The tendency of society to crush the power and potential of its women and girls, wrote Betty Friedan, unforgettably, in The Feminine Mystique (1963), is “the problem that has no name”. Finding a name, and then a language with which to discuss this problem, a history in which to ground it, and an army with which to defeat it, has been the work of the half-century since. There is still much work to be done, and some of the sharpest female minds are turning their intellectual attention to the task. In Women and Power: A manifesto, Mary Beard reveals the ancient roots of misogyny with new and characteristic clarity. Meanwhile, Kate Manne makes the logic of misogyny her subject in Down Girl.
Although Beard’s subject matter comes first, chronologically speaking – concerned, as her book is, with narratives established millennia ago that set the tone for Western civilization – it’s Down Girl that needs to be read first, since it unpicks not just the content of misogyny as a social reality, but the theory of misogyny as a concept. Manne’s book is a forensic and clever analysis which provides the cogs and wheels of how the system of patriarchal policing works, in our minds, as well as in our world. Remarkably, there has never been a book-length treatment on the logic of misogyny until now.
Misogyny, Manne explains, should be understood not as the psychology of individual men, but as “a property of social environments in which women are liable to encounter hostility due to the enforcement and policing of patriarchal norms and expectations . . . insofar as they violate patriarchal law and order”. Although so often confused with sexism, the two are different: if misogyny is the law enforcement branch of the patriarchal system, sexism is the justification. By framing misogyny in such a way, Manne is able to deal fairly simply with otherwise baffling dilemmas. Why are so many women complicit in misogyny? Because they are invested in society’s rules. Why does a rare but recognizable type of affluent white man become a “family annihilator” – murdering his wife and children and destroying their home rather than face bankruptcy? To avoid being humiliated in front of those whose futures he, as a patriarch, should have been able to control. And then, why do so many of us instinctively empathize not with the female victims of male violence and control, but the male aggressor? We are all conditioned to be complicit in upholding their position of power and entitlement. We value this more than the life of the female victim. (There is a name for this, rather brilliantly suggested by Manne: “himpathy”.) How can one be both a misogynist and love individual women? Because misogyny is designed to single out and punish only those women who break the rules by exercising power, dominance, or a perceived lack of care and love-giving.
In this, as in many other aspects of Manne’s analysis, there is a useful parallel with race although Manne does not draw it. The patriarchal man who loves his sister, mother, girlfriend, whose misogyny Manne so expertly unpicks, almost exactly mirrors the racist who declares in his defence “but I have black friends”.
Manne weaves her unflappable logic through the mess of Trump’s “locker room banter” and the (ultimately retracted) rape allegations of his wife Ivana. She takes in the domestic abuse allegations of the White House appointees Andrew Puzder and Steve Bannon; the wider phenomenon of women who have suffered fatal and non-fatal strangulation by their intimate partner; and Brook Turner, the “golden boy” college student who was given a lenient sentence for rape after the judge expressed concern about the impact stronger sanction would have on his well-being. Manne also turns her attention to the treatment, by the press and the public, of Hillary Clinton and the dynamics of #MeToo.
The Isla Vista killings in particular provide a narrative structure to contextualize Manne’s more esoteric arguments. In 2014 an American twenty-two-year-old named Elliot Rodger embarked on what he called a “Day of Retribution”, exacting revenge on society, and especially female college students, for his having been “forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled desires, all because girls have never been attracted to me”. After attempting unsuccessfully to murder every young woman in a sorority house at the University of Santa Barbara, he killed six passers-by and injured thirteen more, before turning his gun on himself. One commentator said that the spree made Rodger “the first feminist mass murderer”, because he had put “pussy on a pedestal” rather than just claiming it. Manne cites far-right and men’s rights activists intermittently, revealing the hidden logic at work here: men feel a sense of entitlement to women’s sexual and reproductive labour. Manne also reminds us of the series of incidents in which the shock jock Rush Limbaugh described Sandra Fluke – the Georgetown student who argued that birth control should be covered by health insurance – as a “prostitute”. He said that if she wanted birth control from male taxpayers, male taxpayers should be entitled to watch her have sex. Manne is at her absolute best unpicking the complexity of this horrific claim: that in using birth control, a woman is asking for something; and for being granted birth control she owes male taxpayers some kind of debt.
It is Manne’s confidence in simplification as much as her capacity for – at times – intimidating complexity, that makes the book more or less accessible. She treats the philosophy of misogyny with laser precision, and uncovers its unceasing relevance through a seemingly open-ended list of crimes and alleged crimes. This makes Down Girl a prescient work, which proves particularly helpful when facing the news cycle each new day. At the same time, her thesis involves a level of depth and detail that can be challenging for either the uninitiated in book-length philosophical theses, or those – like me – who don’t read them very often. The “quasi-contrapositive moral psychological claim”, Manne posits, allows people to see others as less than human, justifying their mistreatment and perhaps acting as an “even necessary psychological lubricant”. It would be a shame, though, if this book were to end up only in the hands of philosophers. For the ordinary thinker concerned about societal oppression, Down Girl offers a sharply cut prism through which to view our everyday experience.
If Down Girl provides an unyielding analysis of the ever-sprouting branches of misogyny, Women and Power uncovers its roots. In Beard’s history of the ways in which the limits of female power have been circumscribed and policed, ancient examples are eerily resonant with the present. Here instead of Donald Trump, Steve Bannon and Rush Limbaugh, we have the Odyssey’s Telemachus, the rape of Lucretia, Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra and, of course, Medusa.
The tale of Medusa in which male dominance is wielded against the illegitimate and depraved power of a woman, with ultimate violence, leaving nothing but a decapitated head, is quite deservedly singled out for extra attention. It had escaped my notice how often contemporary women who dare to take on male dominance are still superimposed onto the snaky head of Medusa. In one particularly unsettling image, Trump is cast as Perseus holding the disembodied head of Hillary Clinton high in his triumphant hand. “I give you Trump and Clinton, Perseus and Medusa, and rest my case”, says Beard.
