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DOWN GIRL

1

DOWN GIRL

The Logic of Misogyny

Kate Manne

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Moses describeth a woman thus: “At the first beginning,” saith he, “a

woman was made to be a helper unto man.” And so they are indeed,

for she helpeth to spend and consume that which man painfully

getteth. He also saith that they were made of the rib of a man, and

that their froward [difficult] nature showeth; for a rib is a crooked

thing good for nothing else, and women are crooked by nature, for

small occasion will cause them to be angry.

The Arraignment of Lewde, Idle, Froward, and

Unconstant Women, Joseph Swetnam, 1615

Guiltie, guiltie, guiltie. Guiltie of woman- slander, and defamation.

Swetnam the Woman- Hater, Anonymous, 1618

MR. MANNINGHAM. Admirable, my dear Bella! Admirable! We

shall make a great logician of you yet—a Socrates—a John Stuart

Mill! You shall go down in history as the shining mind of your day.

That is, if your present history does not altogether submerge you—

take you away from your fellow creatures. And there is a danger of

that, you know, in more ways than one. [Puts milk on the mantel.]

Well—what did I say I would do if you did not find that bill?

MRS. MANNINGHAM. [Choked.] You said you would lock me up.

Angel Street (or “Gaslight”), Patrick Hamilton, 1938

CONTENTS

Preface: Going Wrong xi

Introduction: Eating Her Words 1 Smothering 1 Silence 4 Vocal Changes 7 Aims 12 Nonappearance 15 Overview 18 Regrets 24

1. Threatening Women 31 The Isla Vista Killings 34 What Kind of Question Is “What Is Misogyny?” 41 What Misogyny Might Be 49

2. Ameliorating Misogyny 55 Rush Limbaugh on Sandra Fluke 55

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An Ameliorative, Intersectional Proposal 62 The Metaphysical Dependence of Misogyny

on Patriarchy 67 The Varieties of Misogynist Hostility 68 The Epistemology of Misogyny 69 (Latent) Misogyny as a Disposition 71 Misogyny as Systemic, and as Itself Part of a

(Much) Larger System 71 The Analysis Exposes Underlying Moral

Characteristics of Misogyny 72 Misogyny Can Exist with or without Misogynists 73

No Man’s Island 75

3. Discriminating Sexism 78 Sexism vs. Misogyny 78 Misogyny and Sexual Objectification 84 The Art of the Smackdown 87 Loving Mothers, Erasing Others 91 Withholding (from) Women 98 Misogyny as Backlash 101

4. Taking His (Out) 106 Misogyny and Entitlement 106 What She Has to Give 110 His for the Taking 113 Taking Lives: Shame and Family Annihilators 121 Looking Ahead 128

5. Humanizing Hatred 133 Humanist Thought in Action 135 Clarifying Humanism 141 The Trouble with Humanism 146 A Socially Situated Alternative 150

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Dominating People 158 Women, All Too Human 168

6. Exonerating Men 177 How to Get Away with Murder 178 Boy Kills Girl 181 Testimonial Injustice as Hierarchy Preservation 185 Himpathy 196 Locker Room Talk 205 Misogynoir in Action: The Daniel Holtzclaw Case 209

7. Suspecting Victims 220 On So- Called Victim Culture 220 What Is a Victim? The Role of Moral Narratives 223 (Down)Playing the Victim 228 Independent People: A Case Study 240

8. Losing (to) Misogynists 249 When a Man Competes with a

Woman: Comparative Gender Biases 250 Social Rejection Is Mediated by Disgust 256 Expressions of Disgust toward Hillary 259 How Disgust Sticks 261 Keeping One’s Distance 263 Care- Mongering 267 Gendered Split Perception 269 Faking It 273

Conclusion: The Giving She 279

Bibliography 309

Index 327

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PREFACE: GOING WRONG

[L] aid on the grass how small, how insignificant this thought of mine

looked; the sort of fish that a good fisherman puts back into the water

so that it may grow fatter and be one day worth cooking and eating . . .

But however small it was, it had, nevertheless, the mysterious property

of its kind— put back into the mind, it became at once very exciting, and

important; and as it darted and sank, and flashed hither and thither,

set up such a wash and tumult of ideas that it was impossible to sit still.

