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likealittleheartbeat · 5 years ago

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The Queer Platonic Love of Aang & Zuko

Friend. What a weighty and intimate word in Avatar The Last Airbender. The series’ “found family” is iconic at this point, and is literally established as a “family” by Katara in the third episode. She pulls Aang back from the outrage of the Avatar state, saying “Monk Gyatso and the other monks may be gone, but you still have a family. Sokka and I, we’re your family now.”

As I’ve said before, establishing this central safety net of trusted people is essential to Aang’s healing. Still, it’s interesting to me that they insist on this group as a “family” rather than something that might emphasize “friendship.” Something along the lines of ‘we’re your friends and we’re here with you.’ I can think of several animated shows that have done as much successfully. The show withholds the word “friend” for another purpose. I’ll happily admit that Aang and the others describe each other as “friends” throughout the series, but rarely is the use of the word (through pacing, repetition, or emotional context) given a sense of gravity in those moments.

However, three scenes in the series rely heavily on the word “friend,” and each scene connects Aang more and more profoundly with Zuko, eventually revealing that the show’s entire plot hinges on the friendship between these two boys. In a series so latent with symbolism, what do we make of these star-crossed friends? The relationship between Aang and Zuko, I want to suggest, is meant to explore Platonic Love in all its depth, especially within a masculine culture that not only devalues it, but views its queer implications as inherently dangerous to the dominant power structures of an empire.

Get ready zukaang fans for a long-ass atla meta analysis...

“If we knew each other back then, do you think we could’ve been friends, too?”

The first time the word “friend” is uttered between them, Aang is perched on a branch, waiting for Zuko (who is laid out on a bed of leaves the Avatar made for him) to wake up after his blue spirit rescue. “You know what the worst part about being born over a hundred years ago is?” Aang waxes, “I miss all the friends I used to hang out with. Before the war started I used to always visit my friend Kuzon. The two of us, we'd get in and out of so much trouble together. He was one of the best friends I ever had...and he was from the Fire Nation, just like you. If we knew each other back then do you think we could have been friends too?” The scene stood out for me when I first watched it for the melancholy and stillness. We are not given a flashback like we did when Aang talked about Bumi or Gyatso in earlier episodes. We have to sit with Aang’s loss of a male friend. It echoes a veteran’s loss of a war buddy more than anything a western audience would expect in a children’s show about the power of friendship. Instead of simply mourning, Aang invites Zuko into the past with him. He invites Zuko to imagine a time before the war, a land of innocence, where they could live together. And between them there is a moment of reflection given to this invitation (...until Zuko shoots a fucking fire blast at Aang).

The wistful mood returns when the two boys arrive back to their respective beds. Aang is asked by a loopy fevered Sokka if he made any “friends” on his trip, to which Aang sadly replies, “No, I don’t think I did” before tucking away to sleep. Aang’s mournful moments often stand out against his bubbly personality, but this moment stands out moreso because its the final moment for Aang in the episode. For the first time, he doesn’t receive comfort in his dejection. He doesn’t even confide in his peers. The solemnity and secrecy of this failed “friendship” is remarkable.

It’s in the next symbolic gesture that I think Avatar reveals what’s at stake in the concept of “friendship.” Zuko, in the next scene, lays down to rest after his adventurous night, looks pensively at the fire nation flag in his room, and then turns his back on it. We realize, especially after the previous revelations in “The Storm,” that Aang’s gestures of “friendship” have caused Zuko to doubt the authority of the Fire Nation.

Now all three remaining nations have misogynistic tendencies, but the Fire Nation celebrates a specific brand of toxic masculinity, and Zuko longs to emulate it even after it has rejected and scarred him. In the episode, “The Storm,” which directly precedes “The Blue Spirit,” we see how Zuko failed to replicate masculinity’s demands. In a room of men, he disregards honorifics to speak out in the name of care and concern for people’s well-being over strategy. Though the war room was all men, we later see that The Fire Nation does not exclude women from participating in this form of toxic masculinity. (Shoutout to Azula, one of the best tragic villains of all time!) This gender parity prevents disgraced men, like Zuko, from retaining pride of place above women. So Zuko’s loving act and refusal to fight his father puts him at the lowest of the low in the social hierarchy of the Fire Nation, completely emasculated and unworthy of respect.

