No account of our political moment could fail to dwell on the politics of gender. How could any observer fail to notice the remarkable hostility to women that surfaced during the recent campaign? The fact that the US almost elected a female president but didn’t was no incidental fact about the election of 2016, whether gender determined the result or not. (Given the narrow result, it’s impossible to know this.)
The US is hardly the only nation to face issues of gender bias and hostility. All nations have subordinated women for centuries, and it is likely that none is free today from bias against women in politics—although in nations with a parliamentary system rather than a direct presidential election, women have been rising to top offices with regularity (Indira Gandhi, Golda Meir, Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Theresa May).
Still, it’s something to ponder. Let’s start with a list of things our president has said about women, presumably well designed to please his “base”:
1. BLOOD. On August 7, 2015, Trump appeared to comment on Megyn Kelly’s menstrual period, saying, “You could see there was blood coming out of her eyes. Blood coming out of her wherever.”103 (Trump later said he meant her nose.)
On June 29, 2017, Trump attacked reporter Mika Brzezinski, saying that on a visit to his Mar-a-Lago club she insisted on joining him, but he “said no!” because she “was bleeding badly from a facelift.”104
2. WEIGHT. On September 27, 2016, Trump mocked Miss Universe winner Alicia Machado, calling her “Miss Piggy” and “Miss Eating Machine” because she allegedly gained weight after winning.105 Over the years he has attacked comedian Rosie O’Donnell as “disgusting,” and as a “slob” and “pig.”106, 107
3. BATHROOM. On December 21, 2015, Trump commented on Hillary Clinton’s bathroom break: “I know where she went—it’s disgusting. I don’t want to talk about it. No, it’s too disgusting.”
4. BREASTFEEDING. In 2011, when attorney Elizabeth Beck requested a break from a deposition to pump breast milk, “He got up, his face got red, he shook his finger at me, and he screamed, ‘You’re disgusting, you’re disgusting,’ and he ran out of there.” (Beck recalled the incident in an interview on CNN on July 29, 2015.)108
5. ATTRACTIVENESS. On October 28, 2012, Trump called Bette Midler “an extremely unattractive woman.”109 On August 28, 2012, he called Ariana Huffington “unattractive both inside and out.”110 When women came forward by October 13, 2016, to accuse him of inappropriate sexual behavior, following the release of a video in which he boasts of such conduct, Trump insulted one accuser, saying, “Look at her . . . I don’t think so.”111
In September 2015, during an earlier phase of the campaign, he mocked candidate Carly Fiorina’s face with a facial expression of disgust, saying: “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that? Can you imagine that, the face of our next president? . . . I mean, she’s a woman, and I’m not s’posedta say bad things, but really, folks, come on. Are we serious?”112
In 2011, Gail Collins wrote a column making fun of Trump’s claims of vast wealth. He mailed her a copy of her own column with her picture circled and “Face of a Dog” written over it.113
In October 2016, he commented on Hillary Clinton’s rear-view appearance, as she walked out on stage for the start of the presidential debate: “I’m standing at my podium and she walks in front of me, right. She walks in front of me. And when she walked in front of me—believe me, I wasn’t impressed.”114
Such incidents might simply illustrate the idiosyncrasies of Donald Trump were they not made on the campaign trail, to great applause. I am far less interested in Trump’s likely views than about what the enthusiasm for these utterances in Trump’s “base”—and the fact that they were not disqualifying for the larger group of Americans who voted for him—shows us about attitudes to women in our country. The president’s preoccupations are evidently those of a large segment of Americans (mostly but not entirely male). To such disgust-laden attacks, we can add other odd features of the hostility displayed to Hillary Clinton throughout the campaign: the repeated rumors and speculations about her health, the grotesque “Pizza-Gate” rumor that Clinton ran a child prostitution ring through a DC pizza parlor, and of course the omnipresent undercurrent of speculation about whether Clinton was really up to the job.
All this seems pretty nasty, but it really doesn’t sound like fear. Nonetheless, I’ll argue that hostility to women, when they attempt to assume leadership roles, does have roots in fear—but in three different ways, connected to three different emotions we’ve already investigated. Some hostility is driven by the dynamics of fear-blame: women have gotten out of hand, taking things that are ours and refusing to play the helpmeet role that is their proper role. So, they have to be disciplined, put back in “their place.” Some hostility is driven by fear-disgust: anxiety about bodily fluids, birth, and corporeality in general lead (some) men to vilify (some) women as “disgusting.” Finally, and we see this less in these particular examples than in others we’ll get to later, a lot of hostility is driven by fear-envy: women are enjoying unparalleled success in American life, more or less taking over in university and professional school admissions and subsequent employment opportunities, leaving many men (and their families) feeling marginalized and put down, cut off from the good things of life.
