Understanding Transmisogyny, Part One: Misogyny and Heterosexualism

To understand the particular case, we must first begin with the general.

This is perhaps a controversial sentiment, but most people have a very surface-level understanding of misogyny.

This is ultimately a fate shared by most bigotries, as conceptualized by the average person: “I don’t hate the gays. I don’t hate non-whites. I don’t hate women!” Which might even be true, since most people tend to not be ideologically committed to the active hatred of certain demographics. All the same, they might still pull their child out of the local public school when they notice that the student body has become disproportionately full of children from “poorer neighborhoods” (as a safety measure! Private school might be a better fit anyway). Or they might happily attend a drag brunch but become incredibly uncomfortable if they find out that their child has a gay friend, or isn’t quite as interested in the opposite sex as they should be, at that age. They might even be ardently pro-choice and advocate for equal pay, but remain vigilant and suspicious of any woman their husband befriends or seems to get too close to—most women are envious and covetous, after all, and it would be naive foolishness to not safeguard the happiness you worked so hard to build.

(Did you think the misogynist I was describing in gender-neutral terms was a man this whole time? Perhaps you should check your implicit biases—women can be misogynists too!)

In general, systemic bigotry is far more deeply-rooted than mere personal acrimony. Woman-hatred at the interpersonal level is nowhere near the totality of misogyny, a system that is most likely our oldest institution, one embedded into the cultural, the political, and the economic as much as the personal or the private spheres. Misogyny is a regime, an organizing principle of society itself, one that dictates and pervades nearly all aspects of social life. We can ask, then, what is the matrix that births this force, this machine? What is the function of misogyny?

Succinctly, misogyny is the organizing principle by which heterosexuality is reproduced.

Admittedly, that’s a bit of a mouthful, and confusing in its own regard if one’s understanding of heterosexuality is ‘attraction to the opposite sex’. That short statement is in and of itself quite illustrative, however: think of ‘opposite sexes’ as a phrase, how it implies not merely the binary of sex, but also how it juxtaposes them, frames them as opposites, antagonistic, polarized. That alone should begin to reveal something about the deeper structures at play, how the role of ‘man’ and ‘woman’ are constructed in our lexicon and imbued with meaning far beyond the merely biological.

For the biological is where the traditional, conservative and simplistic notion of gender begins and ends. To the gender-conservative, a man is a man due to the penis and testicles he is born with, while a woman is a woman due to her vagina, her womb, her breasts, all the aspects of her biological make-up that make her innately oriented towards motherhood and the rearing of the young. Gender is thus self-evident, even banal and mundane, a straightforward matter of biological destiny determined at birth. Some of us are birthers and some of us are sires, which is where the matter ends.

Only, that’s not where it ends at all. It would be one thing if gender was merely an imprecise determinant of one’s reproductive capability, but everyone who lives under patriarchy is intimately familiar with how much more it connotes, how much about your life and ambitions and permitted disposition is dictated by gender. Gender carries with it a social meaning as well, a socially-imposed bevy of characteristics and expectations that individuals of that gender are asked to meet.

A woman is not merely a person with the reproductive potential to give birth, to gestate and deliver a child. She is also a nurturer, someone soft and caring and loving and understanding, who is suited for the demands of the domestic, the household, the selfless imperative to feed and clothe and teach and raise others without regard to her own wants and desires. A woman is a homemaker, is weaker and less assertive and naturally inclined to follow, someone who craves submission, who requires leadership, who needs to be led and will allow herself to be, once someone who demonstrates that he (invariably a ‘he’) can lead her takes ‘command’ of her. All of these traits, these roles assigned to women in the social realm of the patriarchal society, do not flow naturally from the mere fact of perhaps being born with gestational anatomy, but gender-traditionalists are extremely invested in the notion that they do.

As for men, they are conversely independent, natural-born leaders and dominants for whom the imposition of their will upon nature and other people is an innate urge, an unquenchable biological drive. Men are strong! Sturdy! Rigid! Turgid! Inseparable from the romanticization of the phallic and its inevitable poetic derivatives, meant to embody qualities such as sturdy and stoic and dependable and powerful. It seems that the desire for freedom and autonomy, along with all the attendant intellectual and physiological auspices that are indelibly associated with that desire, is stored in the balls.

