We Deserve Better From Our Public Intellectuals
On Kate Manne’s new book, incels, and the perils of public philosophy.
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THE Chronicle of Higher Education REVIEW
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By Anastasia Berg
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/author/anastasia-berg>
DECEMBER 2, 2020
Ethical prescriptions are implicit in the work of many academics, from
literary scholars to economists, but no one is as unabashedly willing to
claim moral authority as are philosophers. Only they promise to deal
with the most urgent human questions, private and public: How should we
live? What should I do?
It is not unreasonable to suppose that philosophers would have plenty to
offer by way of moral guidance to the general educated public.
Philosophers’ impulse to reach the widest possible influence is
therefore understandable. This task, however, is a delicate one:
Audiences turn to the public philosopher neither for philosophy lectures
nor pronouncements in the manner of prophets and demagogues. At her
best, the public philosopher helps her audience to think through matters
of concern with greater clarity and precision, maintaining accessibility
without compromising rigor. At her worst she gives her prejudices, and
by extension those of her audience, the guise of philosophical insight.
For Manne, a murderous spree represents the logical terminus of all
behavior motivated by misogyny.
The challenge is formidable, and it is one that the Cornell
philosopherKate Manne
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/the-philosopher-of-metoo/>has
taken up consciously and methodically. In graduate school at MIT, Manne
was inspired by her adviser, the feminist philosopher Sally Haslanger,
to theorize the importance of social phenomena; she accordingly shifted
her focus from logic to moral and feminist philosophy. She didn’t wait
long before offering her work to an audience extending far beyond the
classroom. Besides essays in the popular press and a robust social-media
presence, Manne, now an associate professor, has written two widely
celebrated books that seek to revolutionize our understanding of
gender-based discrimination:/Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny/(Oxford,
2017), a crossover work for professional philosophers and the general
public, and this year’s/Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women/(Crown,
2020), a piece of even more straightforwardly popular writing. In
response, Manne has been showered with praise from professional
philosophers and mainstream authors alike — hailed as “a
once-in-a-generation mind,” “one of the most essential voices of our
times,” and “the Simone de Beauvoir of the 21st century.”
The work is indeed ambitious. In/Down Girl/, Manne argues that we ought
to entirely rethink our understanding of a familiar explanatory
framework for gender-based hostility and discrimination: “misogyny.”
Rather than thinking of misogyny as a hostile psychological attitude
directed toward womankind, or toward particular women merely insofar as
they are women, Manne says that misogyny is better conceived of as the
various more or less visible coercive mechanisms by which patriarchal
norms are maintained.
These mechanisms include everything from the excessive sympathy we
extend to men accused of offenses against women (“himpathy”) to the
double standard faced by women seeking positions of power — especially
highest political office./Down Girl/’s secondary thesis is that the
patriarchal norms enforced by misogyny dictate not only that women
should occupy certain professional and social roles and not others, but
also that women, in the most general sense, should be “givers” of
various “moral goods,” like approval, admiration, attention, and care,
to which male “takers” are entitled.
Manne has said in an interview that she took her time between projects,
“lest I inadvertently write the same book twice.” In part,/Entitled/ends
up covering similar ground as/Down Girl/, albeit with some updated
examples: Brett Kavanaugh instead of Donald Trump; Elizabeth Warren
rather than Hillary Clinton. But the newer book also expands Manne’s
discussion of the ways patriarchal investments disadvantage women, from
inequities in medical care to unequally shared domestic labor. And it
offers more extensive treatments of men’s “entitlement” to various goods
like attention and respect (“mansplaining”), women’s bodies (abortion),
and sex (rape). Even complicated cases of ambivalence and reluctant
acquiescence of the sort depicted in the short story “Cat Person”
<https://www-newyorker-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person>find
a place in Manne’s schema as instances of men’s entitlement to
“consent.” What had been a secondary argument in/Down Girl/becomes the
focus of/Entitled/.
