Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, by Kate Manne

Abstract

Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny combines traditional conceptual analysis and feminist conceptual engineering with critical exploration of cases drawn from popular culture and current events in order to produce an ameliorative account of misogyny, that is, one that will help address the problems of misogyny in the actual world. The result is a timely, engaging, and relatively accessible account of a phenomenon that, in a variety of ways, structures the lives of millions. Manne’s definition of misogyny aims to capture usage patterns in many feminist circles. She presents her view as an alternative to the naïve yet widespread belief that misogyny is a matter of the internal attitudes of individual men. On Manne’s account, misogyny is not primarily a matter of the psychology of individuals. Rather, it is a matter of the social norms, expectations, and consequences that order the lives of women and girls under a system of patriarchal oppression. Misogyny is to be contrasted with sexism, which Manne takes to comprise the set of ideological justifications, often scientistic in nature, that serve to rationalize and naturalize the patriarchal order.