Down Girl: How Misogyny Upholds Male Dominance

Kate Manne
Book Proposal (Now under Contract with OUP; Manuscript due July 2016)
Intended Readership
To the best of my knowledge, the book would be the first extended treatment of misogyny by an
analytic philosopher. There is an abundance of work in recent analytic feminist philosophy which
provides important resources for tackling this topic. But these resources remain largely untapped
at this juncture. (See my enclosed manuscript, What is Misogyny? A Feminist Analysis, n. 3, for
some indication of this.)
The books primary market would include analytic feminist philosophers, as well as philosophers
with interests in critical theory, non-ideal theory, moral psychology, and moral, social, and
political philosophy more broadly. The book could fit naturally into courses in any of these areas.
An introductory course in feminist philosophy could easily use it as an assigned text. It might
also be suitable for courses in womens and gender studies.
A secondary market for Down Girl would be any readers with an interest in feminism, whether or
not they are in academia. This is obviously a large market in principle. Admittedly, it is rarely
broken into by analytic philosophers. But I plan to put a lot of work into making the book as
accessible as I can, without compromising philosophical rigor, in the hopes of reaching as wide
an audience as possible.
Organization and Length
The book will be divided into five chapters, as summarized above, dedicated to (1) defining, (2)
working, (3) excusing, (4) facing, and (5) ending misogyny.
I anticipate each of these chapters being around 15,000 words long; so the book would end up
being around 80,000 85,000 words in total (allowing for a brief introduction).
Content warning: Please note that the book overview that follows contains graphic descriptions of violence towards
women and sexual violence.

Overview
When will women be human? When? asked Catharine MacKinnon, in a 1999 essay. When will
women be granted the moral and legal status of full human beings, in other words? Even in
supposedly egalitarian parts of the world, such as the contemporary US, women are far likelier
than men to be sexually assaulted, battered in their own homes, and murdered by a current or
former intimate partner. The wage gap persists; it has barely narrowed since the mid-90s.
Women currently earn 77 cents on the male dollar. Womens reproductive rights are increasingly
being challenged. And at least one in five women is sexually assaulted while attending a four year
college. This might make us doubt that womens humanity has yet been recognized, even in the
US context.
I think this would be a mistake, however. In this book, I argue that the failure to recognize
womens full humanity is not, and has seldom historically been, the problem. For, among other
things, womens manifestations of their characteristically human capacities e.g., autonomy,
agency, and a political sensibility often engender misogynist hostility. The following example
will serve as an illustration of this, as well as being telling when it comes to the nature of the
aggression.
On April 17, 2015, 20-year-old University of Mary Washington student, Grace Mann, was
murdered. She was found bound and unconscious in her off-campus apartment. She was taken
to the hospital, but they could not revive her. She appears to have been asphyxiated using plastic
shopping bags.
Why was Mann murdered? Although the police have not yet released a suspected motive for the
crime, the identity of the person charged, together with the backstory, is suggestive.
Mann was a prominent feminist as well as LGBT activist on campus. She was well-known as a
member of the student organization, Feminists United, which was widely believed to have been
responsible for another death of sorts recently. Namely, it was blamed for the demise of the
schools rugby team.
The UMW administration announced its decision to disband the team in March 2015, citing as
their reason footage that had surfaced of some of the players reciting the misogynistic team
chant. The lyrics are the bawdy lament of a man who had engaged in an act of necrophilia with a
prostitute, and now has to deal with the fallout a red and sore member. (Never fuck a
whore being the moral of the story.)
The administration had had the footage since November 2014 though. It was put in their
possession by Feminists United. OCR recommendations state that universities should conclude all
such investigations into Title IX complaints, regarding a hostile environment for students on the
basis of their sex, within 60 days. So, after this interval had elapsed with no administrative action,
2