As we’ll see, these three dynamics are all compatible with one another: we don’t have to choose. All three are occurring, and they reinforce one another. And the three dynamics correspond roughly to three different accounts of “the heart of the matter,” or the deeper issues at stake, driving opposition to women’s full equality, especially in public life. Let’s call the first story the story of the delinquent helpmeet. What men most of all want from women, this story says, is faithful service and selfless sympathy. While he is a breadwinner, she is a homemaker. She raises children and tends to the home while he goes out into the world. Her generosity and selflessness make his fraught life calmer and gentler. But look: many women don’t want to serve any longer. They want their own careers, even in politics! And they have the temerity to ask men to help with housework and child rearing. This violates a primal natural contract. No wonder men are increasingly unhappy, that their longevity and health are declining. Women must be shown that their desertion of duty has consequences. (A minority of men, admittedly, welcome the female breadwinner, feeling liberated from provider anxiety.)
The second story is the story of woman as embodiment. In connection with the time-honored human desire to transcend the merely animal, women have frequently been cast as more bodily than men. Because women give birth, because they menstruate, because they receive men’s sexual fluids, and because their “nature” seems to be connected to birth and sex, anxiety about embodiment and mortality gets projected onto women. They are dirt, fluid, and death. It is because of this symbolic link with feared aspects of the male self that women must be relegated to the home and closely watched. It is for this reason that their bodily functions must be anxiously policed.
Obviously, these are different stories of the “heart of the matter,” but both can be true, and they can act to reinforce one another, upping the ante when women’s sexuality is policed and women are urged to confine themselves to the home. Paternity anxiety partakes of both “causes,” as we’ll see.
And then there is another story, a new “cause” in our own time, although its signs have been around for a long time. This is the story of women as successful competitors. Anxiety about competitive success is a very old story in human life, and very general. But it does have its distinctive gendered side. If males grow up defining success in terms of competitive achievement—money, status, admiration, jobs that signify all three—how bad it is to find that, instead of all those men you have to get ahead of, you now have a double competition, since women are flooding in everywhere and doing extremely well, maybe even better than men. This “story” seems to be less uniquely about gender; the same dynamic plays a role in hostility to immigrants. But it is often given a gendered edge by being combined with one of the other “stories”: why don’t they stay home and take care of us, as nature ordains? Why must they bring their fleshy loose bodies, their breast pumps, their menstrual periods, into our workplaces? For many men, too, the family gives this “story” deep roots: the precocious verbal development of a sister, the felt superiority of a mother. And maybe womb envy is in there somewhere: she has good things I can’t have. I am excluded from that zone of happy fertility.
Before we go further, a distinction must be explored. People talk about sexism, and they also talk about misogyny, often using the two words interchangeably. But they are really not interchangeable. At any rate, there are two very different phenomena that we should distinguish, although perhaps the two words do not map perfectly onto the two phenomena. Here I’ve learned from philosopher Kate Manne’s new book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, although I won’t be agreeing with her account in all respects.115
Sexism, in Manne’s useful account, is a set of beliefs. The sexist believes that women are inferior to men, less fit for a variety of important functions. Or, perhaps, the sexist might believe that “nature” dictates that men are fit for employment and political roles, women for domestic roles.
Sexism is amply evident in American history (as in the history of every nation). A typical and famous example of the “two natures” story is Justice Joseph Bradley’s opinion in Bradwell v Illinois (83 US 130 (1873)), the Supreme Court case that upheld an Illinois law forbidding women to practice law in Illinois:
The natural and proper timidity and delicacy which belongs to the female sex evidently unfits it for many of the occupations of civil life. The constitution of the family organization, which is founded in the divine ordinance, as well as in the nature of things, indicates the domestic sphere as that which properly belongs to the domain and functions of womanhood. The harmony, not to say identity, of interests and views which belong, or should belong, to the family institution is repugnant to the idea of a woman adopting a distinct and independent career from that of her husband.
Justice Bradley’s assertion of female incompetence encounters an immediate obstacle: Myra Bradwell had already been practicing law successfully for a number of years. As editor of the Chicago Legal News, she crusaded tirelessly for higher standards in the profession and an upgrading of legal education; in 1873, she became one of the founders of the Chicago Bar Association, which, of course, she was unable to join. Moreover, Iowa admitted a woman to the bar in 1869, and in 1870, a woman had graduated from an Illinois law school (the forerunner of Northwestern University’s Pritzker School of Law). Ohio admitted a woman to the bar in 1873. But Justice Bradley was ready:
It is true that many women are unmarried and not affected by any of the duties, complications, and incapacities arising out of the married state, but these are exceptions to the general rule. The paramount destiny and mission of woman are to fulfil the noble and benign offices of wife and mother. This is the law of the Creator. And the rules of civil society must be adapted to the general constitution of things, and cannot be based upon exceptional cases.
There is a glaring problem in this “argument”: Myra Bradwell was married.
