Haven’t you got a sense of humour, love?
Joan Smith on the resurgence of misogyny.
The murder of Jo Cox rightly caused an outpouring of emotion, from shocked disbelief to calls for more civility in public discourse. But memories are short, especially in the feverish atmosphere of a Labour leadership contest. I could hardly believe my ears when Owen Smith, in a campaign speech about equality, said he was upset that Labour did not have the power to “smash” Theresa May “back on her heels”.
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Woman-hating has come roaring back, borne on a tide of recession, economic uncertainty and religious extremism. In this country, we have just witnessed misogyny in its “jokey” form, prompted by May’s arrival at No 10 Downing Street. “Heel, Boys” declared the Sun, showing a pair of kitten heels trampling on the heads of six of her most senior colleagues. Haven’t you got a sense of humour, love? It revived memories of an old trope of Margaret Thatcher as the Conservative party’s dominatrix, confirming that some people cannot see a woman assuming power without thinking of men being humiliated.
It’s true you know. I remember a “political” cartoon of Thatcher with guns firing out of her tits, hahaha geddit she has tits so it’s funny to pretend her tits can fire bullets hahaha.
Misogyny has deep roots. It sometimes becomes dormant – usually when the economy is doing well – but it never really goes away. It is a mistake to regard it as just another form of abuse; it is a peculiarly intimate form of hatred, rooted in relationships carried on behind closed doors but that frequently spill over into the public world. (Racists rarely marry their victims but misogynists often do.)
It needs to be met with zero tolerance, because once it starts being culturally sanctioned, there is no end to it. When a well-known woman starts receiving rape threats on Twitter, hundreds of other people join. In a more extreme example, the prohibition of rape has been abolished in areas of Iraq and Syria occupied by Isis, attracting recruits who like the idea of having coercive sex with 14-year-old girls.
What are its deep roots though? I don’t know. I’ve been trying to figure that out my whole adult life, with not much success. I suspect it’s just itself – deep hatred is deep hatred. Women are inferior, so we hates’em.
A day after Jeremy Corbyn’s election as Labour leader, the three great offices of state in his shadow cabinet were given to men. It came as no surprise to feminists, who know that the hard left rarely pays more than lip service to a movement it regards as a distraction from the struggle against imperialism. Nor am I surprised that Labour has become a poisonous environment for women MPs. Last week 45 of them signed a letter to Corbyn, demanding that he do more to stop harassment, vilification and intimidation.
I have watched these developments with outrage – and a weary sense of deja vu. Many brave women died for freedoms that are under attack once again, all over the world. And I am as offended by people who play down outbursts of misogyny as I am by those who unashamedly revel in it.
So am I, and unfortunately it’s commonplace right now – masses of people defending outbursts of misogyny as free speech, pushback against PC, a rebuke to the excesses of “SJWs,” jokes, banter, normal give and take, high spirits, social media, the internet, whaddya gonna do. It sucks.
What women are is physically vulnerable to men.
Like other social animals we form in-groups and out-groups. Like other social animals we jostle each other, making plays for higher social status. These impulses are so deep, most of the time most of us aren’t even fully aware of what we’re doing as we form and jostle.
So females mostly are smaller and have less muscle mass. Dominant males can boss us around, so they do. In most cases I don’t think it’s hatred so much as blind self interest. Until a woman objects and stands up for herself: nobody hates like a bully whose ego has been bruised.
I really doubt it goes much deeper than that. In other words, misogyny is fundamentally like other out-group biases. But it’s exacerbated and complicated by sex. We may be perceived as subordinate, but the bosses want and need something from us. That something (gender trenders take note) is our reproductive power. All the rationales for keeping women in their place come down to that.
The solution is to keep doing what we’re doing, which is the same thing our close relatives the bonobos do: form coalitions of mostly unrelated females. Stand up for ourselves and each other against male abuse. Sisterhood is powerful.
That came out wrong. It sounds like I think it’s a shallow thing. I mean, you can’t get much deeper than that–because the roots of such behavior predate our existence as a species.
It’s the ad hoc justifications and the elaborate systemazation of male dominance that are relatively new, and uniquely human. And those are explicitly misogynistic.
It’s not really physical vulnerability. Rich men are not physically invulnerable to poor ones. The rich ones have just banded together more effectively. It’s always about forming a group.