Since then, Zuko has been seeking to restore himself by imitating the unfeeling men of the war room and his unfeeling sister, barking orders and demands at his crew. The final redemptive act for this purpose, of course, is to capture the Avatar, who’s very being seems to counteract the violent masculinity at the heart of the Fire Nation. In most contemporary Euro-American understandings, Aang is by no means masculine. He’s openly affectionate, emotional, giggly, and supportive of everyone in his life, regardless of gender. He practices pacifism and vegetarianism, and his hobbies include dancing and jewelry-making. And, foremost, he has no interest in wielding power. (@rickthaniel has an awesome piece about Aang’s relationship to gender norms and feminism).

In addition to the perceived femininity of Aang’s behavior, he’s equally aligned with immaturity. Aang’s childishness is emphasized in the title of the first episode, “The Boy in the Iceberg,” and then in the second episode when Zuko remarks, “you’re just a kid.” Aang, as a flying boy literally preserved against adulthood, also draws a comparison to another eternally boyish imp in the western canon: Peter Pan. This comparison becomes more explicit in “The Ember Island Players.” His theatrical parallel is a self-described “incurable trickster” played by a woman hoisted on wires mimicking theatrical productions of Peter Pan. The comparison draws together the conjunction of femininity and immaturity Aang represents to the Fire Nation.

When Zuko is offered friendship and affection by Aang, then, he faces a paradigm-shifting internal conflict. To choose this person, regardless of his spiritual status, as a “friend,” Zuko must relate himself to what he perceives as Aang’s femininity and immaturity, further demeaning himself in the eyes of his father and Fire Nation culture. The banished prince would need to submit to the softness for which he’s been abused and banished. This narrative of abuse and banishment for perceived effeminate qualities lends itself easily enough to parallels with a specific queer narrative, that of a young person kicked out of their house for their sexuality and/or gender deviance.

I want to point out that Aang’s backstory, too, can be read through a queer lens. Although the genocide of the air nomads more explicitly parallels the experiences of victims to imperial and colonial violence, I can also see how the loss of culture, history, friends, and mentors for a young effiminate boy can evoke the experience of queer men after the AIDs pandemic and the government’s damning indifference. In fact, colonial violence and the enforcement of rigid gender roles have historically travelled hand-in-hand. Power structures at home echo the power structures of a government. Deviance from the dominant norms disrupt the rigid structures of the empire. Aang’s background highlights how cultures based in something besides hierarchy and dominance, whether they be queer cultures or indigenous societies, threaten the logic of imperialism, and thus become targets of reform, neglect, and aggression by the expanding empire and its citizens. Survivors are left, as Aang was, shuffling through the remnants, searching for some ravaged piece of history to cling to.

We begin the series, then, with two queer-coded boys, one a survivor of broad political violence, the other a survivor of more intimate domestic abuse, and both reeling from the ways the Fire Nation has stigmatized sensitivity. But the queer narrative extends beyond the tragic backstories toward possibility and hope. The concept of platonic love proposed here, though it does not manifest until later, is a prospect that will bring peace to the two boys' grief-stricken hearts and to the whole world.

“Do you really think friendships can last more than one lifetime?”

“Do you really think friendships can last more than one lifetime?” Toph asks before the four members of the group hold hands. Since Toph previously mourned her friendless childhood, it’s easy to appreciate this line for its hopefulness regarding the four central members of the Gaang. They long to appreciate that they’re all connected. As touching as this is, the soul-mated ‘friendship’ concept is actually uniquely applicable to Aang and Zuko.

When does Toph ask the question specifically? It’s after hearing the story of Avatar Roku and Firelord Sozin: how their once intimate friendship fell apart; how Fire Lord Sozin began, undaunted, the genocidal attack on Airbenders. After recounting the tale, Aang, the reincarnation of Avatar Roku, excitedly explains to the group the moral that every person is capable of great good and evil. While that moral could easily be ascribed to many people in the series, the connective tissue is stretched directly to Zuko in a parallel storyline. Reading a secret history composed by his grandfather Sozin, Zuko discovers that he is not only the grandson of the empirical firelord but of Avatar Roku, as well. We see how the rift between the Sozin and Roku echoed down across history to separate the airbending culture from the fire nation, and, on a more human level, to separate Aang from Zuko. The two boys find themselves divided by their ancestors’ choices— and connected by Avatar Roku’s legacy.

