A reader (who asked not to be identified for the obvious reasons) called this bizarre post by Twitter's favorite feminist philosopher to my attention:
Professor Manne is the proverbial "one trick" pony, but unfortunately, she doesn't recognize when the trick doesn't apply. (We've seen this before.) As commenters quickly pointed out, people had called for Justice Stevens and Justice Breyer to resign. As others pointed out, Justice Scalia was only 68 when George W. Bush was re-elected; Justice Ginsburg was 79, when Barack Obama was re-elected, and Justice Ginsburg had a much worse history of health problems than Justice Scalia.
Manne's tunnel vision and tendency to do "philosophy by anecdote" are both usefully discussed in this review of her recent book Entitled (the review got a huge amount of Twitter attention after Manne had a tantrum about it, no doubt amplifying its effect significantly).
One small point, but worth noting, is made at the start of the review. In describing the themes of Manne's prior book, Down Girl, they write:
[T]hrough a complex and sometimes dubious philosophical procedure called “ameliorative analysis,” it redefined the term misogyny to apply to the arrangements, norms, and practices of a culture rather than the thoughts, words, and actions of individuals. The new definition was systemic or structural rather than psychological: misogyny was now a general social force that kept women “in their place” rather than a negative feeling about women.
Whatever "ameliorative analysis" is, it is not an analysis, but something more like a "stipulative definition," that serves some politically useful purpose. It would probably be better to just acknowledge that, rather than pretending that "misogyny"--which is everywhere characterized in terms of the psychological attitudes (hatred, distaste, contempt, dislike) of misogynists towards women--is in any sense at all being analyzed rather than redefined when the psychological attitudes are erased from the account. The redefinition is a fruitful one, which is all to the good, but a new term might have avoided some of the undestandable confusions that have arisen.
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