Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

by Kate Manne

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).

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.

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.

Notice then that on my proposed analysis 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.

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.

I argue that, often, it’s not a sense of women’s humanity that is lacking. Her humanity is precisely the problem, when it’s directed to the wrong people, in the wrong way, or in the wrong spirit, by his lights.

Her humanity may hence be held to be owed to other human beings, and her value contingent on her giving moral goods to them: life, love, pleasure, nurture, sustenance, and comfort, being some such.

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.

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.

I take it that a social milieu counts as patriarchal insofar as certain kinds of institutions or social structures both proliferate and enjoy widespread support within it—from, for example, the state, as well as broader cultural sources, such as material resources, communal values, cultural narratives, media and artistic depictions, and so on.

First, I do not take subordination to be a success term in this context. As I intend the notion of subordination to be understood, it can be a matter of social pressures that tend to relegate women to this position but may

Second, some patriarchal structures are not only bastions of male privilege but will be exclusively male or heavily male dominated. However, I take it that these structures will generally require the social support of other patriarchal structures in which women are positioned as subordinate,

Third, these relations of domination and subordination are often local to a particular patriarchal structure and the individuals therein.

For a man may be the master of his domain but subordinated, exploited, or marginalized in other contexts. A man hence need not, and typically will not, be positioned as dominant over any and every woman, or even women generally, to count as a fully functioning patriarch.

These mechanisms will range widely in the consequences they visit on women, from life-threatening violence to subtle social signals of disapproval (e.g., when people are unconsciously slightly “taken aback” when women are as interpersonally direct or unapologetic as their male counterparts). These coercive enforcement mechanisms vis-à-vis patriarchal norms and expectations, and the social roles they govern, are the functional essence of misogyny.

He expects to be made to feel cared for and special, as well as to have his meal brought to him (a somewhat vulnerable position, as well as a powerful one, for him to be in). Imagine now that this customer comes to be disappointed—his server is not serving him, though she is waiting on other tables. Or perhaps she appears to be lounging around lazily or just doing her own thing, inexplicably ignoring him. Worse, she might appear to be expecting service from him, in a baffling role reversal. Either way, she is not behaving in the manner to which he is accustomed in such settings. It is easy to imagine this person becoming confused, then resentful. It is easy to imagine him banging his spoon on the table. It is easy to imagine him exploding in frustration.

For one thing, it need not target women across the board; it may instead target women selectively—for example, those who are perceived as insubordinate, negligent, or out of order. For another thing, the model puts paid to the idea (bizarre but, as we’ve seen, not without its adherents) that misogyny and sexual desire are somehow incompatible. Rodger’s sexual desire for the women of Alpha Phi—and his desire that they desire him in turn—played a crucial role in spawning his resentment. It meant that he felt powerless with respect to them.

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.

For it may be that, as well as perceived and actual violations of patriarchal norms and expectations, there may be purely symbolic or representative ones, where one woman is made to pay for the supposed sins of others.

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).

And a cursory look at the social world around us serves as preliminary confirmation of this: hostility toward women is really only the tip of a large and troubling iceberg. We should also be concerned with the rewarding and valorizing of women who conform to gendered norms and expectations,

Another locus of concern should be the punishment and policing of men who flout the norms of masculinity

That is, misogynists may simply be people who are consistent overachievers in contributing to misogynist social environments (whether or not the system counts as misogynistic, all things considered. The point is that their efforts are pushing strongly in this direction). Alternatively, misogynists may be people who have been heavily influenced in their beliefs, desires, actions, values, allegiances, expectations, rhetoric, and so on, by a misogynist social atmosphere.

one need not be a man to be a misogynist either: women can fit the description too, as can non-binary people, for that matter. (Although how common will be the requisite consistency of misogynistic attitudes and actions for women in particular remains an open empirical question, which research canvassed in the final chapter will bear on.) But, beyond that, many if not most of us at the current historical juncture are likely to be capable of channeling misogynistic social forces on occasion, regardless of sincere egalitarian beliefs and feminist commitments.

On this picture, sexist ideology will tend to discriminate between men and women, typically by alleging sex differences beyond what is known or could be known, and sometimes counter to our best current scientific evidence. Misogyny will typically differentiate between good women and bad ones, and punishes the latter.

Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts.

Given this, it turns out that most of the cases of misogyny canvassed so far, and that will be canvassed in what follows, can be brought under the heading of one of the following two complementary social norms for women: (1)She is obligated to give feminine-coded services to someone or other, preferably one man who is her social equal or better (by the lights of racist, classist, as well as heteronormative values, in many contexts), at least insofar as he wants such goods and services from her. (2)She is prohibited from having or taking masculine-coded goods away from dominant men (at a minimum, and perhaps from others as well), insofar as he wants or aspires to receive or retain them.

For a fellow human being is not just an intelligible spouse, parent, child, sibling, friend, colleague, etc., in relation to you and yours. They are also an intelligible rival, enemy, usurper, insubordinate, betrayer, etc. Moreover, in being capable of rationality, agency, autonomy, and judgment, they are also someone who could coerce, manipulate, humiliate, or shame you.

dismantling them may feel not only like a comedown, but also an injustice, to the privileged. They will tend to feel flattened, rather than merely leveled, in the process.

