Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

In some ways, this is an extension of a general modus operandi of such powerful and domineering agents: issuing pronouncements that simply stipulate what will be believed, and then treated as the official version of events going forward.

I propose taking sexism to be the branch of patriarchal ideology that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order, and misogyny as the system that polices and enforces its governing norms and expectations. So sexism is scientific; misogyny is moralistic. And a patriarchal order has a hegemonic quality.

sexism often works by naturalizing sex differences, in order to justify patriarchal social arrangements, by making them seem inevitable, or portraying people trying to resist them as fighting a losing battle.

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).

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.

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

But it is we, as white women, who tend to enable it, in ways that may be more or less connected with the aim of self-preservation. The misogyny white women face arguably does disproportionate damage of one kind: moral damage (cf. Tessman 2005). I hence believe we need to get clear on this form of misogyny partly to understand how we err—and how to

Misogyny also subjects women to what I have come to think of as a kind of tyranny of vulnerability—by pointing to any and every (supposedly) more vulnerable (supposed) person or creature in her vicinity to whom she might (again, supposedly) do better, and requiring her to care for them, or else risk being judged callous, even monstrous.

Misogyny hence functions to enforce and police women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance, against the backdrop of other intersecting systems of oppression and vulnerability, dominance and disadvantage, as well as disparate material resources, enabling and constraining social structures, institutions, bureaucratic mechanisms, and so on.