(*) The 4 paragraphs with parenthesis make more tangential or contextual points to the blog, and I included them only as nonintegral parts to the blog, considering its length.
Part 1. Introduction or summary.
Kate Manne avoids 2 kinds of extremes in thinking about misogyny: (1) the extreme of thinking only in the persons that does misogyny and their affective relationships, the “substance of misogyny”, and (2) the extreme of purely systemic and circumstantial causes, corresponding to the “constitutive nature” of misogyny (pp.74). I focus this blog on the second extreme/aspect, and try to show the problem that, when considering patriarchal social order and sexism together as one system, we seem to get trapped into a picture of our enemy that is impenetrably, insurmountably powerful. Either we attribute our personal wrongs as “sexism” or not, we seem to wind up working against our own goods and goals.
I provide a solution to this problem using Manne’s “ameliorative approach”, making emphasis on the approach’s radical nature, which I think has much more room to capitalize on. By redirecting focus on the girls and women that feel hostility, suppression and confinement (and a whole range of other possible wrongs, implicit and explicit), we dispel our misguided urge to formally daunt ourselves with insoluble enemy of “unjust social orders as a whole”. A second implication of its radical nature lies in a conscious reconstructing of the linguistic uses of a politically laden term, primarily around the mitigations of social, political wrongs, instead of any formal goals, detached from human victims and immovable on its own.
Part 2. Contexts around the problem; presenting the problem.
There is a persistent, pervasive and intangible/structural wrong, and our immediate reaction, our choice of alliance in the moment of reaction, is to “fight against” it. Kate Manne’s reactions instead first takes concentrated gaze at the issue: to regard this wrong in (1.) its detailed structures (how it porously and incorporeally seeped through and takes root in the very things we call existence, the atmosphere of interpersonal relations), in (2.) its underlying [1] functions, such as (2.1.) being parasitic upon our desires and make our desires in turn parasitic upon this wrong itself, (2.2.) turning our own conscious attempts to “fight against” it, such as attributing wrongs as “misogyny” in naïve conception, to camouflage itself out of our scrutiny.
Unsurprisingly, these features are never exclusive for or distinctive of patriarchal social order, and Manne does make repeated emphasis on how “[m]isogyny and racism are inseparably connected” (pp.91). These forms of societal control and orders are likely to have adapted resistance to be “more subtle”, “ambivalent” (Glick 2011) and cunning, precisely in reaction to (even educated by) previous attempts of change.
(Ironically, a more lethal realization would be that these “underlying functions” are not ambiguous but stand proudly on their ground and manifest that they exist, as well as that they work for sexism [2]. We seem to realize in frustration, from simply observing how sexism functions and how it grounds itself in real existence, that sexism is (3.) autonomous, works for its own perpetuation (in us) and its own benefit (in opposition to our benefits), and uses strategies, unbeknownst to us, to efficiently prevent against our possible protest against it. The seeming autonomy of sexism can be found when Manne regards it as possessing a perspective, with a goal of “enforcing patriarchal social relations”, even with a seeming strategic intelligence to judge violence as “not necessary”, “not even desirable”. (pp. 76).)
(Speaking with similar an anthropomorphic bent, sexism taunts us with its unabashed existence because it knows the intertwining of its tentacles with our desires (which it had been strategically planting into humans for around 6000 years), makes it so that our reluctance to go against our own intimate desires, always and necessarily will work also for the benefit of sexism. No amount of intellectual indignation [3], sexism seems to say, can shake the ground of the mix of sexism and our own desires.)
(Have we overattributed daily phenomenon of unjust and frustrations to the incorporeal “sexism”, thereby giving it power, efficiency of function and pervasiveness, even a ghostly independent autonomy (like a “meme”), which itself never had? [4] Or, our attributing a phenomenon as related to, ultimately in service of “sexism” by itself doesn’t primarily add on to the power of “sexism”. And our suspicion that “sexism” cannot be so be big a problem, so powerfully an alienating [5] force is instead a product of denialism, engendered at precisely having to face the reality of “sexism”, really being this big problem and this human-alienating force we had so far regarded. “The truth is terrible” [6], and the terror we feel after identifying sexism as a reality that permeates all of human existence, that has autonomous powers preventing us from “fighting against” it, might only attests to the weighty truthfulness of our realization.)
