Top Quotes: “Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny” — Kate Manne
Introduction
“Women positioned in relations of asymmetrical moral support with men have historically been required to show him moral respect, approval, admiration, deference, and gratitude, as well as moral attention, sympathy, and concern. When she breaks character, and tries to level moral criticisms or accusations in his direction, she’s withholding from him the goodwill he may be accustomed to receiving from her. He may even be in some sense reliant on her goodwill to maintain his tenuous sense of self or self-worth. Her resentment or blame may then feel like a betrayal, and this may make him seek payback, revenge, retribution. Moral criticisms are likely to seem like transgressions or bald-faced lies. Morally speaking, his critic is not to be trusted.”
“I argue that, given the terms ‘sexism’ and ‘misogyny’ can be usefully employed to mark an important contrast, we should do so. I propose taking sexism to be the branch of patriarchal ideology that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order, and misogyny as the system that polices and enforces its governing norms and expectations. So sexism is scientific; misogyny is moralistic. And a patriarchal order has a hegemonic quality.”
“In this economy of moral goods, women are obligated to give to him, not ask, and expected to feel indebted and grateful, rather than entitled. This is especially the case with respect to characteristically moral goods: attention, care, sympathy, respect, admiration, and nurturing. The flipside of this is his being entitled to take much in the way of these moral goods, including — it would seem — the lives of those who can no longer give him what he wanted in terms of moral succor. He may love and value her intrinsically — that is, for her own sake — but far too conditionally, that is, not on her identity as a person (whatever that amounts to be) but her second-personal attitude of goodwill toward him.”
“Misogyny ought to be understood as the system that operates within a patriarchal social order to police and enforce women’s subordination and to uphold male dominance.
Misogyny is primarily a property of social systems or environments as a whole, in which women will tend to face hostility of various kinds because they are women in a man’s world (i.e., a patriarchy), who are held to be failing to live up to patriarchal standards (i.e., tenets of patriarchal ideology that have some purchase in this environment).”
“In a typical patriarchal setting, some men might be hostile toward most or even all of the women whom they in fact come into contact with, insofar as these women happen to wind up disappointing them. But that doesn’t make for a true universally quantified claim, or even a true, somewhat less stringent generalization. These quantifiers are supposed to range over any or most of the women the agent might encounter (respectively), at least in a psychologically and socially realistic scenario. And this remains unlikely. An analogy: someone who has been disappointed by all or most of the restaurants he’s seen in his life doesn’t thereby hate restaurants universally or even very generally. Maybe he’s just been unlucky, or limited, or thwarted in his choices. Were there a restaurant designed specifically to please him, that is, to cater to his particular interests and appetites, his hating that restaurant too would be at least somewhat surprising.
Consider an Elliot Rodger, then. It might’ve been the case, and it’s certainly intelligible, that he would not have been hostile toward women who gave him the attention and affection he was craving. Instead, it would be quite natural for a an in this general social position to valorize such women or to ‘put them on a pedestal.’”
“It may be helpful to consider a schematic illustration. Imagine a person in a restaurant who expects not only to be treated deferentially — the customer always being right — but also to be served the food he ordered attentively, and with a smile. He expects to be made feel cared for and special, as well as to have his meal brought to him (a somewhat vulnerable position, as well as a powerful one, for him to be in). Imagine now that this customer comes to be disappointed — his server isn’t serving him, though she’s waiting on other tables. Or perhaps she appears to be lounging around lazily or just doing her own thing, inexplicably ignoring him. Worse, she might appear to be expecting service from him, in a baffling role reversal. Either way, she’s not behaving in the manner to which he’s accustomed in such settings. It’s easy to imagine this person becoming confused, then resentful. It’s easy to imagine him banging his spoon on the table. It’s easy to imagine him exploding in frustration.”
“Misogyny…need not target women across the board; it may instead target women selectively — for example, those who are perceived as insubordinate, negligent, or out of order.”
