Praising doesn’t always come naturally to pessimists like me, but oh my goodness, is Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny a brilliant book!

Manne’s writing is a wonder to behold: she guides the reader through a lot of rough territory (I mean rough in the sense of depressing and rough in the sense of grappling with lots of challenging philosophical issues) without sacrificing clarity or rigor, and her insight into important contemporary cases makes this a great read for general audiences and academics alike. Down Girl has already had such a powerful effect on my thinking that I may just immediately start re-reading it from the beginning now that I’ve finished it.

On her excellent account, misogyny is (roughly) the enforcement wing of the patriarchy, which means that it serves to threaten and punish women who do not provide the services that men have come to expect under patriarchy. This distinguishes misogyny from sexism, which is (roughly) the propaganda wing of the patriarchy, which serves to buttress patriarchy by explaining and justifying it.

I can only speak for myself, but as someone who share a lot of identity categories with Manne, her analysis of current events was revelatory. She helped me make sense of many frustrating, terrifying, and otherwise awful patterns that, though I see evidence of them all around me, I had been struggling to fully wrap my mind around before.

Kudos to Kate Manne for really getting to heart of an under-theorized but essential subject of feminist inquiry!