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

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.

This is an exceptionally well thought out, developed and persuasively defended book on misogyny and its devastating effects on women's lives. The author is a philosopher but the book is, for the most part, written in such a way that a person with little background in philosophy can easily read and understand its basic premises and conclusions. It is dense, to be sure, and contains hundreds of footnotes (all of which should be read in their entirety), but seriously worth it.The most interesting aspect of the book, to me, was that she removes misogyny from the realm of the psychological (which conceptualizes misogyny as the hatred that individual "bad apple" man have for women) and places it firmly in the realm of the political. Her definition of misogyny as the policing arm of sexism (defined as the attitudes people hold on the differences between the genders, which they often view as innate and unchangeable) and of patriarchy is convincing, well argued, intellectually satisfying and rings true. Her analysis of misogyny as the rage and shame that men feel when their entitlement to female attention, caring and giving is perceived to have been withheld is eye opening.The most interesting aspect of the book, for me, is her analysis of how we women are largely complicit in the misogyny that prevails in our culture. We "himpathize" with the man even when he has clearly wronged a woman. We suspect the rape victim of being a slut or a liar and prefer that the golden boy in an elite college who has perpetrated this crime not to go to prison and ruin his poor young life; what happens to the girl becomes largely irrelevant. We tend to find the testimony of a man more believable than that of a woman. We excuse statements denigrating women as locker room talk or just joking. We stand by silently when we are humiliated, and we stand by when other women are humiliated. We view ambitious women as cold, shrill, demanding and bitchy when competing against a man, whereas we view ambitious men as strong and focused. This finally explained to me why some of my female friends accepted the mainstream media's views of Hilary Clinton as untrustworthy and unfit for higher office.I sympathize when, towards the end of the book, the author arrives at a point where she seems to say, oh what's the point, all this will probably never change, given the deeply ingrained complicity of women in their own subjugation and denigration. I often find myself feeling the same way but I would ask her: What's the alternative? Giving up? Yes, we are looking at a Mt. Everest of opposition but we have made much progress and will continue to make progress. An encouraging factoid of which I was unaware is that the negative emotions that women feel towards a woman running for the highest office are not directed towards a woman running, say, for the Senate. So there is hope here. Let's elect as many woman to as many public offices as we can and get rid some of the pernicious misogynist policies that cripple women's lives.On a personal note, although I am a fairly assertive and outspoken person, this book has made me even more resolved never to stand by and allow myself to be denigrated again, unless it's literally a dangerous and life threatening situation where caution is probably the better part of valor. It is the same resolve I have long ago arrived at with respect to racism when it happens in my presence. Bad things happen when good women remain silent. And I have found a line for myself that I will have handy when misogyny happens to me. " You want to bully me? I'm not going to be bullied by you. Back off." I no longer permit mansplaining ("nah, don't need you to explain, I'm good"), and, as a person who flies a lot, manspreading ("can you put your legs into your own space instead of mine") ) (man become almost literally apoplectic when you do that), or any of the insidious forms of misogyny we all put up with every day. It won't change the world but it changes my world. Up Girl!