#kate manne
Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (Kate Manne, 2017)
“But as I have shown, it is not that Rodger held women to be mindless things, objects, nonhuman or subhuman creatures; nor is this true of women in general under a patriarchal order.
Rather, a woman is regarded as owing her human capacities to particular people, often men or his children within heterosexual relationships that also uphold white supremacy, and who are in turn deemed entitled to her services.
This might be envisaged as the de facto legacy of coverture law—a woman’s being “spoken for” by her father, and afterward her husband, then son-in-law, and so on.
And it is plausibly part of what makes women more broadly somebody’s mother, sister, daughter, grandmother: always somebody’s someone, and seldom her own person.
But this is not because she’s not held to be a person at all, but rather because her personhood is held to be owed to others, in the form of service labor, love, and loyalty.
Her personal services, moreover, have a humanizing psychological effect on those in her care orbit, to whom her attention is held to be owed.
So, when she fails to give him what he’s held to be entitled to, by way of various forms of nurturing, admiration, sympathy, and attention, he may be left feeling less than human—like “an insignificant little mouse,” as Elliot Rodger described himself at one point.
And his revenge may be to dehumanize her in turn: to give her a taste of her own medicine, when it comes to making her feel like a nonperson. (…)
Listening and offering sympathy to those who are prone to shame-based misogynistic as well as racist outbursts is feeding the very need and sense of entitlement that drives them in the first place, when they go unmet.
In other words, it’s adding fuel to the fire, at least in the long term.
You can’t do much to help or give to someone who, yes, is in genuine pain and lashing out— but only because they feel too needy and illicitly entitled to getting such moral attentions to begin with.”