And guess who is consistently harassed or ridiculed into not forming common bonds? It’s only women who are supposed to deal with men one to one, and are then told they’re too weak to do that.
As for the roots of misogyny. Haven’t you ever taken freebies that, upon reflection, cost someone else something? It’s human nature to take what you can, within varying limits. It’s also human nature to want to see yourself as a good person. So, obviously, the people you’re taking from owe it to you because that’s just the way things are. (This second step is the one not everyone falls for, thank justice.) And, before you know it, you have a spiralling hypercycle of exploitation and self-justification, and a race- or gender- or nothing-based caste system.
Anyway, makes perfect sense to me. Maybe I’m missing something.
I said that, about groups. In groups and out groups. Who has dominance over whom. Who gets to be the boss; who gets the lion’s share of the spoils.
But yes I do think physical vulnerability is part of it, where women are concerned.
The threat of physical violence from men as part of the background noise of women’s existence.
Actual-not-rhetorical question: Does anyone think we’d be perceived as “inferior” if we were as strong as men are?
The reference to heels is because Theresa May has long been known for wearing Leopard Print high heeled shoes. It is her brand image.
Commentators are using Heels as a short hand.
Trump’s hair. Hitler mustache. Castro beard. That kind of thing.
I think a lot of it is also training. My brothers were brought up a particular way; I and my sisters, a different way. Both of us were brought up to despise women, at least in a way – to see them as inferior, lesser, dumber, softer, etc. We were brought up believing we owed it to men to take care of them; my brothers were brought up with the same belief. And my mother acted as though feminism were the greatest evil in the world, erasing the natural order of things.
One of my brothers is a flaming misogynist; the other is not. The brother who is a flaming misogynist has spent his entire life living off the work of women, because he has never been able to hold a job for any length of time. It’s not his fault, though. He would have a great job, with great benefits, if he were a woman of color – or so he tells us. For him, women (and people of color) are truly inferior to his incredible brain and his incredible prowess, but somehow we keep taking what is his – it sort of is similar to what Hitler thought about the Jews, they had everything that properly belonged to someone else, and it wasn’t their merit that got them that, but their deviousness.
Fortunately for me, I escaped that morass. I never quite managed to believe it, even when failing to live by it was a threat to my existence. I just learned to pretend. But my sisters have fought tooth and nail for the idea that women belong to men, and are supposed to serve them.
In short, I think boys are trained to a sense of entitlement, not only to jobs but to sex, and it enrages them whenever these pesky womens-lib types refuse to accept their demands.
This book offers the explanation that made the most sense to me:
https://profilebooks.com/catching-fire.html
I’m no expert, but this seems plausible enough to me. Also, despite the official dogma of “sex positivity”, it always seemed to me that there’s an irreducible core of disrespect and sleaziness inherent to the very idea of trying to get laid, which – let’s face it – is traditionally considered a “guy thing”. Yes, some ways of trying are worse than others, but no way is entirely unproblematic*. And yes, consent is always necessary, but it’s not always sufficient. Before there can be anything for the woman to consent/not consent to, the man has to somehow make his intention known, by which time the damage may already be done. The very idea that somebody is thinking of you in that way can be awkward and uncomfortable enough, especially when there is no plausible deniability, and especially when the feeling is not mutual.
Thus every attempt to hit on another person involves a certain disregard for the other person’s feelings (“I don’t care how uncomfortable this makes her if it can help me get laid”). Every man with a social intelligence above that of your average piece of granite knows this. But he still wants the damn sex, and he wants to feel good about himself at the same time. Therefore the “compromise” for many (/most?) guys seems to be to tell themselves that women are a bunch of hypersensitive, whining bitches whose feelings are unworthy of consideration or respect anyway. And of course there’s always a chance that consent will not be given, which can be humiliating to the man. Therefore a convenient face-saving strategy is to – once again – persuade himself that there’s something wrong with those petty, prudish women for denying a man what’s rightfully his. At least this is the impression I get from listening to other men who are into that kind of thing.
* At least as long as the default assumption remains that it’s up to the other person to opt out, which is why I tend to favor restricting that kind of behavior to settings that are explicitly for that purpose, essentially making it an opt in system.
