Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

by Kate Manne

agents in a dominant social position often don’t start out with such a neutral or salutary view of things. They are perpetually mired in certain kinds of delusions about their own social positions relative to other people, and their respective obligations, permissions, and entitlements.

what is in question is a pervasive and an inherently moral delusion, born of the toxic ongoing legacy of a white hetero-patriarchal order.

Women’s subjectivity and autonomous sexuality is increasingly difficult to deny, for anyone not utterly delusional and endowed with an Internet connection (ironically).

Hence, from the perspective of patriarchal values, women may be human—all too human, sometimes.

It is also that the spirit in which mass rapes tend to be committed is typically vindictive, punitive, triumphalist, and domineering. These acts hence bear all of the hallmarks of interpersonal violence, which is expressive of and gives vent to paradigmatically interpersonal reactive attitudes—such as resentment, righteous anger, jealousy, and so on.38

people may know full well that those they treat in brutally degrading and inhumane ways are fellow human beings, underneath a more or less thin veneer of false consciousness. And yet, under certain social conditions—the surface of which I’ve just barely scratched in this chapter—they may massacre, torture, and rape them en masse regardless.40

Again, we see the need to consider dehumanization from the other direction to the customary one in moral philosophy: as a psychological manifestation of a sense of illicit entitlement to be the observer or the judge, or an object of care and admiration, rather than suspicion, contempt, hostility, or indifference. Such a sense can be highly dangerous for those who are held to be looking the wrong way at people in the grip of what may amount to a persecution complex.

We should also be concerned with the rewarding and valorizing of women who conform to gendered norms and expectations, enforce the “good” behavior of others, and engage in certain common forms of patriarchal virtue-signaling—by, for example, participating in slut-shaming, victim-blaming, or the Internet analog of witch-burning practices.

Least widely discussed by far are the positive and exonerating attitudes and practices of which the men who dominate women tend to be the beneficiaries.

credibility deficits—and surpluses as well—often serve the function of buttressing dominant group members’ current social position, and protecting them from downfall in the existing social hierarchy: by being, for example, accused, impugned, convicted, corrected, diminished or, alternatively, simply outperformed, by those over whom they have historically been dominant.

The specific form of himpathy on display here is the excessive sympathy sometimes shown toward male perpetrators of sexual violence. It is frequently extended in contemporary America to men who are white, nondisabled, and otherwise privileged “golden boys” such as Turner, the recipient of a Stanford swimming scholarship.

Turner was found actively violating his victim, who was unconscious and intoxicated, in an alley behind that dumpster. That is rape. Someone who rapes is a rapist. So Turner is a rapist—as well as a golden boy. Therefore . . .

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.

many sexual assaults are committed not because the assailant lacks any concern for or awareness of other people, but because of aggression, frustration, a desire for control, and again, a sense of entitlement—be it aggrieved or still expectant.

so-called promiscuity is not the issue: violence is.

Brock Turner’s defenders exhibited forgiving tendencies, and spun exonerating narratives, that are all too commonly extended to men in his position.

if someone sympathizes with the rapist initially, insofar as he loses his appetite or swimming scholarship, then he will come to figure as the victim in the story.

when our loyalties lie with the rapist, we add profound moral insult to the injuries he inflicts on his victims.

For Americans tired of so-called political correctness, especially those men caught between silence and shame when it comes to gendered derogations and airing their thoughts about women’s bodies, watching Trump vent his vile spleen without so much as the risk of subsequent embarrassment, must have been a cathartic and sometimes emboldening spectacle.

claiming the moral spotlight as a woman over an equally or more privileged man is about as fraught as giving testimony against him, given a tacit—and, often, mistaken competition—for sympathetic attention and moral priority.

That misogynist violence and sexual assault are generally perpetrated by unremarkable, non-monstrous-seeming people must be accepted if things are to improve in this arena, among others.

