Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

"Yes. Kate Manne’s book has been an amazing publishing success, to the extent that the publishers can’t keep up with the demand for it. There are frequent demands on Twitter of ‘Where can I get this book?’ and ‘Why isn’t it in the shops at the moment?’ This is in some ways surprising—not because the book isn’t great, it’s a really excellent book—but because it’s quite a difficult book. It’s difficult in two senses. On one level, it’s intellectually quite difficult. Kate Manne is uncompromising in the way she addresses the problem of misogyny. She’s very precise about what she means by misogyny, and how to diagnose it in our society. She provides examples and meticulously works them out. That’s quite academic, and makes it a book that requires a certain level of energy to read. It’s not like a thriller—you can’t just sit down and let the momentum of plot and suspense take you through it. But it’s difficult in another way, too, because it’s dealing with very visceral subject matter. For instance, it opens with quite a gruesome account of smothering, which is a method of attacking women that occurs frequently in the context of domestic violence. It’s very graphic in the details that it includes because, to make her points, she needs to show you what she’s talking about and not just describe matters in abstract terms. So the book is also emotionally difficult to read. At the heart of the book is the argument that misogyny is a structural phenomenon. Manne isn’t concerned with going after individual misogynists so much as analyzing how misogyny functions within society. What’s been remarkable is that since she wrote the book, there have been so many high-profile #MeToo news stories. There was the Kavanaugh debacle with the surprise outcome: he was made into a Supreme Court judge, despite very credible testimony that he had been physically and sexually abusive to at least one woman in the past. “Manne isn’t concerned with going after individual misogynists so much as analyzing how misogyny functions within society” Kate Manne has been in great demand for writing editorial and opinion articles about what’s been going on, because she put her finger on this kind of dynamic that has been lurking beneath the surface but has come out very dramatically in the last year or so. One of the most remarkable feats of this book is how useful her concept of ‘himpathy’ has proved. I’ll try. In a sense, misogyny is not just about individual people consciously hating women. It’s more ideological. It’s about the way society is structured in forms that permit women to be shamed, attacked, ridiculed, demeaned, gaslit—because of certain social norms that are almost unacknowledged even today, in our supposedly liberated times. Though often completely unconscious, this misogyny is most obvious when a woman violates what she would describe as patriarchal expectations, and then is on the receiving end of, for example, various kinds of put-downs, snide comments, or worse. Manne’s concept of ‘himpathy’ is a good example of misogyny contrasting the treatment of men and women. ‘Himpathy’ is the widespread phenomenon that when a man is accused of some kind of misdemeanour in relation to a woman, as has frequently happened with #MeToo outings, a very strong counter-reaction is visible. Many people start to feel sympathy for him as a victim. There’s a disproportionately strong sense of ‘That poor guy is just getting publicly shamed’, and so on—far beyond what might seem proportionate or reasonable. This notion of ‘himpathy’ is used by Manne to pinpoint that tendency and draw attention to it and in doing so, hopefully, shame people into not doing it, and focus more on the person who is the purported victim of the incident. Manne coined this name for the phenomenon, which is great, because it allows us to talk about it very easily. That concept is a minor part of the book, but it’s an incredibly powerful tool. I think there are other things in the book which will, in time, emerge in that same way. It’s controversial in some ways as well, but this is a book which is timely and intellectually rigorous. It’s a book that will last as a serious contribution to philosophy, but is outward-facing because it’s talking about contemporary issues relevant way beyond the academic philosophy department. Yes, and that’s a kind of trigger warning as well, because if you’ve been a victim of physical violence, you might be a bit cautious about opening up this book on the commute to work. You ought to know that it has descriptions of real life cases that are disturbing to read."