It was thus that I found myself walking with extreme rapidity across

a grass plot. Instantly a man’s figure rose to intercept me. Nor did I at

first understand that the gesticulations of a curious- looking object, in a

cut- away coat and evening shirt, were aimed at me. His face expressed

horror and indignation. Instinct rather than reason came to my help, he

was a Beadle; I was a woman. This was the turf; there was the path. Only

the Fellows and Scholars are allowed here; the gravel is the place for me.

Such thoughts were the work of a moment.

Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own

“When will women be human? When?” asked feminist legal theo- rist, Catharine A. MacKinnon, in a 1999 essay.1 Similar questions

1. Reprinted in MacKinnon (2006)— the quote with which I opened being MacKinnon’s last line therein (43).

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have been posed about the sexual objectification of women— by the philosophers Martha Nussbaum (1995; 2001) and Rae Langton (2009)— and misogynist threats and violence— by the popular writ- ers Arthur Chu (2014) and Lindy West (2015), among others. The question echoes in relation to sexual assault, stalking, intimate part- ner violence, and certain forms of homicide. These are all crimes whose victims are generally (though by no means always) women rather than men, and the perpetrators are generally, and sometimes almost exclusively, men rather than women.2

Why do these patterns persist, even in allegedly post- patriarchal parts of the world, such as the contemporary United States, the United Kingdom, and Australia?3 The same can be asked about the many other kinds of misogyny this book will consider— from the sub- tle to the brazen; the chronic and cumulative along with the acute and explosive; and those due to collective (or “mob”) activity and purely structural mechanisms, along with individual agents’ actions. Why is misogyny still a thing?— to borrow a phrase from John Oliver.

There’s no doubt that, in these milieux, much progress has been made with regard to gender equality, following feminist activism, cul- tural shifts, legal reforms (e.g., laws against sex discrimination) and changes in institutional policy (e.g., affirmative action, whose chief beneficiaries in the United States have tended to be white women). Gains for girls and women in education have been especially impres- sive. And yet, as will emerge in these pages, misogyny is still with us.

The problems that persist, with some arguably on the rise, raise questions that are thorny, puzzling, and urgent. I believe that moral

2. I bracket children generally, as well as adults who are non- binary, for the moment— not because there aren’t extremely important issues concerning their (mis)treatment here, but because they raise complications that are orthogonal to my present purposes. The above is what is needed to raise the question I initially want to consider.

3. These will be my primary focus in this book partly because these are the con- texts in which these phenomena are often denied or, else, found puzzling. They are also contexts in which I have the relevant insider knowledge, since I will be interested in prevalent cultural narratives and pattern recognition. I say more about this in the introduction.

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philosophy has a valuable role to play here— although, ultimately, it will take a village of theorists to gain a full understanding of the phenomenon. My hope in this book is to make a contribution to understanding the nature of misogyny, both in terms of its gen- eral logic, and one (though only one) of its key dynamics in prac- tice. This involves men drawing on women in asymmetrical moral support roles. (I restrict myself to the cultural contexts mentioned above, although welcome others to generalize, or amend and adapt, beyond this.)

What do these moral support relations amount to? It’s helpful to think initially about the men who are the most privileged— in being, for example, white, het (i.e., “straight”), cisgender rather than trans- gender, middle class, and nondisabled. They hence tend to be subject to fewer social, moral, and legal constraints on their actions than their less privileged counterparts. We can then think of a more or less diverse set of women on whom such a man is tacitly deemed entitled to rely for nurturing, comfort, care, and sexual, emotional, and repro- ductive labor. Alternatively, she may represent the “type” of woman who might have served, or may be recruited, for such purposes.

Of course, just because someone has tacit social permission to lean on women in these and similar ways does not mean either that he would actually want to do so, or that he will succeed in so doing (thereby taking advantage of this possibility), even if he does. Similarly, even if the external constraints on his behaviour are less stringent for him than his less privileged counterparts, he may nevertheless observe these or similar norms, regarding himself as constrained as a matter of moral principle or conscience. But, in other cases, the paucity of such constraints and the presence of such entitlements will have an effect on the way he views and treats certain women within his social orbit: specifically, as owing him or his brethren her distinctively human services and capacities, much more so than vice versa.

