Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny Paperback – March 1, 2019

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.

I LOVED this book. It was not an easy or a quick read, but it relied on such interesting narratives and made so many surprising, provocative points that I often stayed up reading well past my bedtime because I truly found it hard to put down.Much of the book was validating and affirming rather than challenging; I've spent a lot of years now attempting to explain misogyny to people who aren't really sure it A) exists or B) harms women all ~that~ much if it does exist, so especially in the first third of the book, a primary pleasure was encountering ideas I understood already and seeing Manne express them succinctly and defend them very thoroughly. In particular, I was completely on board with Manne's observation that//a woman is regarded as ~owing~ her human capacities to particular people, often men or his children within heterosexual relationships that also uphold white supremacy, and who are in turn deemed entitled to her services. This might be envisaged as the de facto legacy of coverture law—a woman’s being ‘spoken for’ by her father, and afterward her husband, then son-in-law, and so on. And it is plausibly part of what makes women more broadly somebody’s ~mother, sister, daughter, grandmother,~ always somebody’s someone, and seldom her own person. But this is not because she’s not held to be a person at all, but rather because her personhood is held to be owed to others, in the form of service labor, love, and loyalty. (173)//That squares absolutely with explicit statements I encountered especially at church about "the divine role of women." And one reason I like this book is because, without ever acknowledging that such a thing exists, it demolishes the nonsense feminism known as "complementarianism": the idea that men and women have different roles by divine decree and that you can argue for women's full empowerment by saying that they owe the men in their lives all this nurturance and support—that, in fact, real feminism will help women be more nurturing and supportive of dudes. [Seriously. There are women who claim to be feminists who say this stuff.]What I really had to grapple with was Manne's analysis and rejection of the idea that the problem with misogyny is that men fail to see women as human and that certain harmful behaviors would stop if men could fully recognize women as human://a fellow human being is not just an intelligible ~spouse, parent, child, sibling, friend, colleague,~ etc., in relation to you and yours. They are also an intelligible ~rival, enemy, usurper, insubordinate, betrayer,~ etc. Moreover, in being capable of rationality, agency, autonomy, and judgment, they are also someone who could coerce, manipulate, humiliate, and shame you. In being capable of abstract relational thought and congruent moral emotions, they are capable of thinking ill of you and regarding you contemptuously (147)....We may see others as ~rivals, insubordinates, usurpers, betrayers,~ and ~enemies~ (inter alia), without ever losing sight of these people's full humanity. And we may subsequently be disposed to try to defeat, chastise, trounce, punish, destroy and permanently close the eyes of those we know full well are people like us (158) ....People may know full well that those they treat in brutally degrading and inhumane ways are fellow human beings, underneath a more or less thin veneer of false consciousness. And yet, under certain social conditions—the surface of which I've just barely scratched in this chapter—they may massacre, torture, and rape them ~en masse~ regardless. (168)//By the end I was persuaded. I think she's right.I also really dug the coinages "himpathy" and "herasure."Manne acknowledges that her polemic isn't likely to succeed in creating a lot of new converts to the cause: she writes that she is not particularly "optimistic about the prospects of getting people to take misogyny seriously—including treating it as a moral priority, when it is—unless they already do so” (280) in part because “Misogyny is a self-masking problem. Trying to draw attention to it is illicit by the lights of the phenomenon itself, since women are supposed to minister to others, rather than solicit moral attention and concern on their own behalf.” (281-82)But if you already consider misogyny a moral problem, this book is a terrific resource because it lays out the stakes so clearly and articulates strong, coherent responses to common objections to feminist ideology.