“I believe that misogyny’s grasp may also exceed its reach because of its tendency to try to restore patriarchal order by treating some women as stand-ins or reps for others, as well as engaging in ‘punching down’ behavior — that is, taking other frustrations out on her, since she’s available and may lack recourse.”
“By the lights of patriarchal ideology, a woman is often expected to play the role of a man’s attentive, loving subordinate — to maintain a loving gaze toward the dominant, metaphorically. It hence plausibly goes deep in the nature of patriarchal gender relations that women’s conduct vis-a-vis men is taken unduly personally (by them and on their behalf, moreover). So women’s indifference becomes aversion; ignorance becomes ignoring; testimony becomes tattling; and asking becomes extortion.
The other element of the solution to this puzzle, I suggest, involves noticing the way in which women are often treated as interchangeable and representative of a certain type of woman. Because of this, women can be singled out and treated as representative targets, then standing in imaginatively for a large swathe of others. Elliot Rodger declared his intentions in his so-called manifesto thus: ‘I will attack the very girls who represent everything I hate in the female gneder. The hottest sorority of UCSB.’ And Limbaugh called fluke ‘a representative liberal.’”
Strangulation
“Women who are strangled rarely cooperate with the police. Often incorrectly called ‘choking,’ non-fatal manual strangulation is inherently dangerous. It can lead to death hours, days, even weeks afterward due to complications from the brain being deprived of oxygen. It also causes injuries to the throat that may not leave a mark. If you don’t know how to examine a victim’s throat, what to look for in her eyes (red spots), and the right questions to ask, it may seem no harm has come from it. The matter will often go no further. She may not seek medical treatment. The incident will be ‘shrouded in silence.’ Sometimes, she won’t wake up the next morning, or some morning hence. Moreover, victims of a non-fatal attack of this kind have also been found to be some 7x more likely to become the victim of an attempted homicide by the same perp. Yet many states don’t have a specific statute making strangulation a crime (relegating it to a simple assault; typically a misdemeanor).
Strangulation is a prevalent form of intimate partner violence, in addition to sometimes taking place within other family relationships. It doesn’t appear to be limited to certain geographical areas; its existence tends to be confirmed wherever data are available. But for many countries, especially poorer ones, they haven’t been collected.
Strangulation may be performed either manually, i.e. using bare hands, or with a ligature, e.g. rope, belt, string, electric power cord, or similar.”
“Strangulation is torture. Researchers draw a comparison between strangulation and waterboarding, both in how it feels — painful, terrifying — and its subsequent social meaning. It’s characterized as a demonstration of authority and domination. As such, together with its gendered nature, it’s a type of action paradigmatic of misogyny. Also characteristic is the indifference or ignorance surrounding the practice, as well as the fact that many of its victims will minimize — or may be gaslit.
Because the victims of strangulation are so reluctant to testify against their abusers, some investigators are now lobbying for evidence-based cases to prosecute the offenders; the witness to the crime having been pre-intimidated or, so to speak, smothered. This last recalls Kristie Dotson’s term ‘testimonial smothering,’ which denotes a kind of self-silencing on the part of a speaker. This is due to it being unsafe or risky to make certain claims, likely futile anyway, due to the audience’s lack of ‘testimonial competence’ that results (or appears to result) from ‘pernicious ignorance.’ It seems clear that strangulation within an intimate partner relationship will tend to give rise to testimonial smothering in Dotson’s sense, according to these criteria. If she speaks out, his demonstrated willingness to do what it takes to regain the upper hand makes the situation dangerous. And the lack of competence regarding the concept of strangulation is extremely widespread. This book as a whole will demonstrate that such incompetence is the result of pernicious ignorance misogyny feeds, and thrives, on.”
Misogynoir
“Consider the recent case of Rosetta Watson, a black disabled woman living in Maplewood, MO. She called the police four times over a short period, due to incidents of domestic violence — including ‘choking’ or, as it’s better termed, nonfatal manual strangulation by her boyfriend. As someone who was renting an apartment, she was declared a ‘nuisance’ after calling more than twice within a 180-day time frame. This is a common kind of local ordinance in many towns and cities throughout the US. Watson hence lost the occupancy permit required to live in the city, and was essentially exiled for six months — all because she sought protection from a potentially lethal, and terrifying, form of violence.