Sexism, however, often has little interest in data. Indeed, it has a very peculiar illogic, already observed by the great John Stuart Mill in his treatise The Subjection of Women, published in 1869. Mill, who introduced the first British bill for women’s suffrage as a member of Parliament in 1872,116 pointed out that sexists must lack confidence in their own judgments of incapacity, since they work so hard to stop women from doing things that, by their own account, women are unable to do: “The anxiety of mankind to interfere in behalf of nature, for fear lest nature should not succeed in effecting its purpose, is an altogether unnecessary solicitude. What women by nature cannot do, it is quite superfluous to forbid them from doing.” Indeed, Mill continues, if we examine all the prohibitions and requirements society has organized, we would rationally conclude that men do not believe that “the natural vocation of a woman is that of a wife and mother.” Rather, it seems that they must believe that this vocation is not attractive to women: “that if they are free to do anything else—if any other means of living, or occupation of their time and faculties, is open . . . there will not be enough of them who will be willing to accept the condition said to be natural to them.”117
So, sexism is an uneasy set of beliefs, fraught with hidden uncertainty. The same beliefs, coupled with the same undercurrent of uncertainty, persisted in the US until very recently. Nancy Weiss Malkiel’s excellent study of coeducation struggles in the Ivy League, “Keep the Damned Women Out”: The Struggle for Coeducation, offers scores of examples.118 She focuses on elite institutions, and on WASP culture, but the attitudes she finds there are broadly American, even if Ivy Leaguers have them in an exaggerated form. (Let’s not make the mistake of thinking that misogyny is primarily a working-class phenomenon!)
As late as the 1960s and 1970s, lots of leading administrators, faculty members, trustees, and even students of all-male institutions (the account focuses on Yale and Princeton, and the sui generis case of Harvard/Radcliffe119) were ready to say with no uncertainty that women can’t learn as well as men, that they don’t belong in institutions that train “leaders” of the country, and that their primary function is that of wife and mother. “Oh, save us from the giggling crowds, the domestic lecture, and the home economics classes of a female infiltration,” wrote the Yale Daily News in 1956 (56). A leading Princeton administrator opined that Princeton was just “too intellectual” for women, who should be trained to become “a good wife, mother, and family person [rather] than a whiz kid” (112).
Women were not the only people excluded by these institutions: racial minorities and Jews were also virtually nonexistent at Yale and Princeton. A new Yale dean of admissions undertook both to advocate coeducation and to broaden the group of men admitted, meeting the usual “leadership” argument by saying that times are changing and leaders are coming from many different groups, including Jews, minorities, women, and public school graduates. He was met, in 1966, with this remarkable riposte from one Trustee:
His interlocutor shot back, “You’re talking about Jews and public school graduates as leaders. Look around you at this table”—he waved a hand at Brewster, [John] Lindsay, [Paul] Moore, Bill Bundy, . . . “These are America’s leaders. There are no Jews here. There are no public school graduates here.”
Did the speaker have so little self-knowledge that he truly believed that “natural” merit and leadership ability had produced the all-white, male, Protestant, preppy board of trustees? Or was he defiantly announcing his determination to keep the “club” the way it was, excluding outsiders?
This question helps us segue from sexism to “misogyny.” This word etymologically means “hatred of women,” but its current use is broader. As Manne defines it, for example, it is an enforcement mechanism, a set of behaviors designed to keep women in their place. The trustee would have been preaching sexism, if he argued that women (and Jews and minorities) all lacked the ability to compete at Yale. But it is easier to read his remarks as expressing a determination to enforce privilege: we are at this table, and we won’t cede “our” place to any new group. Let’s, then, think of misogyny as a determined enforcement of gender privilege, which can sometimes be motivated by hatred but is more often combined with benign paternalistic sentiments. Its primary root is self-interest, combined with anxiety about potential loss. (So, it’s not symmetrical to female hatred of men, to the extent that this exists: that’s anger driven by grievances and a wish for retribution.)
Misogyny is often “justified” by sexism: the reason to deny women university entrance, political offices, etc., is that their “nature” fits them for the role of wife and mother. But sexism is hard to defend with evidence. As Mill points out, the lack of other options for women makes it impossible to know what they are really able to do, and whether they really seek the role of wife and mother. And the fact that they can only be kept in that role by strenuous prohibitions suggests that they are actually eager to have a wider range of choices. So, misogyny often waves a sexist banner but is basically all about the defense of entrenched privilege: we like things this way, and we won’t let them change.
Which attitude do Trump’s remarks suggest? On the whole, sexism is hard to illustrate, since his remarks about female incompetence focus on the specific case of Hillary Clinton. More often, he seems to be delivering what we might call a “smackdown” to women who achieve in formerly all-male jobs (and who have the audacity to challenge him on some issue), by jeers, insults, manifestations of disgust. He doesn’t say that a breastfeeding or menstruating woman can’t be a good lawyer or journalist, he just tries to make life in those professions difficult for such women by public humiliation. So, the misogyny label fits him, and his audience too, better than the sexism label.
This may be the place to remark that, although this chapter focuses criticism on Trump supporters, misogyny also has a long history on the American left. The radical movements of the 1960s and 1970s, prominently including SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) and SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee), excluded women from leadership positions and failed to listen to their demands for a rethinking of domestic responsibilities. As Malkiel insists, they were in that respect as bad as the Yale-Princeton old guard (18–19). Women had to make our own movement, although today that movement gets a great deal of support from men.
