The point can be extended. As white women, we are habitually loyal to powerful white men in our vicinity (e.g., those who outrank us in our workplaces, communities, and other social institutions, including the academy). We keep dominant men’s secrets as a default matter—including when it comes to their sexually predatory behavior. My choice of the inclusive plural pronoun here is deliberate. White liberal and progressive women are not reliably willing to break the habits of a lifetime in this respect either. Consider the amount of time it has taken for multiple credible reports of sexual harassment and assault in academia—philosophy included, which remains one of the least diverse disciplines—to lead to any action against certain prominent male perpetrators. This is a symptom of our collective tendency to keep silent, to be a “good one.” This requires being loyal to dominant men—and caring for anyone and everyone in the vicinity, additionally....
Women in positions of unprecedented political power, or right on its cusp, are also prone to be perceived as rule-breakers generally. They are not to be trusted to stay in line, or respect law and order. These perceptions are understandable, because they’re not baseless so much as defunct: these women are breaking the rules of an unjust patriarchal system that is still in the process of being dismantled. Someone like Clinton was breaking rank; she was out of order relative to nominally passé, but entrenched, social hierarchies wherein only men could aspire to highest political office. And women were expected to defer to and support, not compete with, them. Her defection from this role may hence seem like treason or betrayal—and reacted to in ways both bewildered and bewildering, both threatened and threatening.--Kate Mann "Why the Majority of White Women Voted for Trump," excerpted from Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny by Kate Manne (Oxford University Press, November 2017), @Alternet.
Future historians will notice with amazement, perhaps, that only after elevating a supreme court justice (Thomas) and electing two Presidents (Clinton and Trump) with documented patterns of sexual-workplace harassment that America started to treat it as an issue that could have workplace and income consequences for, to use Manne's phrase, "dominant men." Presumably the Trump election and the successful mobilization for the Women's March on Washington was some kind of threshold in which, perhaps, a sufficient number of the cultural and economic elites (female and male) decided, Basta!
Whether it leads to durable cultural and institutional shifts is to be seen. After all, the material conditions that generate (gendered) social hierarchy are not being challenged. But one element of the culture is the conspiracy of silence (also known to us in professional philosophy) in which risk-averse men cover for each other (Peter Beinart's essay about his own past at The New Republic is very instructive) and, as Manne puts it, too many women are loyal to dominant men. This is no surprise because, in addition to the mechanisms Manne explores, all of us that make it in a discipline are (as Rae Langton once taught me) the beneficiary of supererogatory help of the disciplinary powerful.*
I have not read Manne's whole book yet so what follows may anticipate her own views. I think it is exciting that a professional philosopher confronts the political events of our time. In the excerpt that was published she explores the fact that it seems a majority of white women voted for a man who could not even fake not being a misogynist. (There is an important split, however, between college and non-college educated white women.) This is not just an urgent matter to feminists confronting the present limits of sisterhood. There is a further puzzle in that in European countries where feminism in the workplace and society has been markedly less successful than Stateside, voters have been willing to vote in female political leaders sometimes repeatedly. (In fact, the pundit class tends to forget that Theresa May's 42.4% of total votes cast is not just a serious improvement over Cameron's results, but just a very impressive result in British politics during the last forty years.)** What we learned in the past election is, as Sonya Michel said (HT Liza Mügge) in a forum hosted in my department, "not all American women subscribe to feminist norms, or even if they do, they do not subscribe to them to the extent that they would outweigh other values when it comes to making political decisions." (Michel focuses on both cultural and political issues in her commentary)
Much of Manne's piece is a subtle analysis of the ways in which Hillary Clinton was framed by Trump and the media to generate (gendered) disgust reactions in voters. I found it painful to read because it brought back so many viscerally unpleasant episodes from the campaign and this made me reflect, anew, on my own lukewarm support (despite having markedly less preference ideologically either for Trump or for Sanders) for Hillary Clinton (about which more below). And Manne also carefully explores the psychological mechanisms that shape social perceptions that might encourage us to see "women in positions of authority as posers and imposters." (This fits with other evidence of bias against female professors in teaching evaluations.)