Manne’s delineation of such forms of discriminatory distribution of harm
and benefit may not be entirely original — they won’t come as news to
many of those inclined to pick up/Entitled/. But Manne’s main purpose is
not so much to enlighten her audience about facts as to demonstrate how
the idea of entitlement — real, felt, or longed for — reveals the
internal unity of what may at first glance appear to be the rather
disparate forms of maltreatment to which women are subjected.
Each chapter of/Entitled/focuses on male entitlement to a different
moral good (sex, power, knowledge, etc.). This is a neat organizational
principle, but it is conceptually strained. While “a sense of
entitlement” is perhaps a decent descriptive, if not exactly
explanatory, framework for, say, much of the uneven distribution of
domestic labor, it is a more awkward fit for the/central/force behind,
for instance, what Manne calls the “vigorous cultural policing” around
pregnant women’s habits of consumption, i.e., medical restrictions of
and affective taboos around pregnant women’s alcohol intake. Must we
really invoke the patriarchy as the main explanation for why present-day
men and women, renowned for their neurotic attempts to “maximize their
health” and their unprecedentedly anxious parenting, are so averse to
risking the fetus’s well-being — even if the evidence does suggest, as
Manne dutifully reports, that the occasional drink is merely
“/unlikely/” to be harmful?
But we can largely leave this sort of quibbling toothers
<https://arcdigital.media/mannesplaining-87d1cbf3f7ab?gi=5af76f98b9c7>,
for the imperfect conceptual fit of this or that example to the main
theory is hardly the most noteworthy feature of the work. The biggest
problem with Manne as a public philosopher is the way she conceives of
her audience and her duties toward it. To appreciate this, we must
attend to what is perhaps the strangest feature of Manne’s popular
feminist philosophy: her avid interest in “incels.”
By now the incel needs little introduction. Short for “involuntary
celibate,” the label is used by participants in online forums who
self-identify as sexually undesirable. In these digital grottoes of
resentment and despair, self-described incels share abbreviated tales of
woe, explanatory theories of their cursed inferiority, and violent
fantasies directed against their oppressors — the sexually attractive
women who have no interest in them and the sexually attractive men over
whom the women fawn. Of course, if posting online were all the incels
did, it’s unlikely most of us would ever have heard of them. That we
know so much about them owes to several fatal attacks by young men who
either identified as incels or whose online statements and activity
resonated with incel rhetoric. The two most famous cases, Elliot
Rodger’s 2014 Isla Vista, Calif., shooting rampage and Alek Minassian’s
2018 Toronto van attack, left six and 10 dead, respectively.
On first glance, Manne’s focus on incel murders might be explained
biographically. By her own account, it was the Isla Vista shootings that
inspired her to write/Down Girl./But the extent of the treatment is
still bewildering: Elliot Rodger is referenced in six of/Down Girl/’s
eight chapters, including an extended discussion of the Isla Vista
killings at the beginning. In/Entitled/, Manne again dedicates her first
full length chapter to Rodger’s rampage. It is not immediately obvious
that Manne’s argument requires her to give so much attention to the
case. That Rodger, to put things mildly, harbored intense negative
feelings toward women can hardly be doubted: “I will attack the very
girls who represent everything I hate in the female gender: the hottest
sorority of UCSB,” he declared in the YouTube video he uploaded before
driving to the Alpha Phi house. But recall that misogyny, on Manne’s
account, is not about individuals’ psychological states of mind; it is,
rather, “the ‘law enforcement’ branch of patriarchy.” Its job is to
“police and enforce gendered norms and expectations.” To see Rodger’s
actions as misogynistic in Manne’s sense, we must identify particular
patriarchal norms that the murders were meant to sustain. What is it
that Rodger, whose suicide made clear he had no hopes of getting away
with anything he did, took himself to be “entitled” to?
The answers to these questions are meant to be straightforward./Down
Girl/asserts that the patriarchal norm Rodger’s actions were meant to
uphold was the maintenance of women’s role as nurturing carers and
doting companions: “What could be a more natural basis for hostility and
aggression than defection from the role of an attentive, loving
subordinate?”/Entitled/explains that Rodger, like his fellow incels,
felt entitled to sex with, as well as the admiration and the love of,
young, attractive women.
