Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

By the lights of the naïve conception, misogyny essentially becomes too psychologistic a notion, on the model of a phobia or a deep-seated aversion. It becomes a matter of psychological ill health, or perhaps irrationality, rather than a systematic facet of social power relations and a predictable manifestation of the ideology that governs them: pa

misogyny ought to be understood as the system that operates within a patriarchal social order to police and enforce women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance.

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.

in much of our thinking and acting, we channel and enact social forces far beyond our threshold of conscious awareness or even ability to recover—and sometimes, markedly contrary to our explicit moral beliefs and political commitments.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.