Kate Manne : The Logics of Misogyny

What Elliot Rodger did on the evening of Friday, May 23, 2014, isn’t contested, but the reason he did it is. That night Rodger knocked on the door of a sorority house near the University of California, Santa Barbara, and when the women inside didn’t let him in, he left and shot three women who were on the sidewalk, and then continued the rampage, ultimately killing six people and injuring fourteen. He then shot and killed himself.

Before the attacks, Rodger posted a video of himself online, declaring that he intended to punish women for not giving him the attention he felt he deserved—and the men whom he perceived as receiving that attention and therefore envied. In light of the evidence, a number of feminist commentators called the killing spree an act of misogyny, part of a pattern of gender-based rampages. But others in the media and the academy argued differently. They claimed the cause was mental illness.

It was then that Kate Manne, an assistant professor of philosophy at Cornell University, started to write. What was missing from the debate, Manne thought, was a clear account of the nature of misogyny, and so she set out to develop one. The result is her new book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, a carefully argued work aimed at a broad audience, which proposes that misogyny is the act of correcting women who fail to give men what men believe they’re due.

Manne tosses out the common thinking that misogyny is equivalent to despising all women, and instead offers that it’s a way to keep women in their place. Misogyny, she writes, is “the system that operates within a patriarchal social order to police and enforce women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance.” Like a shock collar used to keep dogs behind an invisible fence, misogyny, she argues, aims to keep women—those who are well trained as well as those who are unruly—in line. The power of Manne’s definition comes from its ability to bring together various behaviors and events under one umbrella. If misogyny is anything that enforces women’s subordination, then it turns out that lots of phenomena fit the profile.

I spoke with Manne over the phone in an attempt to shed some light on this past year, during which so many brave women have come forward to share their experiences of sexual trauma and have actually been taken seriously. The moment is ripe for a reckoning, and Manne offers the language and theory I’ve found myself grasping for. Originally from Melbourne, Australia, she combines the hyper-articulateness of a philosopher and the energy and humor of a down-to-earth millennial, which is electrifying; I imagine she’s a popular professor. At one point during our call, her corgi happily barked in the background, and she pointed out that her dog “couldn’t be silenced” by the patriarchy.

More than anything, I could feel an urgency on the line. Manne is restlessly driven by a sense that things are not right, a sense that this world is a very unjust place for women. She doesn’t think she can fix it. “I’m much more a clarity person than a solutions person,” she says. But she does believe that philosophy can help us understand what’s at stake in the broader fight to overcome patriarchy. “It’s so far from cessation,” she says, “but I’m not despairing.”

—Regan Penaluna for Guernica

Guernica: Why did you write a book about misogyny?

Kate Manne: “Misogyny” wasn’t on my radar until October 2012, when the prime minister of Australia, Julia Gillard, used it in a speech before parliament to call out Tony Abbott, the then opposition party leader, for his sexist and misogynist behavior. Although Gillard’s speech went viral, the occasion for her anger was lost on many people. Abbott had originally demanded Gillard call for the resignation of one of her ministers, who had sent text messages leaked to the media likening women’s genitals to mussels—shucked, he specified—and calling a female colleague an “ignorant botch,” thanks to the Freudian intervention of auto-correct. But Gillard did not want to have to call on Slipper [the minister] to resign; to her mind, he was still a serviceable minister. And she was not sanguine about being “lectured,” as she put it, by Abbott on fitting conduct with regards to gender.

When Gillard’s speech became news, I was interested to realize that “misogyny” wasn’t one of my words—to the extent that I couldn’t remember ever having used it, or even having heard it discussed at length by analytic feminist philosophers. And this despite just having finished a PhD in a philosophy department that is a research hub in that area.

“Misogyny” is also a word that I could have used earlier on in life, as I came to realize later. As one of three girls to attend a hitherto all-boys’ school, I experienced a fair amount of what I now think of as misogynist hostility. “Bitch,” “slut,” and “cunt” were common epithets inscribed in permanent marker on my locker, which was also doused with fish oil to express a disgust of the vagina. I didn’t understand the meaning of the olfactory slur back then, and had to have it explained to me, much to my embarrassment. I experienced other derogations and #metoo moments almost daily. It was against this backdrop that l ultimately came to think misogyny needed a thorough theoretical treatment, after the shootings by Rodger in May 2014.

It wasn’t just what happened that gripped me with horror, though that was certainly part of it. It was also the difficulty of pointing out the gendered nature of the hateful violence plainly, without its importance and systematicity being denied or at least minimized. If not here and now, then when?

Guernica: You also write about a gruesome scene from the TV series Fargo, in which the male protagonist bashes in the face of his wife because the washing machine broke. You felt there was something morally wrong about the presentation by the show makers, and were disturbed by your inability to articulate why. What do you think now?

Kate Manne: Yeah, that’s exactly right. I think what that episode demonstrates most, which I took even longer to articulate, is “himpathy.” The premise of that first episode and the way it gets you hooked is the idea that you will identify enough with his point of view, both literally and metaphorically, to be invested in his fate, and his escaping law enforcement. At the end, his wife is presented as a nagging bitch whom he shuts up.

[His act of violence] is represented as anomalous. It might be anomalous to have Elliot Rodger, in particular, lash out at a sorority house, or this guy in this fictional case in Fargo kill a woman for mocking him about a washing machine repair. But the broader pattern of lashing out because of that feeling that women haven’t been giving enough—that’s everywhere.

Misogyny is the stuff that women face that destroys them in some instances. “Himpathy” is part of the explanation of why we don’t see it, because we’re identifying with “him” and seeing “him” as the good guy, or worrying about “his” future. We don’t see him as taking a life. We see him as asserting his masculinity or defending himself, or as a poor pathetic character, or as vulnerable. Sometimes these things are true, that he is pathetic and vulnerable, but let’s focus on the women.

Guernica: You disagree with defining misogyny as a psychologically motivated phenomenon. Why?

Kate Manne: Yeah. I think it would make misogyny a virtually nonexistent problem. I think it’s based on a stereotypical view of anti-Semitism. It’s just false that Nazis hated all Jews. Like, that was the rhetoric, but you have Eichmann with a Jewish mistress and Jewish family members. There’s a general myth about prejudice, that it’s going to be leveled toward any and every member of a certain historically subordinate class, rather than that it’s something that comes out as a method for enforcing and policing social hierarchies.