Eviction is a ubiquitous problem for black women, one that sociologist Matt Desmond takes to be the undernoticed analogue of mass incarceration for black men, which constitutes a deep source of systemic injustice and disadvantage. ‘Poor Black men are locked up while poor Black women are locked out,’ he argues. This suggests misogynoir is tied to, and makes poor black women especially vulnerable to, housing insecurity, homelessness, legal trouble, and incarceration too, among other adverse outcomes. Women in such positions may become yet more vulnerable to domestic violence and sexual assault due to the combo of these factors (being disproportionately vulnerable already). Misogynoir begets itself, and the cycle may continue.
Having defined misogyny as a property of social environments first and foremost, we can now say that
derivatively, an individual agent’s attitudes or behavior counts as misogynistic within a social context insofar as it reflects, or perpetuates, misogyny therein.
We can give analogous definitions of misogyny as a property of practices, institutions, artworks, other artifacts, and so on.
But, when it comes to calling an agent a misogynist on the whole, there are reasons to be cautious about the risk of overplaying our hand and engaging in some of the very moralism that attending to misogyny teaches us to be wary of. And, of course, there are also relevant considerations of fairness. One generally doesn’t want to attach a shaming label to someone in virtue of a near-universal trait of character, attitude, or behavioral disposition.
I hence suggest that the term ‘misogynist’ is best treated as a threshold concept, and also a comparative one, functioning as a kind of ‘warning label,’ which should be sparingly applied to people whose attitudes and actions are particularly and consistently misogynistic across myriad social contexts. On this view
individual agents count as misogynists if and only if their misogynistic attitudes and/or actions are significantly a) more extreme, and b) more consistent than most other people in the relevant comparison class (e.g. other people of the same gender, and perhaps race, class, age, etc., in similar social environments).”
Acid Attacks
“Such crimes are characteristically motivated by ‘the intention of injuring or disfiguring her out of jealousy or revenge.’ These ‘attacks provoked by her rejection both punish the woman for her rejection and strip her of her social/sexual capital.’ And their overall conclusion about the relationship between repressive social norms and violence against women in Bangladesh is that
[t]the conditions, forms and risks of violence are shaped by local ideologies of sex and gender. The sexual division of work constructs a ‘gender hierarchy,’ which relegates women to the private realm, maintains their dependence on men for survival, and places them in a vulnerable position. Violence is thus linked to and is an index of gender differences in economic power and participation. Acid attacks emphasize women’s extreme dependency on men, and serve as a warning to many women who might resist male authority.”
Sexism and Misogyny
“Misogynists may simply be people who are consistent overachievers in contributing to misogynist social environments (whether or not the system counts as misogynistic, all things considered. The point is that their efforts are pushing strongly in this direction.) Alternatively, misogynists may be people who have been heavily influenced in their beliefs, desires, actions, values, allegiances, expectations, rhetorics, and so on, by a misogynist social atmosphere.”
“There’s no reason to expect that misogyny will typically manifest itself in violence or even violent tendencies, contra Steven Pinker. From the perspective of enforcing patriarchal social relations, this isn’t necessary. It’s not even desirable. Patriarchal social relations are supposed to be amicable and seamless, when all is going to plan. It’s largely when things go awry that violence tends to bubble to the surface. There are numerous nonviolent and low-cost means of defusing the physical threat posed by powerful women who are perceived as insufficiently oriented to serving dominant men’s interests. For example, women may be taken down imaginatively, rather than literally, by vilifying, demonizing, belittling, humiliating, mocking, lampooning, shunning, and shaming them.”