The case being made is that the public voice of women must still be granted permission, and too often is only employed to discuss the female. This debate – clearly deserving of far more attention than it gets – raises existential questions about representation and advocacy that, again, have strong relevance for the subject of race. Is it enough, I often find myself asking, to congratulate ourselves for ethnic diversity in the boardroom, the newsroom, or the office? Surely the question worth asking is whether the prevailing culture is one in which people from different backgrounds are enabled to be true to their diverse perspectives, and to thrive, rather than facing pressure to conform to the expectations and norms of whiteness. And when it comes to women, is it progress when those celebrated for having a public platform are women who talk about the plight of women, as the greater number of female MPs in the Welsh parliament for example, are credited with doing? Why is this a burden for women to carry, when child care, domestic violence, parental leave, and so on, are issues affecting the whole of society? Do women have to emulate masculine power in order to appear authoritative, as Beard reminds us Elizabeth I did in her fabled speech at Tilbury – distinguishing between her “weak and feeble” body on the one hand, and her masculine inner core, “the heart and stomach of a king”.
This is the question with which Women and Power is ultimately concerned. Are women too intent on fitting into a definition of power, laid down millennia ago, that is fundamentally male? How can power be extracted from masculinity and redefined to encompass what women and girls naturally have? We may require a change of language. “To power”, Beard suggests, a verb, not a noun – the male thing, that we seek to possess.
It is startling how much the ancient model of misogyny chimes with modern times. Not a day goes by without a male – and sometimes female – troll accusing me of “whingeing and whining” when I express views on current affairs. The mockery of female voices – Beard points out – is evident throughout Roman legend: there’s Philomela, whose tongue was ripped out to prevent her speaking of the rape she endured; Io, the mortal lover of Jupiter who mooed instead of speaking after being turned into a cow; as well as scientific treatises aligning low-pitched voices with courage, and high-pitched voices with cowardice. “Classical writers insisted that the tone and timbre of women’s speech always threatened to subvert not just the voice of the male orator but also the social and political stability, the health, or the whole state”, writes Beard. Sounds familiar.
What elevates this book from a simple study of ancient misogyny – though that is needed – are the tentative green shoots of solutions. You get the impression that Beard is thinking out loud when it comes to these – not surprisingly perhaps, given that the book started out as the script for two lectures she gave in 2014 and 2017 – but the overall effect is manifesto-like. “What we need is some old-fashioned consciousness-raising about what we mean by the ‘voice of authority’”, she posits. “Gradualism takes too long. It is power that needs redefining, not women so that they can fit into it.”
Beard acknowledges the obvious progress that we have made not just since ancient times but in recent years. The book rattles off statistics about the prevalence of women as politicians – 30 per cent now, compared to 4 per cent in the 1970s – but taking into account police commissioners, CEOs and judges argues convincingly that “our mental, cultural template for a powerful person remains resolutely male. Where Manne defines misogyny, Beard is concerned with defining power. Her thoughts are the beginning of something interesting. “What I have in mind”, she writes, “is the ability to be effective, to make a difference in the world, and the right to be taken seriously . . . . It means, above all, thinking about power as an attribute or even a verb (to power), not as a possession.” This is important. So long as women define themselves in the image of male power, they will be continuing the path laid down by the ancient, misogynist antecedents.
Both books take the narratives around gender and power that have become so normalized, or that we know are wrong but struggle to see clearly, and make them dazzlingly visible. Manne pares Trump’s misogyny back to the level of logical proposition. The “lock her up” hurled at Clinton is woven seamlessly into the theory of containing women, and punishing them for transgressing their proper confinement in the patriarchal order. Beard takes something as obvious and internalized as the idea that high-pitched voices lack authority, and places it in a context that is both profoundly sinister and thrillingly illuminating.
Both authors make some effort to be intersectional in their approach. Beard writes about Sojourner Truth and the women behind Black Lives Matter, while Manne invokes the case of the police officer Daniel Holtzclaw, a serial rapist who was convicted of assaults against thirteen African American women while on duty patrolling a low-income neighbourhood in Oklahoma City. The case – which raised painful questions of police power and the perceived lack of accountability when men assault women deemed to have little recourse to justice – said much about both gender and race in America. Manne in particular makes numerous references to misogynoir – the specific misogyny perpetrated against women of colour – and analyses her own limitations as a privileged white women. I would have liked to see these overlaps between gender and race made more explicit, but given the authors’ lenses, and their already vast subject matter, that may be an unrealistic demand.
What is particularly striking is the revelation in both books of just how patriarchal power continues to be passed down to our children, through history – Elizabeth I at Tilbury, for example – myth and literature. We may be waking from our misogynist slumber, but the roots – millennia old as they are – are deeply entangled within our culture. Indeed, Manne ends her book with an extract from The Giving Tree, the remarkable children’s book by Shel Silverstein which curates a message of women’s service as a gift for men to plunder, and yet is still in demand as a bedtime story. Misogyny, Manne tells us, works through the gendered economy of moral labour – there is no better example than this. It “has always been killing girls and women, literally and metaphorically”, writes Manne. “It is a bitterly sad state of affairs”.
And yet, when these two books are taken together, an overwhelming sense of female agency radiates. Both authors are unapologetic about the unflinching clarity of their projects – this in itself pushes the boundaries of expected, and accepted, behaviour. That this is the case is bitterly sad. That Kate Manne and Mary Beard make us confront it anew is cause for cautious hope.
- On March 29, this article was amended to correct the spelling of Betty Friedan’s name.