This is what takes their “friendship” from simply a matter of the character’s preferences to something fated, something unique from the other friendships. The rest of the found family is positioned as circumstantial in their relationship to Aang and one another. Yeah, it’d be cool if they were all connected in past and future lives, but the audience receives no indicators in the series that it’s necessarily true. Only faith holds them together, which allows room for an appreciation that your “found family” friendships might simply be the trusted people you discovered along the way.

Zuko’s friendship is characterized differently. Both his struggle to befriend Aang and his eventual “friendship” are explicitly destined by the story of Roku and Sozin. After this episode, the series depends upon Zuko’s ability to mend the divide inside himself, which can only be done by mending the divide between him and Aang. Their inheritance symbolizes this dynamic exactly. As the reincarnation of Avatar Roku, Aang can be understood as the beneficiary of Avatar Roku’s wisdom (he should not, as many jokingly suggest, be considered as any kind of biological relation of Roku or Zuko). Zuko, on the other hand, has inherited Roku’s genealogy in the Fire Nation. These two pieces of Roku must be brought together in order to revive Roku’s legacy of firebending founded on something besides aggression.

In addition to making the ideals of Roku whole again, the two boys must tend to the broken “friendship” between the two men. As the Avatar and the Crown Prince of the Fire Nation, Aang and Zuko parallel Avatar Roku and Firelord Sozin precisely. The narrative of the latter pair places destiny precisely in the hands of the former. And since both Aang and Roku expressed the desire for “friendship,” it falls in the lap of the corresponding royal to give up their imperial dreams so they can gain something more peaceful and intimate. For Zuko, this now can only be accomplished when he heals the rift within himself.

Importantly, both the previous friendship and the destined friendship between Zuko and Aang are between two men. The coming-of-age genre has proliferated the trope of homosociality (friendship between individuals of the same sex) and its eventual decline brought on by maturity and heterosexual romance. (Check out the beautiful and quick rundown of classic examples, from Anne of Green Gables to Dead Poet’s Society, made by @greetingsprophet ). The story of Avatar Roku and Firelord Sozin replicates this established narrative.

We see them playing, sparring, and joking intimately with one another. The two as young adults were intimately connected, the series explains, “sharing many things including a birthday.” Eventually their intimacy is interrupted by their worldly responsibilities and the spectre of heterosexual romance on Roku’s part.

Now, It’s not a huge leap for one to wonder if Sozin longed for something stronger in their “friendship.” We see no female romantic interests for Sozin. Instead, he continues to demonstrate his platonic allegiance to Roku. When Roku prepares to leave for his Avatar training, Sozin walks into his room and gives him his crown prince headpiece, a gesture of unique devotion that positions his friendship above his politics (which harkens to Plato and EM Forster’s ideas about platonic love that I’ll discuss in Part 3).

One might note, too, how the wedding between Roku and his childhood sweetheart provides the setting for the escalation of Sozin’s violence. “On wedding days,” Sozin writes, “we look to the future with optimism and joy. I had my own vision for a brighter future...” He then pulls Roku away from his bride for a personal conversation, briefly recapturing the earlier homosocial dynamic with his friend. Sozin describes his affection for their intertwined lives. Then he links their shared happiness to the current prosperity of the Fire Nation. He imagines the expansion of the Fire Nation, which would also expand on the relationship between him and Roku. But the Avatar refuses the offer and returns to his wife, insisting on the value of traditional boundaries (both the pact of marriage and the strict division of the four nations). The abandonment of the homosocial relationship by Roku sets the site for the unmitigated empirical ambitions of Sozin. One wonders how history might’ve been altered had the two men’s relationship been sanctified and upheld. How might’ve Roku persuaded Sozin in his empirical ambitions if he had remained in a closer relationship to his friend? In their final encounter, Sozin reacts vengefully to his former platonic love: he lets Roku die protecting the home the Avatar shared with his wife. Sozin’s choice solidifies the divide between them, and makes the grief he’s experienced since Roku left him into actual death.

