Misogyny is not, in her view, a ‘property of individual misogynists’ and therefore something we can find in particular people, even deep down inside themselves.
It’s not that sort of thing; it isn’t a thing at all, it’s a practice, a lifestyle, a way of doing something
Again, it isn’t something we are, but something we do; and therefore, in our Enlightenment zeal to be able to remake what we have already made, we can imagine it as something we could do differently, or perhaps, not do at all.
‘What lies behind an individual agent’s attitudes, as a matter of deep or ultimate psychological explanation,’, ‘is frequently inscrutable,’ by which, I take it, she means something like ‘unverifiable’, impossible to locate and scrutinise.
It may be that she is asking here for more clarity than is necessary; as she knows, there are people who find psychological explanations useful, without doubting their own ultimate inscrutability.
But by warning us away from an essentialist, psychological view of misogyny, she also alerts us to the mystery-mongering in all essentialism, the acts of faith our essences seem to require of us. Misogynists, of course, are radical essentialists when it comes to women. They know exactly what they are like, and we should not, Manne's book intimates, be fighting one essentialism with another.
It’s not that sort of thing; it isn’t a thing at all, it’s a practice, a lifestyle, a way of doing something
Again, it isn’t something we are, but something we do; and therefore, in our Enlightenment zeal to be able to remake what we have already made, we can imagine it as something we could do differently, or perhaps, not do at all.
‘What lies behind an individual agent’s attitudes, as a matter of deep or ultimate psychological explanation,’, ‘is frequently inscrutable,’ by which, I take it, she means something like ‘unverifiable’, impossible to locate and scrutinise.
It may be that she is asking here for more clarity than is necessary; as she knows, there are people who find psychological explanations useful, without doubting their own ultimate inscrutability.
But by warning us away from an essentialist, psychological view of misogyny, she also alerts us to the mystery-mongering in all essentialism, the acts of faith our essences seem to require of us. Misogynists, of course, are radical essentialists when it comes to women. They know exactly what they are like, and we should not, Manne's book intimates, be fighting one essentialism with another.
No comments:
Post a Comment