Quote of the Day

When people are attached to positions they believe are their birthright, you get huge amounts of backlash.  When men think women are taking opportunities and privileges away from them, when they think women are challenging male dominance, you get backlash.  But we have to deal with that.  Women cannot -- and should not -- internalize patriarchal values and give and give and give until we're nothing.  What would need to change is for men in positions of power to accept that women can surpass them without having wronged them.

-- Kate Manne, "What we get wrong about misogyny"

Quote of the Day

The good news is it's becoming really obvious that women are not inferior to men in masculine-coded pursuits like math and physics and philosophy.  Women are funny.  Women are writers.  It takes an enormous amount of willful denialism not to see that women are free-minded and creative beings just as much as men are.

-- Kate Manne, "What we get wrong about misogyny"

Quote of the Day

What do we do about misogyny? ... I think one thing that will help is undoing the ties that bind people falsely, the false sense of moral obligation that keeps women with abusers and makes us reluctant to try to educate, to really morally educate young men not to participate in and enact rape culture.

-- Kate Manne, "What we get wrong about misogyny"

Quote of the Day

(What's happened since the Harvey Weinstein story broke) seems to be mostly a good thing.  It's certainly better than the alternative, which is these men getting away with it.  But the thing that bothers me is their age.  These are all men in their 50s, mostly 60s, sometimes 70s, who are being taken down well past the age of commercial viability, so they're not paying the price that they should.  The point is, we have this image of these old, predatory, powerful monsters.  They totally exist, but they didn't start out that way.  They started in adolescence.  We are seeing this reluctance to face up to the fact that young men, even boys, can do the damage of their much older counterparts.

-- Kate Manne, "What we get wrong about misogyny"

Quote of the Day

Since August 2015, my prediction was that Trump would be elected over Clinton, and the reason would be low voter turnout for Clinton, because that's just the way these things work: the lack of enthusiasm for a woman who's up against a male candidate who talks and acts like he's the last hurrah for patriarchy ... On election night, I wasn't shocked, but it hurts to know that the most incompetent, morally bankrupt, and ignorant white man can be elected over a woman about whom reasonable people can disagree but who was obviously more qualified than Trump.

-- Kate Manne, "What we get wrong about misogyny"

Quote of the Day

Misogyny is the law enforcement branch of patriarchy.  If you think about someone like Donald Trump claiming he's the law enforcement president, I think that's right.  It's the law of patriarchy, among other things, that he's enforcing.  It's the law that polices and punishes women who transgress or threaten dominant men.

-- Kate Manne, "What we get wrong about misogyny"

Quote of the Day

I'm less interested in assignments of blame or holding people accountable in direct ways for their perpetuation of misogyny, and I'm more interested in having us understand the ways in which most, if not all of us, tend to be complicit in misogynistic social systems.  I wanted to know how we police women, how we keep them in their place, in their designated lane.  We can combat this, and it's not like we all have to purify ourselves or something.  But we have to be aware of the unconscious biases and cultural norms that sustain all of this.

-- Kate Manne, "What we get wrong about misogyny"

Quote of the Day

I think most misogynistic behavior is about hostility toward women who violate patriarchal norms and expectations, who aren't serving male interests in the ways they're expected to.  So there's this sense that women are doing something wrong: that they're morally objectionable or have a bad attitude or they're abrasive or shrill or too pushy.  But women only appear that way because we expect them to be otherwise, to be passive.

-- Kate Manne, "What we get wrong about misogyny"

Quote of the Day

There are relatively few misogynists as brazen or as unapologetic as Donald Trump, partly because misogynists often think they're taking the moral high ground by preserving a status quo that feels right to them.  They want to be socially and morally superior to the women they target.

-- Kate Manne, "What we get wrong about misogyny"

Quote of the Day

... we have these patriarchal social structures, bastions of male privilege where a dominant man might feel entitled to (and often receive) feminine care and attention from women.  I think misogyny and sexism as working hand-in-hand to uphold those social relations.  Sexism is an ideology that says, "These arrangements just make sense.  Woman are just more caring, or nurturing, or empathetic," which is only true if you prime people by getting them to identify with their gender.  So sexism is the ideology that supports patriarchal social relations, but misogyny enforces it when there's a threat of that system going away.

-- Kate Manne, "What we get wrong about misogyny"

Quote of the Day

There's a tendency to define misogyny as this deep hatred in the heart, harbored by men toward girls and women.  I define misogyny as social systems or environments where women face hostility and hatred because they're women in a man's world -- a historical patriarchy.

-- Kate Manne, "What we get wrong about misogyny"