Instead of Avatar Roku and Firelord Sozin finding a resolution, Aang and Zuko are ordained to reverse their friendship’s disintegration. Yes, they must heal the rift in the world created by the Fire Nation’s aggression, but Aang and Zuko must also reverse the tradition of lost homosociality within a culture of unrelenting machismo. Despite Avatar: the Last Airbender’s ties to the coming-of-age genre, the arc of Aang and Zuko’s “friendship” counters one of its most prominent tropes. “Some friendships are so strong they can transcend lifetimes,” Roku says, and it’s precisely this platonic ideal that draws Zuko and Aang towards one another in ways that are revolutionary both in their world and in the traditions of our’s. To come together, as two matured boys, to form an adult platonic love that can persist into adulthood.

“And now we’re friends.”

Which brings us to the consummation of Aang and Zuko’s “friendship.” Having resolved their previous hostilities and having neutralized the outside forces that would rather them dead than together, Aang and Zuko can finally embrace and define their relationship as “friendship.” Now, if we look closely at Zuko’s expression, we’ll notice a pause, before he smiles and reiterates Aang’s comment. My initial response, with my zukaang shipping goggles on extra tightly, was that Zuko just got friend-zoned and was a little disappointed before accepting Aang’s friendship. When I took a step back, I considered that we are given this moment of reflection to recognize Zuko’s journey, his initial belligerent response to the idea of befriending the Avatar. When he accepts the term of ‘friend,’ he reveals the growth he’s undergone that’s brought peace to the world. With these two possibilities laid out, I want to offer that they might coexist. That the word ‘friend’ might feel to Zuko and the audience so small and limited and yet simultaneously powerful. The pause can hint at the importance of “friendship” and signal something more. This reading emboldens the queer concept of “friendship” that undergirds their relationship. That the hug that follows might be meant to define the depth of the platonic love that is at the very heart of the series.

Saving a hugging declaration of “friendship” for the announcement of peace in the series is quietly revolutionary. In the twentieth century, male characters could connect in battle, on competitive teams, and through crime. “In the war film, a soldier can hold his buddy — as long as his buddy is dying on the battlefield. In the western, Butch Cassidy can wash the Sundance Kid’s naked flesh — as long as it is wounded. In the boxing film, a trainer can rub the well-developed torso and sinewy back of his protege — as long as it is bruised. In the crime film, a mob lieutenant can embrace his boss like a lover — as long as he is riddled with bullets,” writes Kent Brintnall. Aang and Zuko’s hug starkly contrasts this kind of masculine intimacy. The show suggests that environments shaped by dominance, conflict, coercion, or harm, though seemingly productive in drawing people and especially men together, actually desecrate “friendships.” Only in a climate of humility, diplomacy, and peace can one make a true ‘friend.’

In situating the’ “friendship” between two matured males in a time of peace, the writers hearken back to older concepts of homosocial relationships in our fiction. As Hanya Yanagihara has described the Romantic concepts of friendship that pervaded fiction before the 1900s. In her book, A Little Life, Yanagihara renews this concept for the twenty-first century with a special appreciation for the queerness that one must accept in order for platonic love to thrive into adulthood. She writes, “Why wasn’t friendship as good as a relationship? Why wasn’t it even better? It was two people who remained together day after day bound not by sex or physical attraction or money or children or property, but only by the shared agreement to keep going, the mutual dedication to a union that could never be codified.” Aang and Zuko’s relationship, despite a history that would keep them apart, reclaims this kind of friendship. Their hearts, bound together by an empyrean platonic love, are protected from the political and familial loyalties that would otherwise embroil them.

