I’ll agree with you that that title was probably designed for click-bait and not for accuracy.
Misogyny is not about hate, and most of the time racism isn’t either. It’s about maintaining the stratified patriarchal social structure that is perceived to be correct because historically that’s what it’s been. It’s a dominance hierarchy where only a few can be at the apex of the pyramid. To change that dynamic feels disruptive to the entire social structure to some people. A shining example of this was the public declamation a few months ago from a Tennessee councilman against a gay man running for president. It was indicative of people like him feeling that if the social pyramid gets disrupted that he is actually losing rights. “Hurst continued: “I’m not prejudiced, but by golly a white male in this country has very few rights and they’re getting took more every day.”
“Misogyny is typically less heavy-handed, but also more insidious. It is in many cases a largely subconscious reaction to women who are not upholding patriarchal societal constructs. Rather than being a philosophy centered around women being inferior or designed for overt submission, misogyny is the policing arm of patriarchal norms. It is not about hating or disdaining women for being women. In fact, one can even love individual women and bear no ill will towards women as a whole, and still be a misogynist.
Notice then that on my proposed analysis misogyny’s essence lies in its social function, not its psychological nature. To its agents, misogyny need not have any distinctive “feel” or phenomenology from the inside. If it feels like anything at all, it will tend to be righteous: like standing up for oneself or for morality, or — often combining the two — for the “little guy.” It often feels to those in its grip like a moral crusade, not a witch hunt. And it may pursue its targets not in the spirit of hating women but, rather, of loving justice. It can also be a purely structural phenomenon, instantiated via norms, practices, institutions, and other social structures.
Manne, Kate. Down Girl (p. 20). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
Misogynists may not expect women to be overtly submissive, but it is anticipated that they will be “cool” girlfriends, loving wives, devoted moms, loyal secretaries, and good waitresses, etc. The emotional labor and care-giving that are a part of so many women’s daily experiences, both in the family and in the larger community, is unremarked upon unless a woman is notably resisting these functions. Misogyny is the hostilities that arise in the face of such resistance, which may be intended to punish, dominate, or condemn the women who are perceived as a threat to the status quo.
As for the quote:
Welcome to the world of being a woman. Where the person who loves you will easily kill you, most likely in you own home where you should be safe.
As a woman you are also likely to be raped or beaten by that person who has sworn to love and adore you.
No woman is safe — ever. Even if you think you are.
Well, statistically that is the truth. Half of all murdered women are killed by current or former intimate partners and 90% of rapes are committed by someone the woman knows, including someone they are involved with. One in four women are victims of some form of domestic abuse. One of the biggest pressures on women is that they almost never feel entirely safe and in fact, all women are running a kind of low-level threat assessment subroutine most of the time — something that most men rarely or ever have to do. You can say that her last line is misandric, but for me, it lands as something that reflects her sense of hopelessness and helplessness in the face of those realities.
You are making the common mistake of conflating her talking about the things that happen to all women as if all men perpetrate them. She has not said that all men do those things. But it is a fact of life that all women have to be concerned about them, to a greater or lesser degree, depending on their circumstances.
I don’t disagree that painting with a broad brush isn’t really fair and is hard on people who are in that category who don’t deserve to be painted with it, but if you see a snake on the sidewalk, you probably don’t stop to closely inspect it to see if it is indeed a venemous snake; you get the hell out of there and tell other people not to walk there. Women’s lives are so inherently dangerous that they are well within their rights to assume that any man they don’t know is potentially dangerous until he proves otherwise. And even then, it’s no guarantee, because so much violence is done to women by men they know.
If you aren’t acting in “toxic” ways then that term really has nothing to do with you. You don’t need to opt out because you were never included in the description in the first place. You are labeling women who are describing the realities of their lives as being hateful for doing so and that’s not really fair. How are we supposed to talk about pervasive social dynamics that are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men if we can’t actually say those words? We can’t solve societal issues through the lens of personal identity. Yes, many of these issues are about more than just men, but because we live in a patriarchy, then men have the most institutional power and talking about how masculinity is cultivated within that social system and how that manifests in the world is not off base.
It is not that we have created the patriarchy around us. Or the working conditions, or even the dominant culture. What we have done is colluded with it. We cannot mature inside a culture without having internalized aspects of it. Our ability to change our political environment begins with the understanding of how we have helped create it. Our consciousness is where the revolution begins. Fifty percent of the work we need to do is on ourselves. The other 50 percent is to focus outward and use ideas like stewardship to redesign the practices, policies, and structures that institutionalize what we wish to become.
Block, Peter. Stewardship: Choosing Service Over Self-Interest (p. 50). Berrett-Koehler Publishers. Kindle Edition.