Let’s return to Justice Bradley. At first reading, he appears to be a sexist, but on closer inspection his primary attitude is one of misogyny. After talking about natural destinies, etc., he gets around to the real point: we can admit that some unmarried women seek to practice law, but we won’t allow married women to do so. Nor does he say that a married woman is unable to practice law. He says that these women have other “duties” that they should be required to do, some of which (raising children, mainly) are “incapacities” when it comes to practicing law. Very similar to Justice Bradley, in our own time, is Pastor Ralph Drollinger, the evangelical leader who offers Bible study sessions for members of President Trump’s cabinet. Drollinger writes that women with children who serve in legislatures far from their home are “sinners.” Like Justice Bradley, he says not that they are incompetent, but that they are breaking a rule.120
Similarly, the conservatives at Yale and Princeton who struggled against coeducation used sexist arguments, but those arguments were flimsy by that time, given that most universities in the nation had long been coed, and women were doing very well there. Their real concern was the one the trustee expressed: keeping the leadership “club” male (and white and Christian). Sexism says, “Poor women, they will always underperform.” Misogyny says, “Keep the damned women out.”
The tension between sexism and misogyny is great, as Mill says. If women are really weak and not up to performing in a given area, things will sort themselves out in the market. So, if we see energetic efforts to erect barricades, this suggests that the defenders really don’t think that things will sort themselves out. The history of coeducation in US universities shows this tension clearly: for it is typically when women perform really well, taking more than “their share” of the spaces in a class, that the desire to keep them out waxes strong. My own university, coed at its inception in 1892, rapidly grew to a majority of women on a merit-based admissions policy, and between 1892 and 1902 women accounted for more than 56 percent of elections to Phi Beta Kappa, the academic honor society. At that point President William Rainey Harper created a side track for women, with separate classes in introductory courses. What he said was that alumni giving would fall off. But fear for the future of the “club” was palpable.
To the credit of the institution, Harper’s experiment was short-lived. Never fully implemented, it ceased at his death in 1906. Not so short-lived was the reluctance of Harvard, Yale, and Princeton to use equal-access admissions. For a long time, the ratio of males to females in the Harvard entering class was held artificially at four to one, using the fiction of a separate Radcliffe (which had never had a faculty of its own). Similarly, Yale tried admitting 250 women and 1,000 men in the first few classes, so that no male student would feel “his place” compromised. As Malkiel points out, the first Yale women, admitted on straight grades and test scores, typically outperformed the men, admitted on all sorts of criteria, including alumni connections, athletic accomplishments, and the more nebulous trait of being “promising.”
Misogyny, as I’m defining it here, is a determination to protect entrenched interests. It may use sexist beliefs as a tool, but the tool sometimes turns into a double-edged sword, so the misogynist typically won’t rely on it too much. (Thus, in the parallel case of anti-Semitism, people rarely tried to say that Jews could not do the intellectual work of lawyers in “white-shoe” firms, or could not do the work at Yale. They would substitute some other “argument,” such as the common claim that Jews were vulgar and socially obnoxious, a claim virtually impossible to falsify.121) Similarly, someone can be determined to keep (most) women in the roles of wife, mother, and sex object without really believing in female inferiority.
Indeed, it seems that our friend Rousseau, enigmatic and contradictory as always, is much more a misogynist than a sexist. In Book V of Emile, his great book on education, he gives the surface appearance of portraying Sophie, Emile’s destined spouse, as inclined by nature to please and support men. But when you read the text with care, you see that at every point Rousseau allows his reader to observe that Sophie’s strong natural inclinations in the direction of physical and intellectual achievement have been forcibly curbed. She isn’t allowed to read the same books, she has to run a race in high-heeled shoes (and almost beats Emile anyway).122 The real driving force in the text is the thought that social stability and order require confining women to a domestic role. In a telling footnote, Rousseau says that in some societies women can have a couple of children and still have employment outside the home. But in Europe, with its disease-ridden cities, people have to have at least four children to ensure that two survive, and that means that the woman has to become a full-time mother.123 That’s an argument for enforced domesticity. It isn’t really sexism.
Let’s now start to sort out the different strands in misogyny, asking what this desire to keep women in “their place” is all about. One strand in misogyny (the one on which Manne’s book focuses) is a male wish to have women available to support their needs and to dedicate their lives to them. Part of this may be about sexual service, part about child care. But let’s start with the bare idea that giving to men is what women are for. Consider Shel Silverstein’s poem The Giving Tree, which used to be read to young children as a touching nice story about mother and child.124 This poem is about a tree (characterized as female) who loves a little boy. The boy relies on the tree for play, food, and sleep. Both are happy. As the boy grows older, he asks the tree for money, and then a house for his wife and children: and the tree gives him her branches to carry away to build a house. He stays away for a long time, and then returns, this time asking for a boat. The tree gives him her trunk, and he cuts it down and builds a boat and sails away. Finally, the boy comes back again, and the tree apologizes: she has nothing left to give him. Her trunk, her branches, and her apples have all been given away. She is just a stump. The boy says he wants to sit and rest, so the tree says that an old stump is nice for sitting and resting. The boy sits. “And the tree was happy.”