Feminists United took the initiative. Their then-president, Paige McKinsey, published an editorial
in the student newspaper entitled, Why UMW is Not a Feminist-Friendly Campus. The piece
sought to expose the insidious misogyny and hatred very much alive at UMW. And it cited the
rugby teams chant as an example.
That was in January. Following another three months of administrative inaction, Feminists United
sent a copy of the footage to the media. It was only after the video went viral in March, causing a
small media fracas, that the administration announced it was dismantling the rugby team. It is
possible the timing was merely coincidental. But it is natural to at least suspect the decision had
as much to do with minimizing bad publicity as combating misogyny on campus.
It was then that the death and rape threats began for Grace Mann, along with other Feminists
United members. Mann was one of the women repeatedly named in the threatening messages
posted on Yik Yak, a popular social media app. (Dandys about to kill a bitch or two;
Gonna tie these feminists to the radiator and grape them in the mouth grape being a
substitute for the banned word rape, which sets off Yik Yak filters.)
Mann and the other women being targeted reported these threats over 700 of them to the
UMW administration. They also exchanged emails with the universitys president, Richard V.
Hurley. But they were told there was little the university could do in such cases, and were advised
to contact Yik Yak directly. The company never responded to their message. Mann expressed
fears about her safety at a Feminists United meeting during these weeks; her girlfriend began to
accompany her everywhere.
In the end though, Mann was strangled in her own home. And the person charged with her
murder, Steven Vander Briel, was her house mate. The two of them had no significant social
relationship and no romantic history, in particular, according to a police statement. Vander
Briel had just rented a room in Manns share house for the semester. Ten years her senior, and a
two-time UMW dropout, Vander Briel was trying again to finish college. He had no known
history of violence. But he had been, at one time, a member of the rugby team.
Grace Manns murder wasnt major news; it made fewer headlines than the rugby teams demise.
Some mens rights activists noted it, however; one even claimed that it served a purpose.
Mann took one for the team, Mike Oelke of the Feminism is a Fraud blog commented. As vile a
sentiment as this was, it had a certain accuracy. Misogyny is not an idiosyncratic property of hatefilled individuals. It functions to uphold patriarchal social structures, both by propping men up,
and by taking down women.
***
Manns case helps to illustrate some of the problems with the idea that such aggression stems
from a failure to recognize womens full humanity. If the crime was indeed triggered by anger
3

about her political activities on campus as it is natural to suspect, given the preceding
background then it would have been a reaction to her expressions of human, all too human,
capabilities. And the details of the crime itself the manner in which she was strangled, in
particular strongly suggests that it was performed in a resentful, vindictive spirit. These are
attitudes which are generally restricted to those who we take an interpersonal stance towards, as
P.F. Strawson famously argued. (1962/2008)
Under these assumptions, Manns murder would count as a paradigm instance of misogyny,
according to the account of it I develop in this monograph. A woman violating patriarchal
norms and expectations would have been summarily taken down, shut down, corrected. Before
transgressing, she was threatened; afterwards, she was punished.
Manns case also illustrates the two types of violations of patriarchal norms and expectations
which are liable to trigger misogynist aggression. First, she and the other members of Feminists
United declined to occupy a service position with regard to dominant male interests. They were
hardly cheer leaders for the rugby team, in other words; on the contrary, they were actively trying
to undermine them. Mann was also out as a lesbian. Second, and relatedly, these women were
powerful. They got what they wanted over these men at least initially.
It is common to suppose that, when women come to acquire more social power, misogyny will
tend to dissipate simultaneously. But this is a mistake. Social progress for women is not a
monolithic phenomenon. And womens growing power may be precisely what engenders
misogynist hostility. In her editorial, McKinsey cited five reasons why UMW was not, in her
estimation, a feminist-friendly college. The last of these being: As soon as Feminists United
started affecting change on campus, we were faced with aggression and hatred. To those who are
responsible please know one thing: Feminists United will continue to push forward We are
not going anywhere. We will not stop.
But Grace Mann was stopped. And like many other victims of misogynist aggression, she
appears to have been knocked down from a high place, not a low one. She had ideas beyond her
station. And she was summarily taught a lesson.
***
Misogyny has received little attention from analytic philosophers to date. But our methods can
shed light on some of the central questions about it. What is misogyny, exactly? How does it
work? What is its purpose? And what should we do now to promote gender justice, given the
subsequent risk of misogynistic fallout, as in the case of UMW?