So, the first move that I make in defining misogyny is to make it something that needn’t target any and every woman. I understand it not as this psychological property of individuals, but as something that women and girls face, not because they’re women in a man’s mind, but because they’re women in a man’s world. And they’re either represented as, or actually seen as, the epitome of girls and women who are transgressing the norms and expectations of the patriarchy that misogyny polices, enforces, and keeps in place.

Guernica: What are the different ways that misogyny discourages women from challenging the patriarchy?

Kate Manne: I think silencing is a big part of it. And silencing can mean replacing anything unpleasant to the patriarchal collective consciousness with pleasantries—like saying, “He’s a good guy.” And it can mean not speaking out, or defending him, as well as not testifying to his misdeeds.

But I think it takes so many forms that it’s almost difficult to catalog. Basically, take any hierarchy that people care about, like aesthetic, or women’s bodies, or women’s intellect, or women’s moral goodness, or women’s moral status, and you can punish someone or threaten someone with the prospect of being down-ranked according to that hierarchy. Or you can just express anger and lash out in a way that’s a more direct kind of shock to the system. It can be a low-grade, unpleasant vibration, like disapproval. Or it can be the really huge outbursts of violence and the shocks that burn, and are on their own called trauma.

Guernica: You argue that sexism and misogyny aren’t the same thing. Misogyny enforces patriarchal norms, whereas sexism rationalizes them—for example, by arguing for gender differences, especially where men come out superior to women. There are scientific studies suggesting that men and women think differently, feel differently, or generally perceive the world differently due to biological differences. I don’t think that the scientists who conduct these studies would call their own research sexist. I think they’d say that they’re merely observing nature, and that to call nature sexist is a categorical error. What would you say to them?

Kate Manne: I think a lot of that science is bad science. There’s no control group in a patriarchal culture. There’s no group of women raised such as not to have sexist theories and misogynistic enforcement mechanisms operating on them. Of course some differences will show up. But it doesn’t lead to an enhanced kind of epistemic state, where we know something interesting and new about two different groups. So it’s not knowledge producing science.

One thing that these pieces of scientific research do is they end up conserving the null hypothesis of no difference. You know, by showing some sex difference, they then make it seem like less of a concern if women are underrepresented, say, in philosophy. They make it seem like, well, that’s just what we’d expect. It’s also used to continue to rationalize exclusion, and say, “Yeah, it’s not a big worry.” We don’t have to worry about sexual harassment in philosophy, or the subtle exclusion mechanisms of great philosophers, or syllabi that are totally dominated by white men. Because women just aren’t as into philosophy. But come look at my intro philosophy classes! They’re, like, 60 percent women and 30 percent women of color. I really think, anecdotally, we can do better.

Guernica: What is it like writing a book about misogyny in philosophy, a field that is historically hostile to women and in which even today women are greatly underrepresented?

Kate Manne: Because misogyny divides women into good women and bad women, I feel like—partly due to things like white privilege, class privilege, having a professor father who taught me to sort of talk the academic talk—I’ve been treated as one of the “good ones.”

Here’s an anecdote that I actually haven’t told anyone beyond philosophy. I have a background in logic, which I think helps, because it’s heavily masculine-coded. One of the first times I gave a talk based on the first few chapters of the book, it was at a university where a very prominent feminist philosopher had recently died. And after the talk, one of the faculty members compared me to this recently deceased feminist philosopher, [who was] his colleague of many years. And he said, “I think you’re much better than her. I think you’re a real philosopher.”

And that was my second year as an assistant professor, so I couldn’t make the equivalent of the vomit-face emoji. I just kind of stopped in my tracks at how lacking in self-awareness, and how morally hideous, what he’d just done was. I just asked him what he meant by that. And it turned out he felt like his colleague had done mostly sociology, and somehow he thought that I was doing philosophy, because of the distinctions I’d made.

Why is philosophy an honorific? We should just be talking about what’s interesting, and there’s lots of stuff, sociologically and psychologically, that is worth talking about. [What he did] is just another way in which hierarchies are enforced. Philosophy is masculine-coded, but thinks of itself as the ultimate humanity.

Guernica: You’re critical of the argument that misogyny is a problem because women aren’t treated as human. In fact, you argue that women are treated as “all too human.” What do you mean by that?

Kate Manne: Yeah, that’s just the wrong metaphor. I feel like it’s just really implausible that women wouldn’t be seen as human, because there’s no spatial segregation. And women have been having human babies for men. It’s also so exonerating for men, like, “Oh, if they only just got it.” No. What’s to get? Here we women are talking, walking, writing, being athletes and comedians, and trying pretty much every human activity that is known to mankind. Pun intended. And men freak out when women do human things. It’s not that men don’t get it, it’s that they don’t welcome human equality.

The other part of it, too, is that I think [this metaphor] misses that violence doesn’t need an elaborate psychological explanation. Men do violence to women all the time as a method of enforcing norms or punching down. It’s just not true that people have these huge inhibitions when it comes to violence. Like, maybe with people they don’t know, but with people whom they’re intimate with, and want to express resentment against, it’s ubiquitous.

Guernica: You also touch upon “misogynoir.” Can you say more?

Kate Manne: “Misogynoir” is [the scholar] Moya Bailey’s term for the potent intersection of anti-black racism and misogyny faced by African American women in the US. One example of misogynoir that I write about in my book is the case of Daniel Holtzclaw, formerly a police officer in Oklahoma City, who preyed on black women—often those who were also further vulnerable in that they were sex workers, poor, and/or were known by the police to have drug addiction issues. Holtzclaw was ultimately convicted of eighteen counts of sexual assault—including sexual battery, rape, and forcible oral sodomy—against these women. The jury, which found him guilty of these crimes, sentenced Holtzclaw to 263 years in prison. The convictions only represented eight of his thirteen accusers. But the white feminist silence around the case in the press, at least initially, was telling—and, I argue, shameful.