These asymmetrical moral support relations may be instanti- ated in many different ways, including in intimate and relatively stable social roles— as his mother, girlfriend, wife, daughter, and

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so on. Alternatively, these relations may be instantiated in the workplace, position him as a consumer, or involve ad hoc encoun- ters with the girls and women whose attention he may solicit by many different means— from catcalling to trolling on social media to mansplaining.

My view is that a significant amount of (though far from all) misogyny in my milieu serves to police and enforce these social roles, and extract moral goods and resources from such women— as well as protesting her nonappearance or supposed negligence or betrayal. And some (although, again, far from all) remaining forms of misogyny— for example, that which is directed at female public figures— is plausi- bly derivative from this one. It reflects a kind of deprivation mindset regarding women being giving, caring, loving, and attentive, as opposed to power- hungry, uncaring, and domineering. And it involves a jealous hoarding of certain positions of presumptive collective moral approval and admiration for the men who have been its historical beneficia- ries. Women who compete for these roles will tend to be perceived as morally suspect in at least three main ways: insufficiently caring and attentive with respect to those in her orbit deemed vulnerable; illicitly trying to gain power that she is not entitled to; and morally untrust- worthy, given the other two kinds of role violations.

Such perceptions are erroneous and pernicious but in many ways understandable, since they are accurate by the lights of history’s bad gendered bargains. She is morally in the wrong, as measured by the wrong moral standards— namely, his: the moral standards that work to protect historically privileged and powerful men from moral downfall. They also protect him from the ignominy of shame and the corrosive effects of guilt, as well as the social and legal costs of moral condemnation. They enable him to form views and make claims with the default presumption that he is good, right, or correct. And the women morally bound to him may not beg to differ.

As a result, such women may be less than morally reliable when it comes to many of the (often less privileged) people to whom she may owe more, or whose word she ought to believe over his. Not least of these being other, less privileged girls and women.

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To the best of my knowledge, this is the first book- length treatment of misogyny (at least under that description) by someone working in the tradition of analytic feminist philosophy. However, I stress that other philosophers, feminist and otherwise, have illuminated many of misogyny’s central manifestations— as well as related concepts and phenomena, such as sexual objectification, sexual assault, gen- dered slurs, sexism, and oppression.4 The picture I develop will hence often involve joining dots well- drawn by other theorists. In other cases, I will embroider on background pictures or adapt them for my own (I hope not too nefarious) purposes. And some of what follows will pick up on previous work of mine on the nature of moral think- ing and the social foundations of morality in the area of philosophy known as metaethics.

My argument in this book is that, in milieu like mine, for com- paratively privileged women like me, e.g., me, our humanity is perfectly well- recognized in general. I think it likely has been for quite some time.5 This is reflected in the fact that misogyny often

4. For just a few examples from the rich feminist literature on these topics, in no way intended to be exhaustive, see, for example: Anne E. Cudd (1990) and Susan J. Brison (2002; 2006; 2008; 2014) on sexual assault; Kimberlé W. Crenshaw (1991; 1993; 1997; 2012) on violence against women of color and the concept of intersec- tionality; Rae Langton (2009), Ishani Maitra (2009), Maitra together with Mary Kate McGowan (2010), and Nancy Bauer (2015) on sexual objectification and pornogra- phy, as well as silencing and subordinating discourse; Kristie Dotson (2011; 2012; 2014) and Miranda Fricker (2007) on epistemic oppression and injustice; Lynne Tirrell (2012) and Rebecca Kukla (2014) on discursive practices that enable violence and oppression; Lauren Ashwell (2016) on gendered slurs; and Marilyn Frye (1983), Peggy McIntosh (1998), and Patricia Hill Collins ([1990] 2000) for some of the classic texts on oppression, sexism, privilege, and Hill Collins’s notion of “controlling images.” Again, I emphasize that this is but a small smattering of the works that illuminate some of the concepts and phenomena closely— and most clearly— connected with misogyny. More will of course be flagged when other connections become salient; and see also my bibliography for some of the many works by feminist scholars and critical race theorists that have informed and inspired me in this undertaking.

