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Moral philosopher and Cornell professor, Kate Manne, is one of those brilliant and insightful observers of culture working today. She’s the author of two incredible books about misogyny—Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women and Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny—and has coined mainstream terms like “himpathy,” her word for the way we afford our sympathy to the male aggressor rather than the female victim. The example she uses is the trial of Brock Turner, the Stanford swimmer who sexually assaulted Chanel Miller, and the way the judge and the media seemed more concerned about Turner’s sullied future than Miller’s experience and recovery.
Her newest book is just as essential: It’s called Unshrinking: How to Face Fatphobia and it explores Manne’s own experience of being a fat woman in our unabiding culture. If you read the Gluttony chapter of On Our Best Behavior, some of the material she explores will be familiar—but in Kate Manne style, she drives it all the way home.
MORE FROM KATE MANNE:
Follow Kate Manne on Twitter
Kate Website
Kate’s Newsletter
TRANSCRIPT:
(Edited slightly for clarity.)
ELISE LOEHNEN: I'm thrilled to talk to you. I'm like every other woman who's engaged with your work, or even been touched by your work, through the chain, so grateful, and I wrote a book that came out earlier this year about women and internalized patriarchy, and using the seven deadly sins as the way we've been coded for goodness.