Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

by Kate Manne

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...