So in the book I’ve tried to speak mostly as a white woman who can very easily be made complicit in not only misogyny in general, but misogynoir in particular. But also, I’ve tried to make it clear that I think there’s a crucial need for continuing to theorize misogynoir in academic philosophy, especially due to the extreme absence of a sufficient number of people of color in general [in the field], and black women in particular. We need more voices on the subject. And I think the same applies to trans misogyny, too. We need more trans voices urgently.

Guernica: You also write about how Hillary Clinton’s loss in the 2016 presidential election was due in large part to misogyny. What’s your thinking there?

Kate Manne: The question I’m interested in is how we got to that point, and why I think it was predictable. It was so obvious. The thing is, people think the rhetoric is unique to Clinton, and it’s just not. It’s the same thing we said about Julia Gillard [the former prime minister of Australia]. You know: bitch, witch, liar. She was seen as so fake, like a nest of Russian dolls. She has many masks, but who has seen her face? There were also complaints about her voice. Endless complaints about her breaking promises and being corrupt, such that she was even brought up on these bogus corruption charges after she left office.

Guernica: So Clinton’s loss is an example of a woman trying to punch above her station, but failing because misogyny forced her down?

Kate Manne: Exactly. Hierarchies are really, really hard to shift. And people don’t realize they’re post-hoc rationalizing when they use values like competence or likeability, just to keep [the male opponent] up.

Guernica: You talk about how despite Trump’s blatant misogyny the majority of white women voters supported him. There was also a lot of support among white women for Roy Moore, the republican candidate for the Alabama senate, who was accused by numerous women of sexual assault. You write in your book, “Misogyny works to disrupt female solidarity, especially among white women.” Why is that?

Kate Manne: I was so angry after the election. But it’s important to be clear that white men are worse, and are more to blame.

About 90 percent of white women who are partnered with men are partnered with white men, and that’s according to the most recent Pew statistics I’ve seen. It could have shifted slightly, but that just gives an indication of how homogenous white women’s preferences are, and how racist. If you hold fixed, both in time and also as a causal explanatory factor, that white men were the vast majority of Trump supporters, you see women falling into line with these white men in support of Trump. White women doing that, it feels like such a betrayal. And it sucks so much. And I feel so ashamed of it.

On the other hand, the book shows what’s at stake in resisting white supremacist patriarchy, which is misogyny of the most brutal kind that’s visited partly on more vulnerable women, women of color, but also on white women within these racially homogenous and patriarchal partnerships.

Guernica: What about misogyny in art and literature—how should we address it? Not just artists who are or might be labeled misogynist, but also the portrayals of women that are misogynist. The traditional argument is that some of these works are beyond moral reproach because they’re genius.

Kate Manne: I’ve overlooked so many problems that are not just moral, but artistic. Iris Murdoch, who’s a philosopher I just love, thought of morality as the battle to see what’s real, and to strip away the gossamer tissue of seeing the world in a way that is self-centered and egocentric.

I think there’s so much truth in that. It’s often the case now that I’ll see or read something that I used to think of as great. There are artists that rate as incredibly crude, and [indulge] male fantasies. There’s often a premise in these conversations that it is great art, and that we haven’t overestimated it. But I think oftentimes that we have overestimated it, because it has this element of just centering around one kind of person’s story, and one kind of person’s voice. And the other thing is, it’s such a good opportunity to branch out, because there’s so much underestimated art made by women of color that just hasn’t been really attended to.

    Guernica: Now that the book is done, what are you working on?

Kate Manne: I’m interested in gaslighting. In misogyny from the inside, from the perspective of the gaslit, someone who fears being morally punished—not just being treated as bad, but being bad for doing things that are in reality just fine. Like saying no to sex. I guess I’m really talking about all of the ways in which women don’t know our own wills or minds, and also in which women [are encouraged] to act against them because of social control structures.

Kate Manne: The Shock Collar That Is Misogyny.  By Regan Penaluna. Guernica ,  Februay 7, 2018

Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny is an accessible and timely exploration of a particular aspect of gendered oppression that has received surprisingly little scholarly treatment. There is a lot of feminist work on sexism, oppression, and patriarchy, but misogyny, as Manne defines it, is distinct from all of these. Her purpose in this book is to describe misogyny as a distinct force present in contemporary society, and to show how it shapes public life. The strength of Manne’s account is that it detaches misogyny from the intentions and attitudes of individual misogynists, showing instead how it is a feature of a patriarchal society.

Misogyny, according to Manne, is like the law enforcement arm of a patriarchal social order. Its function is not to justify women, or non-men, as having a lower place in social hierarchy, but is rather to enforce that lower social status. Misogyny is not a matter of individual attitudes or sexist hatred of women, and in fact it is entirely consistent to claim that misogynist acts can be committed by people who desired women, perhaps loved them in some way. This is important, since one of Manne’s primary motivating examples, the Isla Vista killings, was committed by a man who was deeply angry and resentful at the lack of sexual attention he received from women. His reaction was to lash out against what he saw as an unjust state of affairs—a violation of the patriarchal social order according to which he was owed the women he desired—and attempt to punish many of the women he saw as unjustly withholding attention from him by shooting people at a nearby sorority. The tool that Manne has provided us with for understanding this is a framework under which misogynist violence is a matter of maintaining subordination.

The introduction and first few chapters of Manne’s book introduce these basic ideas and other such motivating instances of misogynist hostility. She argues against such things in terms of what she calls the naive conception of misogyny, which sees misogyny as a matter of individual hatred or hostility towards women—individually or as a group. That gendered violence is more complex than simple hatred should not be surprising to anyone familiar with statistics of violence against women, since the majority of violence enacted against women is at the hands of people they know, often current or former intimate partners, and sometimes in the name of love or desire. It would seem more difficult to consider such violence as misogynist under the naive conception, since these crimes seem motivated by something other than hatred of the women who are victimized by it. And indeed, on Manne’s conception of misogyny, it is relatively independent of the individual feelings that the perpetrators of the violence have towards their victims. Rather, it is a matter of their enforcement of a certain social ranking that places women below men. Under Manne’s conception, misogyny punishes women who are not playing their patriarchally approved role. Unlike sexism, its role is not to justify what the role of women ought to be, but, given a system under which women are held to be subordinate, it enforces such subordination by means that are sometimes coercive or violent.

