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Book Review: Down Girl
Manne, Kate. Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny. Oxford University Press: 2017.
Be careful what you choose for bedtime reading. I had a disturbing dream from the perspective of a man who’s about to drill a hole through his girlfriend’s jaw and attach her to a chain. And I was only reading chapter one.
Page 100: Let’s just call Douche Projecting-his-Nazism-onto-his-Scapegoats Excrement Limbaugh “Excrement” for short.
This book is fortunate I haven’t had a pen within reach for the past 20 pages. So much I could write in the margins.
Page 198: Are victim-blaming misogynists who throw women under the bus for rapists really THAT fucking moronic? Moronic enough to seriously think that you can tell someone is a rapist the moment you lay eyes on them because they look like monsters?
Yup. They are. They’d be outwitted by a dodo bird on meth.
A dodo bird with half a brain on meth and heroin.
A dodo bird with no more than five brain cells and on meth and heroin.
They’d be outwitted by a pile of dirt.
Basically, to paraphrase this book, the empathy-challenged assholes who are claiming there’s a “victimhood culture” are cishet white males gaslighting people who have far fewer privileges than they. These gaslighters wallow in their privileges and have no idea what it’s like to feel unsafe… around assholes like them. Meanwhile, they want to continue making sure we have no sense of safety (since they’re attacking reasonable things like safe space policies) and keep us quiet, convinced that if we assert ourselves these needledickbugfuckers will accuse us of playing victims. Yeah, I get it.
The consensus in the book discussion group (for which I read this book) is that the author’s style is way too exclusive, too academic and therefore off-putting. Aside from the many footnotes and the author’s repeated use of the word “behooves” (which I found amusing), I didn’t really notice. One member of the discussion group said the author made her angry, and that puzzled me. It’s a book about misogyny, and the author’s academic writing style is what angered you?
But yes, I get that the topic is one that should be read by the masses, not just a handful of…