“Progress and resentment are perfectly compatible. Indeed, women may be resented precisely because they’re achieving rapid social progress in some areas. Some women’s success in hitherto male-dominated roles, as well as their abandonment of traditionally feminine forms of care work, would be predicted on my analysis to provoke misogynist hostility. Misogyny often stems from the desire to take women down, to put them in their place again. So the higher they climb, the farther they may be made to fall because of it. The glass ceiling may be broken; but then there may be smackdown. And some women get hit by the shards of glass that rain down from others’ rising.”
“Sexism should be understood primarily as the ‘justificatory’ branch of a patriarchal order, which consists in ideology that has the overall function of rationalizing and justifying patriarchal social relations.
As a substantive matter of fact, sexism often works by naturalizing sex differences, in order to justify patriarchal social arrangements, by making them seem inevitable, or portraying people trying to resist them as fighting a losing battle. The unstated premise here is a version of an ‘ought implies can’ principle — possibly weakened to something like ‘can’t even implies don’t bother.’ If certain social differences between men and women could hardly be otherwise, then is it worth the effort to try to combat them? Alternatively, and more modestly, if men and women tend to have quite different capacities and proclivities, it may make the best sense (i.e. the safest bet in general, or the most efficient default assumption) to encourage or at least not discourage a patriarchal division of labor. Perhaps most importantly, such a division of labor will be far from compelling evidence of discrimination, structural barriers, or so-called pipeline problems differentially lacking female talent.
So sexist ideology will often consist in assumptions, beliefs, theories, stereotypes, and broader cultural narratives that represent men and women as importantly different in ways that, if true and known to be true, or at least likely, would make rational people more inclined to support and participate in patriarchal social arrangements. Sexist ideology will also encompass valorizing portrayals of patriarchal social arrangements as more desirable and less fraught, disappointing, or frustrating than they may be in reality.”
“Overall, sexism and misogyny share a common purpose — to maintain or restore a patriarchal social order. But sexism purports to merely be being reasonable; misogyny gets nasty and tries to force the issue. Sexism is hence to bad science as misogyny is to moralism. Sexism wears a lab coat; misogyny goes on witch hunts.”
Reproductive Rights
“The fetus had not been recognized as a person by evangelicals until recently. (So even if their position did turn out to be correct, it would be the right stance for the wrong — and deceptive — reasons.) This changed after the advent of an ‘astroturf’ (as opposed to grassroots) movement explicitly designed to curb and roll back feminist social progress. I speak of the anti-abortion movement: a paradigm example of misogynistic backlash.”
“In a March 2016 MSNBC interview, Tr**p erred by admitting (after some hesitation) something most Republicans had only whistled to date: namely, that by the lights of their own alleged views on reproductive rights (or, again, lack thereof), ‘there would have to be some form of punishment for the woman’ who seeks or obtains an illegal abortion.’”
“The antichoice movement’s political roots, and tenuous relationship to mainstream Christianity go back much further. Greenhouse and Siegel show that a position previously held only by strict Catholics was deliberately appropriated as part of the Southern Strategy that helped Nixon win in ’72 (the year before the Roe decision). In a New York magazine piece by Kevin Phillips, one of the Southern Strategy’s chief engineers and proponents, ‘How Nixon Will Win,’ he laid out the rationale behind the opposition to abortion (along with ‘acid,’ or LSD, and amnesty for so-called draft dodgers). Siegel summarizes the idea thusly: ‘Abortion rights…validated a breakdown of traditional roles that required men to be present to kill and die in war and women to save themselves for marriage…and motherhood.’
So the hope that working-class whites could be mobilized against a powerful material means and cultural symbol of women’s liberation involved intentionally extracting one piece of a metaphysically and morally high committal — and intricate — Catholic package deal. And this was for cynical political gain.
The appropriation of Catholic ideology didn’t end there, either. The idea that life begins at conception has been proclaimed only recently.”
“In Indiana, the first 2 women to be charged with femicide — Bei Bei Shuai and Pavi Patel — are Asian American in a state where Asian Americans comprise less than 2% of the population. These women may hence be vulnerable to undue suspicion based on stereotypes regarding — ironically — the devaluation of girls and women, and the practice of sex-selective abortion in their countries of familial (and, in Shuai’s case, personal) origin, according to some advocates.
