We began our class with Mood Check, as is customary. Those that did not have the opportunity to give a brief one-sentence summary of their Second Blog post did so, and then we discussed some course logistics. As a class, we agreed that Blog Comments should touch on the philosophy behind the Blog and why it is enlightening to the commenter. Professor Gallegos then said that for our Final Project, we would have the opportunity to revise one of our already existing projects.
We then began the substantive discussion of the class with the notion of himpathy, which was defined as the phenomenon where one has empathy for ‘him’ – him being the perpetrator of harassment or sexual misconduct. More specifically, it is when people feel sorry for him due to the negative consequences that he must endure as a result of the woman’s reporting the assault, and they feel uncomfortable/have a lack of empathy for the woman who make claims against these men.
We then discussed the feminine coded goods (p. 110) with a focus on the idea that they persist because they are truly good. They include affection, adoration and indulgence, to name a few. We also talked about the masculine coded goods (p. 113), defining them as masculine coded privileges, wherein it is important that these privileges are not taken away from men by women. Women who do take away these ‘perks’ from a man are subject to punishment. It was then observed that everything that has to do with masculine coded goods revolves around power or social status.
We then heard a very powerful class summary from Hunter, where he used his personal experience to shed light on a perplexing issue that had not yet been discussed in class. Hunter brought up the idea that power dynamics are fluid, and that people make the mistake of thinking that women don’t have any power. He furthermore stated that gender norms are ubiquitous, and that it is okay to go against them. We also discussed that one of the problems with gender norms is that people get locked-in to always providing something for someone else. Gender norms are consequently restrictive and demanding, but, conversely, they can also be functional and advantageous. For example, for men, there are legitimate real-world pressures that make them want to turn off their emotion, and in those situations, it is advantageous for men to be emotionally unavailable; an emergency situation would be one of those times, as it is important for the man to stay put together in a crisis situation so he can focus on helping the largest number of people without being ’emotionally overwhelmed’ by the situation. However, the biggest problem with this is that when men make turning-off their emotion a habit, over time, they lose their ability to be genuinely emotional, and hence they demand it from their female partner.
We then proceeded to talk about the reading for Thursday, which was Chapter 3 of ‘Down Girl’; the chapter discusses the relationship between sexism and misogyny, and also touches on the concept of autonomy. We first addressed the question as to whether misogyny and sexism can exist without the other, and the relationship between sexism and misogyny was explicated as misogyny being an enforcer for sexism, and sexism being the justification for misogyny. Together, sexism and misogyny maintain the patriarchal order, while sexism furthermore justifies the maintenance of the patriarchal order. Manne states that sexism “wears a lab coat” as it tries to talk authoritatively about the world, and misogyny wears a badge and goes on witch-hunts, meaning that it has a sort of policing function.
We then talked about autonomy, defining it as a sort of free-will whereby one is able to decide for themselves what they want to do and how they want to do it. Manne states that autonomy can be denied in cases of sexual objectification in one of the following two ways (p. 85): the non-attribution of autonomy to a subject, versus the violation of the autonomy of a subject. The former case occurs when a person doesn’t recognize that another person has their own free-will, and the second occurs when a person desires to ‘get inside her head’ by overriding her will, causing her to suffer or violating her body integrity. The last point that was made in class was about how misogyny can also take the form of desexualizing someone.
This is super interesting to me because in my human sexuality class this morning we talked about how being sexualized is powerful and desirable, because according to society, being powerful and under control is represented in the media and being sexually promiscuous, i.e. by being sexualized; but that being sexualized also sets one up for victimization and reputational consequences, for example where is the line drawn between being sexually promiscuous and being slutty?
What’s really interesting is that by desexualizing someone, you take all that power and desire away from them, but you still set them up for victimization and negative reputational consequences. I think that this shows the true power imbalance of society, in that women have been conditioned to protect the well-being and the feelings of their mates, and in doing so, society has created this victim-blaming culture that further suppresses women’s ability to gain control of their own autonomy. It seems like the only way that women can gain control over situations of objectification and assault is by blaming themselves for their occurrence. By blaming themselves, women are able to add predictability into the mix, e.g. I was assaulted because I was wearing a tight skirt, so if I don’t wear a tight skirt, this won’t happen again.
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