Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

So a woman’s recognized humanity may leave much to be desired by way of moral freedom. And her sense of obligation is then likely to be excessive, on the one hand, and lacking, in many others.

When one’s effigy is one’s body, one burns right along with it.

Such objectifying forms of treatment can seemingly serve not only as punishment but also ways of defusing the psychic threat that certain women pose.

What could be a more natural basis for hostility and aggression than defection from the role of an attentive, loving subordinate?

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.

We talk about waves of feminism in a way that strikes me as quite different from other areas of political discourse: why? There is, then, an inbuilt or assumed obsolescence for feminist thinking, rather than a model of amendment, addition, and new centers for new discussions.

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.

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.

Women’s adherence to the relevant social roles—as, for example, loving wives, devoted moms, “cool” girlfriends, loyal secretaries, or good waitresses, to name just a few of the most obvious examples—is supposed to look as natural or freely chosen as possible.