Patel’s case was the one to make headlines. She was arrested, charged, tried, and convicted of self-inducing an abortion using pills bought online and abandoning the fetus, which, Patel testified, had been stillborn at 23–24 weeks (an age at which abortion is still legal in some states). The facts of the case were disputed in court by the state’s expert witness, who testified that the fetus was a week or two older and had drawn breath. But, according to Deepa Iyer, an activist and scholar who became involved in the case because of IN’s repeated and potentially deliberate targeting of Asian American women under this law: ‘Purvi Patel’s conviction amounts to punishment for having a miscarriage and then seeking medical care, something that no woman should worry would lead to jail time.’
Patel was sentenced in March 2015 to 20 years in prison, of which she served one year and four months — until her appeal to the IN Supreme Court was successful. But how many women will avoid going to the ER now, under similar circumstances (profuse vaginal bleeding), even following a miscarriage, for fear of being arrested, charged, and imprisoned? Moreover, the seemingly racist nature of the law’s implementation — with brown bodies being treated as disposable in order to teach other women a lesson is a vivid example of the entanglement of sexism, misogyny, and racism. But it is merely, and shamefully, one such among many.”
“The fetus serves as a powerful cultural symbol or surrogate for certain men’s sense of being neglected or deprived by women. And their sense of vulnerability can be projected onto the fetus, thus allowing them to feel outrage on behalf of another supposed person — who, conveniently, has no plans of their own, and no voice to deny their interest in coming into existence as a sentient creature prior to actually being one. And it’s often easier to take the moral high ground than admit to feeling rejected and wounded.”
Entitlement
“Consider then that the flipside of an entitlement is, in general, an obligation: something he’s owed by someone. So, if a man does indeed have this illicit sense of entitlement vis-a-vis women, he’ll be prone to hold women to false or spurious obligations. And he may also be prone to regard a woman’s asking for the sorts of goods she’s supposed to provide him with as an outrage, or a disgrace. This would be analogous to the waitress asking for service from her customer, after having failed to take his order. Not only is it a role reversal, but it’s likely to prompt a ‘who does she think she is?’ kind of sentiment: at first resentful, than scandalized, if she doesn’t respond to feedback by looking duly chastened and ‘lifting her game,’ so to speak. There’s something especially vexing about someone who’s shameless not only in shirking their duties, but who appears blithe and unapologetic when they effectively turn the tables. They’re not only failing to do their job; they’re demanding that others return the non-favor — or asking them to do their job for them.”
“A crucial complication in all of this, which the cases of Rodger and Limbaugh both bring out, is that there may be no particular woman to claim their supposedly rightful due from, or to blame for trying to cheat them out of it (again, according to the twisted logic of their misogyny). Instead, they each fashioned a narrative that drives a hazy, circuitous connection either between themselves (in Rodger’s case) or on behalf of his listeners (in Limbaugh’s). The end of the connection — and the story — is a representative woman to serve as a scapegoat for the resented absence. (Or, indeed, a double absence, for Rodger: a sin of omission committed by nobody in particular). Hence Rodger’s need to find a woman of roughly the kind he viewed as cruelly depriving him; and she’d deprived him of herself, on the view behind his grievances. She didn’t just overlook him; she’d been deliberately ignoring him. And she wasn’t just oblivious: she was too stuck-up to notice. He didn’t just feel invisible to her: she’d made him feel like nothing, a nonentity, less than a person.
And so he’d treat her in kind — or, rather, pay her back double. He would annihilate her and her sorority sisters.”
Family Annihilators
“It’s also borne out by the phenomenon of family annihilators, and the sense of entitled shame they manifest, as the following disturbing case is intended to illustrate. To anticipate: what’s ‘his for the taking’ may include the lives of his female partner and their children, when the alternative is to wind up shame-faced in their eyes, and then watch them move on without looking up to him.”
“That night, at home, he shot his wife and daughter in the back of hteir heads, killing them. He set fire to all his possessions, and his mansion, on which he’d poured oil. Then he committed suicide.