This alarming narrative seems totally out of place in the education of children, and yet it once flourished there.125 The “tree,” or mother, gives and gives and gives, until she is just a stump. And the boy is never interested in giving anything back, he just uses the tree in different ways. But somehow this is the way things are supposed to be, and the tree is happy because the boy still wants to use her. (There are other themes in the poem, about aging and loss; but the gender dynamics make it impossible to focus on these more humanly interesting aspects.) The nuclear family in many eras, and certainly in the 1950s, just before protest broke out, was romanticized and gendered in just this way. The toll the life of service took on women was vaguely acknowledged but somehow thought to make for her happiness. Men felt that they could not go out into the world, adventure, and achieve, unless they could rely on that tree being always there at home to come back to.
The romance of women as givers has several different aspects. Some versions of the story focus on homemaking and domesticity, some on child-bearing and child-rearing. Some (though not Silverstein’s) focus on the woman’s availability for sex and her duty to keep herself attractive so that the man will have a nice sex partner to come home to.
To that rather bourgeois point about sex, our friend Rousseau adds three others: (1) men won’t want to raise children unless the confinement of women to the home assures them that the children are really theirs; (2) male passion may flag if it is not constantly kindled by female “coyness,” which women will cunningly deploy as fiancées and then as wives; (3) on the other hand, male passion might become distracting and overwhelming, unless women keep it under control by insisting that men confine sexuality to marriage, which will predictably cause desire to decline. As you can see, Rousseau is on many sides of this issue, but always with insight. All three points may be true of some people, though it is difficult to imagine a single person—perhaps excepting Rousseau himself—of whom all three would be true at roughly the same time.126 Thomas Jefferson follows Rousseau, repeating his first and third arguments: “Were our state a pure democracy . . . there would yet be excluded from [our] deliberations . . . women, who, to prevent depravation of morals, and ambiguity of issue, could not mix promiscuously in the public meetings of men.”127
The story of “woman as giving tree” is often freighted with anxiety—not least in our time. Consider the boy in the story. Now he’s all grown up, and he wants to bring up children. But women aren’t playing by the rules any longer. They don’t stay at home, they get jobs, they earn incomes, and they ask that grown-up boy to share housework and child care. This is not what life prepared me for, he thinks. It’s unfair. I want things to be as they were. Maybe he also has a female boss. He sees women running for political office. Again, he thinks, It’s just not fair. They should be supporting me, but instead they are demanding and giving orders. Not raised for reciprocal love, he expects service, and lo and behold, it isn’t there.
This boy might well fall back on sexism, saying women’s natural place is in the home. But the real issue is misogyny: get back there where you belong. A deep anxiety gets blended with rage: they are the ones who have made my life so insecure.
Sometimes the fear-blame reaction targets all women. More often, though, it exempts docile and traditional women who play the old game pretty well. (And, of course, there are women who want to play that game: being taken care of by a breadwinner is, to some, appealing.) Fear and blame (including blame from those more conventional women) target those “uppity” ones who want to change the game. Hence Kate Manne’s title, Down Girl. To the nice little doggie, you don’t need to say “down.” You say that to an obstreperous dog, who hasn’t learned how to behave.
Here we see one reason so many women voted for Donald Trump. There are, of course, many reasons. Many women simply agreed with Trump’s positions on other issues and decided to disregard his comments about women. But some, at least, object on moral or religious grounds to women who pursue personal independence and career success, rather than making care for home and family their primary concern. They blame the “rule breakers” for their alleged selfishness—and sometimes that blame is further fueled by a sense that they themselves, by putting traditional duties first, may have missed something.
Such complaints raise a genuinely difficult issue. Many children in our society do get too little parental care and time. This problem, however, is most often caused by poverty, which necessitates long hours of work and makes quality child care unavailable. It is also compounded by high rates of incarceration, which rob many poor families of a male parent. So, our problems of child neglect are not very closely connected to the alleged problem of “uppity” women. But even in those cases where selfishness is part of the problem, surely blame for irresponsibility should not be put entirely on women: what about men, who still don’t share fairly in care and domestic labor? And what about workplaces, which still do not sufficiently accommodate the lives of two-income families? While we should honor any spouse, male or female, who chooses to stay at home and care for children (and sometimes aging parents), the traditional model, which gave men free choice and told women that they had no choice, is surely wrong in a society of equals.
The “Down, girl” response, in short, deflects attention from the real social problems that need to be solved: problems of poverty, problems of mass incarceration, problems of workplace inflexibility, and problems of genuine choice and equality.
Sexism was comforting to the anxious misogynist: they can’t do as well as we can anyway. As soon as a group manifests superior achievement, that prop falls away, and fear escalates. Anti-Semitism never really had a prop, since the superior achievements of Jews were well known, so a fake prop was invented in the form of slurs about Jewish behavior and culture. What about women? Already in the era covered by Malkiel’s book, people could see that women were outperforming men in many universities, and that they would claim “too many” slots if admitted on a basis of equality.