Ludicrous as that proposition is, it remains the ideological fixation and overarching societal project of gender conservatism. You can easily see, then, why assertive women or men attracted to other men or any and all exceptions to the socially-prescribed gender orthodoxy invites such deep-seated antipathy and hostility. It is an inflexible categorization that must be maintained at all costs, that must be rooted in our ‘natural’, ‘evolutionary wiring’, lest any opposition to these limiting, arbitrary social categories gain any legitimacy!

Already, the answer to our question regarding the basic purpose of misogyny is taking shape. We have a great many of the pieces—the biological differentiation of the sexes that is imbued with undue social meaning, the confinement of women to one sphere contrasted with the autonomy and self-determination afforded men—but we still need to put the full picture together. The missing piece here, the one connecting the construction of strictly-differentiated social gender roles with the underlying motivation, is heterosexuality.

In the social realm, heterosexuality is not simply an orientation among several, just one characteristic a person may have or lack in a neutrally-regarded field of options. It is the presumed default, and moreover, the central social arrangement around which all social relations are determined. Patrilineal property relations, ease of access to divorce and legal recourse in marriage, cultural pressures to procreate and ‘continue the (father’s) line’, the patriarch as head of the nuclear or communal households—these are all institutions that arise from an enshrinement of heterosexuality, and furthermore entrench it as a hierarchical, socio-economic relation.

Crucially, the core insight here is that heterosexuality-as-regime is set up to extract domestic, sexual and reproductive labor from those deemed women under its logics. Its definition of womanhood and the narrowness of her stipulated role in society is oriented around domestic confinement, in rigorously naturalizing a positionality of abjection and servility towards others. In a very real sense, autonomous personhood itself is regarded as out of reach for women, as outside the domain to which they belong, a cruelty that is variously justified as done for women’s own good, or a consequence of women’s “true nature”, their inward, subconscious, biological preference for their own subjugation. The fact that such subjugation must be ideologically, culturally, legally, economically, politically and violently forced upon women, often over their own vocalized or enacted objections, is never quite taken as contradicting this “natural” maxim.

We can see then why the regime of misogyny and heterosexualism needs must encompass such vast swathes of society, so that women can be reminded of their ‘natural’ inclination for servitude at every turn, as well as harshly punished if they ever unnaturally rebel against their biological nature. The strategies for domestic confinement throughout history have included legally preventing women from property-holding and earning an independent income, ostracizing and censuring spinsters and widows, denying women the franchise and the ability to hold office, and most reprehensibly solidifying forced marriage and rape as means of violent control. Some of the earliest laws punishing rape did not even consider the violated woman the wronged party—it was her husband or father owed recompense, due to the despoilment of his rightful property.

Broad as the scope of this already is, it is still insufficient to fully reckon with what it means for misogyny to be a cornerstone of society. Media itself is dominated by the perspective of men, created primarily by men for an audience that is largely presumed to be men as well. Their perspective is centered, cemented, elevated and enshrined while women continue to be objectified, to be depicted as prizes for (male) protagonists, as assets for a presumed-male lens, as objects to be appreciated aesthetically and owned by a suitable patriarch. Philosophers historically have extolled male virtues and deliberated on what makes a man a king, what makes him regal and stately, while categorizing women with beasts and animals and slaves, as synonymous with lesser beings of limited intellect and agency. Psychology and medicine have institutionalized and surgically mutilated women, whether for being insufficiently tame and docile or for being of the wrong race, dismissing their capacity for pain and anguish and advancing medicine on an edifice of their stacked bones and bodies. ‘Woman’ has not been just the bio-social category marked out as lesser, but synonymized with the base, the trivial, the surface-level, the unthinking, the eternally-enslaved counterpart to the liberated, leading, domineering, creative, intellectual Man.

Reckoning with the staggering totality of patriarchy, of misogyny as the very foundation of male-supremacist civilizations, can be disorienting and even incredibly debilitating. It is necessary, however, because it allows us to finally identify the core of its operation. The abjection of womanhood resides in the role carved out for women, in their being defined not just as the ‘opposite’ of men, but as fundamentally deficient, as representing a lack, bearing a void and a nothingness where men are and have. Biological difference becomes social construct, a tangible distinction elevated to irreconcilable identities. In doing so, ‘woman’ becomes everything ‘man’ isn’t … and also, everything ‘man’ cannot be. Everything ‘man’ cannot sink to the level of.

For that is the pernicious secret at the beating heart of every single regime: how much energy and effort and sheer indoctrination is required to enforce and maintain it, to uphold its tenets and proscribe all deviation from them. Regimes require foot-soldiers, after all, enforcers willing to get their hands dirty in exchange for the wages of empire. Many a reign has been founded or toppled on the strength of its ideology, on the reasoning it was able to fashion to socially demarcate the enforcers from the serfs, on its ability to truly, sincerely blunt the capacity for empathy and make its valiant believe that they were materially above and distinct from those they crushed underfoot.