Does it surprise you to learn the reason? I’d hazard that it doesn’t. He’d gone bankrupt after a series of bad business decisions. He was going to lose everything. The possessions he burned were due to be repossessed the next day by the bailiffs.
Trying to understand his case, Ronson found it mysterious until the moment he didn’t, and its logic clicked into focus. Sitting in the well-appointed kitchen of a friend of Chris’ outside the beautiful town of Maesbrook, which Chris and other self-made millionaires had populated, Ronson realizes not only why Chris did it, but why he did it in the way in which he did. Ronson:
It suddenly makes sense to me that Chris Foster would choose to shoot Jill and Kirstie in the back of their heads. It was as if he was too ashamed to look at them. Maybe the murders were a type of honor killing, as if Foster simply couldn’t bear the idea of losing their respect and the respect of his friends.”
“The father is almost always considering suicide as the only escape from some sort of financial crisis. Murdering his family members, then, becomes a way of rescuing them from the hardship and shame of bankruptcy and suicide.
This narcissistic sense of chivalry is evident in the way many of these perps execute their victims.”
“The same point carries over to the fate of the Jewish women who were consigned to sexual slavery during the Holocaust, who were until recently widely omitted from the historical record.”
“Her personal services have a humanizing psychological effect on those in her care orbit, to whom her attention is held to be owed. So, when she fails to give him what he’s held to be entitled to, by way of various forms of nurturing, admiration, sympathy, and attention, he may be left feeling less than human — like an ‘insignificant little mouse,’ as Elliot Rodger described himself at one point. And his revenge may be to be dehumanize her in turn: to give her a taste of her own medicine, when it comes to making her feel like a nonperson.”
“A sense of what she’s (there) for as a woman, and hence often socially situated as a provider of moral goods and resources (to him, first and foremost). It makes sense that we’d see symptoms of deprivation mindset in this regard following the advent of feminist social progress in supposedly post-patriarchal settings. When demand for her attention exceeds supply on a grand scale, it isn’t surprising to find practices of men trying to turn the heads of women previously unknown to them — via catcalling and various forms of online trolling (from the patently abusive to the ostensibly reasonable demands for rational debate, which unfortunately sometimes result in her being belittled, insulted, or mansplained to). In public settings, she’s told to smile or asked what she’s thinking by many a (male) stranger — especially when she appears to be ‘deep inside her own head’ or ‘off in her own little world,’ i.e. appearing to think her own thoughts, her attention inwardly, rather than outwardly, focused. These gestures are then supposed to either make her look, or else force her to stonewall — a withholding, rather than sheer absence, of reaction. So her silence is icy; her neutral expression, sullen. Her not looking is snubbing; her passivity, aggression.”
The Psychology of Misogyny
“In a particularly striking study by Wheatley and Haidt, participants susceptible to post-hypnotic suggestion were hypnotized to feel a pang of disgust upon reading either the word ‘often’ or the word ‘take.’
In a follow-up study, the experimenters included another vignette as a control, describing a student council rep named Dan who [tries to take/often picks] topics of widespread mutual interest for discussion at their meetings. Perfectly innocuous behavior, right? Good behavior, even. But some of the particiapnts who read the version of the vignette containing the disgust-inducing word begged to differ, to the initial surpise of the researchers. ‘It just seems like he’s up to something,’ said one participant, vaguely. Dan seemed like a ‘popularity-seeking snob’ to another. His behavior ‘seems so weird and disgusting,’ a third reported, helplessly. ‘I don’t know [why it’s wrong], it just is,’ they concluded.
The first suggested lesson: disgust reactions can make us harsher moral critics and may even prompt some people to read moral offenses into entirely, and obviously, innocent actions. The second: as moral critics, we don’t always deliver our verdicts based on moral reasons and arguments. Sometimes, we reach for these reasons and arguments to rationalize a verdict already rendered.”