The extent to which white liberals are prone to be sympathetic to women’s predicament reflects our racist habits of moral attention, as Kristie Dotson and Marita Gilbert (2014) have argued, in connection with Nafissatou Diallo’s sexual assault allegations against (now former) managing director of the International Monetary Fund, Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

The “affectability imbalances” they theorize hence contribute to the “curious narrative disappearances” of black women, such as Holtzclaw effectively sought to engineer and exploit to his advantage. That he might easily have succeeded in this endeavor ought to be the basis for shameful self-reflection on the part of white women like me, certainly me included, regarding our complicity with misogynoir and contribution to black women’s herasure—along with “lean down” exploitation and other such racist strands in (white) feminism.

Notice that we need not know what motivated a man like Holtzclaw in order to see that the social meaning of his actions was profoundly hostile toward his victims and contingent on their being women, of a particular race and class, inter alia, in this case, in a hitherto man’s world.

When men are privileged, or long have been, they may proceed with a sense of not only legal impunity but also moral entitlement—secure in the idea that what they seize is theirs for the taking, and sometimes trying to wreak revenge on women who fail to uphold their end of history’s bad gendered bargain.

The impugning and undermining of the victims of misogyny tends to be ad hoc.

In the end, in order to address such egregious forms of injustice, it is necessary—without being remotely sufficient—to stop people siding with dominant men against the women who accuse them of acts of misogynistic violence. The nature of the problem suggests it will be sticky.

the figure of a victim—or rather, a self-perceived and self-appointed one, who nurses and perhaps fabricates her injuries, and demonstrates learned or feigned helplessness—has played an increasingly important role in conservative ideology.

What are the motivations for historically subordinated and marginalized people, women in particular, to come forward and draw attention to the ways in which they’ve been injured? As we will be seeing, the answer to this question is not obvious. 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).

Once Brown was depicted as any kind of criminal or aggressor (in however trivial a way) via the footage of him in the convenience store, many white people couldn’t or wouldn’t see him as the victim of police brutality or misconduct.

one of the goods women are characteristically held to owe dominant men is their moral focus and emotional energy. This may in turn be something that dominant men often feel excessively entitled to and, perhaps, needy for.

There is a prevalent sense that one needs to “get in line” or queue up for something. And there is a tangible frisson around the idea that someone is unfairly cutting in line—in particular, immigrants, both in the United States, and in Australia, a bias that has a considerably longer history of irrational moral panic about asylum seekers or so-called queue-jumpers.17

So I am in complete agreement with Rini’s explanation of the value of publicizing micro-aggressions, say, in order to foster solidarity.

people are (often unwittingly) motivated to maintain gender hierarchies, by applying social penalties to women who compete for, or otherwise threaten to advance to, high-status, masculine-coded positions.

In this condition, agentic female figures who aspired to high-powered positions were significantly less liked and more often turned down for a promotion than in the “low threat” and control conditions.

people under system threat tend to defend their worldviews, which include gender status differences

Many people expressed shock at the number of (white) women who voted for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton. But, given that the above comparative gender biases tend to be found in women just as much as men, it arguably shouldn’t have been so surprising.

women police other women, and engage in gendered norm enforcement behavior.

when it comes to internalized misogyny, we would expect women to be excessively prone to guilt and shame for violating feminine-coded duties, rather than necessarily harboring any global attitude of self-loathing.

disgust is the emotion of social rejection rather than anger,

disgust also has the advantage of spreading by association.

as moral critics, we don’t always deliver our verdicts based on moral reasons and arguments.

When people chanted of Clinton, “lock her up,” at Trump’s rallies, it obviously expressed a desire to see her punished. But it also went beyond that and seemed to express a desire for her containment.

Clinton, Gillard, and Goffman were all suspected of myriad distinct offenses. And this suggests a conviction they’re guilty of something.

misogyny works to disrupt female solidarity, especially among white women.

women penalize highly successful women just as much as men do,

penalizing successful women serves an ego-protective function (only) for other women. It defuses the threatening sense that a similar—and similarly good, decent, and/or “real” woman—is more competent or accomplished than they are. And, tellingly, it appears that this is linked to a lack of self-belief that can be assuaged by positive feedback.

In the days following the election, it was common for those of us grieving the result to judge the white women who voted for Donald Trump even more harshly than their white male counterparts.

almost no black women and relatively few Latina women voted for Trump over Clinton.

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. The thought being that it is virtually only a white woman who stands a fighting chance of being regarded by men like Trump as a “good girl,” if she plays her cards right;