Kate Manne on the new patriarchy
Philosopher Kate Manne on the ascendant commoditized misogyny that links Jeffrey Epstein's circle and the Dominique Pelicot case, and how this new culture is spreading
The philosopher and author Kate Manne looks at misogyny not as a matter of what men think of women, but of the hostility women experience as they negotiate the social world. In her three books, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, and Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia, as well as her newsletter More to Hate, she’s laid out a theory of structural misogyny — a force that shapes the culture we live in, working in much the same way that racism does.
Lately, she has observed patriarchy taking a new form — one that can be seen clearly in the revelations of the Epstein files. While the notion of men looking at women as property they possess is nothing new (“as old as agriculture,” Manne says), she has written about how the Epstein files reveal a world in which men look at women as dehumanized and undifferentiated, not so much prized possessions to be hoarded and guarded and hidden but as commodities to be traded, rented, and shared by groups.
But this isn’t happening just among the ultrawealthy and powerful. The scary thing, Manne points out, is how general this rising culture is, from the sharing of deepfake porn to the online forums in which Dominque Pelicot recruited men to assault his wife; it’s becoming pervasive in an increasingly networked society. Much of what we find threatening in the Epstein files is the power and influence these uncaring people have over government, the economy, and technology — but Manne also sees in the files a symptom of a broader social illness.
We talked to Manne about the psychological underpinnings of what happened in the Epstein and Pelicot circles, and how the intersections between power, wealth, and patriarchy distort and define the world.
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You’ve identified what looks like a new form of late capitalist patriarchy. From this perspective, women aren’t seen as possessions to be hoarded — they’re commodities to be rented or traded. And on that point, you’ve written in your newsletter that looking back into the Epstein files is like seeing a prediction of this future. Can you unpack that?
Treating women as a kind of property is as old as patriarchy, which is as old as agriculture, roughly. But what’s new in this form of patriarchy is men banding together to share, trade, and sell property in groups where they’re not competing for particular women. Rather, they’re doing this in ways that feel like a source of both camaraderie and male bonding over this shared and traded property rather than jealously hoarding the resource of a particular woman.
It’s like commoditization, as if they look at women not individually, but as fungible.
Yes, a fungible commodity. So we’ve always had a very prevalent view, I think, of women as a kind of human property, but usually that’s as the exclusive property, at least in the dominant models of patriarchy, of one particular man who will then have a dedicated woman, a mother, a wife, a sister, to do the various kinds of services that patriarchy relies on women to do, at least for privileged men.
But this looks quite different, and the sheer scale is interesting and also kind of frightening. I’m thinking of not just what was done to girls, although that’s obviously particularly horrific in the Epstein case, but ways that you now have groups where men are sharing nonconsensual pornography of their wives or their girlfriends, and treating this as a kind of sport to bond over. This is a different way of thinking about women, and a shareable, tradable, fungible commodity is a good way to put it.
Why do you think this style of patriarchy is surfacing at this point in history?