In addition to Yanagihara, another author that coats the word ‘friend’ with similar gravity and longing to Avatar is E.M. Forster, who braids platonic friendship in his writing with homoeroticism and political revolution. In Forster’s novel Maurice (originally written in 1914 but published posthumously in 1971 due to Britain’s criminalization of male homsexuality), the titular character asks a lower class male lover lying in bed with him, “Did you ever dream you had a friend, Alec? Someone to last your whole life and you his? I suppose such a thing can’t happen outside of sleep.” The confession, tinged with grief and providence as it is, could easily reside in Aang’s first monologue to Zuko in “The Blue Spirit.”

Platonic love as a topic is at the heart of Maurice. Plato’s “Symposium,” from which the term platonic love derives, is even directly referenced in the book and connected with “the unspeakable vice of the Greeks”— slang for homosexual acts. For Forster, the sanction of platonic love, both the homosocial aspect and the latent homosexuality, reveals a culture’s liberation. “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend,” Forster wrote in his essay “What I Believe,”, “I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” This echoes a sentiment of philial love described by Plato.

Rather than revolutionary ideals, for Forster friendships, and specifically friendships that disregard homophobia, provide the foundation for peace, equality, and democratic proliferation. When Aang and Zuko embrace, they are embodying this ideal. Platonic love and the word “friend” have a history intertwined with queer romantic love, and, while I won’t argue that Avatar attempts to directly evoke this, I will suggest that the series consciously leaves room for this association. Now, the show certainly makes no attempt to imply anything romantic between Zuko and Aang within the timeline we witness (nor any same sex characters, which reflects cultural expectations in the 2000s). And for good reason, the age gap would be notably icky, to use the technical term. (You might note, however, that the show actually allows for crushes to extend upwardly across the same age gap, when Toph accidentally reveals her affection for Sokka to Suki in “The Serpent’s Pass.”) Despite connecting queer friendships to the history of ‘platonic love,’ Avatar provides two critiques to platonic love for audiences to absorb. One is the pederasty with which Plato defined his ultimate form of love in his Symposium. Fans rightfully comment on the age gap between Aang and Zuko as something preventative to shipping them together. And beyond the fact of their ages, Aang’s youthfulness is emphatic, as I remarked earlier. Aang and Zuko are prevented from consummating their platonic love until both are deemed mature in the last moments of the series. And even then, their relationship is directed toward future development rather than conclusion. Instead of cutting away, they are allowed to exit their scene together toward a speech about hope and peace. This stands in stark opposition to the permanence of Aang and Katara’s kiss. The platonic love in Avatar, the kind EM Forster cherishes, is relegated to adulthood as opposed to other kinds of boyish friendships. The conclusion of Avatar, at least for me, actually feels especially satisfying because it settles our characters in the “new era of love and peace.” It is a beginning, and it feels more expansive than the actions the characters choose to take in the episode. Even as our characters conclude three seasons of narrative tension as the sun sets and “The End” appears on the screen, it feels instead as if their stories can finally begin. The characters are allowed to simply exist for the first time. Yes, Aang and Katara or Zuko and Mai are allowed to embrace and kiss, but it’s because the pressures of empiricism have finally been banished. They are now allowed to try things and fail and make mistakes and explore. Things don’t feel rigid or permanent, whether that be one’s identity or one’s relationships.

Ideally, within the morality of the series (at least as it appears to us with no regard for whatever limits or self-censorship occurred due to its era of production and child-friendly requirements), “friends'' are maintained alongside romantic partnerships. Both Zuko and Aang’s separate romantic relationships blossom within the same episode that they declare their “friendship.” In fact, a vital plotline is the development of Zuko’s relationship with Aang’s romantic interest. While anyone in the fandom is well aware of the popular interpretation of romantic affection between Zuko and Katara because of their shared narrative, I have to point out that romantic feelings across the series are made extremely explicit through statements, blushes, and kisses. Zuko’s relationship with Katara can be better understood in the light of the coming-of-age counternarrative. While the love interest often serves as a catalyst for separation for a homosocial relationship, the friendly relationship with Aang’s love interest—seeking her forgiveness, respecting her power, calling on her support, etc—is vital for Zuko to ultimately create an environment of peace in which he and Aang can fulfill their destined “friendship.” In fact, we can look at Katara’s femininity as the most important device for manifesting Aang and Zuko’s eventual union. It’s her rage against misogyny that frees Aang from his iceberg, midwifing him into the world again after his arrested development, the complete opposite of a Wendy figure. It’s her arms that hold Aang in the pieta after his death in the Crossroads of Destiny, positioning her as a divine God-bearer. Afterwards, its her hands that resurrect Aang so that they together can fulfill his destiny. It will be these same hands with this same holy water that resurrect Zuko in the finale. Only through Katara’s decided blessing could Aang and Zuko proceed toward the fated reunion of their souls.

