Facebook-f Instagram Search-location
SUBSCRIBE TO THE NEWSLETTER
Menu

Kate Manne Interview (part 1)

Interview with the Philosopher

Cornell University Professor Kate Manne literally wrote the book on misogyny. In part one of our interview, she tells us how we should evaluate it, why it shows up at work, and when breaking the glass ceiling could be dangerous.

BY JULIE LAWRENCE
On the evening of May 23, 2013 Elliot Rodger knocked on the door of a sorority house near the University of California at Santa Barbara. When the confused women refused to let him inside, he left and shot three women on the sidewalk outside of the house before continuing a rampage that would take the lives of six people and injure fourteen. He then turned the gun on himself.
 
Before the attacks, Rodger posted a video on YouTube, declaring that he intended to seek revenge on the women for not giving him the attention that he felt he deserved.
 
The public discourse exploded, with many feminist commentators declaring the killings an act of misogyny. Other pundits disagreed, pointing to mental illness as the culprit.
 
Enter Kate Manne. She believed what was missing from the conversation was a clear account of the nature of misogyny. So, she developed one. Her critically acclaimed and ground-breaking book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny argues that misogyny is the act of correcting the behaviour of women who fail to give men what they believe is their right to have.
 
When I read Down Girl, I finally felt like I had been given the language to accurately describe my experience both in the workplace and out. I felt validated in my anger and better able to understand exactly what I was up against. I urgently felt like I needed to ring the alarm bells: more women needed to know.
 
I caught up with Kate Manne over Zoom and I will admit I was nervous to have the conversation, worried that my oversimplification of her theory would insult her astounding intelligence. But she quickly put me at ease, and I realized that we were on the same team.
 
To help set the stage for this interview, I encourage you to read my previous article on the difference between sexism and misogyny.
JULIE: Can you explain what you mean by your approach to misogyny being victim-centered and how that’s different than how we traditionally look at it?
KATE: A traditional account of misogyny is focused on what’s in a man’s heart. We think about what’s in his heart and what’s in his mind. Does he really hate women deep down? That would make misogyny very difficult to know anything about because we often don’t know what goes on in other people’s minds. We would be unable to diagnose misogyny if we were doing it from a perpetrator centered perspective.
 
So, what I advocate is a perspective shift to thinking about misogyny, not as what he feels, but as what a woman or girl faces in navigating a patriarchal world. The hatred and hostility that victims of misogyny face becomes the focus, and that can be the result of men’s behaviours, women’s behaviours, the behaviours of broader social institutions and cultural practices.
 
Misogyny can even be a purely structural phenomenon, but the important thing is it’s about what she faces, not what he feels.

JULIE: And why do you think misogyny is so pervasive, especially in the workplace?

KATE: Well, that’s a complicated historical question but I think in some ways the answer is simple, it’s patriarchy, and misogyny is the way that patriarchy perpetuates itself. Basically, the idea in my theoretical approach, is that misogyny keeps patriarchy going by enforcing and policing gendered norms and expectations. So, when women don’t know their place, misogyny puts them in it.

JULIE: Can we almost look at the workplace as a mini-society?

KATE: That’s right. I mean, one difficulty here is that the workplace is so diverse. There are so many different forms of work and there are so many different social roles that women occupy in the workforce relative to men as well as non-binary folks, that in some ways it’s difficult to generalize.
 
But one thing that we can say is that patriarchy is very comfortable with women in subordinate and service roles, and women are often both positioned in those service roles in ways that are limiting to their options and freedoms, but also that involve exploiting women’s emotional, reproductive, service, and caregiving labor. Misogyny often involves punishing women who don’t occupy those service roles, or who are perceived as doing so in ways that are dispensable, or as doing it poorly.
 
There are lots of ways in which this hierarchical structure lends itself both to enforcing women playing certain roles in a patriarchy, and it positions them in subordinate roles, which make them vulnerable to people’s punching down behaviour, particularly male aggression.

JULIE: Are there certain industries that are worse than others?

KATE: Some workplaces will be like last bastions of extreme forms of male privilege and prestige and also involve a kind of masculine dominated space, such as politics, business, academia, science, and sports. Some of these spheres are still perceived as men’s places to dominate.

Women having any power in those domains, especially power that rivals men, can be perceived as usurping what is his birthright. We see that in the political realm all the time, and again, it certainly happens in my field of philosophy, which is the most male dominated humanities field.

JULIE: I was going to ask you about your personal experience in academia. What’s it like for you?

KATE: I mean, it varies. I have older male colleagues who are very much allies and really want a different world, and I unfortunately can think of younger people in the profession who yearn for the good old days that never were for them. But I think there’s certainly something to those historical trends for sure. If you experienced a world where a certain kind of job just was your birthright illicitly…

JULIE: You’re not going to like women coming in there, right?

KATE: Why would you? Except out of a sense of justice, which some people have, and some people can be prevailed upon to have. But some people don’t, or at least need help seeing a rearrangement of their world as something other than its destruction.

JULIE: In chapter one of Down Girl, you say that when the glass ceiling breaks, some women get hit by the shards of glass that rain down from others’ rising. Can you explain what that means?
KATE: The idea is that vulnerable women are often subject to these terrible consequences that are meted out to women generally because some women have risen in the ranks.
 
So, people will often say to me, “Look, you’re a professor at Cornell. You seem to be doing pretty well. You have nothing to complain about.” And I agree, but there are much more vulnerable and less privileged women who are often, in fact, bearing the brunt of the aggression and resentment that crops up because some women are in positions that historically are unprecedented.
 
We can’t just look at some progress of the most privileged, and let’s face it, often white women. Yes, we do need women in positions of power – I actually do believe that. However, we also need to be very worried about the consequences that can result for women in vulnerable positions when gendered resentments spread from those outcomes. Often, it’s not the same women who are getting the benefits of certain newfound opportunities as the women who are the most vulnerable to aggression, they are not necessarily reaping those benefits. They’re getting all of the aggression and none of the rewards.
 
Of course, that’s not to say there isn’t a lot of aggression also directed towards women in power. There is, for sure, and that matters as well. But, like most feminists these days, I think we really need to be centering the women who are the most vulnerable to misogynistic abuse and aggression, who are often not the most high-profile powerful women.
JULIE: They’re the ones that see the fallout?
 

KATE: Yeah, exactly. Think about the black and brown girls who Tarana Burke’s Me Too movement originally centered. They’re the people who we should be most concerned with.

Not the rich, privileged Hollywood actresses who, of course, we should also be concerned with them, but the fact that they were kind of the face of the popularization of Burke’s Me Too movement tells us something about who gets the attention, versus who is most in need of our collective concern and moral mobilization.DEFY

Join us in the next issue for Part 2 of our interview with Kate Manne where she discusses her new book Unshrinking, an exploration of the intersection of misogyny and fatphobia.

Julie Lawrence

Julie Lawrence is a journalist and communications specialist from the east coast of Canada. She is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of DEFY Magazine.

Leave a Reply

Discover more from

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading