Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

by Kate Manne

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

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 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.

Misogyny also subjects women to what I have come to think of as a kind of tyranny of vulnerability—by pointing to any and every (supposedly) more vulnerable (supposed) person or creature in her vicinity to whom she might (again, supposedly) do better, and requiring her to care for them, or else risk being judged callous, even monstrous.

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

misogynist hostilities will often target women quite selectively, rather than targeting women across the board.

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. He need only be dominant over some woman or women, often in the context of familial or intimate relationships.

Women’s adherence to the relevant social roles—as, for example, loving wives, devoted moms, “cool” girlfriends, loyal secretaries, or good waitresses, to name just a few of the most obvious examples—is supposed to look as natural or freely chosen as possible.

What could be a more natural basis for hostility and aggression than defection from the role of an attentive, loving subordinate?

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. From his point of view, they had a “hold over” him.

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.

Rather than conceptualizing misogyny from the point of view of the accused, at least implicitly, we might move to think of it instead from the point of view of its targets or victims.

What matters is the contributions they make to a misogynist social environment—that is, the extent to which they tend to police and punish women, in accordance with patriarchal law and order. Elliot Rodger and Rush Limbaugh are, in this respect, overachievers

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.

misogyny primarily targets women because they are women in a man’s world (i.e., a historically patriarchal one, among other things), rather than because they are women in a man’s mind, where that man is a misogynist.

One generally does not want to attach a shaming label to someone in virtue of a near-universal trait of character, attitude, or behavioral disposition.

misogyny need not and usually will not arise from specialized and, to my mind, fairly puzzling putative psychological attitudes, like the idea that women are seen as sexual objects, viewed as subhuman, or as having a hateful, detestable “essence.”

misogynists may simply be people who are consistent overachievers in contributing to misogynist social environments

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.

misogyny is narcissistic and delusional by its very nature. It transforms impersonal disappointments into embittered resentment

•There is no conflict between a man being vulnerable and insecure and his being a misogynist.

•There is no conflict between a man aggressing against other men and his being a misogynist as well.

Patriarchal social relations are supposed to be amicable and seamless, when all is going to plan. It is largely when things go awry that violence tends to bubble to the surface.

women may be resented precisely because they are achieving rapid social progress in some areas.

one need not be a man to be a misogynist either: women can fit the description too, as can non-binary people,

The idea that life begins at conception has been proclaimed only recently.

maternal mortality rates have been rising—doubling in Texas since 2011, when Planned Parenthood was defunded there.12

women are already being punished for having abortions under conservative lore.

According to a recent Gallup poll, almost one in five Americans said in 2016 that abortion should be illegal under any circumstances, which would rule out even “life of the mother” exceptions.

women who seek abortions, even to save their own lives, are a blank canvas on which to project a set of grievances borne of unmet felt needs in turn borne of a sense of entitlement.

The analogy between a mother’s womb and a dominant man’s home-cum-haven—or safe space—has long been a part of patriarchal ideology. And it remains so.

misogyny is both prevalent in ostensibly oppressive regimes and why we have also been seeing a good deal of it coming to the surface in the United States lately. Feminist progress has been rapid and impressive in many ways. But this has led to resentment, anxiety, and misogynistic backlash.

misogyny that was latent or lay dormant within a culture may manifest itself when women’s capabilities become more salient and hence demoralizing or threatening.

Some men, especially those with a high degree of privilege, seem to have a sense of being owed by women in the coin of the associated personal goods and services that I canvass in this chapter.

misogyny directed toward one woman in public life may serve as a warning to others not to follow her lead, or even to publicly lend their support to her.

The norm that women not compete for or deprive men of masculine-coded goods that he wants, cost him his manly pride, and so on, are further common sources of misogynist aggression when violated.

The model predicts that women’s power will be better tolerated when it’s wielded in service of patriarchal interests,

“Smile, sweetheart” is an ostensibly less offensive remark, but it is expressive of the same insidious demand that a woman’s face be emotionally legible.

to the extent to which she tries to or successfully beats the boys “at their own game” (as it were), she may be held to have cheated, or to have stolen something from him. And so she has, in a way. It’s just that she would have “stolen” historically ill-gotten gains, not his rightful property. She may well be entitled to do precisely what she is doing.

Misogynistic attacks frequently instill a sense of shame in their victims, partly via disgust-based “smearing” mechanisms,

family annihilators are on the most extreme end of a spectrum of toxic masculinity on which Donald Trump and Steve Bannon also sit—that there is ultimately a difference in degree, rather than kind, here.

Women’s role as givers, and privileged men’s as takers, is internalized by women as well as men; so women who are fully paid-up members in the club of femininity are no less prone to enforce such norms, at least in certain contexts. Indeed, when it comes to third-personal moralism, as opposed to second-personal reactive attitudes, they may be more prone to do so, because women who appear to be shirking their duties, in being, for example, careless, selfish, or negligent, make more work for others who are “good” or conscientious.

Moreover, such women threaten to undermine the system on which many women have staked their futures, identities, sense of self-worth, etc.

under even moderately non-ideal conditions, involving, for example, exhaustible material resources, limited sought-after social positions, or clashing moral and social ideals, the humanity of some is likely to represent a double-edged sword to others.

Many of the nastiest things that people do to each other seem to proceed in full view of, and are in fact plausibly triggered by, these others’ manifestations of their shared or common humanity.23

This would open up the possibility that seeing others as fellow human beings, while treating them abominably, is not in fact far-fetched; it is merely in need of some kind of backstory, without which the assertion of the conjunction would be pragmatically anomalous.

Seeing someone as one’s enemy engenders a motivation to try to destroy that person, and seeing someone as one’s rival engenders a motivation to try to defeat them, for example.25

The recent ingress of (e.g.) nonwhites and white women to the most prestigious positions in contemporary Western societies has meant that white men now have serious competition. Add to this the fact that the competition will often result in the hitherto dominant being surpassed by those they tacitly expected to be in social positions beneath them, and you have a recipe for resentment and a sense of “aggrieved entitlement,”

the bastions of privilege that would need to be dismantled in order to achieve social justice. These bastions are often well-defended and difficult to challenge. For people are often, unsurprisingly, deeply invested in their continuation.

the mistreatment of historically subordinated people who are perceived as threatening the status quo often needs no special psychological story, such as dehumanization, to account for it. It can rather be explained in terms of current and historical social structures, hierarchical relations, and norms and expectations, together with the fact that they are widely internalized and difficult to eradicate.