I need to explain some of my own bias. As regular readers know (and here) I have never been a fan of President Bill Clinton (see especially here in 2015)--ever since the execution of Ricky Ray Rector in the middle of a presidential campaign. At the time (and to this day) it struck me as a monstrous thing. Even if you think that Rector deserved punishment for his (horrid!) crimes and that the death penalty is moral, his case was rather special (including racial issues). I am convinced that at trial and execution with a destroyed frontal lobe, he was not mentally competent, and so he was turned into an especially problematic exemplar. While there is much to be said about the nature of a governor's clemency, which hearkens back as Cesare Beccaria already noted in the eighteenth century, to a conception of law that emphasizes its arbitrary nature and overwhelming state power, not using it, and rather abusing the privilege, for electoral gains disgusted me. While I recognize and respect the Machiavellian willingness to do what it takes, I prefer it when the most powerful person on earth has a modest amount of minimal decency. Perhaps that's never an option in electoral politics. But despite being a proud college Democrat -- and relieved that Democrats could compete at the Presidential level (something very much in doubt after nearly thirty years of continuous losses)-- this meant I was not prone to a favorable view of the Clintons for most of my adult life and I should be counted as among the 'not generally as proud to vote for' Clinton supporters Manne identifies.
This post was prompted by Manne's analysis of how loyalty to dominant men works in practice. This resonated with my own experience of the profession, and how difficult it seems for us to really change disciplinary norms in practice. (Men take advantage of this loyalty all the time.) Yet, it is notable that after carefully analyzing how loyalty to dominant men work, Manne skips the ways in which when President Clinton's history of sexualized workplace harassment became a political liability in the campaign of 1992, Hillary Clinton stuck with him especially in the 60 Minutes interview. (I do not trust my memory, but I suspect it was my first TV exposure to her.)
While the bonds of loyalty within marriage are often genuinely unfathomable to outsiders, Gloria Steinem's infamous (1998) NYTimes editorial supports Manne's idea that there is a pervasive force of loyalty to dominant men. Re-reading the editorial, it is remarkable for its inability to even express empathy for his victims. Steinem did not suggest, as she could have, that all long-term political programs may require compromising on principles and holding one's nose in tactical alliances; rather she went out of her way to disparage Clinton's victims. Here the political branch of liberal feminism compromised itself: working women were betrayed by the movement that was supposed to come to their aid. Americans dislike class analysis, but nobody alive at the time could forget the ways in which Bill Clinton's victims were framed/treated as less articulate, lower class (alas, etc.). This is not ancient memory because the Trump campaign made sure these episodes were not forgotten.
In her piece, Manne ignores this political history.++ Perhaps it is really irrelevant. She focuses on the psychological mechanisms involved in the sexist biases of norm violations: "penalizing successful women serves an ego-protective function (only) for other women. It defuses the threatening sense that a similar—and similarly good, decent, and/ or “real” woman—is more competent or accomplished than they are." For all I know something like this does really explain a high number of female votes against Hillary Clinton. It fits well with well known fractures in American political life exemplified by Clinton's famous I could have "stayed home and baked cookies and had teas," comment and women's opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.*** (Manne is very careful not to make any causal claims and as many have noticed, the actual election result is amenable to many explanations.) But it is also possible that Clinton was being penalized not just for being more successful (wealthy, educated, etc.), but also for facilitating Bill Clinton's predatory behavior against women like them (or at least preventing him from suffering any public consequences from it).
I honestly don't know.+ (See here for my analysis before Trump won that in a zero-sum world wanting to have a crook on your side is rational; see also here and here.) Regular readers know that I strongly resist the tendency of moralistic interpretations of other people's voting choices. If we expected moral behavior from voters we would not have representative institutions. So, I am pleased that Manne also resists the tendency to treat Trump's voters as moral monsters. Rather the problem is, as she correctly notes, with a "patriarchal system'' - and let's not forget white men supported Trump in overwhelming numbers! --that, thus far, rewards and reinforces misogynists and entraps too many of us in forms of complicity. I look forward to reading her book.
*For some of these dynamics in the profession see Lisa Lloyd's testimony.
**This is not to deny that it was widely interpreted as a disappointment given the perception she was facing a weak opponent and that she went to polls when she did not have to.
***I rarely see philosophers discussing Jane Mansbridge's Why We Lost the ERA, but it strikes me as essential background
+In her essay, Michel noted that non-college-educated "women feel more threatened by the kind of model projected by Hillary Clinton and her supporters, namely, one in which women are more independent, perhaps get along financially and socially and even manage to raise children without men, or at least, purportedly, in egalitarian relationships. To low-educated women in a society that offers so few supports to working mothers and still denies women equal wages and advancement, this is a situation that they want to avoid at any cost. So it makes sense to them to support a candidate who promises better (or at least some kind of) jobs for their husbands, even if it means continuing to accept male dominance in all of its manifestations." At the time of her writing (February 2017), Michel assumes that the non-college educated voters are primarily lower class. But we are increasingly becoming aware that Trump drew much of his strength from elderly non college-educated, but upper-middle class white voters.
++I don't want to make too much of this because I have not read her book. But in the excerpt she draws a lot on social psychology (not usual for today's philosophers), little on political history. I would like to encourage more engagement with political history and political sociology.
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