One could hardly ask for a more robust, enduring and ubiquitous ideology than misogyny, an all-pervasive system that we are inculcated into from the moment of our very birth. Our belief and investment in it often reflects the role assigned to us, and for men, whose supremacy, superiority and entitlement to sexual access and domestic labor is codified, even ensured by misogynistic doctrine, the investment is well worth the payoff. Thus, men do not only espouse and reproduce misogynistic belief, they mandate it as well, as much among each other as in their relationships and dealings with the women in their lives. They hold each other to misogynistic standards, to being adequately ‘manly’ in demeanor and execution, to eschewing genuine connection and love with women in favor of domination and the imposition of one’s own will to whatever extent they can get away with. “Male bonding”, touted almost as some manner of gendered sacrament, is in fact more akin to ritualistic violence, where men define themselves above and apart from the weak, the womanly. Any shortcoming in a man is attributed to the undue influence of a woman, whether an insufficiently-deferent partner or mother, or the manifestation of an intrinsic womanly emotion or quality that must be shaken off. The worst fate, met with censure, ostracism and outright violence, is being determined as like them in any way—whether that involves being too empathetic towards women, or too similar to them, too effeminate or gay or, even …

This enforced difference, this strict social outlawing of actually-felt affinity between men and women on pain of exclusion, is hardly the exclusive domain of men. Women participate in it too, to varying degrees, because ultimately, to be raised in a misogynistic culture is to imbibe and internalize that which is described as a given, as the natural way things are. It is easy, in the absence of a widespread and rigorous feminist counterpoint, to say that women are shallow and banal and vapid and unintelligent, but I, personally, am not. Falling into the trap of distinguishing oneself as above the fray, an individual breaking the mold of derided womanhood, is a common and distressingly easy thing for many women and girls. It is a tactic that can, in the short term, yield dividends in approval and acceptance, since misogyny is a social currency that everyone bargains with, but in the final summation, no individual woman truly escapes the fate she is consigned to by dint of her gender, merely by participating in its denigration.

Despite this, some women never quite let go of exceptionalism, choosing to negotiate with patriarchal precepts on their own terms and making a grim sort of peace with patriarchal existence. The vast majority of conservative women are not in fact ignorant about patriarchy or their limited role in it, but have adopted a certain fatalistic attitude. To them, liberation from patriarchy is neither possible nor worth fighting for, as it would be no better than tilting at windmills. Better to accept that a woman is modest, domestic, a home-maker and child-rearer and to perform according to those standards. In exchange, they receive the stability and security that a man who has claimed them can provide, a certain safety located within having to manage a single man’s desires and needs. This ‘traditional’ life protects them, shelters them from the wider world which remains hostile and misogynistic, and is thus the ‘smart’ choice, one that all women ought to wisely and maturely accept.

Of course, such a bargain remains slanted in favor of the patriarch, and the task of satiating a single man’s appetites is not quite as manageable as advertised. Leave aside the lack of true autonomy, the complete financial dependence, the everyday drudgery of domestic labor and the lack of recourse in the (not infrequent) cases of abuse. The most glaring and evident pitfall is one that arises from straightforward patriarchal framing: that of the woman’s value being entirely tied to her reproductive and sexual capacity. A woman who assents to the premises laid out by a patriarchal man is signing her own expiration date, affirming her own disposability and always dreading the day when she is no longer of use to her husband. She does and did everything right, from saving herself for marriage to comporting herself with dignity, but in spite of it all she is still only as valuable as her husband deems her, completely at his mercy. Her hopes are bound up entirely in the affection a patriarchal man might feel for a wife too old to excite him, a woman who mothered his children (but can bear him no more) and the slim chance that his eye does not wander to over to any younger woman willing to cut the same deal as she did.

The attitudes and logics described here form the foundation of an antifeminism that is primarily a traditionalist, reactionary fixation, but greatly informs the sexual politics of the liberal-left too. If you map the contours of the reactionary woman’s mindset, you can arrive at the same conclusion many of them often do, led by a scarcity mindset and a fatalistic fear of having to zealously guard one’s meager lot: that other women, far from being sisters, far from being fellow-travelers who can share burdens and pains, are in fact the real enemy. For if you have somehow successfully swindled yourself into believing that men are a prize, that legitimacy as a wife and mother is the greatest ambition permitted to you, that a man’s approval—the apotheosis of which is the offer of marriage—is what makes or breaks a woman, then you have unwittingly entered yourself into a competition where other women are your opponents and your reward is patriarchal heterosexual existence.