The relationship between the incel “worldview” and that of the
“patriarchy” is, however, far more complicated than Manne acknowledges.
According to Manne, as a misogynist, Rodger was trying to defend, or
restore, the patriarchal norms that consigned women to the role of
givers — norms that entitle him, as a man, to admiration, affection, and
care. But this claim fits awkwardly to the case. First, it is odd to say
that the murder spree and suicide were a means of “enforcing” or
“policing” anything. As delusional as Rodger was, there is little reason
to think he took his act to actually advance any practical goal.
Manne speaks sometimes of Rodger’s desire to “punish” his tormentors,
suggesting his actions can be read instead as an attempt at
quasi-retributive justice for its own sake, but even in that case it’s
crucial to note just how broad he considered the category of his
tormentors to be: “After I’ve annihilated every single girl in the
sorority house,” Rodger says in the video, “I’ll take to the streets of
Isla Vista and slay every single person I see there.” His beef was not
simply with women but with mankind. It is humans, with their
exclusionary ways of bestowing social favor, that Rodger could no longer
abide.
The most glaring complication in Manne’s analysis is that the
hierarchies of social and sexual value which, according to incels,
govern how affection, admiration, attention and, of course, sex, are
distributed — and against which incels struggle — are patriarchal
through and through. To the extent the members of the nation’s
sororities past, present, and future prefer handsome, athletic,
successful, and socially adept male acquaintances over despairing,
nihilistic, and socially awkward posters and gamers, it is hardly
feminist propaganda that determines their choice. In other words, the
ordinary incel’s investment in the patriarchy is not positive. He
considers himself its victim. And the murdering incel’s so-called
rebellion is not a way of climbing up the patriarchal ladder; it’s a
desperate, if largely symbolic, attempt to sabotage it. This is why, as
Manne herself notes, “an incel’s plans for revenge may therefore target
not just women but also the men they perceive as besting and thwarting
them.” The rebellious incel is not fighting/for/the patriarchy; in his
own insane way he is struggling against it.
None of this is to suggest that incels are feminist allies, obviously.
My point is that the claim that murderous incels police the patriarchal
order is a gross simplification. This is problematic because, for Manne,
Rodger’s murderous spree isn’t just a central case: It represents the
logical terminus of/all/behavior motivated by misogyny.
Manne acknowledges in/Down Girl/that the risk of any individual woman
falling victim to an actual incel attack “is rather low”; what is
crucial for her is not the literal threat incels pose, but what they
help us see. Rodger’s “rhetoric,” Manne tells us, struck a nerve with
many women not because it raised the fear of meeting the same fate as
his victims but because “it sounded a bit too familiar.” Manne
approvingly recounts how in response to the Isla Vista attacks, women
reported “offenses that were less serious on the face of it, but that
were held to be connected — for example, disparaging and domineering
behavior of subtler varieties, including mansplaining.” In other words,
Rodger’s actions were not different in kind from the wide range of more
familiar behaviors that are the focus of her work: The murders were
merely “at the most violent end of the spectrum,” his outburst but “a
particularly violent reaction to a common kind of grievance.” Here is
Manne returning to this theme in/Entitled:/
Moreover, and more subtly, incels are but a vivid symptom of a much
broader and deeper cultural phenomenon. They crystallize some men’s
toxic sense of entitlement to have people look up to them
steadfastly, with a loving gaze, admiringly — and to target and even
destroy those who fail, or refuse, to do so.
Incel mass murderers (along with family annihilators and serial rapists)
fall on “a spectrum” with garden-variety misogynists: mansplainers,
manspreaders, sexist voters, obtuse lovers, bad colleagues, dads
skimping on child care, and Donald Trump.
In turn, the incel murderer, delusional and homicidal, serves not only
to condemn the long line of more familiar misogynists, but to justify
Manne’s preferred mode of response to all of them. To say the difference
between the mansplainers and Elliot Rodger is merely one of degree is
not only to say that there is a common essence to all the cases under
consideration; it is also to say something about the prospects of
tackling the underlying problem. If the mansplainer, the inattentive
partner, and the biased political journalist are but a change of
circumstances away from a heinous murder spree, what hope do we really
have to work with them, let alone to enlighten them? Indeed, reviewing
the analysis she offers in/Down Girl/, Manne admits defeat: “I give up.
