Preface: Kate Manne, Down Girl

Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Published by Penguin Books, 2018.

Preface: Going Wrong, pp. xi-xxiv

Chapter Summary

Manne's Preface opens with the question that drives the rest of the book: in the context of many, well-documented legal, educational, and social gains for women in the past century, how is it that misogyny is 'still with us' (xii)? More than that: how is it, that, well into the twenty-first century, some of the problems of misogyny are 'arguably on the rise' (xii)?

As one – and, she stresses, just one – answer to these questions, Manne offers the core argument she will make throughout the book: that men tend to 'draw on women in asymmetrical support roles' (xiii, emphasis original). She helpfully unpacks, in the remainder of this chapter, what she means by 'asymmetrical support roles'. Importantly, this is distinct from a conscious 'hatred' of women. Instead, it's about the spoken or unspoken assumption that women owe '[their] distinctly human services and capacities' to men, 'much more so than vice-versa', and the resulting punishment of women who refuse to conform to that assumption (xiii, xvii). In recent years, we've seen the asymmetrical support dynamic more commonly expressed on social media and in pop culture think pieces as emotional labour or the mental load - or even through the rise of 'incel' culture, which (either implicitly or explicitly) holds that men are entitled to sex from women.

In Manne's framing, then, women are subordinated or oppressed in a patriarchal culture not by active and malicious violence alone, but also and equally by the assumption running through all social strata that women should be understood, socialised, and treated not as 'simply [...] human beings', but rather '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' (xix). And, for most of this, this assumption is baked into our understanding of the world, on an unconscious level; as Manne puts it: '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' (xxi). So misogyny is constructed here not as a conscious, hostile mode of action – although, of course, it can manifest that way, too. Rather, it is part of our social programming.

The preface is also a meta-commentary on the gap that Manne sees her work filling in the wider field, as well as a meditation on the nature of writing about a subject that is so variously defined, so diffuse, and so infused into our society. Manne received pushback from 'some disciplinary stalwarts', who labelled a study of misogyny 'positively passé' – but, she notes, 'this seemed somewhat obviated by the fact that there wasn't a single book, or even an article-length treatment, of misogyny as such when I began this project in May 2014' (xx). She highlights, too, the challenges of thinking systemically and training herself, as a critic, to look differently, 'awkwardly, sometimes from uncomfortable angles, and often quite painfully' in order not to miss 'something worth considering that was hiding in plain sight' (xxi).

My Reflections

I first read Down Girl in the context of working on my first book (Canonical Misogyny: Shakespeare and Dramaturgies of Sexual Violence). It struck me as an enormously useful re-framing of misogyny: rather than an individual problem of specific men who hate women, Manne frames the issue systemically and structurally. In other words, rather than looking at misogyny as something that lives within, and therefore can be addressed by, specific individuals, Manne zooms out to consider how misogyny infuses the social structures that pattern our world. This is part of what I see as 'systemic turn' in academic research in the humanities and social sciences over roughly the last decade, whereby more of us are trying to do that kind of zoomed out thinking.

Zooming out in this way is more challenging than it sounds, partly because the logics of neoliberal capitalism are hyper-individual and atomised, not to mention informed by carceral logics. We like very much to have someone on whom to place blame: to indict, to arrest, to try, to imprison, to punish. But – and this is one of the uncomfortable truths that Manne's work asks us to confront – punishing the individual enactors of misogyny has so far failed to move the needle in terms of mitigating its overall infusion in society.

As I say in my book, I appreciate the way that Manne's framing of misogyny as a systemic issue allows me, at least, to look differently at many of its manifestations, including in other women. It also (if I may quote myself!) 'usefully foregrounds the capacity of misogyny' (Williams 24). I'll have more to say about that when we dig into the Introduction next week.

Discussion and Journal Prompts

Thanks for thinking with me! If you want to continue the discussion, I offer these as starting points either for your own journaling or for a discussion in the comments below:

1. What does thinking systemically mean to you?
2. How does understanding misogyny as a system rather than as an individual feeling or set of behaviours change your thinking?
3. Does looking at misogyny as a system help us think more clearly and productively about how it address it outside the carceral system?