In all, by what criterion will we know that we have overattributed sexism, or we have underestimated it? Both sides so far seem to be a desperate situation: for the first side, if our overattributing with “sexism” more powerful than it seems, we are, on top of failing to address those misattributed wrongs, creating a powerfully ensnaring structure of wrong merely via speech acts. For the second side, the situation is even grimmer: the extent of wrongness sexism is doing very possibly far exceeds what we intellectually, within the realm of articulated thoughts, had recognized.
Part 3. Kate Manne’s text deals with the problem.
Kate Manne’s adoption of an ameliorative approach to misogyny radically solves a problem of the same type I previously presented: the problem of exactly when does an offense, an instance of being hurt and treated with hostility, should be count as misogyny.
Manne proposes firstly to take a “shift in focus” to think about misogyny “from the point of view of its targets or victims” (Manne, 2017, pp. 59). For sexism, we may similarly stop harrowing over this ideology’s dauntingly impenetrable ingenuity, power, prevalence and how much had it been engrained into the reality. Instead, we should shift focus to those people actually under suppressive coercions and violent confinements distinctive of the confined women and girls.
In one way, we need to avoid our impulses for psychologism and individualism even for a ghostly ideology/ system and become honest about the nature of any human problem as always most importantly, human. A powerful intuition was overcome by this change of viewpoint. As the default mode mentality for “fighting against” the social wrongs involves also a desire to “eliminate” those wrongs [7], there might be an intuition that one needs to thoroughly regard the wrong in its full possible range of power and function before one can securely root out the wrong in full. This intuition is a hopeless, or at best forever incomplete one, because the longer and the harder we gaze at the wrong, the more impossible it seems to “fight against” it. At a deeper level, the most accurate and “woke” understandings of the generation of the wrongs itself, is irrelevant to the actual point of wrongs, i.e. how the wrongs wronged the victims.
Shifting focus away from the wrong itself, the ones who committed wrongs, and back to the wronged both avoids an implicit overpowering of the wrong itself (or avoid defeating ourselves by the very attempts we take to defeat the wrong). Furthermore, this new focus roots back the entire enterprise of investigating the wrong, wanting to eliminate the wrong back to its affective genesis, its ultimate justifying moral reactive attitude: that we want to amend and care for those wronged, and, in many cases, that we want to punish the offenders.
Tangentially, I’d like to argue that this problem coincides with what P. F. Strawson calls “over-intellectualization” of facts, a problem all theorists are susceptible to. The older approaches to “misogyny” and “sexism” are like Strawson’s optimist for the compatibility of determinism and personal moral responsibility, both getting bogged down in a formal account, exhaustive picture of the wrong itself (or for the optimists, the inexistence of a contradiction), and they lose sight of those affective, reactive attitudes that spurred theoretical interests in the first place. The difference between the two is again ironical. The systematic approaches to “sexism” developed a loss of vision, a terminal inactivity from overfilling a gap (of wrongs in themselves) in their account, rather than leaving a gap (of affective attitudes) in their account unaddressed.
Secondly, ameliorative approach is a radical take on the issue because it’s also about “how we ought to understand misogyny, at least for many purposes.” (Manne, 2017, pp. 63). Apart from the conceptual and posteriori descriptive ways of thinking about a word and its signified phenomenon, the ameliorative way of thinking cares most centrally about how to think about a term so that it can capture most distinctively the wrong/problem we want to capture and mitigate. “Distinctive” is emphasized here as opposed to “being the most inclusive”, “being accurate of its applied phenomena” or “being metaphysically the deepest grounding/ causal”. In this sense, the ameliorative approach also clears away these bad questions, to open up for new horizons.