One feature of Manne’s definition of misogyny that makes it more friendly to feminist analysis than the naive conception, is that it centers the women who are punished by it, rather than the (typically male) enforcers of the patriarchal system. As such, we are better able to see what unreasonable demands patriarchy makes of women. This is the subject of Manne’s fourth chapter: considering how women are positioned as givers of characteristically moral goods such as affection and care. Now, on Manne’s distinction between sexism and misogyny, it is sexism that determines what women owe and to whom, but misogyny that enforces it, perhaps by punishing women who seem to be shirking their duties, or taking social goods that coded as masculine. Sometimes, this takes the form of anger and hostility towards successful women, rising, perhaps, above their station, or taking positions that men should rightfully be holding. Though when it comes to the goods that women are supposed to be providing, it is not always the case that there is a particular woman whose duty it is to provide them. In the case of the perpetrator of the Isla Vista killings, Elliot Rodger, his anger was directed at “hot women” in general, who were to be punished indiscriminately, since none of them were giving them the sexual or romantic attention he believed he merited. In calling himself an incel (involuntary celibate), he, and others who adopt the label, mark themselves as being among men who are unjustly deprived of feminine goods.

All this continues to speak against the naive conception of misogyny that views it as a more straightforward phenomenon of anger and hatred. Manne’s conception of misogyny allows us, for instance, to understand the narrowly circumscribed ways in which misogyny can allow women’s strength to be valued—when that strength is used to stand by or support some man or other. Also, it can explain why successful right-wing women are generally less targeted by misogyny; this framework allows us to understand this by noting that in such cases, women’s power is generally being used in support of patriarchal interests, such as “traditional family values.” Another advantage of moving away from the naive conception is that it lets us situate seemingly distinct types of misogynist violence within the same phenomenon of dissatisfaction with status. Family annihilators are typically successful men who, facing some kind of loss, such as bankruptcy or demotion, kill both their families and themselves. But like incel violence, this can also be seen as a misplaced reaction against low status (in the case of incels) or loss of status (in the case of many annihilators). So we can situate both types of violence on the same sort of continuum, which also demonstrates how a patriarchal system that associates men’s worth with their hetero-romantic and material success is ultimately going to fail people of several different genders.

The analysis of women as providers of feminine-coded goods is also used in Manne’s fifth chapter, to argue against a view that sees misogyny as an issue of dehumanization. More specifically, she argues against a view called humanism, which is a conjunction of several distinct but interrelated theses. This view takes dehumanization to be a key factor in many different forms of oppression, though particularly war crimes. Under such a view, the failure to treat or recognize others as fellow humans is the best explanation of why we treat each other in cruel, humiliating, and degrading ways. Applied to misogyny, the failure to recognize women as fully human, or the tendency to treat women as objects, is the best explanation for women’s mistreatment. And consequently, the best remedy for it would be to find strategies through which women could be portrayed as fully human, or in which common humanity could be showcased.

Manne’s primary argument against the humanist thesis relies on her insights from chapter four, namely that misogyny involves treating women as distinctively human and positions them as human givers. Given the nature of the moral goods that many perpetrators of misogynist violence see as being unjustly withheld, their stance on women seems incompatible with one of dehumanization. More specifically, incels like Rodger view women as being capable of love, affection, and deep emotional relationships; after all, these are the very things that they are demanding of the women they resent. But these capacities are distinctively human ones, and so dehumanization as an explanation of their cruelty towards women seems difficult to square with their stated attitudes. Further, the hostility displayed towards many successful women, such as Hillary Clinton or Julia Gillard, is explained on Manne’s framework as a result of their occupying traditionally male positions of power, or taking what, on a patriarchal scheme, they are not owed. But such a stance towards them positions them as human rivals or usurpers, which is incompatible with the humanist thesis as it has been characterized.

This chapter, though, reveals the primary weakness of Manne’s book, which is its focus on a single axis of oppression. Manne acknowledges other oppressions, such as racism and transphobia, and notes with regret in her introduction that she is unable to discuss them in much detail, and they are noted in several examples, say of misogynoir. It would be unfair to demand that one book do everything, but chapter five does mark at least some ways in which Manne’s analysis could have benefited from further consideration of issues such as racism. While I think she is right, in the examples she considers, such as hostility towards women such as Clinton and Gillard, that dehumanization plays no significant role, much of the literature on dehumanization focuses on ways in which it is applied to people of particular ethnic groups, rather than people of a particular gender identity. Accounts of dehumanization that she considers, like David Livingstone Smith’s, argue that dehumanization portrays a people as simultaneously human and inhuman. They are are seen as “uncanny,” like monsters or beasts wearing human faces, but such characterizations are often given along ethnic lines.

In pushing back against accounts like Smith’s, Manne points out the tension between it and atrocities such as sexual enslavement and wartime rape, arguing that, were dehumanization the mechanism that enabled the atrocities in such cases, we would find more aversion on the part of the perpetrators. We do not, after all, generally want to have sex with monsters, regardless of their outward appearance. Now, I grant to Manne that we do not typically want sexual relationships with the uncanny or monstrous—incels who desire sexual relationships with women might hate or resent women but still view them as human. But it is not clear that wartime rape (and other instances of rape) are sexual encounters, much less relationships. I think that we could view rape in such cases as a way of degrading a certain kind of good or loot, namely women. Soldiers in war might burn homes in a show of dominance over enemy civilians, just as they might steal valuables. They might just as well use rape as a way of destroying or defiling what is seen as essentially property.

What Manne gets right, though, is that we have no reason to think that misogynist violence generally occurs because women are dehumanized. But on an account of misogyny under which it is primarily a matter of putting women back in their place, it is likely not the source of all instances of women’s mistreatment. Factors such as ableism, racism, and transphobia may intersect with both misogyny and sexism in complex ways that are certainly worth further exploration. Women, as Manne argues, are positioned as providers of particular kinds of goods, particularly moral goods of care, service, and attention. But the form such giving is supposed to take might vary with the social identity of the woman in question, as well as the way in which she is to be punished for failing to provide it. I think this just shows us, though, how much more work on misogyny has yet to be done, and how Manne’s book provides us with an important starting point for further research.

