By Kate Manne (Oxford University Press, 2018)
This is a worthwhile read for anyone interested in a philosophical treatment of gender norms as they relate to White patriarchy. Her treatment of the subject is both detailed and comprehensive, but also accessible. This is due to her approach. She uses real life examples throughout the book, references that are current enough that most readers will be familiar with the incidents she uses to explain her positions. Some of the illustrative stories are multi-faceted enough to be used to reinforce several positions taken throughout the book. One example is her use of Eliot Rodgers, who was responsible for the Isla Vista killings. His intention was to kill all the Tri Delta sorority sisters, but ended up killing two, wounding one, and then going on a rampage, killing one other and injuring over a dozen more.
The Isla Villa story is a good example of the nuanced treatment given this and other incidents by the author. The reaction of many to this killing spree was that Rodgers easily fit the definition of a misogynist — a person who simply hates women. But not so fast. Taking this as an explanation for his actions is a deceptively narrow and erroneous understanding of misogyny. Appropriately, the book begins by distinguishing sexism from misogyny.
The author’s definition of sexism becomes the foundation upon which patriarchal gender-defining norms are developed. There is a purported scientific basis for such norms, which make it implicit that males are identified with specific roles in society, and women are identified with others. Essentially, women are presumed to be inferior with regard to all matters other than child bearing, child rearing, and providing support for their male partners and colleagues. For example, men are normatively expected to take on leadership roles – in business and politics. Women are not precluded from business and politics but they are normatively expected to take on supporting, nurturing and accommodating roles, in addition to playing those roles in family settings. She breaks down this phenomenon, as follows: There is what is hers to give – affection, admiration, sex, children, nurture, security, comfort, contrasted with what is his to take – prestige, public recognition, reputation, honor, upward mobility and status.
Misogyny, is the “law enforcement mechanism” for keeping women in their gender-defined lanes. “Sexism is to misogyny as civic order is to law enforcement.” This is an apt analogy, but I think one could also say that sexism is to misogyny as Social Darwinism is to racial violence and sanctioned discrimination. Just as sexism presumes male superiority, Social Darwinism presumes a racial hierarchy with Caucasians at the very top. Misogyny exacts punishments on those who violate gender norms. Racial violence and discrimination have been historically used to ensure non-whites “know their place.”
Another useful distinction she makes is her classification of a kind of reactive visceral sympathy for men who do harm to women (“himpathy”), along with how in many abusive situations the women disappear altogether. She refers to the latter condition as “herasure.” The section on himpathy starts with a Shakespeare excerpt from Julius Caesar, where Marc Anthony undermines the excuses Brutus gave to slay Caesar. In spite of being offered the crown three times and refusing it each time, “Brutus says he was ambitious; And Brutus in an honorable man.” She uses this as an example to show if the perpetrator of a crime is characterized as a model of righteousness, then attempting to characterize him as a monster fails. As mentioned above, Manne’s talent at making a point through real-world examples is very useful, as in one case she uses to make this point.
She discusses the case of the college student who rapes a woman when she is unconscious. He was caught in the act by two other students, was subsequently arrested and went to trial. At the trial, the rape victim all but disappeared, replaced by the rapist who morphed into the victim of a threatened promising career. He was a college athlete, good student, and his father testified, begging the court not to do an injustice to his son by letting “twenty minutes of action” erase twenty years of an exemplary life. The judge apparently agreed, sentencing him to six months, of which he only served three. “…the judge in this case seemed to be reasoning in accordance with the following inference pattern: a golden boy is not a rapist. So-and-so is a golden boy. Therefore, so-and-so is not a rapist. This is the honorable Brutus problem.”
She makes a point that should be obvious, but was not something that was obvious to me. Once the media, or supporters, or a lawyer makes a victim of the defendant, every victim needs a villain, and that villain can be the prosecutor, but most often it is the actual victim who either “asked for it,” somehow deserved it, is not worthy of our empathy, or has been simply dropped from the story completely (“herasure”).