This book seeks to develop an original account of misogyny, which speaks to these and other
current controversies surrounding it. It also seeks to dispel some long-standing myths about it,
some of which it argues are politically detrimental. Misogyny is often conceptualized as:
(1) A psychological property of individual agents; namely,
(2) A tendency to hate or be hostile towards women universally, or at least very
generally.
If we put these claims together with common claims about the nature of gendered prejudice,
then such a psychological tendency would naturally be held to stem from, or at least be tied to:
(1) An essentialized view of women as the other, as sexual objects, or even as
sub-human; and
(2) The explicit or implicit belief that women are inferior to men, or naturally rank
beneath them, in various prestigious or masculine-coded arenas.
But this way of thinking about misogyny is unhelpful, I argue. It threatens to turn a morally
powerful term into a name for no ones problem. Misogyny should rather be conceptualized as:
(1) A property of social systems or environments as a whole; in which
(2) Women tend to encounter hatred, hostility, and other negative reactions (e.g.,
aggression, resentment, threats, punishment, and similar) insofar as they are
represented as challenging or violating social norms and expectations of a
patriarchal nature.
Misogynists can then be defined derivatively, I propose, as agents who are strongly influenced
by, or make significant contributions to, misogynist social environments. I argue that these
agents will often have:
(3) An essentialized attitude not towards women as such, but towards certain
types of women (e.g., bitches, sluts, feminazis, etc.), who may be
represented by individual proxies who serve as outlets for aggression; and
(4) An often inchoate or unconscious desire to keep women down, or to put
them in their place again i.e., a subordinate one when they challenge or
violate patriarchal norms and expectations.
I argue that this way of thinking about misogyny enables the corresponding term to do morally
useful work, that it better reflects ordinary usage, and that it properly secures a necessary

connection between misogyny and patriarchal ideology. Misogyny does not arise in a political
vacuum, and the account of misogyny I develop reflects this.
My account also has implications when it comes to how to combat misogyny. On my account,
overcoming misogyny will not be simply a matter of expanding the circle of concern, wherein
the privileged people at its center open their arms and embrace the common humanity, or equal
rights, of the rest of us. (Cf. Peter Singer 2011, and Steven Pinker 2012, Chapter 7; and see my
Humanism: A Critique, ms, for some of my worries about such views.) It is also a matter of
the people who expected to be at the top of the gender hierarchy coming down in the social
world, relative to their hitherto subordinates, and managing the backlash which may occur as a
result of this.
This brings me to one of the several painful lessons about misogyny which I draw in this book.
The men who lash out violently against women, as Vander Briel is alleged to have done, are
often themselves reeling. They are not typically entrenched bigots who have something against
women qua women, regardless of the circumstances. Rather, they typically manifest hostility,
aggression, and other negative reactions towards women qua historical occupants of a
subordinate social position, who are perceived as insubordinate, jumped-up, or out of order.
Men who manifest such hostilities are often deeply insecure and feel in danger of coming down
in the social world, relative to other people. They may feel as if women (among others) are
surpassing them; or they may feel as if they are falling behind women. These impressions of
teetering on a precipice or being stuck precariously on a ledge may or may not have any
basis in objective social reality. But they can nevertheless cause people to feel dazed, unstable,
and to be dangerous, in consequence. I hence call this phenomenon social vertigo. How should
we respond to it? This is one of the central ethical questions I will be addressing in this
monograph.
***

