Nova Scotia is in the middle of a crisis—and we’ll say it over and over until everyone believes it. Since Oct. 18, seven women and one man have been killed in incidents of intimate-partner violence. In five of the seven homicides, the perpetrator then killed himself.
As a province, we also own two records: the highest rate of gender-based violence in the country and the largest mass shooting in Canadian history.
The reality is grim.
The problem of gender-based violence might seem insurmountable. But focusing on education about misogyny may provide a place to start. It is important to help understand what misogyny is, how it affects us all, and how it can lead to violence.
The epidemic of gender-based violence combined with the increasingly polarizing political landscape has made the conversation about women’s rights more heated than ever.
This means that the words ‘sexism’ and ‘misogyny’ have officially entered the mainstream.
Like all terms that enter the public vernacular—I’m looking at you “woke” and “politically correct”—social media and pop culture have oversimplified them. “Sexism” and “Misogyny” have been thrown around so much that they have become interchangeable, but they do not mean the same thing and understanding the difference is key to helping us, as a province, understand exactly what we’re up against.
Enter Kate Manne. She is an associate professor at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell University and one of the foremost thinkers and writers on misogyny in the world; her focus is on moral, feminist and social philosophy.
Her book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, is an exploration of misogyny in public life and politics. It explains that misogyny should not be understood primarily in terms of the hatred or hostility some men feel toward all or most women.
Instead, it should be recognized as the controlling, policing, punishing, and exiling of women who challenge male dominance. In many cases, it is compatible with rewarding “the good” women and singling out “the bad” women. This serves as a warning to those women who dare to defy their male counterparts.
Down Girl examines events—mainly American ones—like the Isla Vista killings by Elliot Rodger, Rush Limbaugh’s diatribe against Sandra Fluke, and the case of the convicted serial rapist Daniel Holtzclaw who preyed on African-American women as a police officer in Oklahoma City. The book also talks about the “misogyny speech” of Julia Gillard, who was once prime minister of Australia.
It highlights how these events—among others—set the stage for the 2016 U.S. presidential election as she argues that the misogyny levelled against Hillary Clinton was predictable in quantity and quality. It was also predictable that many people were prepared to forgive and forget Donald Trump’s history of sexual assault and harassment.
This is misogyny’s often overlooked and equally pernicious underbelly: exonerating or showing “himpathy” for the comparatively privileged men who dominate, threaten, and silence women.
“There’s a tendency to define misogyny as this deep hatred in the heart, harbored by men toward girls and women,” said Manne. “I define misogyny as social systems or environments where women face hostility and hatred because they’re women in a man’s world—a historical patriarchy.”
She explains that one way of looking at it is to see our society and workplaces as patriarchal social structures—bastions of male privilege—where dominant men might feel entitled to (and often receive) attention from women and other forms of feminine care.
“I think of misogyny and sexism as working hand-in-hand to uphold those social relations. Sexism is an ideology that says, ‘these arrangements just make sense. Women are just more caring, or nurturing, or empathetic,’ which is only true if you prime people by getting them to identify with their gender,” said Manne.
Sexism is the ideology that supports patriarchal social relations. Misogyny, on the other hand, enforces it when there’s a threat of that system going away. It is something we practice almost unconsciously, and is embedded into our cultural customs and norms. This means that we can be implicated in the scheme without even being aware.
Manne explains that most misogynistic behavior is about hostility towards women who violate patriarchal norms and expectations, and who aren’t serving male interests in the ways they are expected to. There is this sense that women are doing something wrong: that they are morally objectionable, have a bad attitude, or they are abrasive, shrill, and too pushy.
She considers misogyny to be victim-centred, which is a departure from how we traditionally think about it.
“A traditional account of misogyny is focused on what’s in a man’s heart. Does he really hate women deep down? That would make misogyny very difficult to know anything about because we don’t know what goes on in other people’s minds.We would be unable to diagnose misogyny if we were doing it from a perpetrator centred perspective,” said Manne. “So, what I advocate is a perspective shift to thinking about misogyny, not as what he feels, but as what a woman or girl faces in navigating a patriarchal world.”
What it all boils down to is that when men think women are taking opportunities and privileges away from them, when they think women are challenging male dominance, you get backlash. But we have to deal with that. Women cannot—and should not—internalize patriarchal values and give and give and give until we’re nothing.
So, how will we know when things are getting better?
“What would need to change is for men in positions of power to accept that women can surpass them without having wronged them”.
This article appears in Apr 1-30, 2025.