In chapter six, now, Manne considers the stories we tell about the perpetrators of misogynist violence. Connecting misogyny to the issue of testimonial injustice, she considers how the latter can be seen as a mechanism through which hierarchies of subordination can be preserved. Situations of testimonial injustice are cases in which someone suffers a credibility deficit as a result of systemic identity prejudice. We can see many so-called “he said, she said” situations as instances of testimonial injustice, in which stereotypes about women’s capriciousness or irrationality can make their word less valuable than that of men. This is the flip side of misogyny as punishing women trying to rise above their supposed place; here we see misogyny as protecting more dominant men from falling from their place, namely by shielding them from accusations of wrongdoing. Testimonial injustice in the service of misogyny protects men who do wrong. Part of this protective function is what Manne calls himpathy, which is an excess of sympathy and understanding towards men, particularly male perpetrators of violence against women. We can see this in many media portrayals of those accused of sexual assault or harassment, which sometimes seek to demonstrate how men have their lives ruined by such accusations. What is missing here, of course, is the extent to which such narratives neglect the impact on the lives of victims of assault or harassment. But in a male-dominated social order, such omissions are sometimes what protects the status quo.

What, then, can victims do to be heard or believed? Chapter seven discusses the sometimes disparaged trope of women playing the victim, often dismissed as part of a culture of fragility and melodrama. This goes along with a further image of women making false accusations against powerful men in order to serve their own ends. But, as Manne points out in this chapter, what ends? Those who cast themselves in the role of victim, particularly when the perpetrator is a man with significant social power, do not often get a great deal of public sympathy—the latter, tending as it does, towards himpathy. Victims who deviate from an image of innocence and moral purity are often the subject of humiliating public scrutiny and speculations about hidden agendas which might lead them to have vendettas against those they accuse. Yet sometimes the benefits of exposing wrongdoing end up outweighing the personal costs. Without those willing take such risks and make public their experiences, many predators and misogynists might well continue unhindered.

The final chapter in Manne’s book deals with the case study of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. While I have claimed that the book’s main shortcoming is its insufficient attention to modes of oppression beyond gender, it does provide an ideal way to analyze the treatment of high-status white women like Clinton, as well as the Australian politician Julia Gillard. Both women were notably criticized as being power-hungry liars, and marked by significant suspicion in the public eye, despite a lack of evidence of untrustworthiness. But of course, misogyny gives us a reason not to trust women such as this, who attempt to usurp positions that are traditionally occupied by men. Such transgressions lead to their being viewed with disgust and contempt, as so-called “nasty women.” Since attempting to run for high public office is already against the patriarchal rules, it is easy to see how women who do so are seen as rule-breakers or as unreliable generally. Misogyny, then, explains how a president like Trump, who has been caught in several lies and has admitted on tape to sexual assault (dismissed, of course, as “locker room talk”), is still seen by his supporters as trustworthy. He is, after all, doing what is expected of him.

So where does this leave us with respect to misogyny? Manne’s conclusion is pessimistic. Our society is one in which patriarchal social norms are deeply entrenched, sometimes with deadly consequences. Looking at daily events with her framework in mind reveals an unfortunate abundance of “down girl” moves, in which we see women face negative consequences for disrupting patriarchal strictures. The goal of the book, though, was not to provide prescriptions for ameliorating misogyny, but rather to help us understand the role it plays in our social life. So while Down Girl is not a hopeful read, it is an important one for the time in which we live.

As I said at the outset, the book is also quite accessible for audiences less familiar with feminist philosophy. The discussion of testimonial injustice may be somewhat difficult without the relevant background, as well as some portions of the discussion of dehumanization. But overall, even those parts of the book that engage with and make more technical philosophical points are grounded in concrete examples that make at least the overall shape of the argument clear. As such, the insights it provides make it a valuable addition to feminist philosophy, as well as an important read for anyone seeking to understand our contemporary political and social climate.

Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Oxford University Press, 2017. Review by Audrey Yap.  Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal ,  August 15, 2018

Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny | Robert Wright talks with  Kate Manne [The Wright Show]

November 19, 2018. Video

Misogyny has long been understood as something men feel, not something women experience. That, says philosopher Kate Manne, is a mistake. In her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Manne defines misogyny as “as primarily a property of social environments,” one that not only doesn’t need hatred of women to function, but actually calms hatred of women when it is functioning.

Politics is thick right now with arguments over misogyny, patriarchy, and gender roles. These arguments are powering media controversies, political candidacies, and ideological movements. Manne’s framework makes so much more sense of this moment than the definitions and explanations most of us have been given. This is one of those conversations that will let you see the world through a new lens.

In part because her framework touches on so much, this is a conversation that covers an unusual amount of ground. We talk about misogyny and patriarchy, of course, but also anxiety, Jordan Peterson, the role of shame in politics, my recent meditation retreat, Sweden, the social roles that grind down men, and a piece of satire in McSweeney’s that might just be the key to understanding the 2016 and 2020 elections.

The Ezra Klein Show, Ezra Klein talks with Kate Manne.   Vox,  January 31, 2019.   Podcast

The word ‘misogyny’ was rarely used when I was training to be a child psychotherapist in London in the late 1970s, but the question that invariably came up when children were being assessed was: ‘how much’ – or, rather, ‘in what sense’ – was the mother to blame? The question wasn’t explicit; even in those days people were mindful of the significance of political and economic conditions, racism and sexism, and transgenerational histories, and psychoanalysis was against blaming. Indeed if psychoanalysis was a theory of anything it was a theory of scapegoating as the saboteur of development. And yet, more often than not, the focus was on the mothers: on their histories, their states of mind, their sexuality, their failure to protect their children when there were abusive men around. There was an aversion to blaming mothers, but mothers were often told, in the nicest possible way, that if only they had done, or could do (or feel) this, this and this, their children wouldn’t be so unhappy. (Mothers and child therapists each, in their different ways, had a lot of explaining to do.) In those days, when there was a viable NHS, there were a lot of amazingly sympathetic and imaginative people working in child-guidance clinics and departments of child psychiatry, and a remarkable service of care was often provided. But, as one of my supervisors said to me, ‘No one can ever really forgive their mother.’

