This is What Internalized Misogyny Looks Like

A few days ago, I published this piece on Substack (which is humor/satire, clearly, but I consider satire a legitimate form of social critique, and that’s how I’m using it in my letter to Harold).

The following morning, I woke up to these messages from a Burned Haystack Dating Method™ Facebook group member:

First, I want to be clear that this is not a critique of the sender; this is a teaching moment. I don’t know the person who sent this, but I suspect that her offense and concerns come from a place of kindness and tolerance and openness to other human beings. That’s actually what bothers me, because I understand how insidious internalized misogyny is, how it operates, and how it renders women vulnerable to abuse and manipulation and warped self images.

Internalized misogyny refers to the unconscious biases that women assume; it is complex and multi-faceted and emerges as a set of “byproducts” of living in a patriarchal system. “The Internalized Misogyny Scale (IMS) was created to assess one's internalized misogyny.^[11] It consists of 17 items measuring three factors: devaluation of women, distrust of women, and gender bias in favor of men.” That third one is what I believe we’re seeing in the messages above, though I would argue we’re seeing a bit of the first two as well, since the message sender is more concerned about Harold than about the women he’s encountering, and because she clearly distrusts my response to him.

The sender is concerned that I am being “mean” to Harold and that he is being “shamed.” Harold is being critiqued, for sure, but that’s different than being shamed. No one is picking on Harold for his appearance or his age or his height or his dis/ability status or his intellect. Harold is being *critiqued* because he posted a picture of his PENIS in his Bumble profile, the photo shot explicitly from the perspective a woman would have if she were performing oral sex on him (I cropped it out before I used the image; you’re welcome. I have no idea how it got past the Bumble filters).

According to a 2022 article published by the National Institutes of Health, the sending of unsolicited sexually explicit images from men to women is considered “sexual cyber-violence.” It’s a digital form of sexual harassment, and in California, you can actually sue for it; this almost certainly means that other states will follow suit.

Harvard Business Review suggests asking these two questions to reveal hidden biases resulting from internalized misogyny:

• Do you criticize women for minor transgressions and forgive men for major ones?

• Do you make excuses for men’s behavior?

This may be what we’re seeing here. Internalized misogyny may be (subconsciously) inspiring the message sender to critique my humor writing and to call me “mean” while forgiving or making excuses for Harold’s sexual harassment. The problem with this is that it actively works against the wellbeing of other women.

Many scholars believe that internalized misogyny is not just a byproduct of the patriarchy but an active agent of it; as long as women are busy going after each other, the patriarchy continues to operate unfettered, repeating and strengthening its dynamics, and women do its work by weakening each other.

For this reason, I did not respond to the message sender because I’d be exacerbating that operation—spending my time and energy fighting with one woman behind the scenes while the Harolds of the world go on harassing and women go on not only tolerating but making excuses for them. The reason I’m instead sitting here writing an article about internalized misogyny and its societal effects is that I believe shedding light on it in the public sphere is more productive and supportive of women than me fighting in the shadows with someone I don’t know on Facebook.

Back to Harold: Harold is a sexual harasser. The women who signed up for and paid for Bumble did not consent to confront Harold’s penis. They also didn’t agree to contend with hundreds of other pictures of hundreds of other men shot from the exact same angle, all of which contain the same implication; the suggestion itself is aggressive and inappropriate and triggering for many women. Even if I WERE shaming Harold, some people and some behaviors—the kind that harm others—deserve to shamed. Harold deserves to be shamed.

The message sender concludes by asking, “How else could this have been said?” which is one of the rhetorical strategies we use in Burned Haystack; it’s an applied rhetoric question that is helpful in identifying what people are revealing through their words when they don’t intend to.

In response to that question (a question I appreciate), I would offer this:

There are definitely other ways to make the points I’m making. I could have written a serious journalistic think piece; I could have penned social media posts that solicited men’s opinions on why they do this and gently suggested the reasons they should stop; I could have done an investigative piece that seeks to understand the reason so many men behave like this—in 2024—and then explain how we can mitigate the effects of such men and such behavior.

But why should I do any of that? Why should that be my job? If I chose to publicly defend or even to show empathy for toxicity and sexual aggression, I’d be working against other women. And anyway, humor writing is my vehicle, it’s my art. It’s the way I choose to tackle the Harolds of the world. Satire writing has a rich history in feminist literary tradition; centuries ago, it was the ONLY way women writers could get away with socio-political critique, and so they harnessed the genre to that end.

FINAL WORDS:

I don’t care about Harold, and I don’t think any women should. Harolds on the dating apps should be ignored into irrelevance; if women learn to recognize our own internalized misogyny, we will simply not engage with Harolds, and then they will all fall into the ethos of obscurity and digitally vaporize themselves into extinction.

If anyone STILL feels bad that I’m being mean to and shaming Harold, think about this:

Harold has a Bumble account and enough technological expertise to outsmart Bumble’s filters, which are considered to be amongst the best. This means he is also in possession of a smart phone with access to the internet, which houses all the knowledge of human history. He could use that smart phone to do a little research on . . . I don’t know . . . gender dynamics or contemporary discourses or sexual violence. But he’s using it to take and post pictures of his own penis and then impose those pictures on women without their consent. And that’s really the only thing we need to know.