Misogyny Is Back. Did It Ever Go Away?

[ismnotwasm]

On the night of Saturday, Sept. 10, between the hours of about 8 and 11, six women, each of them walking in Midtown Manhattan, were approached by a group of young men who sought to light them on fire. Although the attacks were mercifully unsuccessful — no one was injured — one woman, standing at the intersection of Fifth Avenue and East 54th Street had her skirt set aflame, while another, walking past a Valentino store, the police reported, felt something warm on her left arm, only to realize that her blouse was on fire. Six days later, a 14-year old boy was taken into custody, and charged with attempted assault and harassment. Given that everyone targeted for conflagration was female, the police have considered these hate crimes.

That four of the five encounters occurred on a stretch of Fifth Avenue just outside Trump Tower may bear no actual relationship to our current political misfortunes. For whatever it has done and failed to do, the presidential candidacy of Donald J. Trump has revived a national discussion of misogyny, which, as a word, an idea and worldview had long ago fallen out of favor, lost to the 1970s and obscured instead by the cheerfully appointed goal posts of contemporary feminism.

If you are concerned about misogyny, you are worried less about how we can create a better world for women who want to share whole-grain breakfasts with their children and still make it to Teterboro on time for the flight to the board meeting in Sun Valley, and more about the cultural damage inflicted by collective male rage. You take to heart Margaret Atwood’s famous saying that men are worried that women will laugh at them while women are worried that men will kill them. You are a generalist, really, and you see that the problem goes beyond whatever hindrance men might pose to your making partner or getting the dishwasher emptied. One kind of feminism imagines men as an existential threat, another merely as an inconvenience.

The former, of course, is a dark and not consistently rational way to think. That is why many women — particularly educated, affluent women who live in cities where crime rates are at historical lows and the presence of physical danger and extreme prejudice seem distant — don’t easily imagine that they could be set on fire on their way to dinner.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/16/nyregion/misogyny-is-back-did-it-ever-go-away.html?_r=0