Manne makes reference to a study done by Jonathan Haidt and Thalia Wheatley where they used post-hypnotic suggestions to elicit disgust by the use of an innocuous word. When that word was used in a sentence expressly conveyed meritorious conduct, the readers read beyond the actual words and suggested the person described must have an agenda, there must be something he is hiding, or he must be a “popularity-seeking snob,” among other disparaging suspicions. The study suggested that we often “reach for these reasons and arguments to rationalize a verdict already rendered. We unwittingly concoct a post hoc case on this basis.” Of course, the hypnotism example is used to explain how we similarly react to someone disapprovingly, and sometimes with disgust, not based upon any reasonable basis but upon their temerity in seeking a role or acting outside of their gender-defined norms. She spends a lot of time analyzing the defeats of both Hillary Clinton (with Trump not wanting to “even think” about her using the restroom during a debate commercial break) and the first and short-lived female Prime Minister of Australia, Julia Gillard (“she has many masks, but have we ever seen her face”).
Manne goes into some detail on why (a majority of) White women voted for Trump, lumping them into a category of women who are vested in White patriarchy and work to defend it against those women who wish to undermine it. “It turns out that women penalize highly successful women as much as men do…inferring norm violations…manipulativeness, coldness, aggression.” Or, as she later writes, for just being a bitch. This section of her book reminded me of a situation I experienced with a Black female worker who started with my organization as an intern living in a domestic violence shelter with her two children. She was never offered another job, but over time took more and more responsibility until she had experienced support, service and administrative positions in every aspect of the organization. After about twelve years she was operating as the chief operating officer and today is the CEO of an organization (Banana Kelly) with numerous social service programs and an affordable housing portfolio valued at over $100 million. Her rise was not meteoric. It was incremental, yet unrelentingly progressive. However, she was not without detractors.
While I still served as CEO, my wife was living in upstate New York. I stayed in the Bronx and went home on weekends when I could. On one particular weekday, she opened a letter from an unknown person. The letter began: Dear Mrs. DeRienzo, I have so much admiration for you, the strong woman that you are, especially since [the CEO referenced above] is pregnant with your husband’s baby. Of course, none of this was true and the only thing that upset my wife was the letter brought this drama into her home.
Friends and people I worked with often saw this as an example of “crabs in a barrel.” Manne speaks to this as well, when she writes “penalizing successful women serves as an ego-protection function (only) for other women. It defuses the threatening sense that a similar – and similarly good, decent or real woman – is more competent or accomplished than they are.” Whatever cabal was responsible for the letter may still be working there. But it has not stopped this woman from growing the organization and leaving her mark on the organization’s continued success. Apparently, in the not-for-profit field, the normative rules are not as dispositive, although they do exist.
There is so much more to this book and I feel I have barely scratched the surface. Manne explores problems of White feminism, vis-à-vis Black women. She references Hannah Arendt, writing of the “banality of misogyny.” She writes about “testimonial injustice” where we tend to discount the opinions, feelings, and value of those who are not like us, who we see as beneath us. She explores sexual solipsism, which stands for the proposition that the only “human minds are male ones.” But most of all, she succeeds (in my opinion) of convincing us that misogyny goes much deeper and is much more nuanced that the common perception that it simply represents one man’s hatred of women. She debunks the individualistic sense of that belief, making the case for the systemic purpose that misogyny plays in the enforcement of White patriarchy. The conclusion of her book, entitled The Giving She, reminds me what others (such as Joy James) have written concerning the Captured Maternal, the person (usually a woman) who gives her all to help people simply survive. And while she gets the life sucked out of her by the system, nothing really changes for those she committed her life to. [Makes me think of Fannie Lou Hamer]
I recommend this book to everyone who feels compelled to challenge prevailing assumptions regarding all forms of hierarchy, and how entrenched implicitly-held norms cause us to work against our own interests, while mistakenly assuming we are working for our collective interests.