I wish I could offer a more hopeful message.”
Many of Manne’s critics have seized on elements in her style and method,
or pointed out the ways in which her ideological commitments limit her
analysis. They are not wrong: Manne cherry-picks her evidence (e.g.,
discussing the 2020 Democratic primary, Manne insists misogyny is
responsible for Warren’s defeat but fails to note that Warren didn’t
lose only to men, but, in a significant moment for her campaign, to Amy
Klobuchar, in New Hampshire); engages in dubious psychological
conjecture (e.g., when discussing the case of a man accused of serial
rape, she asserts that “many will hence instinctually reach, with a
sense of moral necessity, for any excuse in the book as to why he’s
innocent, and all the women who testify against him can’t be trusted” —
the man was unanimously convicted by a jury of his peers and sentenced
to 236 consecutive years in prison); indulges in selective hyperbole
(e.g., she equates the pressure women feel not to disappoint a romantic
partner with the experience of the participants in the infamousMilgram
shock experiments
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/how-a-decades-old-experiment-sparked-a-war-over-the-future-of-psychology/>);
and is reluctant to consider alternative explanations for the phenomena
she’s interested in (she never so much as raises the possibility that
Donald Trump defended Brett Kavanaugh because he was his nominee, not
because of “himpathy,” or that, similarly, the father ofBrock Turner
<https://www-chronicle-com.ezproxy.cul.columbia.edu/article/outrage-over-a-stanford-rape-case-might-change-how-some-colleges-respond-to-sexual-violence/>,
the Stanford student convicted of sexual assault, defended him because
he is his father; that at least/some/conservatives oppose abortion
because they sincerely believe it is a religious and moral wrong, not
because they wish to keep women in their place; that at least some of
the white women who voted for Trump did so because they favored the
Republican platform, not merely because they sympathized with their
husbands’ sense of patriarchal entitlement, etc.).
Manne is guilty of all of this. But more troubling is her abandonment of
the possibility of persuasion in advance.
In Manne’s telling, the forces stacked against progress, embodied in the
figure of the deranged incel, are often simply insurmountable.
Misogyny-driven defeat is nearly preordained. For example, according to
Manne, misogyny did not just contribute, as a matter of fact, to
Clinton’s 2016 loss; misogyny is so prevalent that, in hindsight,
Clinton never stood a chance. In this light, any appearance of progress
is very likely deceptive. Here she is explaining why the #MeToo movement
is no sign of improvement:
As powerful man after powerful man has been exposed as a sexual
wrongdoer, it’s tempting to conclude that the ground has finally
shifted. At last, we are taking their sexual misconduct seriously.
Another possibility: Something has changed about the perpetrators.
The obvious factor is that they have gotten older, making it easier
for people to cast them as “dirty old men” — albeit a more powerful
variant of the ageist cultural trope, rather than a more pathetic
figure. Notably, older men also tend to be less useful than young
earners from the perspective of late-stage capitalism; their sell-by
date is approaching. And so, in some such cases, they are more
disposable than their younger counterparts.
Did men fail to get older in the past? And haven’t countless younger men
been similarly called out, for instance on the so-called Shitty Media
Men spreadsheet? What’s the point of this sort of motivated reasoning?
Manne, it seems, wants to undermine any sense of positive change and
hence of future possibility. “During the time I was researching this
book,” she confesses in/Down Girl/, “I became less optimistic about the
prospects of getting people to take misogyny seriously — including
treating it as a moral priority, when it is —/unless they already do
so./” (emphasis mine).