5. I want to leave open the possibility that girls and women who occupy different social positions, for example, involving multiple intersecting systems of oppression that compound one another, together with material conditions such as poverty and homelessness, may face injustice that is best understood as dehumanization. This is one of the many questions in relation to misogyny that I don’t feel qualified to speak

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involves what P. F. Strawson ([1962] 2008) calls “the reactive attitudes,” such as resentment, blame, indignation, condemnation, and (for the first- personal analogues) guilt, shame, a sense of responsibility, as well as a willingness to accept punishment when one is held to deserve it. The second- personal and third- personal reactions are supposed to be restricted, at least in the first instance, to our dealings with others who are recognized as “fellow human beings.”6 Moreover, we only tend to have these morally laden and broadly juridical or legalistic reactions to other presumptively reasonable and reasonably mature persons, who we are willing and able to remonstrate with regarding their behavior. Strawson says we take the objective stance, in contrast, to young chil- dren, the severely intoxicated, people having a psychotic break, and those who are “not themselves,” more or less temporarily. We may instead try to manage, treat, educate, or simply avoid, someone to whom we take the objective stance. And we may also take the objective stance as a “refuge” from the “strains of involvement” with those we could but choose not to relate to interpersonally ([1962] 2008, 10, 13, 18). We may be too exhausted— or lazy, or overwhelmed, among other possibilities— to engage with them on this occasion.

Strawson’s treatment of the reactive attitudes was brilliant, novel, and has been enormously fruitful in subsequent moral phi- losophy. But it is typical of the narrowness of the range of Strawson’s concerns— which typify that of an Oxford don of the mid- twentieth century, nonaccidentally, since he was one— that he only considers

to. But I hope that the general framework for theorizing misogyny I develop (and call its “logic,” as opposed to its substantive nature) makes room for other voices and other scholars who can do so. Certainly, I don’t think that these questions are any less urgent than the ones I hope to shed some light on— often, quite the contrary. But they are also, I think, entangled— as I will go on to argue in the introduction.

6. Whether or not they ought to be so restricted, absent anthropomorphism, is another matter, but I take this to be plausible— though it is interesting to think about what exactly one feels when one’s beloved corgi (for example) darts after a squirrel and refuses to come back when called, making you worry for her safety. “Moral disappoint- ment” seems a slightly odd label, but it is probably the closest I have come to finding this sort of entirely nonpunitive but nonetheless normatively valenced dismay theo- rized in the literature; see Fricker (2007, chap. 4, sect. 2) for discussion.

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the salutary aspects of our practices of resentment and blame and expressions of disapproval or consternation, and (for their posi- tively valenced counterparts) forgiveness, praise, and expressions of approval or gratitude.

Strawson also considers but one person’s side of the story— and hence, by default, the protagonist in a miniature drama. He is the one who wants to express resentment, and is expectant or hopeful of receiving an explanation, or else apology. Strawson’s opening case of someone stepping on his hand, such that he will resent her unless he is assured she didn’t mean it, that she bears good will toward him— it being just an accident— is the paradigm here. It is also inadvertently revealing in this context.

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 ter- ritory, 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 trespass- ers will be prosecuted or— as one sometimes sees to this day— shot at?

The person on the other side of Strawson’s divide, who is resent- ful of your misstep, may experience genuine shock and distress as a result of your violating a norm, or refusing to play your assigned part. He may have long been accustomed to expect the compliance or performance of someone in your position. You yourself may have met his great expectations dutifully in the past. So when you cease to, he may well be resentful. He reacts as if you are in the wrong because, from his perspective, you are in the wrong. You are miss- stepping, or over- stepping, or deviating, or wronging him.

Most if not all of those of us with some form of unjust, unmerited privilege are susceptible to these sorts of errors. Privilege is prone to

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confer an inaccurate sense of one’s own proprietary turf, epistemi- cally and morally. White women’s tacit sense of narrative dominance, or claim to the moral spotlight over black women, remains a serious problem within (white) feminism, for example.

