I have to preface this by a content warning due to the very intense and disturbing topics it covers: violence against women, genocide, sexual assault, mass shootings, strangulation, family annihilation, hate crimes, domestic violence.
This is a philosophy book written by a professor at Cornell that I’ve been meaning to read for a while now, since I had heard about it a couple of years back. It falls under the school of thought known as analytic philosophy, where the standard practice is for the writer to dissect her argument methodically with logical precision. It has a reputation of being dry, lifeless and too narrowly focused, unlike the poetic flair and mind expanding reach that philosophy’s other school of thought, continental philosophy, possesses.
This book, however, is anything but dry and lifeless. Kate Manne is writing this in the shadow of Donald Trump’s US presidential victory in 2016, with all the righteous fury and rage one can muster at a whole host of despicable men that had risen to infamy in and around that time. The characters brought up as examples to explain the concepts she expounds on include Trump himself, right wing figures such as Rush Limbaugh, who once said on his show that a woman who wants free access to contraception should take videos of herself having sex and post them online as “payment”; or Steve Bannon, who had strangled his wife and subsequently shamed her into silence; or the incel Elliot Roger, who went on a mass murdering spree after deciding that attractive women who he thought owed him sex were not giving him what he deserved. The list goes on, and some of the stories really made me squirm and disgusted by what men do to women.
The thing that all these men had in common is misogyny, which Manne defines very particularly as “the ‘law enforcement’ branch of a patriarchal order, which has the overall function of policing and enforcing its governing ideology” (p63).
What does that definition of policing and enforcing the patriarchal order entail? Manne argues that misogyny doesn’t dehumanize women so much as hold them to a certain role in society where they owe their human capacities (love, labor, loyalty, sex, submission, etc) to the men in their lives, and the men in turn feel entitled all these services and feel that they have every right to violently retaliate whenever a women refuses to give these things.
The chapters go through various forms in which misogyny latches on to our society’s implicit and explicit rules and behavioral norms. Some examples: men literally getting away with murder because a “good guy can do no wrong” while his victim is denigrated as crazy, stupid, hysterical, or asking for it, etc; women being divided into “good women” who play their roles in upholding the patriarchy and policing the “bad” ones who are brazen enough to not give men what they feel owed; masculine-coded roles being fiercely guarded, such as positions of leadership, wherein a women who competes for such a role is regarded as “taking what belongs to a man”; or how misogyny intersects with other dimensions of oppression such as race and class, where victims can be not just silenced but completely erased, as in the case of black sex workers in the US who get abused by police.
The whole book was so gripping for me because I definitely enjoy methodically laid out arguments that leave no stone unturned, but also because the human stories and examples shocked me into attention and I feel ashamed to be a man who is in many ways a beneficiary of misogyny.
Growing up in Myanmar, I was surrounded by misogyny in both its crudest forms of overt violence (like stories of mistreatment of sex workers told with delight by people I know) and more subtle forms of norm enforcement through culture (like movies where women who show any agency that doesn’t serve the male protagonist gets punished). On the other hand I was also fortunate to have been brought up by incredibly strong, independent and headstrong women: my mother, grandmother and aunt, who all had a huge positive impact on my outlook of women. I’m always thankful for that, but still in the process of unlearning a lot.