Chapter Outline
Chapter 1: Defining Misogyny
In the first chapter of the book, I develop an analysis or real definition of misogyny. I begin by
arguing against what I call the nave conception thereof. On the nave conception, misogyny is
as misogynists are, and misogynists are agents who are prone to hate any and every woman, or at
least women generally.
The nave conception of misogyny has numerous disadvantages. It threatens to make misogyny
into an epistemologically inscrutable and politically marginal phenomenon. For, the tendency to
hate any woman, or even women generally, would make little sense in a patriarchal culture.
Consider: in a patriarchal culture, women can often be relied upon to do mens bidding and
to do mens bidding in an amicable manner. So why would even the least enlightened of men
within such a culture be prone to hate women universally, or even very generally? Why would
such a man insist on biting the hands that soothe and serve him? On the contrary, we would
naturally expect him to be well-pleased with many women, provided his expectations regarding
them are satisfied. It is only if his sense of entitlement is challenged or thwarted that he is likely
to become hostile. (See Michael Kimmel, 2013, 1825, and Chapter 1, for the notion of
aggrieved entitlement and relevant empirical evidence here.) Even then, his hostility wont
typically be directed towards women across the board; it will typically be directed towards the
supposedly relevant type of woman, e.g., women who are domineering, selfish, cold, disloyal,
duplicitous, and so on.
I subsequently argue that misogyny is better understood as primarily a property of social systems
or environments as a whole, rather than a property of individual agents psychologies. On my
eventual analysis (simplified slightly below for exegetical purposes; see my What is Misogyny,
4, for the full version), a social environment is misogynist iff and because, and also insofar, as:
(1) Women are liable to face hostile interpersonal reactions and their characteristic
manifestations (e.g., resentment, blame, indignation, disapproval, and various kinds
of punishment and retribution, as well as interpersonal aggression) to a
disproportionate extent or in a distinctive way because they are represented as
women who have violated, challenged, or resisted gendered norms and expectations
of a patriarchal nature; and
(2) Women are liable to face the proactive or forward-looking analogues of the above
attitudes and their characteristic manifestations (e.g., suspicion, intimidation,
threatening behavior, and various kinds of discouragement, warnings, cautionary
tales, etc.) to a disproportionate extent or in a distinctive way because they are

represented as liable, in the future, to violate, challenge, or resist gendered norms and
expectations of a patriarchal nature.
The because here is meant to encompass the because not only of reasons, but also of causes.
For these misogynistic reactions on the part of individuals will often be inchoately triggered
rather than explicitly rationalized by the targets gender and/or gender non-conformity. (Cf.
J.L.A. Garcia, 1996) Misogynist reactions are hence often subject to post hoc rationalizations.
And misogyny can also be a matter of disorganized mob activity, or hostile social climates,
where individuals do not so much harbor as unwittingly channel and carry misogynist social
forces.
On my analysis, misogyny is an inherently political phenomenon, which can be extended in
individuals, but is necessarily connected with patriarchal ideology. I argue that this is a salutary
result, drawing on Sally Haslangers notion of an ameliorative project. (2012, 223225; 366368)
I conclude the chapter by using my analysis of misogyny to draw a clean contrast between
misogyny and sexism. I suggest that sexism often involves the belief that men naturally outrank
women in high-prestige domains; whereas misogyny involves the desire to maintain this social
order. (Compare psychologists Peter Glick and Susan T. Fiske on ambivalent sexism, and the
distinction between hostile and benevolent forms thereof; 1997, 2001.) More broadly, sexism
characteristically involves representing the world in accordance with patriarchal ideology;
whereas, misogyny characteristically involves trying to make the world accord with it. G.E.M.
Anscombes notion of two different directions of fit helps to clarify this contrast. (1957, 56)
The distinction between these is as follows:
World-guided mental states, e.g., individual beliefs, as well as facets of broader
social reality, e.g., items of common knowledge, folk wisdom, cultural
narratives, news stories, scientific theories, etc., are supposed to represent the
way things are. That is, their content is supposed to fit the way the world is.
World-guiding mental states, e.g., individual desires, as well as facets of broader
social reality, e.g., social norms, scripts, rules, laws, instructions, archetypes, etc.,
are supposed to affect the way things are. That is, they are supposed to make the
world such as to fit their content by changing the world, or alternatively,
maintaining the current order.
So, metaphorically: sexism is to misogyny as civic order is to law enforcement. Sexism is to
misogyny as complacency is to insistence. Sexists tend to believe that women are inferior;
misogynists tend to desire this, and may fear just the opposite.