Freud, however, had been more preoccupied by fathers, differing in this respect from the prominent British child analysts Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby. Questions were asked about the significance of the father in child development, and family therapy opened up the family as a system rather than a cult of personality. At the same time we were encouraged to believe that everything depended on what the mother was like, and what the experience of dependence was like (for both the mother and the child). So powerful had mothers – and their absences – been in everyone’s life that something about femininity was deemed to require a great deal of regulation, much of it punitive and some of it nominally and some of it genuinely therapeutic. And this is where the plot against women’s pleasure (and aggression) begins, and in particular the plot against women’s pleasure that excluded men (and children).

The male child, in this story, had to turn the trauma of having been mothered into the triumphalism of male potency. In this set-up vulnerability is masculinity’s dirty secret, leaving men with a haunting and haunted sense of impotence that only becoming a bully can assuage. Looked at this way, development would be about getting even. Boys who have grown up experiencing their mothers’ care as a regime become men who are intent on turning the tables, on revenge. (Not surprisingly it is problematic for adolescent girls that boys treat them as both alluring and frightening.) And psychoanalysis was left trying to address everyone’s terror of their own misogyny. It wasn’t just that everyone wanted to kill the thing they loved, but that they mostly wanted to keep it alive in order to torture it, unable to forgive their own need for someone they could not be everything to. In this story the child’s dependence on the mother was tainted by his fear of harming her when he felt let down, as he always did, and by his terror of abandonment. The child’s question was: how do you sustain contact with someone you need when you are all too often enraged with her? How can you ever be confident that your love is stronger, and better, than your hate?

In this account of child development it wasn’t hard to understand why men felt enraged by women, even if that wasn’t all they felt. Similarly mothers don’t necessarily intend to frustrate, though they are inevitably experienced as frustrating. Desire, as Freud pointed out, is always in excess of any object’s capacity to satisfy it. (Though that never stopped anyone wanting what they want.) Children are frustrated, and mothers are guilty (among many other things). In Freud’s view, we are ambivalent animals, partly because we were born with varying amounts of innate love and hate, and partly because hate is what we feel when love is frustrated; and love is always frustrated. Everyone, in this account, is ambivalent about both their parents, and indeed about anyone and anything they love; the discrepancy between the ideal loved object of fantasy and the real loved object is always only more or less bearable. People could never get over the fact that the people they loved and desired weren’t exactly the ones they wanted.

It was the child analysts, perhaps unsurprisingly, who made early development all about mothering, and who made early development the key to all subsequent development. The child starts out in a state of absolute dependence on the mother (or caretaker), and if all goes well – if the child has a ‘good-enough mother’, is sufficiently well attached, isn’t born with too much innate aggression and develops appropriately – he begins to acknowledge that the mother he depends on can’t be controlled by him and doesn’t desire only to satisfy him. The mother who can make him feel wonderful by satisfying his needs is by the same token the mother who can make him feel deranged and destitute by frustrating him. So mothers are the best and worst of people; and at some ‘deep’ level all women are experienced as mothers. Women are exorbitantly promising, and so shatteringly disappointing. They are the most gifted and competent people in the world, and the least. The kindest and the cruellest, the cleverest and the most stupid; the most reliable and the most fickle; the most virtuous and the most immoral. Women are maddening because they don’t invariably make everyone feel better, because they don’t give us exactly what we want when we want it. In this version women are ineluctably set up to fail – i.e. more often than not the focus of murderous aggression. ‘Some women are not beautiful,’ Karl Kraus wrote: ‘they just look as though they are.’ And so on and on and on. When misogyny isn’t horrifying or dispiriting, it is unrelentingly boring.

Everybody loves and hates the people they most depend on; traditionally, it was a woman, though it isn’t always so now. What they really hate, psychoanalysis suggests, and sometimes insists, is the part of themselves that is dependent. And they protect this part of themselves by attacking its object: men don’t hate women – they hate their need for women. In this account people are always, but to varying degrees, enraged that they are not self-sufficient, that they aren’t omniscient, omnipotent gods; the happily dependent part of oneself thinks it is wonderful to live in a world in which people can do different things: the unhappily dependent part thinks, why can’t I do that? It couldn’t be more straightforward. To begin with we are dependent on women, but we hate being dependent, so we hate women (we all do, women as well as men, though woman-hating obviously poses different questions for men and women). It is a developmental achievement, then, to be able to acknowledge the fact that one’s mother is a real person, and that we can enjoy relying on her, even though like all real people she can be unreliable. In this particular psychoanalytic version – the version derived from the British child analysts – everyone suffers initially from who their mother happens to be; from the fact that she is a person with a history, and that there is more to her than her identity as a mother. No young child accepts that his mother is anyone other than his mother, and mothers are always to blame (on this the child and some of the so-called mental health professionals agree). And this is where the trouble starts for both mother and child. And where, in this account, the misogyny starts.

Down Girl is usefully and tellingly sceptical of all such ‘psychological’ explanations: Kate Manne describes them as the ‘naive conception of misogyny’. Misogyny is not, in her view, a ‘property of individual misogynists’ and therefore something we can find in particular people, even deep down inside themselves. It’s not that sort of thing; it isn’t a thing at all, it’s a practice, a lifestyle, a way of doing something (keeping women down in both senses implied by Manne’s title). Again, it isn’t something we are, but something we do; and therefore, in our Enlightenment zeal to be able to remake what we have already made, we can imagine it as something we could do differently, or perhaps, not do at all. ‘What lies behind an individual agent’s attitudes, as a matter of deep or ultimate psychological explanation,’ she writes, ‘is frequently inscrutable,’ by which, I take it, she means something like ‘unverifiable’, impossible to locate and scrutinise. It may be that she is asking here for more clarity than is necessary; as she knows, there are people who find psychological explanations useful, without doubting their own ultimate inscrutability. But by warning us away from an essentialist, psychological view of misogyny, she also alerts us to the mystery-mongering in all essentialism, the acts of faith our essences seem to require of us. Misogynists, of course, are radical essentialists when it comes to women. They know exactly what they are like, and we should not, Manne intimates, be fighting one essentialism with another.