@ 8 Bjarte Foshaug
You are being too extreme, in my opinion. If I understand your argument, it is essentially that nobody should express sexual interest in anyone else except in “settings that are explicitly for that purpose”, by which I assume you mean online dating sites, singles bars, etc.
I’ve been in a mutually satisfying relationship with my wife for about twenty years. We didn’t meet in any such environment. And I think what is true of me is true of most people. That is, if you were to poll all readers with successful and mutually satisfying relationships, my bet is the majority would not have met their partner via online dating or singles bars or whatever.
I think it is possible, and preferable, to educate men to be more mindful of consent without going to the extreme of cordoning off all expressions of sexual attraction to specific zones set aside for that purpose.
Silentbob #9
My position may be too “extreme” (a.k.a. uncommon) for most, but it’s no good pointing to “what’s true of most people” under the status quo when the topic under discussion is precisely what’s wrong with that same status quo. The catch 22 as I see it goes something like this.
1. It’s not OK to proposition somebody who’s not cool with it (To disagree with this is pretty much the definition of disrespect).
2. You cannot know if other person is cool with it (in an opt out system) until after you’ve propositioned him/her.
If anyone has come up with a satisfactory solution to this dilemma, I sure as hell haven’t seen it. Bottom line, whether or not something constitutes sexual harassment should not depend on having the good fortune to hit on somebody who – in retrospect – turned out to be interested.
Bjarte Foshaug – I don’t know if #2 really is true or not; I think there are signals that can let a person know if someone is OK with it, and there are definitely signals that can let a person know that someone is definitely not OK with it…such as my having my calls held by the switchboard, telling them to let through only client calls during the period that I was being harassed. That should have been a dead giveaway, but my harasser decided that didn’t mean him, because of course I would want to hear from him, and he pretended to be a member of my family, and was put through anyway.
I think most harassers simply ignore the signs. I think they are perfectly able to read them, but choose not to.
To be ‘knocked back on one’s heels’ is a boxing expression, which does not refer to shoe styles. Still, using a violent idiom in politics is always going to be questionable.
‘1. It’s not OK to proposition somebody who’s not cool with it (To disagree with this is pretty much the definition of disrespect).
‘2. You cannot know if other person is cool with it (in an opt out system) until after you’ve propositioned him/her.’
There is NO solution unless both parties are acting autonomously on their own interests and desires. So long as women are property, and/or sex a commodity to be ‘given’ or sold, we will be stuck with the ‘proposition’ mode.
Bjarte @ 8 – Yes, I think that is one big part of the explanation. There was this one time years ago at a book group discussion where we’d read Antonia Fraser’s The Weaker Vessel and we were pondering this same question – what is the root of misogyny? One rather annoying guy explained it the way you did, but from the pov of the aggrieved constantly rejected guy. He said, basically, men want to fuck women but women can say no and it makes men hate them. I’ve known men who fit that description.
Oh, if you follow We Hunted the Mammoth, the blog that “tracks and mocks” Men’s Rights Activists (MRAs), Pick Up Artists (PUAs), Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOWs), and the alt-right, you’ll see that attitude expressed over and over again.
The acronyms will tell you women are the “gatekeepers of sex,” and that makes them powerful. That’s why Warren Farrel chose as the cover for the latest edition of his book The Myth of Male Power a photo of a shapely young woman’s ass.
Implicit in this is the idea that, as Bjarte said, getting laid is “a guy thing.” Sex is for men, women are sex dispensers with the power to give or withhold themselves. (Women who aren’t young and attractive are simply invisible. They don’t count as “women”.)
Lady Mondegreen @ 1
I agree that sisterhood can be powerful indeed. As you discussed, some people have “blind self interest” which can include women who get irrationally jealous and target other women, especially those who are more successful than themselves. Sadly, the jealous women encourage other decent women, who they are exploiting, to join them in the abuse of their women targets. Gotta watch out for those apples!
Am I a bad person for thinking this would be the best cartoon ever? (I’d bet London-to-a-brick that this would have been created by Gerald Scarfe.)
Yes, pretty much, since my point there was to echo Joan Smith’s point about misogynist “jokes” about women in power. Telling us you think misogynist “jokes” about women in power are the best thing ever is not admirable, no. I hope that answers your question.