Internalised misogyny examples please

[StandingDeskDisco]

I have seen the term 'internalised misogyny' flung about on some threads like it is a catch-all gotcha or an all-purposed slur. To me it made no sense whatsoever as a genuine observation in the context of the discussion.
I have even seen a man accused of having internalised misogyny - is that even possible? Surely that is just misogyny?

I understand what the words mean, but not what it looks like.

Internalised: when you take on other people's beliefs. e.g. if your parents always said you were pretty, you will be confident in your looks, but if your sister was always 'the pretty one' while you were the clever / sporty / whatever one, you won't have such confidence. So women can absorb misogynistic beliefs from living in a patriarchy.
Misogyny: hatred or fear of women, females, or femininity.

So what does it look like?

Is it the woman who says she just gets on better with men, and has no female friends?
Is it the woman who only has female friends, never male, and thinks men and women can never be real friends?
Is it the woman who never leaves the house without full make-up and hair and nails done?
Is it the woman who hates all signs of femininity in her clothing, wears plain clothes, and if there is a tiny bow on a new bra she will snip it off.
Is it the woman who climbs the career ladder but never quite feels like she is worth it (imposter syndrome) due to being a woman?
Is it the woman who avoids promotion, preferring to stay in her comfortable all-female team, and calls any female managers 'bitchy' and 'bossy'?

Do you have any examples please?

I nearly quoted "biological essentialsm' in my first post as an example that's always - erroneously to the point I get painful second-hand embarrassment - trotted out, but didn't think we needed to descend into farce.

Anyway, someone has kindly done that for me.
We had a poster on here who insisted that the GC take - that being female-bodied means nothing about anyone as a person re their characteristics, desires etc - was "biological essentialsm" and not in fact the exact opposite

'Internalised' to mean 'directed at oneself' is kind of odd, linguistically, though - we can have a lot of beliefs that we've internalised that don't necessarily need to be about ourselves or a facet of ourselves?

For me it’s things like men make better leaders because that’s what women have been told all their lives.

Or you wouldn’t want the pilot, surgeon, firefighter to be a woman, would you because they’re too emotional/not technical/not brave enough.

Or women are too emotional to make good decisions- as if anger is not an emotion….

Or women having periods makes them too erratic.

Or the OW is to blame for being the siren and leading him on.

I always thought of it more as 'unconscious misogyny ' - some women will a argue all sorts of things that are derogatory to women, as evidence on this thread - rather than it being specifically against oneself as an individual.

While denying the sexism that they are demonstrating. The belief that they aren't being sexist that's just how it is.

Has someone had a namechange fail there? Don't understand what's being replied to otherwise.

Unless someone is trying to make this a TAAT to get it deleted?

I think some of the worst, or most damaging are the ones some PPs have mentioned. When a girl within a family is told she cant have the same as brothers. By worst I mean that as a child it can be hard to understand and can really hurt that it is family members treating you as a lesser person.

Not sure if it is misogyny but a lot of women take on a sort of social policing of other women. Sometimes quite trivial in terms of dress, but some of the nonsense (amplified by commercialism) around weddings, and sadly sometimes around the sex of the first born child.

One of the worst is that research has shown that in rape trials it is often the women jurors who argue it isn't fair to "wreck" a man's career by convicting him of rape. (Apparently this still happens.)

And of course those who think the must insulting thing to say about someone and how worthless they are, is to compare them to a part of women's anatomy as being the worse thing in the world ie the c word.

There was a poster some months ago that kept saying "gendered traits" included things like 'having breasts" or similar. Pretended not to be able to distinguish between shared female biology and "what women are like, yknow, feminine"?

Because istr that poster didn't actually identify any traits I shared with any other person of my or any other "gender" and conflated it with physical characteristics to the point they got in a real muddle.

This exactly

As someone posting/reading in the swingers thread, I think that's a massive misrepresentation. I don't think any posters on there who think swinging is distasteful or unappealing (for whatever reason) think that it's a fine good time for men, but gross for women. The judgement is equally applied to women AND men, so not misogynistic.

This seems a good thread to post something I have actually been mulling over for months now. I am not as eloquent as many of the posters on here, but I will do my best.

When I was growing up, I internalised the belief that to be a good person you must be a feminist because feminists were the only people who believed men and women to be of equal value. Fair enough. However, I also somehow developed the belief that to be a feminist you must eschew and loathe anything feminine coded or you were a bad feminist and that made you a Bad and Wrong person.