(In detail, since for an instance to be called misogyny, ameliorative approach needs nothing more than “that treatment [of girls and women] be distinctive along some gendered dimension”, than having “having a distinctively gendered bias or quality” (Manne, 2017, pp. 70). The virtue of the ameliorative approach coincides with the descriptive approach, giving voice and tangibility to already existing, yet never articulated phenomena of wrong. The ghostly mystery that we seem (pre-consciously compelled) to adorn our systemic problem with, is cleared away. Instead, by focusing back on the victims actually wronged, the ghost dispels, in the face of concrete affective marks they leave on humans, in our social reality. Meanwhile the formal dilemma of attributions of terms never needed to arise.)
I’d argue that example of Janey Williams and Matthew illustrates himpathy, not primarily because that himpathy was widespread among Janey’s circle of friends and family as a phenomenon, or that it authentically describes what those ingrained urges and phenomena in their full potential dangers and recalcitrance. Himpathy is a term worthy and necessary to be established, because a chain of affective impacts, affectively set off by a “pro-social impulse”, highly distinctive of “something” and highly identifiable, were experienced. If we had turned to focus on the systematic orders, patriarchy itself, that most fundamentally had allowed for this instance of wrong to come to being, we would have arrived at a truly all-encompassing, purely constitutive explanation. However, that explanation would carry zero weight in responding to the torrent of highly distinctive affective details these people had underwent, as the identifiable distinctiveness had been submerged by a monstrously grand picture of formal and self-enclosing desperations, primarily for sake of providing explanations and not much else. For example, a constitutive explanation might see Janey’s friends indifference, reluctance to act against the offender and nitpicking criticisms, as a natural manifestation of the ingrained human bias for always prioritizing one’s own comforts, goods, one’s “staying within one’s familiar range of social actions”, “security of one’s standings within groups” [8], even over others’ manifested suffering. And all our rationalizing intelligent faculties would automatically work for securing our comfortable residence inside the priority of our own interests, without exception. These mechanisms of self-prioritization are so strong, natural to follow and affectively alluring, that we had convinced ourselves of the victimhood of the offender, and the deluded pettiness of the victim.
Such a bleak explanation focusing on the systems that tenaciously generate and perpetuate wrongs might not be far from the actual case at all, yet, is a bad line of approaching the problem because the attention, the spotlight and the mystified powers are granted only to the cause of wrongs, leaving the suffering of the wronged impenetrable, immovable and even inevitable (like the cause itself). Recall Janey’s mother, whose denialism that her suffering as well as victimhood as inevitable, worked successfully even against the evidence of her own manifested suffering [9]. Contrasted with the ameliorating approach the podcast explored instead, the old “constitutive”, systematic approach seems to be more of an ingeniously disguised enemy, planting the controlling systems of wrong and oppression into the affective structures of the victims, than a caring ally for the victims.
Footnotes:
[1] By “seeped through” and “underlying”, I am referring to those parts of sexism ideology and social orders/ structures that are working successfully, efficiently, (for men) non-intrusively, (for men) invisibly and (for complying women) benevolently. Kate Manne expresses this as “(latent) misogyny”, before immediately identifying a similar epistemological anxiety from it, “will there be any way of knowing that a social environment is misogynistic, if the relevant social mechanisms have done their job too well?” (pp. 71). Also, “misogyny that was latent or lay dormant within a culture may manifest itself” (pp.101) when women are capable of actively striving out of (or, effortlessly disregard in “freedom” (pp.86)) the misogynistic norms, roles and ideals supposed to constrain, control and discipline them.
[2] “Sexism” is sometimes used instead of sexism, because in those cases I want to put to the foreground the deliberate speech act of identifying something as sexism. Also, for women, the blatancy with which sexist functions, misogynistic reinforcements manifest precisely as themselves, sexist and misogynistic, work as implicit testimonials that sexism is collectively, naturally “just how human societies work”, therefore “can’t even implies don’t bother” (Manne, 2017, pp.79). These self-confirmed norms and demands work to profess and flaunt themselves, also in the purpose of disillusioning a girl or a woman from ever trying to put up a fight against sexism in the first place.
