Ladies! You've made it to the lightning round
of Misogyny Mayhem! Are ya ready?!
...No?
Absolutely not.
I hate this game.
Great!
Welcome back! Let's take a quick look at our scores.
Hey! Look at that!
You all answered the question correctly, so
Anita, Carolyn: you each get 80 points!
And Ebony: 63 points for you!
I answered the same thing they did!
Why do I only get 63?
Ha ha! The game is rigged! [laughter]
It's so rigged!
I don't want to play this game!
I kept telling everyone,
I didn't want to play this game.
[laughter] You don't get to stop playing
and you'll never win...
because DA DA DA DAAAAH! It's Misogyny Mayhem!
Where you don't get to choose the game,
because the game...it chooses you!
Ok, contestants -- next question--
Hey, hey, hold up -- you know what?
Ebony, Carolyn -- let's just leave. Screw this.
That's not how the game works!
You can never stop playing and you can never win!
Man, patriarchy sucks.
You know, here at Feminist Frequency,
we've had a lot of practice with folks calling us
all sorts of horrible things.
But the fact is, you don't have to be a woman with
a semi-public profile to be attacked with discrimination
and gendered insults from random people who seem
to think they have a right to your time and attention.
Here are some things that people will feel totally justified
in informing women of their opinions on:
Doing things that women aren't supposed to do
Looking a way that women aren't supposed to look
Being too sexy
Not being sexy enough
Having sex with that guy
Not having sex with that other guy
Playing video games
Wearing tank tops around your middle school principal
Making decisions about your own health
Reporting harassment
Not reporting harassment
Having short hair
Having long hair
Making joke on Twitter and not letting
men explain them back to you--
[CAROLYN] Yeah, look -- if we get into this,
we'll be here all day.
The point is, like the game of Misogyny Mayhem,
it doesn't matter if you didn't sign up to play.
Exist as a woman in this culture,
and like it or not, you're in the game:
subject to having people emphatically police
how you "do" gender; and often
harassing or threatening you if you don't conform
to restrictive patriarchal notions of who and what
a woman should be.
More importantly, you can never do well enough
in this ludicrous "game" to win.
And, of course, those women who conform to
cultural standards and expectations are also oppressed,
by the limiting roles that our culture lays out for them.
Like Kevin said, the game is rigged.
It's rigged to benefit men as a group in ways
that necessitate the subjugation of women as a group.
See, across many societies and throughout much of time,
cultures have reinforced false notions about gender
that justify the system in which men are given
power over women with the horrifying excuse
that it's for our own good.
And the most powerful cultural tool for maintaining
that fiction?
Framing gender myths as fixed, universal,
and our favorite, natural.
Myths like, women are naturally more emotional
than men, while men are naturally more analytical.
It is in their nature for women to be caregivers,
while it is men's nature to be protectors.
By their nature, women love salad.
Men require steak to live.
But...but I love steak.
Too bad!
Because these are beliefs passed down
through our families, social institutions, art,
media, culture and religion for generations,
they've acquired an air of permanence and
false objectivity.
As a result, these assumptions don't just support
misogyny, they cloak it -- so that most of us
grow up unable to see the imbalance and unable
to recognize the injustice of it all.
Instead, we believe that this is how human society
naturally is and always will be.
But that doesn't mean that these assumptions are
inherently true.
They're not.
And the more we allow ourselves to pass these
assumptions on unquestioned, the more of a
disservice we do to ourselves and future generations.
Now, I'm not psychic, but I can already hear
the counterarguments from the Youtube Yokels
who insist that patriarchy is a myth,
misogyny is just jokes,
and sexism is somehow women's fault
because of boobs, or something.
To be honest, those folks probably aren't
even listening right now.
They're too busy writing op-eds about the
redistribution of sex.
They've already decided that women's bodies are
just a commodity to be allocated at the discretion of
any passing Kevin.
But for the rest of us,
it's useful to explain a little bit more about
how misogyny and sexism are tools designed
to maintain systems of power,
that systematically and institutionally disempower
women and gender non-conforming folks.
So let's start at the top.
What is misogyny?
And how can I be a misogynist if I love my mother
and my dentist is a woman?
I'm glad you asked, Ebony!
Misogyny is the dislike of,
contempt for, or inherent
prejudice against women
based on their gender.
Sometimes people get hung up on the fact
that misogyny involves hating women.
But we're not really talking about the
"grrr! I really hate that person!" kid of hate here.
We're talking about an often unconsious kind of hate
that allows you to love individual women
whiles still hating women as a class.
Like, you can love your daughter and still think that
women shouldn't be mechanics.
Think about it:
in our society,
the worst, most insulting thing that you can call a man
is a woman.
Words like "bitch," "pussy," and "mangina,"
have so much power specifically because women
are so degraded in our culture that there's nothing
in the entire universe more shameful for a man
to be associated with than femaleness or femininity.
And while women suffer far more
under patriarchy than men do,
it is worth noting that this is one way
in which men can also be limited by it.
They can have their gender and gender expression
policed and be attacked if they don't
perform masculinity in a way that helps
maintain and reinforce male dominance.