As a result, for years I wore trousers even though they were massively uncomfortable for me because skirts= feminine and therefore Bad and Wrong, I fought hard against my desire to get married and have children (feminine coded thus Bad and Wrong), against enjoying dressing up for formal occasions, wanting to wear makeup (dyspraxia made that impossible anyway so that was an easy one to give up) and I still feel guilty that I need DH's help sometimes because women should all be strong and independent and not need anybody ever because if you do, then you are letting the side down somehow.

Is that internalised misogyny? If it isn't, what is it?

Another example might be women looking down on women who choose to be stay at home mothers rather than pursue careers or looking down on women who don't have a tertiary education.

My son's year group at school had many ex professional mothers who only associated with others who also claimed to be avowed feminists. They would ask mothers about their working life & quickly move on if they didn't meet their education standards giving the impression they would never have anything interesting to say as a result.

Honestly, there are just so many variations of this stuff that while you expect this rubbish from men is a real gut punch from women.

I think that's just cutting off your nose to spite your face. It's prioritising ideological principles over pragmatism, even when those principles actually affect you negatively, and not acknowledging the possibility for any grey areas. Are you, by chance, autistic?

I’d say this is more of misunderstanding of feminism, nothing to do with internalised misogyny, I mean how could it be?

I’m interested to know where you got this idea tbh, I’m not saying I doubt you - I’ve seen plenty of these comments. It’s just that most feminist site, MN included swear their feminism by ’all the expected things women are supposed to to do are empowering choices’.

It is a recognised thing, not just a "gotcha" for mumsnet!
Generally it is when women and girls subconsciously absorb sexist stereotypes, patriarchal values, and biases, then project them onto themselves and other women. These beliefs are deeply embedded in culture and media, individuals often replicate them without realising it - the idea of a woman relying on a male's salary to survive = "gold digger" when she has given up working to be a SAHM, for eg.

There's also the "cool girl" who thinks (or has been told by men) she is "not like the other girls". They often say women have more "drama" so they hang out with men. Coding for women are shallow, silly, less inherently interesting. It also means the woman is trapped into not expressing herself for fear of being the same as all the other women "who moan/whinge" or in reality pull men up on their bullshit.

On this forum I’ve seen it used for agreeing with a man in any way or disagreeing with a woman

Great post.

Another I see often on here is judging other women harshly for not adhering to conventional beauty standards, or conversely, shaming them for wearing revealing clothing or changing their natural appearance. Feeling intense disgust or shame toward natural traits like female body hair is a common too. Threads where posters start commenting on women wearing certain things usually descend into judging women for their active dating lives or sexual autonomy (slut-shaming) while viewing similar behaviour by men as normal or admirable

Misogyny is against women not men. What you describe is misandry

Women gynaecologists who call women 'silly' if they want pain relief during a hysteroscopy, who go along with 'take a paracetamol '. They have taken on the misogyny themselves. That's internalised misogyny.

I would say the burka is also internalised misogyny but aware I'll be shouted down! Ditto dressing in an overly sexualised way.

It might help to have an example of how these ideas become socially accepted by some women/men. I noticed today that the game advertisements I get are that Harbour one with the single mum and her kid who have no money, the guy has run off and set up home with another woman and they look through the window at them warm. The game is all about helping them stay warm and fed against all odds. On the surface you might think this is about a woman surviving against the odds. On a deeper level it reinforces that men will find a woman without kids and leave, you will have to survive solo as a parent and if you are "good enough" you will just manage it by being ingenious. Users don't consider that it really wouldn't work with the man left holding the baby.

Or the King one where some fat white guy is stuck in his castle in rooms of gems. We are meant to want to "save" him, despite him being fat, old, surrounded by gold and presumably in the traps he set for people trying to steal from him. People wouldn't feel as obliged to help a rich old fat woman, where they will for an older round bellied man.

For me it boils down to lack of self esteem. I found it incomprehensible that a woman should think so little of her own sex that she falls for all the guff "society" tells us we should feel, do, behave blah blah.

But I am an old second-wave feminist whose response to this sort of rubbish was always, from my earliest days, "fuck off".

@OtterlyAstounding you asked if I was autistic. However did you guess?

@AceInSpace I don't know where I got the idea. That's something I also wanted to ask if anyone had any ideas where that came from. I was a teenager in the '90s if that means anything.

I think that's naive. It's not about "falls for the guff", it's about deep seated often unconscious biases about what's normal or how things should be. It's stuff like women as well as men thinking a woman dominated the meeting when she actually spoke less than the men. It's stuff like "they'd get their message over better if they just spoke a bit more nicely". It's stuff like women as well as men being more likely to challenge what a woman says than a man, so women are constantly on the back foot or have to spend time being on top of details that men can high level over and no one minds.