“Women penalize highly successful women just as much as men do, but for seemingly different reasons. The researchers had M and F participants rate a newly appointed female VP, described in a personnel file, on measures of hostility, antisocial traits, and overall likeability. Both M and F participants were prone to punish her, by inferring norm violations — for example, manipulativeness, coldness, aggression — unless given specific info about her feminine virtues and good behavior. In which case, the ‘social punishment’ effect was blocked for M and F participants. However, crucially, only the F participants then had more negative self-evaluations. This supported the researchers’ hypothesis that penalizing successful women serves an ego-protective function (only) for other women. It defuses the threatening sense that a similar — and similarly good, decent, and/or ‘real’ woman — is more competent or accomplished than they are. And, tellingly, it appears that this is linked to a lack of self-belief that can be assuaged by positive feedback.
In the first experiment, the researchers blocked women’s punishment of other women by describing the subject as having feminine-coded, prosocial tendencies. In the second, they achieved a similar magnitude of the same effect by priming participants (all of whom were women) in the experimental condition with positive feedback about their own exceptional business acumen. They were no longer motivated to penalize the female high-achiever.”
“We need to move beyond simply thinking about higher and lower standards for M and W. Rather, we often take M and W to have fundamentally different and nominally complementary, responsibilities. I’ll now canvass some evidence of 2 mechanisms that helps to bear this out: what I call ‘care-mongering’ on the one hand, and gendered ‘split perception,’ on the other.”
“It’s not just that many students — again, M and F alike — tend to prefer their intellectual and moral authority figures to come in a cis male body, either. (Although that’s what studies consistently show; some recent results regarding race are more promising.) It’s also that perceptions of W vs. M tend to be very different; and, relatedly, they tend to be punished for different shortcomings. Sprague and Massoni showed that M professors are penalized more for being boring, and F professors for seeming cold, uncaring, or not developing a personal relationship with each and every student. They also found that, in students’ descriptions of their best and worst teachers:
The most hostile words are saved for women teachers. The worst women teachers are sometimes explicitly indicted for being bad women through the use of words like ‘bitch’ and ‘witch.’ Students may not like their arrogant, boring, and disengaged men teachers, but they may hate their mean, unfair, rigid, cold, and ‘psychotic’ women teachers. These findings are substantiated by…reported incidents of student hostility toward women instructors who are perceived as not properly enacting their gender role or who present material that challenges gender inequality.
“The researchers concluded that, though both M and F professors had to make special efforts due to their gender, women’s efforts were more likely to be especially effortful. For, while a man’s not being boring will scale with relative ease to a larger audience, a woman’s developing a relationship with each student obviously won’t. And, beyond a certain point, it simply won’t be feasible.”
“The results suggest that female professors were more often described as ‘fake’ — sometimes by many orders of magnitude — in all but two subjects. On the flipside, M professors were likelier to inspire students to use the word ‘genuine,’ although by a somewhat smaller margin. (This time, in all but one subject; a different one, not obviously suggestive of a pattern). The results for ‘cold,’ ‘mean,’ ‘nasty,’ and — again — strikingly — ‘unfair’ also showed dramatic gender distributions. Namely, women appear to be perceived as mean, nasty, cold, unfair, and above all fake as opposed to genuine, much more often their male colleagues.
You might wonder whether M and F professors just have different teaching styles and so are subject to different kinds of assessment and criticism. Fortunately, Sprague and Massoni address this point and argue that this is unlikely: M teachers often receive comments along the same dimensions, but with the opposite polarity. This suggests that they’re not evincing incommensurably different qualities, so much as being held to more or less stringent standards.
Assume (as I think is safe) that it’s not that F professors deserve these unflattering perceptions — by genuinely seeming ‘fake,’ somehow, whatever that might look like. This suggests that people are more inclined to see women in positions of authority as posers and imposters compared with their male counterparts.”
“We can now make sense of contraception coverage having become a common point of contention, too. She is asking to be provided with antidote to human giving — and in a way that often highlights her human capacities being deployed in self-development or geared toward financial success, that is, his province. The latter also threatens to turn her into a usurper.”