Today the story of higher education is ever more alarming to men who feel that certain slots are “theirs” by right. Women are outperforming men as applicants virtually everywhere. Indeed, a common story I hear from schools that are strongly attached to their male athletic programs is that those schools artificially hold down the number of women so that they won’t be required by Title IX to cut expenditures on male sports. (Title IX requires that the proportion of expenditure on male and female sports correspond to the proportions of men and women in the student body.) One football school told me that the ratio of women to men dictated by grades and scores would be at least 60 to 40, maybe higher. But they hold it to 55 (women)/45 (men) for the sake of the football program. Other schools skew the ratio artificially in order to produce a balanced social atmosphere, reasoning that both men and women will reject a school whose sex ratio is too skewed. (Sarah Lawrence, which does not skew, is 71 percent female.128)
The story of women’s achievements is international. In countries that depend more on test scores than we do, and less on alumni connections, athletics, or hobbies, women are eclipsing men virtually everywhere. For example, although Americans have a stereotype of the Arab world as hostile to women’s achievements, women outnumbered men as university students in 2012 in Algeria, Bahrain, Kuwait, Lebanon, Morocco, Tunisia, Qatar, Oman, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates.129 In Jordan, women not only lead men by 52 percent to 48 percent, they really clean up at the top university, the University of Jordan in Amman, where I was told on a visit in 2007 that women comprise 75 percent of the student body. Women still face severe employment barriers in all these countries, but how long can they be kept out of the leadership “club” when their achievements in tertiary education are so impressive?
When women succeed, what happens to men? The story of Harvard, Princeton, and Yale offers a microcosm of a question that looms large in our nation as a whole (especially given the changing requirements of the economy, which make a college degree a must for most jobs). For a while, the leaders of these Ivy League institutions tried to pretend that there was no zero-sum competition: places for women would simply be added, but the number of men would remain constant. That strategy didn’t work over the long haul, of course. None of these institutions ever contemplated simply doubling the number of places they offered, a financially and logistically unworkable idea, since it would have meant doubling residences, greatly increasing faculty size, etc. As pressure rose to admit a more nearly equal number of women, and as admissions decisions gradually heeded qualifications rather than aiming for a rigid quota for women, the number of men sooner or later had to decline. The three institutions resisted equal access for a long time. At Harvard, the fiction of Radcliffe’s autonomy served to hold the four-to-one admissions quota in place through the 1970s, and the two colleges merged fully only in 1999.
Surprisingly, the fact that there are surely fewer places for men than formerly at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton has not created much of a backlash these days. Rich alumni have daughters as well as sons; alumnae gradually filtered into the ranks of donors; some expansion of class sizes lessened the shock of diminished access. But above all, people became convinced that coeducation was essential to attract the best students, and worries about how it would work in practice gradually waned.
In American society as a whole, there is no such happy ending. Even though people sort of believe that all people’s talents should be developed and that everyone has a right to compete in education, employment, and the political arena, the unavoidable fact is that doubling the applicant pool, in all these areas, means many disappointments for many men. It also means other changes for which American men of my generation were not at all prepared: above all, more men doing more housework, child care, and elder care. As I’ve mentioned, the left-wing movements of my generation were very male-dominated, and had no interest in the equal division of domestic work. This issue was raised mainly by women, and it is still an exceedingly difficult one in families all over the country—especially given that our country, unlike many, does not subsidize child care for preschool children or even universal pre-K education, and has a comparatively weak family and medical leave program.
Envy flares up, I said, when a group feels cut out of key good things that other people have (money, status, offices, employment opportunities). There’s no doubt that white men, particularly in the lower middle classes, are indeed losing out. The jobs that are available mostly require a college degree. Even men who are employed face income stagnation and declining purchasing power. The glaring health problems in this group, opiate addiction above all, are signs of misery and hopelessness. Nobel Prize–winning economist Angus Deaton and his wife and co-author Anne Case see a “sea of despair” among non-Hispanic white working-class men.130 Mortality has skyrocketed in both sexes, for those with no college degree, but is higher among males. They attribute the rise to bad employment prospects and to the cumulative disadvantage of obesity, drug use, and stress, as behaviors initially sought to treat disappointment make prospects worse.
What interests me is the interaction between the stress and anxiety produced by bad prospects and a type of despairing envy that lashes out against those who are seen as displacing them. This particular envy dynamic requires a belief in one’s own privileged entitlement: “they” have taken “our” place. Immigrants bear the brunt of some of this envy, but women get a very large share—easy to understand, given the sudden ascent of women in all aspects of American life. Disparate educational success is particularly relevant, since many women escape, to some extent, the employment problems of men of similar background. At any rate, seeing the prominence of women in education and jobs requiring education, it’s easy to blame them for men’s problems.