The importance of this critical relationship to femininity becomes relevant to a scene in “Emerald Island Players” that one might note as an outstanding moment of gay panic. Zuko and Aang, watching their counterparts on stage, cringe and shrink when, upon being saved by The Blue Spirit character in the play, Aang’s performer declares “My hero!” Instead of the assumption of homophobia, I wonder whether we might read Aang and Zuko’s responses as discomfort with the misogynistic heterosexual dynamics the declaration represents. Across the board, Avatar subverted the damsel in distress trope. There’s a-whole-nother essay to be written on all the ways it goes about this work, but the events in “The Blue Spirit” certainly speak to this subversion. It’s quite explicit that Zuko, after breaking Aang’s chains, is equally dependent on Aang for their escape. And, by the end of the actual episode, the savior role is reversed as Aang drags an unconscious Zuko away from certain death. To depict these events within the simplistic “damsel in distress” scenario, as The Ember Island Players do, positions Aang as a subordinately feminized colonial subject, denies him his agency, and depicts the relationship as something merely romantic, devoid of the equalizing platonic force that actually empowers them. The moment in the play is uncomfortable for Aang and Zuko because it makes Zuko the hero and Aang the helpless object. Aang is explicit about his embarrassment over his feminized and infantilized depiction in the play. And Zuko, newly reformed, is embarrassed to see, on one hand, his villainy throughout the play and, on the other hand, see how his character is positioned as made out as a savior to the person who has actually saved him.

At the heart of the series is not the idea of a chosen one or savior. Instead, we are saved by the ability for one person to see themselves in another person and to feel that same person equally understands their own soul. This is the ideal of platonic love. Platonic love between two matured boys—two boys with whose memories and bodies bare the scars of their queer sensitivities—is an essential part of the future of peace. Many fans have a sense of this, labeling the relationship as “brotp” and “platonic soulmates.” I simply encourage people to acknowledge that platonic love, especially in this context, is not a limit. There is no “no homo” joke here. When we remark on the platonic love between Zuko and Aang (and across media more generally) we are precisely making room for friendship, romance, and whatever else it could mean, whatever else it might become. While I find Legend of Korra lacking and in some ways detrimental to appreciating the original series, it’s finale interestingly parallels and extends this reading of platonic love in a sapphic vein. And most recently, She ra Princess of Power was able to even more explicitly realize these dynamics in the relationship between Adora and Catra. Let’s simply acknowledge that Aang and Zuko’s relationship blazed the trail: that peace, happiness, hope, and freedom could all hinge on a “friendship,” because a “friend” was never supposed to be set apart from or less than other kinds of relationships. For the ways it disregards gender, disregards individualism, disregards dominion, platonic love is the foundation of any meaningful relationship. And a meaningful relationship is the foundation for a more peaceful world. *Author’s note: I’m just tired of sitting on this and trying to edit it. It’s not perfect. I don’t touch on all the symbolism and nuances in the show and in the character’s relationships. And this is not meant to negate any ships. It’s actually, quite the opposite. This is a show about growth and change and mistakes and complexity. Hopefully you can at least appreciate this angle even if you don’t vibe with every piece of analysis here. I just have no chill and need to put this out there so I can let my obsession cool down a bit. Enjoy <3

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topmixtrends · 7 years ago

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STRANGULATION IS A FORM of torture that often comes at the hands of a misogynist. It’s mostly inflicted by men on intimate female partners. It’s less obvious and more insidious than cat-calling, social media trolling, and mansplaining, since the effects can be slow to impact the victim; the signs are subtle unless a doctor knows what to look for, and victims are often afraid to speak up. This is also one of the reasons why it tends to go underreported and misreported. In her first book, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny, Kate Manne unpacks strangulation and other forms of keeping women down.

