Down Girl Quotes

“always somebody’s someone, and seldom her own person. But this is not because she’s not held to be a person at all, but rather because her personhood is held to be owed to others, in the form of service labor, love, and loyalty.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“Sexism is hence to bad science as misogyny is to moralism. Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“When demand for her attention exceeds supply on a grand scale, it is not surprising to find practices of men trying to turn the heads of women previously unknown to them—via catcalling and wolf-whistling and various forms of online trolling (from the patently abusive to ostensibly reasonable demands for rational debate, which unfortunately sometimes result in her being belittled, insulted, or mansplained to). In public settings, she is told to smile or asked what she’s thinking by many a (male) stranger—especially when she appears to be “deep inside her own head” or “off in her own little world,” i.e., appearing to think her own thoughts, her attention inwardly, rather than outwardly, focused. These gestures are then supposed to either make her look, or else force her to stonewall—a withholding, rather than sheer absence, of reaction. So her silence is icy; her neutral expression, sullen. Her not looking is snubbing; her passivity, aggression. But an ice queen, a bitch, a temptress—or an angel, for that matter—each has something in common: they are human, all too human, female characters.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“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.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“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.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“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.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“Rather, a woman is regarded as owing her human capacities to particular people, often men or his children within heterosexual relationships that also uphold white supremacy, and who are in turn deemed entitled to her services. This might be envisaged as the de facto legacy of coverture law—a woman’s being “spoken for” by her father, and afterward her husband, then son-in-law, and so on. And it is plausibly part of what makes women more broadly somebody’s mother, sister, daughter, grandmother: always somebody’s someone, and seldom her own person. But this is not because she’s not held to be a person at all, but rather because her personhood is held to be owed to others, in the form of service labor, love, and loyalty.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“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.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“Patriarchal ideology enlists a long list of mechanisms in service of this goal—including women’s internalization of the relevant social norms, narratives about women’s distinctive proclivities and preferences, and valorizing depictions of the relevant forms of care work as personally rewarding, socially necessary, morally valuable, “cool,” “natural,” or healthy (as long as women perform them).”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“propose taking sexism to be the branch of patriarchal ideology that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order, and misogyny as the system that polices and enforces its governing norms and expectations. So sexism is scientific; misogyny is moralistic. And a patriarchal order has a hegemonic quality.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“Her humanity may hence be held to be owed to other human beings, and her value contingent on her giving moral goods to them: life, love, pleasure, nurture, sustenance, and comfort, being some”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“For one such: women positioned in relations of asymmetrical moral support with men have historically been required to show him moral respect, approval, admiration, 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-worth. Her resentment or blame may feel like a betrayal, a reversal of the proper moral relations between them, and this may make him seek payback, revenge, retribution.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“On my analysis, misogyny’s primary function and constitutive manifestation is the punishment of “bad” women, and policing of women’s behavior. But systems of punishment and reward—and conviction and exoneration—tend to work together, holistically. So, the overall structural features of the account predict that misogyny as I’ve analyzed it is likely to work alongside other systems and mechanisms to enforce gender conformity. 7 And a little reflection on current social realities encourages pursuing this line of thinking, which would take the hostility women face to be the pointy, protruding tip of a larger patriarchal iceberg. 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.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“There is no reason to expect that misogyny will typically manifest itself in violence or even violent tendencies, contra Steven Finker. From the perspective of enforcing patriarchal social relations, this is not necessary. It is not even desirable. 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. There are numerous nonviolent and low-cost means of defusing the psychic threat posed by powerful women who are perceived as insufficiently oriented to serving dominant men's interests. For example, women may be taken down imaginatively, rather than literally, by vilifying, demonizing, belittling, humiliating, mocking, lampooning, shunning, and shaming them.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“For one such: women positioned in relations of asymmetrical moral support with men have historically been required to show him moral respect, approval, admiration, 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.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“There is no conflict between social progress for women and misogynist aggression toward them, contra Heather Mac Donald (2014). Progress and resentment are perfectly compatible. Indeed, women may be resented precisely because they are achieving rapid social progress in some areas. Some women's success in hitherto male-dominated roles, as well as their abandonment of traditionally feminine forms of care work, would be predicted in my analysis to provoke misogynistic hostility. Misogyny often stems from the desire to take women down, to put them in their place again. So the higher they climb, the farther they may be made to fall because of it. The glass ceiling may be broken; but then there may be smackdown. And some women get hit by shards of glass that rain down from others' rising.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“We may also lose sight of the fact that, in the eyes of the law, his crimes were committed against the people: that is, all of us, supposedly. And with regard to the rape victim who comes forward and bears witness to his crime, the question too often becomes, what does shewant out of this? She is envisaged not as playing her difficult part in a criminal proceeding, but rather as seeking personal vengeance and moral retribution. What’s more, she may be seen as being unforgiving, as trying to take something away from her rapist, rather than as contributing to upholding law and order. 17”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“But it is easy to be angry with the father, the judge, and the friend. It is also fitting, up to a point. Yet it would be a mistake to view them as on a different plane of moral obtuseness, as opposed to merely being on the extreme end of a himpathetic spectrum on which many of us lie. Brock Turner's defenders exhibited forgiving tendencies, and spun exonerating narratives, that are all too commonly extended to men in his position. And such tendencies seem largely from capacities and qualities of which we're rarely critical: such as sympathy, empathy, trust in one's friends, devotion to one's children, and having as much faith in someone's good character as is compatible with the evidence.

These are all important capacities and qualities, all else being equal. But they can have a downside, when all else is not equal: for example, when social inequality remains widespread. Their naive deployment will tend to further privilege those already unjustly privileged over others. And this may come at the expense of unfairly impugning, blaming, shaming, further endangering, and erasing the less privileged among their victims. In some cases, the perpetrators, knowing this, select their victims on this basis.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“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. The two narratives—Brown as having committed a minor wrong, and Brown as the victim of a major civil rights violation, perhaps even murder—seemed to compete with each other, even though these two possibilities are of course compatible.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“The judge in this case, Aaron Persky, similarly worried about “the severe impact” of the conviction on Turner’s future and gave him what was, by the relevant standards, a very lenient sentence (six months in county jail—of which he served just three—and three years’ probation). Much was made throughout the trial and sentencing of Brock Turner’s swimming prowess. And Dan Turner was still not satisfied, believing his son shouldn’t do any time whatsoever. He described his son’s crime as a mere “twenty minutes of action,” out of twenty years of good behavior (WTIW Staff 2016; see note 10 here.). But just as the murderer can’t claim credit for all of the people he didn’t kill, Turner was no less a rapist for all of the women he didn’t violate. And when there is one victim, it must be said: there are often others. So his father’s estimated ratio may have been on the low side. 11”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“When one’s effigy is one’s body, one burns right along with it.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“Limbaugh is an expert at channeling a sense of confusion, loss, and sadness common among his target audience-primarily white male conservatives, as well as some of their female counterparts-and transforming it into anger, partly by furnishing them with a suitable moral narrative that casts them in the role of victims.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

“There is no conflict between a man being vulnerable and insecure and his being a misogynist. Indeed, this kind of vulnerability would be predicted on my analysis to be a common trigger. Similarly, there is no conflict between someone being a racist (say) and his being a misogynist. On the contrary, it makes sense that a person would be fixated on his position in multiple salient social hierarchies.”
― Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny