Warning: Long Response



Dear Gunnar,



An excellent and insightful set of questions. I will hazard a couple of answers.



So far I have only read the first two chapters. Chapter Two "Ameliorating Misogyny" covers many of the questions you raise, so we will see how far we can get.



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GUNNAR:

I am not clear on the nature of your post. Are you saying that you are under attack for what "amounts to [your] holding on to ancient academic standards," that you are under attack for the specific charge of misogyny, or that you infer from reading Kate Manne's *Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny* that you will inevitably come under such an attack?

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KEITH:

I am under attack for maintaining academic values in the face of complaints by female students. I have NOT been charged with “misogyny”. Yes, I infer from Manne’s book (Down Girl) that the charges amount, if one were to read them according to Manne, to accusations of misogyny. I doubt that anyone, other than me, will raise the misogyny issues. Sexism is probably the end point and I have raised sexism, on the part of the accusers, to howls of NO NO NO.

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GUNNAR:

I have not read Manne’s book. My impression from reading about it is that she redefines misogyny away from a hatred of, contempt for, or bigotry against women, and instead uses the word to describe actions that tend to enforce gender roles and punish those who step out of "their place."

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KEITH:

Yes, she does attempt to shift the focus from individuals to systems but she keeps reinventing individuals because the systems, fascinating as they are, don’t do much more than a library of unread books does.



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GUNNAR:
As to your discovery of your misogynist status: If I am correct about Manne’s redefinition of misogyny, I still don’t know how she deals with the question of whether misogyny is basic to some people--thus making them misogynists--or if it is an action taken by people more broadly and not limited to specific sorts of individuals--thus setting up some sort of parallel to talk of "racism without racists." (Would "misogyner" capture the protagonist in a situation where we consider misogyny to be an action rather than a belief as such?)

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KEITH:

Manne resists sticking it to individuals, as such. Why? Because it is more advantageous, politically and intellectually, to find the evil everywhere rather than just in bad apples. I have sympathy for her project, in this aspect. It is a worthy and academic aim.



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GUNNAR:
Does Manne’s book deal with the question of the differences between punishing women who step out of subservient roles and punishing men who step out of subservient roles? How do you deal with those differences?

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KEITH:

Maybe that issue is addressed later in the book. She does address the issue indirectly in terms of separating out patriarchal behaviours that are implemented against all genders equally, and similar/same behaviours that target women specifically. So, presumably, she could address my concerns about academic standards by questioning whether I implement these standards equally for all students. On that basis, I could argue against a formal accusation of misogyny: I take exactly the same approach to all students. The fact that individual female students experience affects of being bullied by patriarchal structures implemented by a male would then become the sticking point. I might survive copious tears and many mothers. I probably would not.



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GUNNAR:
Do you believe that the distribution of women vs. men in subservient roles is random or is something else going on? What is your role (and mine) in dealing with the answer to that question?

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KEITH:

In my own circumstances, I am in a very equitable discipline. There are as many females as males at ever level, except Professor (one male currently – we have had one female in the past). There are more females in charge of student services and the default for all situations is that a female either must be in charge of matters of student well-being and/or a female must be present. My role seems to be to complain.



My teaching area is being feminized regardless of my complaints. The issue, in the end, doesn’t seem to be about gender equity. It seems to be about there being more female students than males and hence there is a perceived need to stop failing females. Some males don’t seem to care about the feminizing of assessments, perhaps because they know that ten years out, the males will have all the good jobs and the females will be looking after babies. So, there is an example for Manne of the sly patriarchy in operation. Weak men tolerate lower standards for females because weakened females will never be able to compete in the real world.



Hope that helps



I haven't yet finished the book because it is rather poorly written and I have a sub-editor's brain - this may be a symptom of both structural/systemic misogyny and also my own misogynistic tendencies? That is, there are actual academic standards worked out by men over centuries (structural/systemic misogyny) and, in my urge to sub-edit, I make other people subordinate to my skills so as to restore my sense of status when challenged by an original and disconcerting idea that is beyond my patriarchal control (agentive misogyny). Hence, my mental sub-editing is a form of “down girl”.



And, it is taking me a long time to read the book, because I find myself reflecting at great length on issues being discussed. That is, I take the project seriously and personally (see a personal reflection below).



Early in the book, (footnote on page 3) Manne evidences her own childhood experience of a fellow five-year-old male classmate who strangled her with "a piece of yarn - technically a ligature" apparently because "he'd had some trouble processing being runner-up to me [Manne] in the spelling bee". The nominal point of telling this story seems to be to justify the claim that boys too choke girls just as men choke women. I have no doubt that boys choke girls. If they don’t actually do it (and yes, I have seen them actually do it) then many of them desire to do it. And yes, as a boy I experienced a desire to throttle a girl more than once. And a desire to throttle another boy and a desire to throttle a dog. Wow, Keith is really into this throttling thing.



From whence cometh the desire to throttle? If it is a universal possibility and we are all potentially capable of the desire, why are there so few instances of girls throttling boys? Patriarchy? Or, perhaps, because the physical act would mostly be futile when carried out by a female?