“Silence is golden,” she writes, “for the men who smother and intimidate women into not talking, or have them change their tune to maintain harmony. Silence isolates its victims; and it enables misogyny.”

I connected with Manne, a professor of Philosophy at Cornell University, via email to talk about misogyny, sexism, and breaking the silence.

SKYE C. CLEARY: Why does misogyny manifest in cat-calling, social media trolling, mansplaining, and strangulation?

KATE MANNE: Rather than seeing these behaviors as disparate, we can see them as symptoms of a common social ill, unified by their common misogynistic function: that of policing and enforcing patriarchal norms and expectations. This includes not just putting or keeping women down when they threaten or challenge male dominance — as in many cases of strangulation — but also maintaining or reinstating male dominance via subtler controlling behaviors.

Take cat-calling, for example. If he sets the evaluative terms — by commenting on women’s bodies or ranking her attractiveness within earshot — then that’s a form of social control. It doesn’t necessarily matter if you pass or fail the test. It’s a potent reminder that he gets to judge you, and he gets to define the terms — and to broadcast the results for all and sundry, oftentimes.

Of course, it’s only human to react appreciatively to people’s appearances, to experience more or less unbidden attractions, to have sexual fantasies, and so on. And that’s not what I’m objecting to. That can all be perfectly benign, within reason, depending on umpteen contextual factors and subsequent behavior. The question is more: who may tell a total stranger to smile, that is, to arrange her countenance to be more pleasing to him? Many more men do this to women than vice versa, and that says a lot about a sense of male entitlement that is prevalent in our culture.

Sexism, you argue, is “the branch of patriarchal ideology that justifies and rationalizes a patriarchal social order, and misogyny [is] the system that polices and enforces its governing norms and expectations.” What makes a person a misogynist rather than a sexist? And why is it important to know the difference?

Sexists truly believe that women are “naturally” inferior to men in masculine-coded domains, such as math, tech, science, and philosophy, and less worthy of historically male-focused spotlights of collective attention in, for example, political leadership positions, comedy, some sports, and certain kinds of writing or commentary — often, the most prestigious. This ideology of supposedly natural sex differences undermines the presumption that stark gender imbalances in these domains and roles is evidence of biases operating to systematically keep or push women out of them.

In theory, a sexist might be open to learning they are wrong or, more subtly, that there’s currently little compelling science that can demonstrate “natural” sex differences of this kind — given the lack of a control group of people not exposed to patriarchal social forces. A misogynist is typically someone who inchoately wants to keep women out of masculine-coded domains and for women to continue to give men, and society in general, the bulk of feminine-coded forms of labor, such as social, emotional, moral, and reproductive services. And he — or she, in some cases — tends to be prepared to threaten and punish non-compliant women.

A misogynist who is not really sexist deep down may be in denial — clinging to sexist ideology as a form of wishful thinking — or anxious and angry. But a “tell” is that he will be happy to have women serve in traditionally masculine-coded power positions if she is loyal and deferential to patriarchal authority figures. Donald Trump is hence a brazen and virulent misogynist but is not particularly sexist — or so I argue in my book. And he’s self-centered and narcissistic to the point that women most reliably inspire his aggression when they challenge or threaten him directly, rather than violating broader social mores.

Of course, in practice, sexism and misogyny have a high co-morbidity in individual agents. And, when it comes to maintaining a patriarchal social order, both tend to play crucial roles.

Women have been treated as the second sex, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote, for most of history. So, is misogyny getting worse, or are we just noticing it more now?

I think of misogyny as something that can be latent. I suspect certain forms of it are liable to manifest when the patriarchal status quo is threatened. So, ironically, genuine feminist social progress tends to beget eruptions of misogyny in the form of backlash. It’s an intertwined vicious and virtuous cycle, since that backlash also tends to inspire more feminist consciousness-raising and activism in turn. It’s pretty clear we are seeing both in the United States at the moment.

To what extent do you think the rise of Trump is white male disappointment and revenge against feminism?