One small yet telling example of envy-driven misogyny was a crisis over a website called AutoAdmit that purported to offer advice about law school admissions. The site quickly degenerated, however, becoming a mainly pornographic site on which anonymous male law students told fictional obscene stories about named female law students. Even if employers didn’t believe the formulaic porn stories, they had a tainting effect, and women felt that it did real harm in their job searches—besides producing stress in the classroom, since the defamers clearly knew the women personally, and yet the women could not trace their defamers’ identity. When two women—high-achieving Yale Law School students—sued for defamation, they were only able to identify some of the posters. They eventually settled with some of those involved; the terms of the lawsuit, however, remain confidential. The law school community took this very seriously, and it was a central exhibit in a 2008 conference about Internet law that later became an edited collection.131
My own contribution discussed connections between the sentiments expressed on the site and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s idea of ressentiment Ressentiment, for Nietzsche, is an envious emotion felt by the powerless toward the powerful, but then it becomes creative: it prompts the powerless to invent an alternative universe in which they are powerful and their competitors are pathetic. That, I said, was what Internet porn makes possible: an alternative universe in which the woman is not a successful achiever, but simply a slut; and this universe has effects in the real world. Fortunately, this sort of bullying, still common elsewhere on the Internet, is not typical in today’s law schools, where women are achieving ever greater parity.
This is what I now see happening more generally with American misogyny. In reality, women are achieving ever more success. In the alternative universe of the misogynist (the people who cheered at Trump’s remarks), women are pathetic, disgusting, sluttish, weak, ugly. In the real world more and more women are refusing to play the role of charming helper. They insist on other criteria of success. In the parallel universe of misogyny, those who don’t play that role are jeered at as abysmal failures. Unfortunately, misogyny in America at large is far more influential than it is in law schools.
The fear-envy-misogyny story fits well with the fear-blame story: men feel bested by women in a zero-sum competition and at the very same time they also fail to find the unequivocal support and undemanding comfort that women once offered as “homemakers.” Or if they do find it in their own homes, they know well that the institution of the “giving tree” is rapidly dying out.
Trump’s remarks, however, appeal above all to disgust. Sometimes they target women who don’t fit a narrow male norm of attractiveness: women who are overweight or aging. But many of his remarks evince a more general disgust at women’s bodily fluids: breast milk, menstrual blood, blood from a facelift (where he would have seen no blood surely, only bruising and possibly stitches), the imagined urine or feces of Hillary Clinton’s bathroom trip. And his audience goes along with all these references, finding it delightful that women (including conventionally attractive women) are characterized as zones of disgusting liquid. Why?
Misogynistic disgust has a long history and has been much studied. For some strange reason (given that all human beings excrete and bleed) women have often been cast by men as somehow more bodily, more animal, more bound up with stench and decay, than men. Is it because women give birth and are thus associated indelibly with vulnerable embodiment? Or, as legal theorist William Ian Miller suggests, is it the fact that men leave their own fluids behind in the woman and therefore think of her as a receptacle of the sticky stuff they discharge?132 (This would fit with the way in which disgust toward gay men focuses obsessively on anal intercourse.) Who knows. These things are hardly logical. What is clear is that many whole cultures have seen women as somehow more bodily, more animal, than men, and have seen men as capable of transcending their mere humanity only on condition that they keep women confined and keep their bodily functions under close control. Taboos surrounding menstruation, birth, and sex are ubiquitous. And that’s a type of misogyny, if we mean what I mean by that word, the enforcement of a lower status for women.
Obviously that sort of misogyny is compatible with sexual desire. Often disgust follows gratified desire. As Adam Smith remarks of male desire, “When we have dined, we order the covers to be removed.”133 (Smith, a hypochondriac who lived with his mother until her death shortly before her ninetieth birthday, is not known to have had any sexual experience, so he is probably talking about his culture rather than making a personal remark.) But often the two are more profoundly linked: the woman is alluring for the very reason that she is disgusting: she represents embodiment, which is feared but also coveted. Sigmund Freud believed that for this reason all sexual desire is inevitably mingled with disgust. I’m sure he is wrong, but the fact that he said this shows how widespread the link was, or is.
Disgust-misogyny is clearly fear-driven, like all projective disgust: what is feared is death and mortal embodiment. But if women represent that feared (but often desired) condition, then they represent dirt and death, and are feared, hence disciplined and controlled, for precisely that reason.
The disgust-misogyny story is a very different story about the “root of the matter” from The Giving Tree story or the envy-competition story. It is appealing because it gets at something deep in people that is not simply the creation of a single political moment. But we don’t have to choose. The stories are not incompatible; they are complementary and even mutually reinforcing. I’m inclined to say that the disgust story could not explain the outbreak of misogyny we see in America today without the other two stories. Fear and insecurity never go away entirely, and human fears focus insistently on the body and mortality. But fear can be dramatically exacerbated by rapid social changes that appear to remove a source of comfort and undemanding love. And it can be further exacerbated by economic conditions that make competitive envy soar upward, especially when envy has an obvious target: a competitor who used to help you and who now takes your job.
