Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

by Kate Manne

What if you are the agent on the other side of the divide? What if you stepped upon the hands, or toes, of another? Or, for an example recalling the opening scene from Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own (1929): what if you are held to have trespassed on verboten territory, or his turf? What if he erroneously thinks you are not allowed on the soft grass, and are instead bound to stick to the uninviting, unsteadying path lain with gravel? What if his sense of what’s his, proprietarily, or is safeguarding as others’ property, is exaggerated, unjust, and a vestige of history? And what if he is less than reasonable in his reactions to your (non-)trespassing? What if he puts up signs promising that trespassers will be prosecuted or—as one sometimes sees to this day—shot at?

For one such: women positioned in relations of asymmetrical moral support with men have historically been required to show him moral respect, approval, admiration, deference, and gratitude, as well as moral attention, sympathy, and concern. When she breaks character, and tries to level moral criticisms or accusations in his direction, she is withholding from him the good will he may be accustomed to receiving from her. He may even be in some sense reliant on her good will to maintain his tenuous sense of self or self-worth. Her resentment or blame may then feel like a betrayal, a reversal of the proper moral relations between them, and this may make him seek payback, revenge, retribution.

It follows that misogyny is a self-masking phenomenon: trying to draw attention to the phenomenon is liable to give rise to more of it. This makes for a catch-22 situation. But, as far as I can tell, there is no way around this. It also emerges that the failure to recognize women as human beings need not, and often will not, underlie misogyny. For misogyny may target women in ways that presuppose a sense of her as a fellow human being. The key contrast naturally shifts to the second part of the idiom instead. Women may not be simply human beings but positioned as human givers when it comes to the dominant men who look to them for various kinds of moral support, admiration, attention, and so on. She is not allowed to be in the same ways as he is. She will tend to be in trouble when she does not give enough, or to the right people, in the right way, or in the right spirit. And, if she errs on this score, or asks for something of the same support or attention on her own behalf, there is a risk of misogynist resentment, punishment, and indignation.

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. If it feels like anything at all, it will tend to be righteous: like standing up for oneself or for morality, or—often combining the two—for the “little guy.” It often feels to those in its grip like a moral crusade, not a witch hunt. And it may pursue its targets not in the spirit of hating women but, rather, of loving justice. It can also be a purely structural phenomenon, instantiated via norms, practices, institutions, and other social structures.

Specifically, I argue that misogyny ought to be understood as the system that operates within a patriarchal social order to police and enforce women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance.

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 (i.e., tenets of patriarchal ideology that have some purchase in this environment).

But the naïve conception of misogyny has serious limitations. Some of these turn on epistemological concerns. For what lies behind an individual agent’s attitudes, as a matter of deep or ultimate psychological explanation, is frequently inscrutable. So the naïve conception would threaten to make misogyny very difficult to diagnose, short of being the agent’s therapist (and sometimes not even that would be sufficient). This would threaten to make misogyny epistemically inaccessible to women, in particular. That is, it would threaten to deprive women of the wherewithal to acquire knowledge and justified beliefs about the manifestations of misogyny that they may encounter, and to go on to make warranted assertions on that basis. So in effect, this notion of misogyny would be silencing for its victims.

No doubt the idea that I’ve just mooted will be resisted by some people. Misogyny must involve hating women as such, and for no further reason. So misogyny cannot just target some women, it might be insisted. But I see little motivation for this blanket insistence. And I suspect it draws strength from the unwarranted assumption that misogyny must resemble the most commonly—though often historically inaccurately—envisaged form of anti-Semitism, which is supposed to be leveled at the entire Jewish people in our entirety.18 But why should this one type of oppression be treated as the paradigm? Why should we accept the “Paradigm Paradigm,” as we might call it, whatsoever? Gender-based oppression may be partly sui generis. Or, it may be a useful paradigm for other forms of oppression—a possibility chapter 5 briefly expands on.

