Donald Trump broke into national consciousness during the GOP primaries by making outrageous comments. In August, 2015, he attacked the began the first GOP presidential debate with horrible comments about one of the moderators of the first debates, Megyn Kelly. Toward the end of the campaign, a tape of him bragging about sexually assaulting women was released. Yet he won and has now served as president for a year.
Kate Manne’s book Down Girl, is perfectly timed (despite having been in the works for many years—she swears Trump’s election is not just a marketing ploy to sell more books). Down Girl examines the concept of misogyny—deconstructing some of the common definitions, proposing one of her own, and examining the application of her definition in a variety of contexts, including (among many others) examining the tv show Fargo, Rush Limbaugh’s attack on the Georgetown Law Student who dared to make the case that contraceptives should be covered by health insurance, two high profile crimes, and concluding with an analysis of the role misogyny played in the recent presidential election.
Kate Manne is a professor of philosophy at Cornell, but you should not let that scare you away. While this is real philosophy, it is (almost) jargon free, and highly readable, even for those with zero background in philosophy (full disclosure: my undergrad major was Ethics and Political Philosophy 40 years ago, but am in no sense a philosopher).
To risk over-simplifying Prof. Manne’s thesis, she defines misogyny as a system of customs and actions designed to signal to women that they should “stay in their lane” and not compete for what have traditionally been coded as jobs (which I am using loosely to include all social roles) reserved for men. She rejects the view that misogyny is defined by the motives of the men in question, and instead suggests that the key is examining the impact of the actions and social structures on women—do they have the effect of signaling to women that they are out of line? Do they impose a cost on women not borne by men in similar situations? If so, they are examples of misogyny, regardless of the intent of the actor. Viewed this way, people who perform acts furthering misogyny can love their wives, mothers and girlfriends, without contradiction). Note that this allows women to engage in actions which constitute misogyny as well.
It is important to note the limitations of Prof. Manne’s book. Early on, she explicitly states that she is not qualified to address—and will not examine in any detail—the very important issues of the intersection of race and misogyny, or the special case of how misogyny intersects with the struggle by transwomen for equal rights. That said, in the final chapter, she does discuss race, and its interplay with misogyny, in the context of examining Trump’s victory over Clinton.
But it is the earlier chapters of the book which I found to be the most thought provoking. Prof. Manne rejects the idea that misogyny depends on pretending that women are somehow less human than men—rather, they are viewed as serious competitors for male coded jobs who—precisely because of their full humanity—must be slapped down. I am not sure that I agree. Using John Rawls’ framework of the “veil of ignorance,” you must consider the possibility that you would fill any of the “fully human” slots once the “veil” is removed, and are thus motivated to develop moral rules which would benefit you, regardless of your future position in society. However, you need not consider the impact of your proposed moral rules on those who are viewed as less than “fully human,” as you can be assured that you will not fill one of those slots. It is in this sense, that the ethical rules applicable to non-human animals are generally considered less compelling than those applicable to humans. Applying this formula to misogyny, if you adopt a moral rule which allows misogyny to exist, then you presumably don’t believe that you will be assigned a role as a woman—otherwise, why would you purposely inflict handicaps on yourself? In this sense, I think that racism and misogyny both depend on some level on the assumption by those in power that women (and non-white people) are not fully human.
To be clear, my argument against Manne on this point in no way detracts from my admiration of Professor Manne’s book—it adds to it. I love books that engages me in this sort of thought process. It is why I chose an undergraduate major in philosophy, and it is an exercise I (and I suspect many people) engage in only rarely after we leave college. Reading Down Girl was for me an excellent way to regain that habit.
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"Down Girl" tops my list of favourite books of 2017. I love this book and placed it on my shelf of feminist classics.
What is misogyny? On the face of it, it's the tendency of individuals to feel hatred, or hostility, to any and every woman. But that's too simple, and also inaccurate, as Kate Manne argues cogently in Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Rather, she says, misogyny is primarily a property of social systems, "in which women will tend to face hostility of various kinds, because they are women in a man's world (i.e. the patriarchy), who are held to be failing to live up to patriarchal standards." This hostility can take multiple forms, from infantilizing women to violence and threats, but also includes "ridiculing, humiliating, mocking, slurring, vilifying, demonizing, as well as sexualizing or, alternatively, desexualizing, silencing, shunning, shaming, blaming, patronizing, condescending, and other forms of treatment that are dismissive and disparaging."Manne draws on a wealth of examples, from the horrific threats Hillary Clinton faced in her 2016 Presidential campaign to the ways in which rapists sometimes receive more sympathy ("himpathy") than their victims. Her book also offered me many personal insights: As I was reading it I looked back at events and relationships of the past, and thought, "ah, that explains so much." Manne's writing crystallized for me why people behaved the way that they did, and why I responded the way I did. In doing so, it helped me reassess the past from a place of greater strength. I highly recommend it.
Top reviews from the United States
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Reviewed in the United States on December 30, 2017
illuminating; shifts the paradigm of misogyny from something haters do to something women experience
Reviewed in the United States on April 9, 2019Top reviews from other countries
QB
It's the COSTS not the MOTIVE.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 11, 2018
Furiosa
If you to understand misogyny better this is the book
Reviewed in Australia on June 11, 2018