In other words, in such “he said”/“she said” or “her word against his” scenarios, we move from the premise that he’s an “honorable man” or “good guy” to the conclusion that she must be lying or hysterical, instead of responding properly to the stronger evidence that she’s the one telling the truth. And we subsequently fail to question the collective presumption that he is trustworthy after

Testimonial injustice arises due to systematic biases in the “economy of credibility,” as Fricker (2007) aptly calls it. It afflicts members of a certain social group, most notably when the group has historically been and to some extent remains unjustly socially subordinate.5Testimonial injustice then paradigmatically consists in subordinate group members tending to be regarded as less credible when they make claims about certain matters, or against certain people, hence being denied the epistemic status of knowers, in a way that is explained by their subordinate group membership.

that real rapists will appear on our radars either as devils, decked out with horns and pitchforks, or else as monsters—that is, as creepy and ghoulish creatures. Monsters are unintelligible, uncanny, and they are outwardly frightening. What is frightening about rapists is partly the lack of identifying marks and features, beyond the fact that they are by far most likely to be men. Rapists are human, all too human, and they are very much among us. The idea of rapists as monsters exonerates by caricature.

And with regard to the rape victim who comes forward and bears witness to his crime, the question too often becomes, what does shewant out of this? She is envisaged not as playing her difficult part in a criminal proceeding, but rather as seeking personal vengeance and moral retribution. What’s more, she may be seen as being unforgiving, as trying to take something away from her rapist, rather than as contributing to upholding law and order.

It won’t be easy to persuade people that they’re being prejudiced in ways that are so ugly, unjust, and morally pernicious, and hence show up (only) in particular social contexts. All the more so because such prejudice affects our habits of moral attention: their operation may hence feel, from the inside, like simply being fair to the men who stand accused, rather than being unfair to the women who are making these accusations.

There turn out to be strong reasons not to come forward from a subordinate social position, given the high risks of being discredited, dismissed, and subject to counteraccusations (among other possibilities). But if coming forward from such a position is liable to be futile or positively backfire—being a highly uncertain path to the material resources and social justice one may need and be entitled to, respectively, and at best a fraught way of attracting sympathy and attention—then, frankly, why bother? And yet women (among others) are increasingly coming forward

coming forward can be an expression of agency and an act of subversion, insofar as it wrestles the moral narrative away from the dominant and default versions, and makes one’s situation salient to those who would otherwise remain oblivious.

For claiming victimhood effectively involves placing oneself at the center of the story. This move is even more fraught than self-casting is in general. It is liable to be perceived as at once self-dramatizing and self-important, and at the same time, wan or maudlin.

It follows that, when we have a sense that a woman is “playing the victim,” “pulling the gender card,” or being overly dramatic, we have reasons to be critical and doubtful of our instincts (Schraub 2016). What she is doing may stand out not because she’s claiming more than her due but because we’re not used to women claiming their due in these contexts. Women are rather expected to provide an audience for dominant men’s victim narratives, providing moral care, listening, sympathy, and soothing.

So agentic women competing with men for male-dominated roles are doubly likely to be punished and rejected in light of these mechanisms. They are perceived as having more of the qualities they are less permitted to have than their identically-described male counterparts

Given that people under system threat tend to defend their worldviews, which include gender status differences . . . and because female agency was especially rejected by people under system threat, [these results] provide direct evidence that backlash functions to preserve the gender hierarchy.

Disgust is also a moralizing influence that intensifies and even drives novel moral judgments—in some cases, powerfully.8 It turns out that even mild “pangs” of disgust can cause some people to judge that someone is suspicious and up to no good, even when such judgments clearly have no rational basis—when what the person was doing was entirely innocent, even praiseworthy.

The first suggested lesson: disgust reactions can make us harsher moral critics and may even prompt some people to read moral offenses into entirely, and obviously, innocent actions. The second: as moral critics, we don’t always deliver our verdicts based on moral reasons and arguments. Sometimes, we reach for these reasons and arguments to rationalize a verdict already rendered.

So I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that Clinton was subject to a striking number and intensity of disgust reactions as her campaign wore on, just as the empirical evidence canvassed above would predict. And, as we’ve seen, this plausibly would have led to their mistrusting her, and may also have increased the severity of their moral disapproval of her actions.

So, at the highest level of generality, it’s not surprising that women who aspire to be “good” have social incentives to distance themselves from a woman deemed “bad,” as Clinton often was, and to publicly participate when she was ostracized and punished for supposed moral crimes and misdemeanors.

Whatever the case, it seems plausible that white women had additional psychological and social incentives to support Trump and forgive him his misogyny (among other things). Such incentives are due to the fact that (1) on average, white women are considerably likelier than their nonwhite counterparts to be partnered with a Trump supporter, and (2) again, on average, relatedly in some cases, white women would generally have greater incentives, and hence corresponding dispositions, to try to get or stay on the good side of powerful white men of Trump’s genre.

But evidence suggests that the same actions performed by a man versus a woman may be viewed differently in the first place—where a lens of differential prior suspicion or a gendered division of labor makes the very same actions performed by her versus him seem different. His behavior seems normal, unremarkable, business as usual, nothing to see here. Her doing the same thing makes us wonder: what’s she hiding?

Women in positions of unprecedented political power, or right on its cusp, are also prone to be perceived as rule-breakers generally. They are not to be trusted to stay in line, or respect law and order. These perceptions are understandable, because they’re not baseless so much as defunct: these women are breaking the rules of an unjust patriarchal system that is still in the process of being dismantled.

The idea that Clinton was so careless as compared to other politicians seems driven by a tacit moral judgment, a prior conviction that she was guilty, rather than an unbiased assessment of the evidence.

Misogyny is a self-masking problem. Trying to draw attention to it is illicit by the lights of the phenomenon itself, since women are supposed to minister to others, rather than solicit moral attention and concern on their own behalf.