(It’s a miracle we’ve survived as long as we have).

Following this train of thought, we can see what shaped the emergence of modesty culture, of sex and sexual access becoming a fierce battleground among (heterosexual) women and men alike. In a field where women feel that they must actively compete for men, with sexual access to their bodies as their only leverage, a natural tension arises between those who consider it imperative that sexual relations occur only with the “safe”, legally-enforced bounds of heterosexual marriage and those who do not see the point in doing so, who view marriage as more a shackle than a shield and who wish to embrace their sexuality more fully, instead of wielding it as a reward in a legal transaction.

Such dichotomy fosters resentment, breeds animosity and imposes strict but contradictory standards on women, based on their sexual philosophies. The domestic aspirants bitterly despise the sexually ‘liberated’, regarding them to be ‘loose’ women, ‘floozies’ and ‘strumpets’ whose inability to maintain a strict discipline devalues all women’s sexual power and disincentivizes men from entering into marriages, since they can have their sexual needs met outside of the bounds of matrimony. It is almost trivial, in a way, to associate the sexually-liberated woman with a liberal, laissez-faire progressivism, one that rejects the stuffy, confining, almost backwards outlook of the ‘modest’ woman. The sexually-liberated woman, so the myth tells, is a woman who is in charge of her own sexual destiny, who determines access to her body on her own terms and isn’t afraid to enjoy sex, to actively seek it out, even! Is it any wonder, then, that she was able to single-handedly overthrow patriarchy, chipping away at its stalwart edifices one orgasm at a time?

Perhaps this is a disappointing revelation to some readers, but based on our current socio-political circumstances, free love and sexual liberation did not in fact succeed in lighting women’s way to equality and emancipation. It has been tried more than once, the pendulum swinging inexorably between ‘whore’ and ‘madonna’, cycling them in and out of vogue, but ultimately liberating sex without liberating women rarely seems to achieve the desired outcomes. As much as men love sexually-liberated women—love sleeping with them without strings attached most of all—eventually it comes time to settle down, time to return to the patriarchal fold, at which point he’s back to searching for his perfect, virginal, modest woman. As it so happens, in order to be liberated, women don’t just need the freedom to sleep with anyone of their choosing, but also require the ability to earn, inherit, purchase property, influence policy—you know, liberation, the ability to exist independently of men. Otherwise, they are merely trying to negotiate between two tightropes: being the matronly madonna without being too prudish or dull, or being the sexually-liberated free lover without also being considered disposable, tainted, or too into sex, all things that deny her the status of “wife material”.

Which brings us to the final, cruel joke of the farce that is patriarchy and the misogyny that empowers it. This force that pervades all legal, socio-economic and political institutions, that structures the atomic family unit itself and that seeps into our most private intimate moments also, ultimately, robs most of us of the capacity for the kind of intimacy we crave. The patriarchal man may covet the sexually free woman to bed and may wish to trot out the modest woman at family gatherings, but he never quite manages to respect either. Cherish, perhaps, prize as a conquest or a tamed servant, even, but true, actual respect, the appreciation one engenders for a fellow person’s wit and charm and intellect and compassion and genuine, sparkling insight—why, that kind of admiration, that kind of love, is only reserved for fellow men.

Because misogyny is an un-personing of the woman, a dictum to hold her in contempt, to slander everything associated with her and burn away one’s ability to empathize with her state. She is only as good to you as the function she can serve, whether helpmeet or matron or just a good fuck. If one is to humanize her, it requires tearing the veil misogyny places over all our eyes and reckoning with the codified strictures of patriarchy in fact and in execution. To truly, actually love her, you must begin to dismantle everything you’ve been raised to believe about her.

Let me assure you, reader: I love women with all I am and all I can be, and I hope that you do too, or will in time.

Thank you for lending me your time and reading this summary of misogyny and the heterosexual regime. I have debated including a reading list so that readers may explore the works that outline these ideas more thoroughly than I can summarize, and I have decided that if there’s enough demand I will include something of an appendix at the conclusion of Part Three. For the moment, we will stop here, having built a concise enough understanding of misogyny for our purposes, and resume this discussion next week in Part Two, Homophobia and Transphobia.