When Virginia Woolf veered onto the grass at Oxbridge, she was waved angrily away by the Beadle. She found her way into the library, but she was not allowed to stay. She needed a letter of introduction from, or to be escorted by, a college fellow (pun intended). Today such rules are defunct, and the library open to people of any gender. But some people still react to women’s treading on what was hith- erto men’s turf— or, similarly, breaking his now defunct or unevenly enforced rules— with resentment or indignation. These reactions may not, and typically do not, reveal their causal triggers— that is, her being a woman who is deviating, or aspiring, in ways historically verboten. They are hence ripe for post hoc rationalization: it just seems she’s up to something. She appears vaguely threatening. She seems cold, distant, and arrogant— or, alternatively, pushy, knocking down everyone who stands in her way ruthlessly.

So perhaps the Beadle has not ceased to look askance at wayward women; he is still rankled by the sight of one straying from the path. He reaches for spurious grounds, or seizes on near universal mis- steps, to justify his resentment toward her. He may have little insight into the causal triggers for his hostility. And the Beadle’s wife may wholly share his moral judgments. She may, as we will see, have little or no good alternative.

And so you move to try to reason with Mr and Mrs Beadle. You try to convince them that their reactions are morally off- base, reflective of old, deeply internalized social mores they themselves now claim to reject. But, as you develop your argument, their faces grow resentful (on his part) and disapproving, indignant, even disgusted (on hers). And then you realize the terrible trap: part of what women like you (e.g., me) are held to owe men in such positions of (in this case, rather petty) moral authority is good will of the kind Strawson says is so important to receive from one’s fellow human beings. But where he says “fellow human beings,” and “one,” this conceals the extent to

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which both the desired good will and the desire for it depend on gen- der, among other systems of domination and disadvantage.

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 charac- ter, 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 resent- ment or blame may then feel like a betrayal, a reversal of the proper moral relations between them, and this may make him seek pay- back, revenge, retribution. And to those who are on his side— Mrs Beadle for one, but extending far beyond that— moral criticisms of Mr Beadle are likely to seem like transgressions or bald- faced lies. Morally speaking, his critic is not to be trusted.

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.

So a woman’s recognized humanity may leave much to be desired by way of moral freedom. And her sense of obligation is then likely to be excessive, on the one hand, and lacking, in many others.

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I wrote this book largely as a prolonged attempt, as I can now see, to free myself of a sense of various spurious obligations, so that I might glean and better meet other, real ones. I also wanted to get past some of the spurious guilt and shame that I am prone to feel when I am at cross- purposes with felt (and, again, sometimes trumped- up) moral authority figures. More than anything, I was prone to feel certain forms of moral embarrassment vaguely reminiscent of that of par- ticipants in the Milgram (1974) experiments when I had to resist authoritative- seeming claims that seemed unwarranted on reflec- tion— and, possibly, pernicious.

I felt morally embarrassed to look at the events with which I begin— the Isla Vista killings— from the perspective of the women who were targeted and killed. And I felt embarrassed, in a similar way, to dwell on them at all— as if I should be detached and cool where the female victims were concerned, rather than animated, as I in fact was, by moral horror and grief for them, and all of the other women killed in a similar spirit on a daily basis in America. I felt some pressure to turn instead to purely structural cases of misogyny, or else misogyny of the subtle or chronic and cumulative variety.

But, although these are all important phenomena to investigate, and I go on to do so in what follows, I came to doubt my initial reflexive instinct to turn away, as opposed to subsequently varying my lens and widening my focus. And I came to worry that such instincts were having a bad effect on my thinking, or reflected a kind of intellectual cowardice. Feminist philosophy shouldn’t only focus on male dominance, patriar- chy, toxic masculinity, and misogyny, of course. Still, to the extent that doing so was represented as positively passé by some disciplinary stal- warts, this seemed obviated by the fact that there wasn’t a single book, or even an article- length treatment, of misogyny as such when I began this project in May 2014. But I think there is value in work of this rather old- fashioned, unfashionable nature, and arguably a need for more of it, plainly written. This thought received some support during the 2016 US presidential election campaign, and was further reinforced by the subsequent outcome, when Donald Trump