Most importantly, for my ensuing purposes, small violations may be blown out of all proportion, and taken to indicate something damning about a woman’s character. She may be represented as breaking promises, telling lies, or reneging on her side of the bargain—and hence as deeply untrustworthy, duplicitous, irresponsible, and so on. If we look hard enough, we can often find some (more or less) nominal basis for such complaints in a woman’s behavior. But the broken promises and undone deals were illicitly made on her behalf by the patriarchy.

This brings us to an important puzzle about misogyny’s aetiology and targets. How, and why, is it often so delusional? How do people manage to harbor or inspire others to form such personal-seeming grudges against women who remain personally unknown to them, on such manifestly thin bases? And, clearly, Limbaugh was counting on his diatribe being not only intelligible but also appealing to his listeners.

It hence plausibly goes deep in the nature of patriarchal gender relations that women’s conduct vis-à-vis men is taken unduly personally (by them and on their behalf, moreover). So women’s indifference becomes aversion; ignorance becomes ignoring; testimony becomes tattling; and asking becomes extortion.

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.

Such a socially (if not scientifically) distant possible world is not a good basis for comparison in cases involving pregnancy, lactation, menopause, and so on. Better to think about what would be the case if pregnant bodies navigated not a “man’s world”—that is, the actual world, with its hetero-patriarchal and transphobic structures—but rather a world that recognized everybody’s claims to have equal moral purchase. And in this world, significantly more effort would be made to accommodate those tasked with bearing the next generation of human beings, I would argue.

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. Overall, sexism and misogyny share a common purpose—to maintain or restore a patriarchal social order. But sexism purports to merely be being reasonable; misogyny gets nasty and tries to force the issue. Sexism is hence to bad science as misogyny is to moralism. Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts. How do sexism and misogyny stand in relation to one another? Sexist ideology (and its bearers, i.e., sexist attitudes, actions, practices, institutions, and artworks or other artifacts, inasmuch as they reflect or perpetuate sexist ideology)2may be used in service of misogynist ends in practice. But whether it actually does so, and therefore counts as misogynistic, will be a question of how the sexist representations actually function. Do they constitute a barrier or form of hostility as the girls and women in that environment will tend to encounter, and would naturally interpret, them? (Assuming the girls and women in question are being reasonable, by which I don’t mean anything too idealized, as per the discussion in the previous chapter.) Or will some sexist artifact (a text or an image, for instance) just be seen as ludicrously pseudo-scientifi...

sexism is to misogyny as civic order is to law enforcement. Sexism taken alone involves believing in men’s superiority to women in masculine-coded, high-prestige domains (such as intellectual endeavors, sports, business, and politics), and the naturalness or even inevitability of men’s dominance therein. Misogyny taken alone involves anxieties, fears, and desires to maintain a patriarchal order, and a commitment to restoring it when it is disrupted. So sexism can be complacent; misogyny may be anxious. Sexism is bookish; misogyny is combative. Sexism has a theory; misogyny wields a cudgel.

So there’s a puzzle: what are women held to be guilty of doing or being? Withholding and failing to give, I think; being cold, callous, and heartless; neglecting their natural duty to provide safe haven and nurture, by evicting a vulnerable being from their rightful home, their birthright. Hence 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. This is an idea which the next chapter will elaborate.

For even when people become less sexist—that is, less skeptical about women’s intellectual acumen or leadership abilities, and less inclined to buy into pernicious gendered stereotypes about women’s being overly emotional or irrational—this does not mean that feminism’s work is done. On the contrary, 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. And this may result in more or less subtle forms of lashing out, moralism, wishful thinking, and willful denial, as well as the kind of low-grade resentment that festers and alights on effigies and scapegoats.

This idea of what women owe or ought to give: why does it persist? And what does it encompass, in addition to the goods and services just mentioned?

So it’s no surprise that this work is often safeguarded by moral sanctions and internalized as “to be done” by women. Then there’s the threat of the withdrawal of social approval if these duties are not performed, and the incentive of love and gratitude if they are done willingly and gladly.