Professor Nancy Harding has been carrying out research into how misogyny is experienced 50 years after the passing of anti-discriminatory legislation in the UK and US that aimed to tackle it. Today misogyny is flourishing again. Here, she lays out the dangers of resurgent misogyny and how we can find the words to combat them.
In the late 1980s – which wasn’t too long ago – I took a cheque to my bank made out to ‘Dr N. Harding’. I was told that my husband must deposit the cheque himself.
I phoned an airline to confirm my seat on a business trip to Hong Kong. A voice came down the line saying that Dr Harding needed to confirm the flight himself: his secretary couldn’t do it.
Like any woman my age, I can recount numerous such examples – and the Everyday Sexism and #MeToo movements have uncovered far worse.
For a time it appeared as if such incidents were just part of history: women were flooding into management and the professions, overt sexism seemed to be disappearing, and it became unacceptable to treat women as second-class citizens on the grounds of their gender.
Then the internet exploded, offering a vehicle for incels, Andrew Tate, the Proud Boys and other misogynistic groups to travel out of the virtual woodwork. Right-wing politicians, sniffing an opportunity, jumped on the bandwagon. Around the world patriarchy is resurgent and women are losing hard-won rights.
It is time for resistance: sexism denigrates everyone and turning the clock back half a century will hurt us all.
Time for rebellion
The fight back begins with understanding the interchangeable terms ‘misogyny’ and ‘male chauvinism’. ‘Male chauvinism’ was a term coined in the 1970s to describe a centuries-long, all-pervasive ideology that preached women to be men’s inferiors, who should keep to their place (the kitchen) and remain silent.
The Second-Wave feminists who turned ‘male chauvinist’ into an insult were young revolutionaries rebelling against conservatism. Today’s chauvinism is just the opposite: it is an anti-revolutionary movement aiming to restore conservative norms and practices.
‘New chauvinism’ is practised in subtly different ways from its predecessor. Online misogynists may use overtly hate-filled language, but our research suggests that new chauvinists generally use much softer, more subtle language.
Old chauvinism lobbed verbal bombs at women – women and many men came to recognise these statements for what they were, and as a result could fight against them.
Its successor fires fusillades of little arrows from a quiver full of insults that are sometimes so subtle they are barely consciously registered as such. That is their power: it takes time to recognise that we have been pierced by a verbal weapon and to identify the cause of the discomfort. It’s that familiar experience of thinking, after the event, of the perfect riposte.
Indeed, our study shows that confident, funny women were silenced in the moment of receiving the insult. Their humour, which was often denigratory of their male colleagues, disappeared.
We call this ‘chauvinising’ – we’ve turned it into an active verb to alert onlookers to the destructive effects of what at the time seem like small, seemingly harmless, non-violent acts.
Internalised misogyny
One aspect of chauvinising is the absorption of the insults into our self-understanding; told often enough that we have a natural predilection for care rather than action, we may come to feel guilty if we do not prioritise one over the other.
Immersed in cultures governed by binary opposites, we may forget that ‘care’ and ‘action’ actually work very well together. ‘We’ here includes all genders: new chauvinism can subtly manipulate every one of us into bending our attitudes and beliefs to directions we would not otherwise wish to travel.
The success of chauvinising practices arises in part because the history of women’s success in the battle against misogyny, always only limited and partial, is so recent. It hasn’t had time to put down deep roots in language, thought and practice.
That explains why the women in our study were unable to fight against the little arrows of verbal violence fired at them: the language that they needed in that moment was forgotten because it had not become sufficiently embedded in their cultural repertoire.
What is embedded, however, is centuries of misogyny that lack a vocabulary of resistance, so the words for a riposte just aren’t available when we need them. They may come later, after we’ve had time to think and process the insult. For example, the response on X to Andrew Tate’s announcement that he would not sleep with any women who’d had the Covid-19 vaccination: ‘Hooray,’ someone responded. ‘The vaccine works.’
Call and response
This indicates a possible tactic for resisting new chauvinism: we must prepare our answers in advance, have them ready to hand. We could call this the Pavlovian method of resistance: a misogynistic statement provokes an immediate response that nullifies the provocation.
This could involve no more than becoming practised in turning insults into compliments. To take an example from our study, if we are told that women are good at anything that requires a little bit of cuddling (and therefore not good at the sort of work that doesn’t require such human skills), then, ‘Well yes, and isn’t it amazing how we can do care work as part of all the other things we do?’ might be an effective response.
Feminist humour may be useful, too: if someone says we have little brains, we may retort that science shows that size often doesn’t matter.
The emergence of new chauvinism requires strategies that help us quickly retrieve an appropriate, resistant response to deflect from its target any chauvinistic arrow winging our way. Forewarned and prepared, we can resist its resurgence.
Respond