There are reasons people have (and want) theories about human nature – theories taken to be universal in application – and reasons we find essentialist theories so compelling. Once you know what to start with you have some idea of what you can do; once you know where to start from you can work out where to go. But all essentialist theories – theological, political, psychoanalytic – require you to believe a lot of other things in order to believe them (to believe in the Judeo-Christian God, say, you have to believe that the world was created, and that there is such a thing as omnipotence). In order to believe the psychoanalytic story about misogyny you have to believe that there is essentially nothing more to people than their instincts (and their mothering), and that human development is subject to uncontroversial, normative standards (those who have been fortunate enough to have had good enough mothering will be OK, despite the fact that what is OK, what is good enough, and what mothering is are all debatable and contentious).

There is nothing deep inside us, Richard Rorty once remarked, that we haven’t put there ourselves. So even though, at least for some people, psychoanalysis, and psychology more generally, have interesting things to say about misogyny, they also run the risk of naturalising it (misogyny is deep inside us because our mothers are). But what is deep inside us, in this odd spatial picture, is what Manne calls ‘prevalent cultural narratives’; for example, ‘a strenuous collective effort, yet to be fully acknowledged … to uphold certain men’s innocence, to defend their honour, and to grant them a pardon prematurely, or without the proper authority to do so’. She calls these ‘exonerating narratives’, and her examples, some taken from literature and some from life, have to do with instances where women are murdered. But above all she wants us to see how it works, and acknowledge the significance of what is happening, rather than simply punish (humiliating and shaming Harvey Weinstein has more to do with the problem than with the solution). ‘Often,’ she writes, ‘sexual assault involves not just overriding the victim’s will, but mentally rewriting it (“You like that, don’t you?”).’ There may always and only be rewriting, but we need to know who and what the rewriting serves. If suspecting victims – the title of one of Manne’s best chapters – is what we are prone to do, we need to consider what it is we don’t want to know, both about ourselves and about others. It is, she says plainly, ‘just moral life’ – though ‘just’ is ambiguous here – that ‘attempts to disrupt existing power relations are rife with moral hazards.’ Manne is quite explicit in asking us not to believe what she says, but to follow her argument. And, of course, in helping us to reread other people’s rewriting, she is showing us how we might read hers.

Once misogyny is essentialised – once it is treated as in some way integral to our nature, or just a part of how we live – it all too easily becomes one of Manne’s exonerating narratives. If there is little justice for women, what is there? If there is no cure for misogyny, what is there? The question then is how to co-exist with it. This is one of the many reasons Manne’s book is so illuminating. Apart from taking for granted the fact that ideas about women, like all ideas, are culturally and historically specific, it shows us how to think (and talk) about misogyny without telling us precisely what to think. Manne knows that a book about misogyny is going to be preaching to the converted, when the converted don’t necessarily know what or how they think; or indeed what to do with their doubts, not least their doubts about the ideology of virtue, about being on the side of the angels. Down Girl rightly insists that misogyny is so all-pervading and so alluring that we are more likely to take it for granted than we are to acknowledge it properly, or want to change it for something better. ‘What could possibly change any of this?’ Manne asks in the conclusion to her book, and it sounds like a cry from the heart: ‘Even trying is liable to make me seem nasty, abrasive and pushy.’ It’s not that women can’t win, she seems to be saying, but that they are all too often shut out of the game. Or the man tells the woman what the game is, and she then has to learn how to play it.

A book about misogyny is going to be, as Manne’s is, about kindness and against bullying. It is likely to assume that if sexual desire is not mutual, sex is something other than sex (coercion, intimidation, self-assertion, fantasy, rage). And it will be seeking the causes of something that both horrifies and excites people – sometimes the same people – with a view to doing something about it. Manne’s book does all this, sometimes explicitly, sometimes not, while bringing to its subject the engaging clarity that its subtitle refers us to. Writing as ‘someone trained in moral and feminist philosophy, rather than psychology, sociology, gender studies, anthropology or history’, she wants to offer ‘a useful toolkit for asking, answering and debating’ misogyny, a word she thinks we are ‘in danger of losing’, so fraught and overused and clichéd has it become. Wittgenstein’s familiar term is apposite here because Manne is showing us what we do, what we might do and what we don’t notice we are doing with the word ‘misogyny’, and how we might best use it. She wants her book to be ‘a bulwark against … the siphoning off of heat and light from the problem of misogyny, in both private life and public discourse, and the concomitant denialism’. And Down Girl does this with an acuity and precision that is both hospitable and exacting. In eight chapters, each of which can be read as a self-standing essay, divided into sections with titles like ‘What Kind of Question Is “What Is Misogyny?”’, ‘Care-Mongering’, ‘His for the Taking’, ‘The Giving She’, Manne makes it clear how difficult it can be to see misogyny at work, self-evident and flaunted though it is; and why misogyny is ‘still a thing’. We can only get a sense of why ‘misogyny’ exists if we know what it is, if we have workable descriptions of it. And this is what Manne sets out to provide. ‘It functions,’ she writes, ‘to police and enforce a patriarchal social order without necessarily going via the intermediary of people’s assumptions, beliefs, theories, values and so on.’ It doesn’t, in other words, require consent or assent; it’s how things are, rather than a regime or a set of instructions. Both sexism and racism, she writes, uphold the patriarchal order, but ‘sexism purports to merely be reasonable; misogyny gets nasty and tries to force the issue … misogyny goes on witch hunts’. There will be people who take exception to phrases like ‘the patriarchal order’, but it would be Manne’s salient point that a patriarchal order, by definition, defies formulation and so disarms criticism. When you go on a witch hunt, you can only find what you are looking for.

Manne aims to understand ‘the nature of misogyny, both in terms of its general logic’ and through ‘one (though only one) of its key dynamics. This involves men drawing on women in asymmetrical moral support roles.’ She has in mind ‘a more or less diverse set of women on whom such a man’ – the sort of man she refers to as the ‘most privileged’ (i.e. white, straight, cisgender, middle-class and non-disabled) – ‘is tacitly deemed entitled to rely on for nurturing, comfort, care, and sexual, emotional and reproductive labour’. These entitlements more or less define how such a man treats a woman – what he treats her as – and may, for example, lead women to try to work out what men want, and then try to provide it. It is asymmetrical because men will then assume that women want to satisfy men’s wants, without thinking too much about women’s wants (or wanting these to be articulated). Wanting nurture, comfort, care, sex and children is not the problem here: it is the entitlement and the asymmetry that ultimately get everyone, but mostly women, down. Entitlement is always fuelled by rage; and even though the wish for symmetry in relationships all too easily narrows the repertoire, asymmetry breeds resentment.