In/Down Girl,/Manne’s “solutions” fit her terminal diagnosis. Don’t
worry about reaching out to misogynists, Manne advises. If an offender
has shown progress but still falls short of the mark, beware of
expressing any gratitude for his efforts, say, in order to encourage him
to continue to improve (accordingly, Manne berates Jancee Dunn, author
of/How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids/, for showing appreciation
for her husband, who by the end of the book does more around the house
than before, though still less than half). In fact, better to stop
worrying about those who disagree with you altogether:
I suspect that, for many readers who have made it this far, you may
be of a similar mind to mine and feel similarly frustrated by the
apathy, indifference, and pernicious ignorance of most people. So
maybe the thing to say, somewhat reluctantly, is — fuck ’em, in the
limited sense of ceasing to even try to catch the moderate with mild
honey.
In/Entitled/, Manne remains careful not to give in to the seductions of
hope, distinguishing her “political commitment” to “fighting for a
better world” from any reasonable conviction that such a world is
possible. She is, she makes clear, “still pessimistic about the
possibility of making much-needed feminist social progress without
incurring destructive, toxic backlash.” However much encouragement she
received from the positive responses to/Down Girl/, nothing material has
changed in her analysis of the world she lives in — the misogyny is just
as rampant, the men merely grow older.
More importantly, nothing has changed in how she thinks we should make
our way in this world. The second book has no more to offer than the
first concerning how we might communicate our grievances to the
partners, care givers, and colleagues who let us down. After all, “most
people” remain ignorant, indifferent, and apathetic. If
anything/has/changed in/Entitled/, it is that whatever nuance existed
in/Down Girl/has been replaced in the new, slimmer volume by a shorthand
of bitter sarcasm. Reflecting on an anti-domestic-violence activist’s
statement to the effect that “you can disagree with someone without
wanting to silence them,” Manne is quick to interject: “Well, I
assume/you/can, dear reader. But not everyone is so capable.” The only
thing escaping mockery and condemnation is the strategy Manne sets
herself: Stoke the anger of those with “a similar mind,” shame the rest,
and to hell with those who remain unmoved.
What should we do about the injustices we encounter, about the ways in
which we and those around us continue to fall short of our ideals? This
remains the most important question faced by those concerned with — and
suffering from — gender-based discrimination and violence today. But
Manne’s two books, grounded in her perception of continuity from
mansplainer to murderer, offer only two options, both equally
fatalistic. You can give up, as she threatened to do in/Down Girl/, or
you can take up proverbial arms, as she promises to do by the end
of/Entitled/. In the latter case, though, you are to appeal only to
those who are like-minded, and your work will be to teach them to
disregard any analysis or experience that fails to reaffirm the
“pernicious ignorance” of the crowd.
Who if not philosophers will remind us how much we have to learn
from others, even from those we fear most?
Here we see the real threat posed by the public philosopher who, instead
of guiding her readers through matters of great concern, exploits her
disciplinary authority to hawk personal opinions under the guise of
philosophical insight. In flattering the prejudices of her audience, the
philosopher does not merely fail to offer clarity, she does her readers
harm.
To turn your readers against “most people” on account of their alleged
ignorance and moral turpitude is to fail them both politically and
personally. It is to discourage them, as members of a democratic
society, from continuing in the task — Sisyphean though it may sometimes
seem — of determining their collective fate together. It is also to do a
disservice to all those private individuals who will never have the
luxury of shutting themselves off from the less enlightened.
To advise one’s readers to give up on communication is also to fail them
as a thinker. Who if not a philosopher should be responsible for keeping
the faith that intellectual and moral insight might be uncovered where
we least expect it? Who if not philosophers will remind us how much we
have to learn from others, even from those we fear most? Who if not
philosophers ought to be challenging us to expand our intellectual
communities beyond those of “similar mind”? In thewords
<http://wehuntedthemammoth.com/2018/05/03/escape-from-incel-redditor-explains-how-he-extracted-himself-from-the-toxic-subculture-and-rejoined-the-real-world/>of
one of Manne’s own bogeymen_,_an anonymous self-identified ex-incel:
The biggest problem of the community is that it does nothing to
solve the problem, and only reinforces the beliefs that one already
has. …[You] go online and find people like you, you find false
explanations for your problems and a sounding chamber for your ideas
... they don’t help you in the real world, they just make things worse.
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