If a girl attempted to throttle a boy, thus initiating the crossing of a threshold, the outcome would most likely be the boy actually throttling the girl to the point of passing out. So, what actually limits female violence against males is not some moral superiority but rather the pragmatic recognition that starting such fights will most likely end badly for the female (all other things being equal). On the other hand, girls will readily slap boys and they mostly anticipate that the boys will not slap back. I slapped back. I only needed to do it once. No girl tried it again because they knew I would slap back.



(The literature clearly indicates that women hit men far more often than men hit women – their hits are not as effective, so no one cares. The reason why women are far more likely to hit men is possibly because they know their hits are hardly likely to cause real physical harm. In the same literature, you will find that children are hit more by women than men for similar reasons, perhaps, plus women spend vastly more time with children.)



A better approach than slapping or throttling, on the part of a female, seeking to act violently against a boy, is to provoke being abused by the boy in the presence of a mother figure (passive patriarchy). The boy will be shamed, humiliated and sent before the school principle. As a last and totalizing resort, a girl can enact the same morality play in the presence of a father figure but then the outcome is likely to be havoc and mayhem (active patriarchy). Some girls like this violent outcome. Think bar room brawls in movies in case you have never actually seen one of these ritual enactments of indirect female on male violence.



Why have I extended this account? There are lots of possibilities including the recognition that I am a misogynist. Do I resent women playing the girl card? Do I feel betrayed because my expectation is that women should be passive and subservient with no recourse to direct violence?



One might discern that the morality plays described above are in fact patriarchal structures designed to bring out the big daddy of all daddies: that is, the patriarchy as patriarch-judge. But, if this is the case, then we need to be very subtle in convincing ourselves that a woman, calling on this system, is evidencing her inferiority and subservience in a patriarchy rather than enacting her vicious personal capacity to manipulate systems to serve her personal ends. Effectively: “I had to accuse you of rape to the police because I couldn’t hurt you enough by merely shaming you on Facebook and I know you are stronger than me so I couldn’t bust your face in the pub in front of my girlfriends.” This is pretty close to a recent case of false accusation in the UK.



When, as a child, I discovered the forces of righteousness I could instigate from my father to rebalance my problems with three older brothers (two of whom were dominating and violent), I stopped calling on my father. The morality play was worse than reality. I resisted patriarchy as the answer to my being in a world of others where I was mostly subservient (if white, if male, if cis, if highly intelligent). I got beat up, often, violently and all but universally within the social system of my school. This went on for almost a decade in various forms of spectacle. As a male, I dare not complain. I had to become my own judge of people, including myself and including women. At ten, I got kicked out of the town library for reading Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra. All values were up for valuation. I had a project.



If we have to accept the idea that the patriarchy is just so dominant that no one could see their way past the system, except with the tortured and ornate forensic insights of an academic, then we really are f…ed. (I’m happy to spell the word out but our colleagues in gentle countries would then be blocked from reading this message.)



At the risk of compounding my misogyny, I will tell my own pathetic spelling bee story. When I was seven, I had a lovely female teacher who seemed to see that I was maybe more than a noisy, not that well groomed, boy. As I have mentioned, on the list, before, I taught myself to read and write before going to school. This, in my case, led to my spelling being atrocious. At the age of 10, I had the reading age of a second year university student and the spelling age of a five-year-old. How is this possible? It’s not difficult to see words as objects – chickens can recall thousands of locations. I‘m a rooster.



Anyway, my lovely teacher invented a draconian system of valuing people in the class according to their ability to spell. The Boeing 707 was just about to go into service so she called the weekly (Friday) competition, the 707.



Forty students would be arranged around the walls, in a U shape, according to their current status in the competition. Was this a patriarchal ranking? It certainly ranked the high achieving, intelligent and compliant girls in the top ten. And, it certainly ranked the non-compliant males in the bottom ten.



What to do with such a system? Because I really didn’t care about the status of spelling, I also didn’t care about my own ranking. My strategy was to aim for the bottom simply by doing no revision or preparation. So, usually I was last or very nearly last (some boys are really, really, really bad spellers). This meant that in the U shape, I was always opposite the top girls. How smartly dressed and prim they were (that’s a fact not an opinion). I liked looking at them from across the room (here is my origin of the male gaze?).



I really didn’t like this system and yet, I really liked my teacher. As I said: she was lovely. Did she not see how this discrimination affected those who were unfortunate for one reason or another? This was a public school. There were kids in the class from all kinds of background, with all kinds of social disadvantage and advantage, with all kinds of intellectual deficits and extraordinary aptitudes. My mother was highly literate. She bought us books. She read to us. In spite of our low social standing, we were not deprived of knowledge. There was church.



My lovely teacher was up for the idea of wild cards. That is, anyone could challenge anyone else in the list when their turn came around. So, last could challenge first. If last bested first then last would become first: very Christian.





So, I set out on my quest to bring low the dragon of invidious comparison, to bring the system into rebuke. As last and the least, I challenged first and the best. And I beat her (the teacher) at her own game. How did I do it? I decided to memorise a word that we had not covered in class. The word had an extra advantage of being a slightly naughty word. I selected HOTEL. Each day, on my way to school, I would walk past the Cecil HOTEL. This is probably where my interest in graphic design started. The sign for the hotel used an unusual font. It was also a rather seedy pub. I visualized HOTEL.



My lovely teacher never ran the 707 competitions again. And the end of the year, she gave me several books, one of which was Robinson Crusoe.



Did I throttle the dragon?



keith




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