But make no mistake:
it's women who are truly subjugated.
When a man calls another man a "pussy,"
he's not just insulting that individual man,
he's insulting all women as well,
by suggesting that being a women is the most
shameful and insulting thing that a person can be.
Maintaining that male dominance over women
is so central to patriarchy that when women make men
feel emasculated through even mild humor
the reactions from men are often extremely violent.
Hence the adage, men are afraid that women will
laugh at them; women are afraid that men will kill them.
Ok! But then what's the difference between
misogyny and sexism?
You really want to get into this?
Do you want Kevin to force us
to play another round of Misogyny Mayhem?
Yeah, uh...good point.
Well, one way to think about the difference between
sexism and misogyny, is to think of one as active,
and the other as passive.
Or one as the cause, and the other as the effect.
That is, misogynist beliefs lead to sexist behaviors
and policies.
And misogyny takes many forms:
sometimes it can be incredibly overt and in your face,
like physical abuse or men shouting sexist epithets,
but subtle, insidious misogyny like hiring practices that
favor men over qualified women is at least as common
and can do just as much harm.
Scholars like Kate Manne and Moya Bailey are doing
crucial work fleshing out the critical distinctions between
different types of misogyny, as well as the ways
in which other social factors intersect with misogyny,
resulting in very different experiences of sexism for, say
black women vs. white women.
Of course, no matter how diligently we do this work,
to point out misogyny's existence and dismantle
its machinery, there will always be those who dismiss us.
It's kind of ridiculous.
One of the most absurd derailing tactics that trolls
and harassers use is to suggest that
it's impossible for western feminists to care about
say, horrifically sexist video game characters while
simultaneously caring about the safety of kidnapped
schoolgirls in Nigeria.
Apparently, there's a hard cap on how
many women you can give a crap about at once.
And the reason they resort to tactics like this is because
challenging misogyny in western culture is a threat to them.
They don't want to lose the advantages that come from the
subjugation of women.
Yeah, definitely.
But you know what part of this doesn't make sense
for a lot of people?
Sometimes, women seem invested in keeping sexist
systems in place, too.
That's because we're all immersed in a patriarchal
misogynist culture from the moment we're born;
and as we mentioned earlier,
some of the assumptions built
into the culture serve to camouflage
misogyny.
When it's part of the cultural air you breathe
every single day,
it's hard to see it.
And it's very easy to accept it as natural and normal --
rather than as an oppressive system created by humans.
As Allan G. Johnson writes in his incredible book,
The Gender Knot,
"There is no escaping misogyny because
it is not a personality flaw.
It is part of patriarchal culture,
and we are like fish swimming in a sea laced with it --
unable to breathe without it passing through our gills.
Misogyny infuses into our cells and becomes
part of who we are because by the time we know
enough to reject it, it's already too late."
Also, there are some women who,
consciously or unconsciously, leverage misogyny
for their benefit --
by playing along with sexism, laughing at the sexist jokes,
or making sexist comments themselves to be accepted
as one of the cool girls.
I definitely tried to make my way into
the boys' club when I was younger and had
to work to unlearn this behaviour.
Hey! You know how there are those tv ads that are meant
to teach young people that, like, smoking or whatever
isn't cool?
Maybe we need to start making those for misogyny!
Hmmmmm
[fanciful music]
Hey, Jimmy! Aren't girls stupid?
Uh, I don't know.
C'mon, Jimmy. Girls are totally stupid.
Um...I guess.
Whoa! Anti-Patriarchy Man!
Hey, kids! You don't always
have to get along with your little sister.
Girls can be annoying sometimes,
just like we boys can.
But remember: thinking that all girls are stupid today
sets you on a dangerous path to not being able
to see women as equal human beings later,
when you're an adult.
And you know what that's part of?
Patriarchy?
That's right!
And what do we say about the patriarchy?
Equality rules, patriarchy drools!
Thanks. Anti-Patriarchy Man!
[record scratch]
It needs work.
ANYway, look -- we get it.
Pushing back against misogyny is really, really tough.
The truth is, doing the hard work of
of recognizing the operation of misogyny and sexism
in our lives is scary, frustrating,
confusing and discouraging.
When you recognize that social conditioning about gender
permeates every aspect of our culture,
from the jobs we do to the food we eat,
it feels overwhelming.
We can joke about the ridiculousness of some of
the more absurd examples of sexism in our culture,
and we definitely laugh when we
we come across examples of really outdated thinking
that seem out of place in our modern world.
But what happens when we do more than laugh and joke?
There's a tremendous cost to fighting these
battles in earnest, day in and day out.
It's so much easier to go with the flow,
because when you rock the boat, you often
become singled out for punishment and harassment.
And people might go to frightening lengths
to silence you.
It's no wonder that we often choose to stay in line and
tell ourselves that we're going along with patriarchy
because we want to; rather than because
it's easier or safer.
I mean, who wants to be the feminist killjoy
ruining video games?
[laughter]
Hope you found this video helpful.
We'd love it if you shared this episode with your
friends and family.