"Agreed! This is a very timely book in the light of the current ‘Me Too’ movement. She describes sexual harassment and sexual assault, and she has a moving chapter on strangulation. She spends a lot of time on the case of Eliot Rogers, this man who felt he was always rejected by women, and then went on a shooting spree, killing many people, and finally killing himself. She describes these cases in some depth, and provides a really interesting analysis. I see this analysis as the mirror image of David Livingstone Smith’s, although they could both be right for different cases. Manne’s proposal is that in cases of misogyny, it’s not that men don’t see women as people. It’s not that they lose control in some way. It’s rather that men are morally outraged. They expect things from women: they expect nurturance, they expect sex, they expect love, they expect care, and they get enraged when these expectations aren’t being met. So, for Manne, the husband who strangles his wife out of rage, it’s not that he doesn’t think of his wife as a person, it’s not that he’s lost control in some way; it’s rather that he is morally driven, he feels his wife has done something horribly wrong by not being a good wife and she deserves what’s coming to her. And so Manne, very vividly and very powerfully, presents a important perspective on cruelty. Using the example of misogyny as a case study, she suggests that cruelty can be a moralistic act based on a certain ideology about how people should act. For Manne, misogyny is a belief that women should act a certain way towards men. When they don’t, violence and cruelty are often directed towards the women to punish them or to bring them in line. (She notes as well that certain positive feelings towards women could also reflect misogyny. If somebody is made Woman of the Year for supporting her husband, that also reflects the same ideology. But it’s cruelty that her book is mostly about.) As I said, this is the mirror image of the very convenient, very palpable message in the dehumanisation work. What Manne is saying is that when you recognise people’s humanity—she links this with Peter Strawson’s notion of reactive attitudes—there are all sorts of moral risks. There’s a lovely passage on this in her book where she points out that to see someone as human means it is possible for that person to be a true friend or a beloved spouse, but it also means that he or she can compete with you, or disagree with you, or humiliate you, or betray you. Men and women often live together, and so you’re nose to nose with an independent cognitive agent, and this, along with misogyny, makes possible all sorts of cruelty and violence. Yes. She calls misogyny ‘the law enforcement branch of the patriarchy’. It emerges from society. If her book has any weakness, and it’s a weakness that applies to many other books on the topic, it is that there is a lack of interest in the psychological mechanisms that underlie all of this. Manne doesn’t wrestle at all with the empirical evidence on the nature of aggression and bias, but focuses primarily on the broader philosophical arguments, and on real-world cases. Yes, definitely. But there are also the psychological issues of how it’s acquired, how it’s represented, and how people differ. Not everybody is equally misogynistic. Some people might show subtle implicit biases, others obvious and blatant ones. We may all be misogynists to some extent, but I’ve never strangled anybody, and I don’t think I ever would. There are all sorts of psychological questions that Manne, by choice, isn’t that interested in. That’s OK. It’s her book. “For Manne, misogyny is a belief that women should act a certain way towards men. When they don’t, violence and cruelty are often directed towards the women to punish them or to bring them in line. ” I resonate to her way of thinking because it chimes well with my own interest in the ‘moral’ quality of violence: when people who do bad things think they are doing the right thing, out of a sense that they are morally right. Morality explains a lot of the terrible things that we do to one another. This claim isn’t unique to Manne or to me, of course. Another book that could have ended up on my list is Virtuous Violence by Alan Fiske and Tage Rai which argues that a lot of violence is motivated by moral principles—it summarises a lot of interesting research in this area. There’s a lot more to say to say about evil and cruelty, of course. For instance, some people’s cruelty comes very directly from physiological causes such as different forms of brain damage. Also, even for those of us who are neurologically fine, a great cause of cruelty is simply lack of impulse control. Most of us have cruel thoughts to one another which we don’t act on. But sometimes we slip. If you want a palate-cleanser to think about humanity at its best after the more pessimistic outlooks I’ve been discussing, Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature is a tremendously optimistic book. He describes a lot of cruelty though the ages, but argues convincingly that we’ve been getting better and better. (He’s followed this up with Enlightenment Now , which I’m currently reading.) And Larisssa McFarquar in her book Strangers Drowning has a series of case studies of real good-hearted individuals: some of them are effective altruists, some are driven by religious convictions, and some are just really nice people, who give their kidneys to strangers, and won’t order a Martini because the money spent on it could go to feed the poor, and so on. She begins by taking a bemused view of these moral saints, but by the end she’s not cynical: she says these people really are good people, they really are leading good lives. Reading about all these kind people doing kind things is a great antidote to reading all the descriptions of torture and murder and rape in the books I’m recommending!"

