Sublime

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.

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

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

Social Justice approaches that focus solely on group identity and neglect individuality and universality are doomed to fail for the simple reasons that people are individuals and share a common human nature.

when women do minister to men’s hurt feelings, they tend to be rewarded. And when they do not, they are liable to be punished.

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

Misogyny, as I’ve argued, finds in fatphobia a powerful and convenient ally: it constructs a ready-to-hand hierarchy among girls and women based on the infinitely gradable metric of body mass, usefully complicated by body shape, breast size, waist-to-hip ratio, and various markers of privilege.

Even if these interventions were perfectly safe and costless and painless—which they’re currently far from being—I would still find them objectionable at a social level of analysis. For they flatten out difference, in the form of human bodily diversity, which I believe we ought to value. They flatten out such difference not at random, moreover, but