Misogyny and Socialization

I'm interested in discourses of misogyny through the ages.  The mind-body dualism gets mapped onto male-female.  (Is that the inaugurating misogynistic gesture in Western culture?)  But that mapping, of course, is differently inflected in different historical time periods.  For instance, in the twentieth century (according to Andreas Huyssen), women are identified as the dupes of mass culture, always eager to consume the latest sensationalistic romance or what have you: the sense in which a stigmatized mass culture engages the body means that it must needs appeal most to women, as the more bodily of the two genders.  The misogynistic notion of women as lacking rationality gets articulated, in consumer culture, as their greater susceptibility to advertising and their "baffling," mindless compulsion to make purchases of non-utilitarian items and "trinkets."  This association of women with the "compulsive"/mindless recalls notions of hysteria (or simply the idea that women were more prone to madness) with which women were pathologized in earlier eras.

Second Wave feminists reacted against a "feminine" look--since they were eager to resist the socialization which constructed women to behave as subservient and submissive to men.  One might speak of the "misogyny" of Second Wave feminism as it's disparagement of the "feminine" on the grounds that those who instantiated it were mindlessly in the grip of socialization--that their feminine masquerade, in other words, was an unconscious one, without reflection or awareness of the actually alienated status of "femininity."  A "feminine" look, from a Second Wave viewpoint, becomes permissible only when accompanied by the requisite sense of ironic distance on the part of the woman wearing it.

Feminism, as a movement, then, made a particular group more aware of the ways in which their peculiar identity markers were conventional rather than innate.  There needs to be a similar movement with respect to men (perhaps there already has been) to make men more aware of the degree to which male heterosexual desire, for instance, is socialized--mediated, conditioned, and commodified by images of hegemonic female beauty that are sold to men in mainstream advertising and pornography.  Such a men's movement would be feminist in inspiration and inclination--would in fact be a feminist off-shoot.  Of course, the bare mention of a "men's movement" sounds risible and insufferable.