Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

by Kate Manne

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...