyny essentially becomes too psychologistic a notion, on the model of a phobia or a deep-seated aversion. It becomes a matter of psychological ill health, or perhaps irrationality, rather than a systematic facet of social power relations and a predictable manifestation of the ideology that governs them: patriarchy.

Misogynists can love their mothers—not to mention their sisters, daughters, wives, girlfriends, and secretaries. They need not hate women universally, or even very generally. They tend to hate women who are outspoken, among other things.

It hence plausibly goes deep in the nature of patriarchal gender relations that women’s conduct vis-à-vis men is taken unduly personally (by them and on their behalf, moreover). So women’s indifference becomes aversion; ignorance becomes ignoring; testimony becomes tattling; and asking becomes extortion.

In many ways, this seems to be misogyny’s characteristic sentiment. It is punitive, resentful, and personal, but not particular. And the psychological targets of such attitudes may little resemble the actual victims.

Ameliorative projects are partly stipulative in nature. This does not (or at least ought not) make them arbitrary, however. As Haslanger (2012) puts it, their characteristic animating thought is, “This is the phenomenon we need to be thinking about” (224). So, at this point, having pursued both conceptual and descriptive lines of inquiry in the spirit of seeing where they lead, I want to offer an ameliorative proposal about how we ought to understand misogyny, at least for many purposes. I propose that, at the most general level of description, misogyny should be understood as the “law enforcement” branch of a patriarchal order, which has the overall function of policing and enforcing its governing ideology. We can make this more precise as follows: Constitutively speaking, misogyny in a social environment comprises the hostile social forces that (a)will tend to be faced by a (wider or narrower) class of girls and women because they are girls and women in that (more or less fully specified) social position; and (b)serve to police and enforce a patriarchal order, instantiated in relation to other intersecting systems of domination and disadvantage that apply to the relevant class of girls and women (e.g., various forms of racism, xenophobia, classism, ageism, transphobia, homophobia, ableism, and so on). And, as a substantive matter of fact, these misogynistic social forces will: Often target girls and women (in the relevant class) for actual, perceived, or representative c...

misogynist forces can be distinctive for girls and women located in different positions in social space, or they can operate on girls and women in a way that is more general.

Eviction is a ubiquitous problem for black women, one that sociologist Matthew Desmond takes to be the undernoticed analogue of mass incarceration for black men, which constitutes a deep source of systemic injustice and disadvantage. “Poor Black men are locked up while poor Black women are locked out,” Desmond argues (2016). This suggests misogynoir is tied to, and makes poor black women especially vulnerable to, housing insecurity, homelessness, legal trouble, and incarceration too, among other adverse outcomes.11 Women in such positions may become yet more vulnerable to domestic violence and sexual assault due to the combination of these factors (being disproportionately vulnerable already). Misogynoir begets itself, and the cycle may continue.

Having defined misogyny as a property of social environments first and foremost, we can now say that derivatively, an individual agent’s attitudes or behavior counts as misogynistic within a social context insofar as it reflects, or perpetuates, misogyny therein.

individual agents count as misogynists if and only if their misogynistic attitudes and/or actions are significantly (a) more extreme, and (b) more consistent than most other people in the relevant comparison class (e.g., other people of the same gender, and perhaps race, class, age, etc., in similar social environments).

According to my account, misogynist hostility can be anything that is suitable to serve a punitive, deterrent, or warning function, which (depending on your theory of punishment) may be anything aversive to human beings in general, or the women being targeted in particular. Misogynist hostility encompasses myriad “down girl” moves—so many as to make the list seem likely to be indefinitely extensible. But, to generalize: adults are insultingly likened to children, people to animals or even to objects. As well as infantilizing and belittling, there’s ridiculing, humiliating, mocking, slurring, vilifying, demonizing, as well as sexualizing or, alternatively, desexualizing, silencing, shunning, shaming, blaming, patronizing, condescending, and other forms of treatment that are dismissive and disparaging in specific social contexts. Then there is violence and threatening behavior: including “punching down”—that is, deferred or displaced aggression. And since, on my account, one woman can often serve as a stand-in or representative for a whole host of others in the misogynist imagination, almost any woman will be vulnerable to some form of misogynist hostility from some source or other.