Manne’s picture here – allowing for the fact that everyone’s experience is limited, and no one knows everyone – seems incontestable. The question would be – though this may be too ‘psychological’ for Manne – what does this arrangement satisfy? Manne urges us to distinguish not between women as human beings and women as objects, but ‘between a (self-)recognised human being – e.g. white men who are otherwise privileged in most if not all major respects – versus a human giver, a woman who is held to owe many if not most of her distinctively human capacities to a suitable boy or man, ideally, and his children, as applicable’. ‘Versus’ is the right word here for what is virtually a structural antagonism. The advantage of this description is that it can both be reversed (men could be human givers) and allow us to think about what we might want to give each other, as opposed to what we think we owe each other. Once giving is gendered, it’s extortion. In wanting to redescribe the repertoire of ways in which men and women can do things together – against what she calls the ‘regular social-norm enforcement mechanisms’ – Manne wants not only a redistribution of labour, but more probity in our descriptions of these mechanisms.

‘Misogyny,’ she writes, ‘though often personal in tone, is most productively understood as a political phenomenon.’ It isn’t that Manne favours the norm enforcement mechanisms over individual voices, rather that she wants us to notice how informed by these mechanisms our voices are; as though we – and perhaps women in particular – always run the risk of being the ventriloquist’s dummies of patriarchy. ‘We need to try to do justice in our theorising,’ she writes, ‘to both agents and social structures,’ but the difficulty of doing this has always been the point not the problem. Productive understanding for Manne – aware as she is of the potential gap between those who write about misogyny, and those who practise it and the potential for complicity between them – has everything to do with alerting us to codes of practice that legitimate the systemic humiliation of women.

But it is also a shame to relegate individual psychology entirely, to lose it in the name of something else. What is personal in tone is often theory’s first casualty, in its will to generalise and abstract; and misogyny, unlike virtually any other subject, as Manne’s book makes abundantly clear, causes us to wonder what we think we are doing when we are theorising (people who commit horrifying crimes against women are unlikely to read her book). So when Manne writes about misogyny from a philosophical point of view her instances and examples are there to temper her speculation. ‘It can be useful,’ she writes, ‘to understand the inner workings of a system that upholds the status quo in intricate, and sometimes even morally gory detail, in order to see how best to combat it’ – the gory detail and the combat being inextricable, even though the less vivid descriptions of the inner workings of the system are the point of the book. But it is inevitably the evidence the book cites that stays in the mind. Theoretical descriptions are easily trumped by accounts of violence, as though theory itself is never traumatic enough. An introductory section of the book entitled ‘Smothering’ begins:

   Women who are strangled rarely co-operate with the police. Often incorrectly called ‘choking’, non-fatal manual strangulation is inherently dangerous. It can lead to death hours, days, even weeks afterward due to complications from the brain being deprived of oxygen. It also causes injuries to the throat that may not leave a mark. If you don’t know how to examine a victim’s throat, what to look for in her eyes (red spots called ‘petechiae’), and the right questions to ask, it may seem no harm has come of it. She may not seek medical treatment. The incident will be ‘shrouded in silence’. Sometimes she won’t wake up the next morning … victims of a non-fatal attack of this kind have also been found to be some seven times more likely to become the victim of an attempted homicide by the same perpetrator.

The starkness of the presentation, and the bluntness of the facts, make strangulation an emblem of Manne’s argument: the evidence of misogynistic acts is often invisible, ignored or actively covered up (both by the powers that be and by the terrified victims); and, their long-term effects having to be allowed for, they can be more or less fatal. Steven Bannon and Donald Trump’s ex-wives, among others, are cited as victims of similar acts, both of whom seem to have been intimidated into retracting or airbrushing their accusations. Everyone knows the truth, so everyone turns a blind eye. Humiliation is enforced agreement.

Manne wonders why it is, and always has been, so difficult to take misogyny seriously; and indeed found that during the time she was researching the book she became ‘less optimistic about the prospects of getting people to take misogyny seriously – including treating it as a moral priority’. So it is essential to the problem of misogyny that most people don’t think it is a problem; and for Manne the result of the 2016 US election overwhelmingly confirmed this. (‘It surely cannot be doubted,’ she writes, ‘that, among the factors that account for this largely unforeseen and disastrous outcome, misogyny is one of the most important.’) It is, of course, dangerous for women to complain about abusive men, or try to shame them – women’s ‘designated role is to listen, not to criticise or censor’. Calling it a role, even if designated, implies the possibility of change, though you sometimes feel that the possibilities Manne senses require women to manage a lurking defeatedness. And this in itself makes the book more not less engaging.

Manne has to be resolutely political rather than psychologising in her quest for causes, steering clear of what she calls ‘fairly puzzling putative psychological attitudes’. And sometimes her book suffers from a determination not to be vague. Misogyny, she insists, is not ‘a matter of psychological ill-health, or perhaps irrationality’: it is a ‘systematic facet of social power relations’. Her book is clarifying about misogyny, but it is equally interesting for what it has to say about the issue that has dogged the social sciences virtually since their inception: the relationship of the individual to the systems and structures that seemingly comprise him or her. We can punish and give therapy to those who behave misogynistically, or we can try to change the systems and structures, if they are the kinds of thing that we can change, or know how to change. Misogyny is as misogyny does, Manne proposes:

I try to understand misogyny throughout from the inside, not primarily as a psychological matter – but rather as a social-political phenomenon with psychological, structural and institutional manifestations. I present misogyny as a system of hostile forces that by and large makes sense from the perspective of patriarchal ideology, inasmuch as it works to police and enforce patriarchal order.

The ‘inside’ may be a ‘social-political phenomenon’. But the difficulty is always what you say after that. Down Girl makes it very clear that in talking about misogyny we are talking about many of the things that matter most to us. Or should.

Unforgiven by Adam Phillips. London Review of Books  ,  March 7 , 2019.  

A review of Down Girl: the Logic of Misogyny by Kate Manne

Oxford University Press

Also of interest : 

The Logic of Misogyny. By Kate Manne. Boston Review , July 11, 2016.