Chapter 2: Working Misogyny

This chapter develops a substantive account of the workings of misogyny (as defined in the
previous chapter), in terms of its characteristic functions, triggers, mechanisms, and effects.
I begin by arguing against a salient alternative here. According to a popular just-so story about
gender-based oppression, womens political situation is steadily improving. Pockets of social,
material, legal, educational, and economic inequality admittedly remain. But these pockets are
relatively small and local, at least in contemporary Western contexts. Moreover, progress is likely
to continue, perhaps more or less inevitably. (See, e.g., Pinker 2012, 381.) And this owes crucially
to our living in a post-Enlightenment era. Or so the story goes, at any rate.
Stephen Pinkers The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence has Declined, exemplifies such a view.
Pinker:
We are all feminists now. Western cultures default point of view has become
increasingly unisex. The universalizing of the generic citizens vantage point,
driven by reason and analogy, was an engine of moral progress during the
Humanitarian Revolution of the 18th century, and it resumed that impetus
during the Rights Revolutions of the 20th. Its no coincidence that the expansion
of the rights of women followed on the heels of the expansion of the rights of
racial minorities, because if the true meaning of the nations founding creed is
that all men are created equal, then why not all women too? (2012, 404)
The question dangles, rhetorically. But I believe it has an answer. It can be summarized in one
word: viz., hierarchy.
I go on to argue that Pinkers humanist picture, which many contemporary moral philosophers
are broadly sympathetic to, is seriously misleading as applied to gendered oppression. It
subsequently misleads about what will be required in order to achieve gender justice. And we are
not all feminists now; nor is feminism a humanism.
On my account, misogynys primary targets are insubordinate women those who challenge,
violate, or resist patriarchal norms and expectations. And far from stemming from a failure to
recognize womens full humanity, the ascription of such offenses to women typically
presupposes and expresses that very recognition. For, misogyny is often triggered by a womans
manifestations of subjectivity, rationality, agency, and so on. Moreover, misogyny
characteristically results in a standard range of negative reactive attitudes, to invoke P.F.
Strawsons notion. (1962/2008) These attitudes are more or less distinctive to our relationships
with other competent, responsible, adult persons, and encompass standard affective responses to
personal slights, norm violations, and other ostensibly anti-social behavior which we bear witness
to. Such responses include resentment, indignation, retributive desires, and all the essentially
9

