An interesting critique of the work of Kate Manne (Cornell) by philosopher Anastasia Berg (Hebrew University) at CHE. I was particularly struck by this:
Many of Manne’s critics have seized on elements in her style and method, or pointed out the ways in which her ideological commitments limit her analysis. They are not wrong: Manne cherry-picks her evidence (e.g., discussing the 2020 Democratic primary, Manne insists misogyny is responsible for Warren’s defeat but fails to note that Warren didn’t lose only to men, but, in a significant moment for her campaign, to Amy Klobuchar, in New Hampshire); engages in dubious psychological conjecture (e.g., when discussing the case of a man accused of serial rape, she asserts that “many will hence instinctually reach, with a sense of moral necessity, for any excuse in the book as to why he’s innocent, and all the women who testify against him can’t be trusted” — the man was unanimously convicted by a jury of his peers and sentenced to 236 consecutive years in prison); indulges in selective hyperbole (e.g., she equates the pressure women feel not to disappoint a romantic partner with the experience of the participants in the infamous Milgram shock experiments); and is reluctant to consider alternative explanations for the phenomena she’s interested in (she never so much as raises the possibility that Donald Trump defended Brett Kavanaugh because he was his nominee, not because of “himpathy,” or that, similarly, the father of Brock Turner, the Stanford student convicted of sexual assault, defended him because he is his father; that at least some conservatives oppose abortion because they sincerely believe it is a religious and moral wrong, not because they wish to keep women in their place; that at least some of the white women who voted for Trump did so because they favored the Republican platform, not merely because they sympathized with their husbands’ sense of patriarchal entitlement, etc.).
As Professor Berg notes, Manne "is guilty of all of this," although she goes on to raise a different set of criticisms of Manne's work.
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