Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

Misogyny does this by visiting hostile or adverse social consequences on a certain (more or less circumscribed) class of girls or women to enforce and police social norms that are gendered either in theory (i.e., content) or in practice (i.e., norm enforcement mechanisms).

Silence is golden for the men who smother and intimidate women into not talking, or have them change their tune to maintain harmony. Silence isolates his victims; and it enables misogyny. So, let us break it.

All in all, I have tried in writing this book to let myself look long, hard, and awkwardly, sometimes from uncomfortable angles, and quite often painfully, in what felt like all the wrong places, in the wrong ways, at the wrong times, in the wrong order.

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.

For the logic of patriarchy, hence misogyny, very much includes a commitment to gender binarism (see Digby [2014]), as well as an anti-trans metaphysics of gender (see Bettcher [2007, 2012]), a heteronormative view of human sexuality (see Dembroff [2016], for an alternative conceptual framework to the usual distinctions between homo-, hetero-, and

Even if women like Clinton aren’t subject to false beliefs or defunct gendered stereotypes per se, they may be viewed and treated in a hostile way precisely because of their manifest competence.

In many ways, this seems to be misogyny’s characteristic sentiment. It is punitive, resentful, and personal, but not particular. And the psychological targets of such attitudes may little resemble the actual victims.

Eviction is a ubiquitous problem for black women, one that sociologist Matthew Desmond takes to be the undernoticed analogue of mass incarceration for black men, which constitutes a deep source of systemic injustice and disadvantage.

We should also be concerned with the rewarding and valorizing of women who conform to gendered norms and expectations, in being (e.g.) loving mothers, attentive wives, loyal secretaries, “cool” girlfriends, or good waitresses. Another locus of concern should be the punishment and policing of men who flout the norms of masculinity—a point that is fa