personal antagonisms. (Strawson 1962/2008, 11; for a brief overview of Strawsons distinction
between interpersonal reactive attitudes versus the objective stance towards people, see my
What is Misogyny, n. 30.) So misogyny turns out to be primarily a second-personal
phenomenon, in Stephen Darwalls sense (2006; 2013) a conclusion which will be surprising
to some, at least at the outset. The twist is that misogynys perspective is often second-person
plural. I will punish you all for it is its characteristic sentiment. (These were the words uttered
by misogynist mass killer, Elliot Rodger, to the hot blonde sluts who he pined for from a
distance; see What is Misogyny, 1.1.) The sentiment is personal, pointed, but need not be
pointed at the target. More precisely, it may be pointed at the target not in her individual
particularity, but rather as a representative member of a certain type of woman who is held to be
out of order. In other words, this woman may epitomize a supposedly objectionable class of
women, which she may or may not belong to, and may even be an empty or incoherent category.
This is why misogyny can target women who have done nothing wrong, by the lights of
patriarchal values.
When it comes to the mechanisms of misogyny, there is a tendency to focus on violent and other
palpably hate-filled actions (e.g., slurring). (See, again Pinker, 2012, Chapter 7.) But this is an
excessively narrow view, I argue. Women are also taken down by means of, e.g.:
(1) Humiliating humor as in lampooning, mocking, satirizing, and skewering
women;
(2) Moralizing as in shunning, shaming, demonizing, and vilifying women,
criminalizing their conduct, and impugning their characters; and
(3) Belittling forms of treatment as in infantilizing and patronizing women, and
also mansplaining. (See Rebecca Solnit, 2014)
Such subordinating manoeuvres may be played out in social space, or merely in the individual or
collective imagination, thus serving to defuse the psychic threat which certain women pose to the
patriarchy. I go on to discuss the ways in which each of these families of techniques played an
important role in the eventual political takedown of Julia Gillard, the first female Prime Minister
of Australia.
I then explore the role of sexual objectification in enacting misogyny. Rae Langton has
sympathetically explored Catharine MacKinnons view that violent, degrading, heterosexual
pornography is a leading cause of, and even constitutes a form of, womens subordination.
(Langton, 2009; cf. Martha Nussbaum, 1995, 2011.) Pace Langton, and drawing on recent work
by Nancy Bauer (2015), I argue that this kind of pornography may be primarily a symptom and
expression of a broader cultural problem. It often functions to imaginatively restore male
dominance, and to eroticize womens power in ways which render it emotionally more
10

manageable. Pornography of this kind may hence be soothing. But it is the underlying wound,
more than the balm, which should worry us.
Finally in this chapter, I examine some of the characteristic effects of misogynistic social
practices in silencing and excluding women from male-dominated spaces and masculine-coded
domains. There is also the valorization and rewarding of good women to consider (good by
unjust patriarchal lights, that is). (See Haslanger, 2013, and forthcoming; and Jason Stanley, 2015,
Chapter 4.) Misogynistic values may also be internalized by women. This can result in women
policing other women, and engaging in more or less subtle forms of complicity. It can also result
in womens so-called adaptive preferences, in alignment with patriarchal values, as well as
women softening themselves in various aspects of their self-presentation. Popular food blogger
Deb Perelmans recent bestselling Smitten Kitchen Cookbook (2012) provides an example of the
latter tendency. Despite Perelmans impressive accomplishments, almost half of the recipes
therein contain an explicitly self-deprecating remark about her intelligence, rationality, commonsense, competence, or personality in the headnotes. (Perelman on her new favourite chicken
recipe: This is my absolutely favourite example of why I and possibly you should never
listen to myself. Because I couldnt have been further off in my guess that this dish would be an
epic disaster. Youre probably wondering why I made it anyway 2012, 175. Perelman on
disliking beets: I knew my reaction was an immature one. I knew it was unreasonable [But]
I couldnt quite hurdle it. I could not rise above it for the sake of rationality. I am hardly a model
eater; 2012, 76. Perelman on liking to talk about cooking techniques: You are welcome to pity
my husband right now. I understand; 2012, 57.) In softening herself in this way, quite possibly
unconsciously, Perelman pulls off an increasingly difficult task: remaining a likeable, prominent
woman on the internet.
Chapter 3: Excusing Misogyny
Having argued that misogynys primary function is to control and police women, and enforce
womens subordination, I turn to the other, overlooked side of the coin in this chapter. This
involves being an apologist for the men who control, police, and otherwise dominate women.
I seek to connect this phenomenon and the tendency to deny and excuse misogyny more
generally to the phenomenon of testimonial injustice, theorized by Miranda Fricker (1999;
2007), Patricia Hill Collins (2000), Karen Jones (2002), and Kristie Dotson (2011; 2012), among
others. Testimonial injustice occurs when (e.g.) a womans word is not taken as seriously as it
ought to be, due to an unjust view of the woman herself as incompetent or duplicitous.
Why does testimonial injustice for women persist though? The standard answer to this question
grounds out in gender stereotypes or, similarly, implicit biases. On this view, testimonial injustice
stems from honest, albeit socially injurious, cognitive errors. We need to educate people, or help
them to adjust for their own biases, in order to combat it.
11