Sexism is a problem. But sexist beliefs can be refuted by evidence. By and large they have been refuted. The real problem is many men’s determination to maintain the old order, by any means possible: ridicule, expressions of disgust, refusals to hire, to elect, to respect as equals. Misogyny is not a very intelligent strategy, since it is purely negative: “Keep the Damned Women Out.” It’s like a child stamping a foot: no, no, no. Refusing change doesn’t solve the health problems of working-class men or help all of us extend university education and its opportunities to more of our people, problems that misogynists themselves want to solve. Nor does it solve a problem they have hardly begun to face: how to reinvent love, care, and the nuclear family in an era of increasing female work and achievement. Misogyny is comforting for a moment but achieves nothing.
Once again, what we need is not more of this toxic brew, it is, instead, strategies that move us beyond what we might call the Fear Family, and into cooperative work for a more promising future with one another.
1 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/08/07/trump-says-foxs-megyn-kelly-had-blood-coming-out-of-her-wherever/?utm_term=.e9badd71dab7.
2 http://money.cnn.com/2017/06/29/media/mika-brzezinski-donald-trump-tweet/index.html.
3 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/09/27/alicia-machado-the-woman-trump-called-miss-housekeeping-is-ready-to-vote-against-donald-trump/?utm_term=.96bb895b92cb.
4 http://www.businessinsider.com/trump-rosie-odonnell-history-2017-5/?r=AU&IR=T
5 https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2015/12/21/donald-trump-calls-hillary-clinton-disgusting-for-using-the-restroom-during-a-debate/?utm_term=.dfae51490c16.
6 http://edition.cnn.com/2015/07/29/politics/trump-breast-pump-statement/index.html.
7 http://edition.cnn.com/2017/06/29/politics/kfile-trump-long-history-disparaging-comments/index.html.
8 Ibid. The story contains numerous other similar examples.
9 https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/trump-responds-to-allegations-from-reporter-look-at-her-look-at-her-words/2016/10/13/0e266b8a-9175-11e6-bc00-1a9756d4111b_video.html?utm_term=.65d2877360ae.
10 http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/09/media/donald-trump-rolling-stone-carly-fiorina/index.html.
11 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/02/opinion/02collins.html.
12 http://edition.cnn.com/2016/10/14/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-appearance-debate/index.html.
13 New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. My primary disagreement with Manne is that she focuses more or less exclusively on the “bad helpmeet” scenario, mentioning disgust briefly and envy not at all.
14 The bill failed, of course. Britain got full female suffrage only in 1928 (the US, in 1920). Aaron Burr, of all people, introduced a bill for female suffrage in the New York State legislature in the late 1790s. Burr, a serious feminist, kept a portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft on his study wall. His daughter, Theodosia, was one of the best-educated women of her day.
15 J. S. Mill, The Subjection of Women, ed. Susan Moller Okin (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1988), ch. 1.
16 Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. Page numbers are given inside the text.
17 Sui generis because Radcliffe admitted women who (after a brief period of separate classes) took classes with Harvard men and even received Harvard degrees, and yet the illusion of an independent Radcliffe held in place a mandatory admissions quota.
18 http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-la-pol-trump-cabinet-pastor-20170803-story.html.
19 See my “Jewish Men, Jewish Lawyers: Roth’s ‘Eli, the Fanatic’ and the Question of Jewish Masculinity in American Law,” in Saul Levmore and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., American Guy: Masculinity in American Law and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 165–201.
20 This understanding of the text is convincingly argued by Susan Moller Okin in her Women in Western Political Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979, new edition with introduction by Debra Satz, 2013), part III.
21 Bloom edition, 362.
22 Shel Silverstein, The Giving Tree (New York: Harper and Row, 1964). Manne discusses the poem well.
23 My research assistant Nethanel Lipshitz, from Israel, read the book in Hebrew translation and was totally unaware that the tree was female: in Hebrew both boy and tree are male.
24 The first and third views are stated in Emile; the third is implied there but is explicit in the Letter to d’Alembert.
25 Jefferson, letter to Samuel Kercheval, September 5, 1816; Jefferson also excludes “infants” and slaves. This sentence is often quoted incorrectly, saying “ambiguity of issues” instead of “issue” (offspring).
26 https://www.sarahlawrence.edu/about/.
27 http://edition.cnn.com/2012/06/01/world/meast/middle-east-women-education/index.html. The data were compiled by the UN. See also http://monitor.icef.com/2014/07/increasing-participation-by-women-in-middle-east-education/andthemorecomprehensivedatainhttp://monitor.icef.com/2014/10/women-increasingly-outpacing-mens-higher-education-participation-many-world-markets/.
28 A good summary of their work is at https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/new-research-identifies-a-sea-of-despair-among-white-working-class-americans/2017/03/22/c777ab6e-0da6-11e7-9b0d-d27c98455440_story.html?utm_term=.8e053e1e6b88.
29 Saul Levmore and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., The Offensive Internet: Speech, Privacy, and Reputation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).
30 William Ian Miller, The Anatomy of Disgust (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997).
31 Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (Indianapolis: Liberty Classics, 1982), I.ii.1.2, 28.