Misogyny is in a smirk, a meme or in violence

Mail & Guardian

4 days ago

Graphic: John McCann
Every year, when 9 August rolls around, we parade Women's Day like a trophy. We are reminded of 1956, when thousands, including Lillian Ngoyi, Helen Joseph, Sophia Williams and Rahima Moosa, confronted the apartheid status quo of racial discrimination and female oppression. We are reminded to be awed by those women who challenged injustice, but not so inspired to become them.
This Women's Day, we need to reflect on how the echoes of miso­gyny are reverberating around the world, with the rise of anti-feminist movements, the rolling back of women's rights, affecting us all. It appears the 'we' who hate women is growing and our socialised passivity allows the echo of misogyny to be deafening.
Misogyny isn'talways overtly violent; we don't always call it hate, it's advice, it's a smirk, a shared meme. But the hate is there, unexpected, subtle and inherited. From the day women are born, they are socialised into being the other, being treated as defective, dirty and hysterical.
Women in liberal constitutional democracies today are told to be grateful — we have rights, programmes, seats at the table. Yet research suggests that, although the inclusion of women in leadership positions has increased, they hold less institutional power than men. Women are disproportionately confined to people-centred roles, while men consolidate their power on golf courses, over whiskeys in cigar lounges, free to let loose, be 'politically incorrect', express their distaste for equality, feminism and women's rights movements.
I had better clarify that it is not all men, before I am labelled as a problematic woman, a misandrist, just more fuel for the effigy of female hate that incels and men's rights activists love to burn. On the other hand, it is these same men who claim to be the ones marginalised. We are reminded that it could be worse — look at the women in Iran — as if formal equality cancels out inequalities in practice.
So, we women remember our place — not to destabilise the system, to be grateful that we are in the room at all, quietly holding our breath so as not to exhale too loudly, disturbing the misogyny in the air out of fear we will be kicked out of the room altogether. As misogyny seeps into our pores, we women start to internalise our inferiority, as thinkers such as bell hooks, Roxane Gay, Luce Irigaray and Naomi Wolf have pressed on over the years.
Religion, the handmaid of miso­gyny, socialised the previous generations. Traditions masquerading as cultural truths linger over society today. Misogynistic cultural truths became, and still are, the expectation: female suffering is graceful, female sexuality is shameful, men are natural-born leaders and women are completed by marriage. The familiar tropes extend to secular society: the martyr wife, the submissive daughter.
All women who don't internalise these cultural truths are branded as 'other', are labelled deviant, dangerous and shameful. These problematic women are living cautionary tales used by others to warn their daughters of the dangers of being too loud, too wild, too free.
Loud, wild and free women are good fantasies, good TV and good memes to send. The patriarchy allows us women to admire, to be inspired by the Miranda Priestlys, Olivia Popes, Annalise Keatings, June Osborne, Lindiwe Dikanas, Beth Harmons, as long as their empowered persona stays in our offices, books we write or on our mood boards which we never act on.
We women are encouraged to be inspired to cosplay these characters at Halloween but not to become them. Emulation is threatening, disrupting business as usual. For that reason, people of all genders are socialised to be the patriarchy's antibodies, policing women, judging, criticising, trolling or excluding them, attacking anyone who is too loud, too different, neutralising the threats that challenge the patriarchal norm.
Because we women are holding our breath so as not to disturb the misogynistic air, the presence of more women, women who are freer, wilder, louder than ourselves, makes us uneasy. That is the skill of the misogynist system; its internal mechanism has taught us how to divide ourselves. White women troll black women, cis women judge trans women. It works so well that not only is it so easy to hate women, but the default is for us women to hate ourselves.
The cultural pushback of women's rights globally (such as the overturning of Roe vs Wade, the rise of anti-feminist movements) and the drive to push 'traditional values' is the latest swing of the pendulum of patriarchy. From the tradwife making homemade jam to the day-in-the-life-of-a-stay-at-home-girlfriend reel, the soft girl aesthetic, embracing passive femininity, to the cottagecore wife and her domestic rituals.
These whitewashed heteronormative aesthetics create an online space for misogyny to thrive. Online spaces where little girls and women are moulded to dream of submission and exhausted girl bosses toy with the daydream of trading in their laptop for a sourdough starter. We are free only to exercise a curated femininity; we get to decide what kind of cookie-cutter female tropes we wish to embody — the Karen, the Pick-Me Girl, the Girl Boss or the Slay Queen.
As we remember our women struggle heroes this year, let their resistance inspire us to find new ways to resist social injustice.
Paige Benton is a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Johannesburg, based at the African Centre for Epistemology and Philosophy of Science.