I think there is something more insidious going on though. A clue to this: stereotypes of women
as incompetent and duplicitous are both highly entrenched, yet also crop up inconsistently. And
womens competence and trustworthiness are generally rated higher than mens, when it comes
to knowing how to care for children, perform housework, and manage social interactions.
We should also look at these issues through an intersectional lens. Recent ethnographic work has
suggested that poor Black women, living in over-policed neighborhoods in the US today, are
subject to testimonial injustice in quite different contexts than middle class White women. Such
Black womens testimony remains not only undervalued but largely inaudible in a wide range of
circumstances. (See, e.g., Kristie Dotson and Marita Gilbert, 2014.) However, these womens
testimony is ostensibly taken seriously in one noteworthy context: when they can be exploited to
testify against, and hence help the state to convict, the Black men in their families, social circles,
and neighborhoods. (See Goffman, 2013, Chapter 3, When the Police Knock Your Door In;
and compare Rachel McKinneys notion of extracted speech.)
I subsequently argue that the sticky yet ad hoc stereotypes of women as incompetent and
duplicitous are not simply unfortunate cognitive artifacts of history. They serve an important
ongoing ideological function. Namely, they serve to prevent women from overturning existing
gender hierarchies by making it difficult for women to challenge mens word, or testify
against them, successfully. But these preventative measures and hence the stereotypes themselves
are otiose when there are other dominant social forces pushing the men in question downwards,
e.g., white supremacist ones. Black men and, for that matter, men who are gay, trans,
genderqueer, disabled, mentally ill, and also those who have been vilified as monsters and sexual
predators are the beneficiaries of testimonial injustice comparatively rarely. It is hyperprivileged men i.e., white, straight, cis, nondisabled, and arguably wealthy men, in the US
context who are liable to be pardoned. Stereotypes about womens duplicity help to protect
hyper-privileged men from being convicted of sexual assault, domestic violence, and sexual
harassment, in particular. And stereotypes about womens incompetence allow these men to
assume the intellectual high ground, and to engage in mansplaining, to use Rebecca Solnits
term for it. (Solnit 2014; compare also Patricia Hill Collins, 2000, Chapter 11.)
This chapter also discusses several examples of excusing misogyny drawn from popular culture.
They include the bestselling novel and subsequent feature film Gone Girl, the recent television
adaptation of the Coen brothers film Fargo, the sleeper hit podcast Serial, and the so-called
Gamergate controversy which began when Zoe Quinns ex-boyfriend posted a resentful rant
about her on the internet, accusing her of cheating on him.
These cases all illustrate the strength of the desire to uphold mens privilege, and the balance of
sympathy which men tend to garner. These exonerating tendencies and narratives are an
important and often overlooked aspect of male privilege.

