Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

by Kate Manne

If there are subtle patterns of male dominance and other forms of misogynistic behavior on the part of the male partner, then there are also fairly powerful psychological incentives for the female partner to deny, minimize, and overlook their prevalence and importance.

Donald Trump held that he could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot someone, and still not lose voters.14 Many people were outraged by his remarks. Yet he still won the election.

Someone like Hillary Clinton is frequently cast in the moral role of usurper. And unsurprisingly so (which is of course not to say justifiably); she threatens to take men’s historical place or steal their thunder. If she wins, the game is rigged. She could not have won it fairly. And her behavior and she herself seems to be careless, shady, and crooked (so the thought continues).

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 women are breaking the rules of an unjust patriarchal system that is still in the p...

people are more inclined to see women in positions of authority as posers and imposters compared with their male counterparts.

The fact that misogyny is killing girls and women, literally and metaphorically, clearly isn’t enough to grip that many people.2I shouldn’t have been surprised by this. It has always been killing girls and women, literally and metaphorically—especially those who step out of line. So it goes.

it often seems to be a shame-based phenomenon, at the level of the moral psychology of individual agents. Within a misogynistic worldview, women’s admiration and approval, among other things, confers status on men relative to one another within intra-masculine hierarchies. And erstwhile or aspiring alphas often become pathologically ashamed when such attentions are withheld or unforthcoming. So it’s dangerous to try to call out such misogyny, even if the shame is only a by-product of trying to get someone to think before he speaks the next time.

Listening and offering sympathy to those who are prone to shame-based misogynistic as well as racist outbursts is feeding the very need and sense of entitlement that drives them in the first place, when they go unmet. In other words, it’s adding fuel to the fire, at least in the long term.

All of this is to say that misogyny makes people so irrational, so inclined to engage in post hoc rationalization, and so lacking in that thing that many tout and purport to think crucial, namely personal responsibility (a tricky philosophical concept, but the point here is one of consistency) that this has made me pretty pessimistic about reasoning with people to get them to take misogyny seriously.

a good portion of the dominant social class have a vested interest in maintaining men’s superiority.

That we do not always think of the toxic masculine violence of family annihilation or strangulation as misogynistic, even though they are typically faced by women and committed by men due to patriarchal forces that serve and reflect gender roles and relations, is testament to the fact that we think of hostility in an excessively psychologistic way.

Agency is not lacking when a woman is taking it upon herself to tell her story, or play her current part, in a manner that may be subversive or expose the bully using nothing other than his own behavior to embarrass him. This remains the case, indeed is doubly so, in a story in which she was made passive or, more commonly, her hand was forced (as in coercion) or she was taken advantage of (as in sexual predation, involving the exploitation of power relations and the associated social scripts; see Manne 2017).