[3] It was mentioned in class that a comprehensive psychological and physiological rewiring (of what do we instinctively find comforting, normal and desirable) might do the work.
[4] A haunting danger in identifying a personal wrong, a personal feeling of harm and trauma (since all wrong are ultimately “personal wrong”), as a result of misogyny, is that we have also a profound desire to mitigate this wrong, harm and trauma. Giving trauma a corporeal shape, a cause that can be given a name, a face of an enemy, are perfect strategies to mitigate the trauma. The infinite number of impenetrable, suggestive specificities, details that reside in an instance of wrong, and hauntingly does the work of harming us, end up trimmed down, in order that the wrong may be packaged into a heartening shape of sexism, racism etc. Of course, this fear is but a psychologizing one.
[5] Here, “alienation” is used more accurately as being estranged from oneself, from the abilities which ought to be available for one’s self-control. The end result is that the external force of control gets embedded into the alienated girls and women and does its work implicitly. Manne’s similar dictions may be “learned or internalized” (pp.76).
[6] A popular quote from Nietzsche, “But my truth is terrible: for hitherto lies have been called truth.” in Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is.
[7] A desire to eliminate the wrong in full, regardless one believes such a project can be possible, feasible at all. In the more common case where one tries to eliminate wrongs in only a local and relatively benefiting way, one still follows in this intuition because one always want to eliminate “more” wrongs, to destroy the “deeper” layers of systems/ conditions that make possible, that efficiently perpetuates committing those wrongs in the first place. This intuitive urge to overattribute the enemy can be proved to be negated, when Manne repeatedly identifies 3 forms/ dimensions of misogyny, “by individual agents, collective (or ‘mob’) mentality, or purely structural mechanisms” (pp.64, pp.84) as mere manifestations, her approach is radical because she never distinguishes any “structural mechanisms” as underlying, or regard one of the dimensions as causal, while the rest manifested. Refraining taking this causal leap, Manne’s ameliorative approach bypasses the dangerous possibility of painting the enemy to be more formidable, more powerful, more cunningly elusive, more inaccessible to be genuinely revised, than it only what it appears to be.
[8] These group-dependent self-interests are prescribed by one’s roles and the social goods one’s morally demanded/expected to provide, as if to continually securing one’s standing and membership of an in-group. A telling quote comes from Veronica, “People weren’t including him, it wasn’t like that. It was just, he made the effort to not be excluded and to not be a pariah.” (pp. 17).
[9] One evidence in support of this is that Janey’s mother strangely cared more about being not found by her neighbors, than she did about intervening to defending in the moment of being harmed. Janey William was quick to identify this a to be caused by the constitutive structure of patriarchy order, “how deeply it’s ingrained in us”, yet the two cannot go much further than this recognition. How to react or try to right a wrong, we know is too huge to be righted, too huge to be even sufficiently casted under our conceptual gaze? It’s an intimate danger that defeatism would ensue.
References:
1. Glick, P., & Fiske S. T. (2011). Ambivalent Sexism Revisited. Psychol Women Q, 35(3): 530-535. doi: 10.1177/0361684311414832 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3896071/).
2. Manne, K. (2017). Down Girl: The Logic of misogyny. NY, New York: Oxford University Press.
3. Klein, E., Biewen, J., Headlee, C., Williams, J., & Manne, K. “Episode 53: Himpathy (MEN, Part 7).” Scene on Radio, This Happened, Oct. 3, 2018. (http://www.sceneonradio.org/episode-53-himpathy-men-part-7/) (The cited page numbers were those of the transcript.)
4. Strawson, P. F., & Watson, G. (Ed.). (1962). Freedom and Resentment. Proceedings of the British Academy, 48, 1-25. (https://www.informationphilosopher.com/solutions/philosophers/strawson/freedom_and_resentment.html).
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