12

Chapter 4: Facing Misogyny

The next chapter of the book considers how we ought to respond affectively and ethically
to individual men and women who channel misogynist social forces, or are out-and-out
misogynists. If we conceptualize misogyny as stemming from an essentializing view of women,
i.e., a perceptual or quasi-perceptual tendency to represent women as the other, as sexual
objects, or even as subhuman, then misogyny will tend to seem like an ingrained form of bigotry
which would require a major moral epiphany or transformative experience to overcome. (See
L.A. Paul, 2015, for a pioneering treatment of the latter, together with the theoretical and
normative implications thereof.) But if misogyny typically owes to what I am calling social
vertigo an often deceptive sense of being in danger of falling socially, relative to other people
then it is merely a particular form of a routine social phenomenon. Namely, hierarchical
insecurity and jostling for position. Misogyny often involves particularly ugly and injurious forms
of jostling, admittedly; but the underlying anxiety should be understandable, perhaps familiar.
For this reason, I think that flashes of misogynist aggression are not only ubiquitous, but often
quite forgivable.
Not always, of course. There are people whose misogynistic behaviour is too enduring,
entrenched, unapologetic, or simply injurious to be forgiven, especially when they have had
ample opportunity to reform. What then? There is an exciting new literature in philosophy on the
politics of anger, including work in progress by Amia Srinivasan, Myisha Cherry, and Martha
Nussbaum, among others. I am sympathetic to the views being developed by Srinivasan and
Cherry on the political importance of anger at least for a certain period of time following the
offense. But, after a point, I worry that anger becomes exhausting. And blaming people is, as I
argue elsewhere, an inherently hopeful kind of attitude. (In my Internalism about Reasons: Sad
but True? Philosophical Studies, 2013.) That is, blame seeks or at least hopes to restore the
relationship. What should we feel when the situation or person seems a hopeless case, with
regard to their misogyny?
Fortunately, forgiving people and continuing to blame them do not exhaust our options. We may
instead choose to adopt the objective stance towards them, and try to manage, avoid, or
navigate around their behaviour. This does not commit us to the view that the person shouldnt
be held morally responsible for what they do. It is rather to grant oneself a reprieve from being
the one to so hold them. Strawson:
We look with an objective eye on the compulsive behaviour of the neurotic or
the tiresome behaviour of a very young child, thinking in terms of treatment or
training. But we can sometimes look with something like the same eye on the
behaviour of the normal and the mature. We have this resource and can
sometimes use it; as a refuge, say, from the strains of involvement. (1962/2008,
18)
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But Strawson did not see, or at any rate did not say, that the objective attitude can also be a
resource for dealing with privileged peoples bad behaviour. (1962/2008, 10; 13) This offers us
a way out of an otherwise unattractive bind having to always forgive ones oppressors, which
seems too exonerating, versus having to stay angry and blame them forever. That would be
burdensome and, in some cases, destructive. And it would also keep ones attention trained on
ones oppressors, at the expense of a potentially more liberating orientation.
Chapter 5: Ending Misogyny
In the final chapter of the book, I argue that we should concentrate politically on minimizing and
mitigating the harmful effects of misogyny, rather than purifying individual agents hearts. (Cf.
J.L.A. Garcia, 1996) But how can we dismantle the bastions of male privilege i.e., the
historically situated and materially constituted institutions which serve to buttress male
dominance without precipitating unnecessary fallout? How much fallout should we be
prepared to countenance, to bring these institutions into line with what justice ideally requires as
rapidly as possible?
The idea that we should sometimes proceed with caution, and even be prepared to go slowly in
some cases, has not been terribly popular in my political demographic. But I think we need to
take it seriously regardless. Drawing on work by Ruth Barcan Marcus on iterated oughts (1966),
I draw a distinction between what ought to be done ideally, i.e., if the world was as it ought to
be, versus what ought to be done in practice, given the sub-ideal realities. We shouldnt ever have
to compromise the pursuit of justice for the sake of minimizing misogynistic backlash, granted.
But this may be one of the many sets of circumstances in which you shouldnt have to but you
do, given that social realities, and people, are not as they ought to be.
For, if the argument of this book is along the right lines, then the process of achieving justice for
women will be difficult, disruptive, and often downright dangerous. Admittedly, dismantling
patriarchal social structures is plausibly in at least some mens long-term best interests. (See Tom
Digby, 2012, Chapter 6, for interesting discussion here.) Important as this is, it is not enough to
block the above line of argument. Losing privilege will often feel like a great loss, as well as a
deep injustice, for hitherto unjustly privileged people especially since one of the pervasive
features of privilege is its invisibility to those who possess it. (See Peggy McIntosh, 1988, for the
classic articulation of this view.)
So we cannot simply march in and demolish patriarchal social structures, leaving people
women especially to live in the ruins. And we cannot simply throw open the door to the
citadel for women, and then walk away from a now volatile situation. We need to balance the
long-term political imperative of achieving gender justice against the short-term risks for women
like Grace Mann. Most importantly, when the bastions of privilege do fall, we need an ethos of
attentiveness to the vulnerable in the aftermath.
14

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