"Lisa Whiting: We chose the book, firstly, because we both love it as a book. It’s a really good example of a book that’s incredibly powerful, and both academically rigorous and accessible. That combination is one of the reasons I think it has been so successful. Another reason I like this book—which ties in with the first, and Manne talks about herself in the book—is that discussions around misogyny or sexism can become so fraught. I think applying this strict, analytical lens to that kind of debate and discussion is very satisfying because it really helps to clarify the concepts that are so often either misconstrued or misunderstood in these kinds of debates. Also, some of the concepts she articulates, ‘himpathy’ being the most notable example, have really caught on in popular culture, which again, I think, is a credit to her innovative analysis. Lisa Whiting: Himpathy is the idea that society conditions both men and women to feel greater sympathy for the perpetrators of misogyny and sexual violence and disproportionately focus on excusing the behaviour of men rather than supporting the victims of their behaviour. One of the examples that Kate Manne uses in the book is around Brock Turner, and the overly sympathetic response that was given in his case when he raped an unconscious woman. This has now been applied more widely across a range of different domains. This book is quite timely. Even over the last couple of weeks, we’ve seen examples of women speaking out about sexual assault in the comedy industry and there’s still a tendency—that’s amplified online—around people’s desire to defend or give far more benefit of the doubt to pepetrators as opposed to their victims. Lisa Whiting: Definitely. There’s a tendency to view misogyny as a trait of individuals and she points out that you’ll never know for sure whether someone has this visceral hatred of women. Her structured account is powerful because it shows the ways these norms embed themselves in structures and institutions in a way that men and women themselves aren’t necessarily consciously aware of. She provides a powerful argument for furthering this kind of structural analysis to understand better how misogyny embeds itself in all these different ways—as opposed to being this kind of individual challenge. “Applying this strict, analytical lens to that kind of debate and discussion is very satisfying because it really helps to clarify the concepts that are so often either misconstrued or misunderstood” It then also becomes quite important in how we respond to this critique. If it’s a feeling about individuals, it’s hard to know what to do to prevent this. Manne herself talks about how hard it is to persuade people to change those ideas if it is so visceral. But in terms of a structural account, it’s obviously not easy, but it does provide some avenues for thinking about how we can bring about change on a larger scale. Rebecca Buxton: Yes. I really remember reading the first chapter of the book when I got it, which is about manual strangulation and the ways in which women speak about it. It’s just such a gripping book. There’s some pushback at the moment against the tendency in philosophy to use fictional examples. Miranda Fricker has a great book on epistemic injustice , but chose to use fictional examples—when there are so many real-world examples that she could have applied it to. I think one of the reasons that Down Girl is so successful is it doesn’t locate philosophy in all of these abstract or fictional examples or case studies. It locates it in things that people care about and experience in their everyday life. I hope that there will be more books that do this in the future. And I know that Kate Manne has another book coming out this month, Entitled , so I’m really excited to see what she’s done in that one. Rebecca Buxton: None of the trolls have read her book, unfortunately. It’s the same with Angela Saini, who wrote Superior: The Return of Race Science and she’s just had to delete her Twitter account because she gets so much racist abuse there. That’s another thing about being a woman philosopher. Lisa and I haven’t received very much abuse on Twitter – most people are very supportive. In a way, the book doesn’t put forward a particularly challenging message, because we’re just saying that we should include women, which most people seem to agree with nowadays. But if you’re working on something like misogyny or race and you’re a woman of colour, you are going to receive a lot of abuse."