To a very large extent. It’s important to recognize that misogyny and its associated ills — something I’m tempted to call “sympathetic attention deficit disorder” — can lead to “punching down” behavior. Consider the intense and irrational meanness that prevails within conservative circles toward refugees, immigrants from what Trump has charmingly termed “shithole countries,” undocumented people, and marginalized Americans in need of basic health care and welfare benefits. There’s both a denial that the care is needed, and an extraordinary resentment toward those who are doing okay or positively prospering. To me, that’s plausibly a symptom of a kind of deprivation mindset with regard to the caregiving labor that has remained very much women’s work in the conservative imagination, in particular. Indeed, women in general continue to do a great deal more of this work than their male counterparts in the United States to this day. The sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild has shown that, though women have entered traditional male professions more and more, the “second shift” problem of unequal distribution of domestic drudgery has been disappointingly enduring. True, norms of fatherhood have been shifting in a salutary direction. But I see surprisingly few calls for men to give moral, material, and emotional support to women in het — or so-called straight — relationships, and more broadly.

Esther Perel, who I have also interviewed for LARB, suggests that one of the main problems of the 21st century is that we are facing a crisis of masculinity because, she proposes, “We have the permission to ask what it means to be a woman, but men have not been given nearly the same permission to think about personal growth.” Is this exacerbating the problem of misogyny?

I’m a fan of Perel’s, but that sounds a little “himpathetic” to me, to invoke a term I use for the disproportionate or excessive sympathy of which privileged men are often the beneficiaries. As Lilian Calles Barger put it to me recently in conversation, “there is always a crisis of masculinity” — primarily white masculinity, I am tempted to add. I will be more sympathetic when white men stop hurting, blaming, and lashing out at others due to their pain and shame. It’s not as if feeling pain and shame is unheard of for the rest of us.

You propose that white women tend to enable misogyny for reasons of self-preservation and “strong norms of loyalty.” This is not only morally damaging to themselves, but also disproportionally harms more vulnerable women, such as nonwhite and transgender women. This makes sense in light of the fact that more than half of the white women who voted in the general election voted for Trump. Can you talk about why so many white women act as gatekeepers of the patriarchy, and the effect that it has on more vulnerable groups?

Recent Pew statistics show that white women who are married will have a white male partner in a very high proportion of cases — around 90 percent, and even higher than that in non-metropolitan areas. Now observe that white men in these areas are disproportionately likely not only to be Trump voters, but to have relative legal, social, and moral impunity to enforce norms of loyalty within intimate relationships, by means of threatening, controlling, and sometimes violent behavior. That makes a considerable proportion of white women subject to a system of powerful incentives and punishments, risks and rewards, which can make it hard and costly to challenge or disagree with the white supremacist patriarchal status quo. Of course, that doesn’t excuse privileged white women’s complicity, but it does point out that white women are often both oppressed by white men and oppressors of more vulnerable women — those who are nonwhite, queer, trans, and/or disabled — among others.

Another factor is that if white men are resentfully hoarding and enforcing women’s feminine-coded care work, then their — again, on average — white female partners are liable to be exhausted, to have so-called “compassion fatigue.” It’s a bit of a euphemistic expression and, to reiterate, I don’t mean to be offering excuses, but rather explanations here. To that end: If, as a woman in this position, you’re not consciously questioning or challenging the social norms that mandate you to give enormous amounts of moral, social, and emotional labor to him, to your family, and to your local community, without asking for or receiving much reciprocal care in return, then perceived outsiders who ask for or are suspected of feeling entitled to such care will tend to be unwelcome. That makes it a case not of “punching down,” exactly, but similarly directing resentment outward, or inadvertently taking one’s frustrations out on less powerful people.

How did you come to write about misogyny?

“Misogyny” was a word that first came on my radar in October 2012 when Julia Gillard — then prime minister of my home country of Australia — used it in a speech before parliament. She called out Tony Abbott — then opposition party leader — for his sexist and misogynistic behavior. Although Gillard’s speech went viral, the original occasion for her anger was lost on many people: Abbott had demanded Gillard call for the resignation of one of her ministers, Peter Slipper, who had sent text messages likening women’s genitals to mussels (shucked, he helpfully specified) and calling a female colleague an “ignorant botch,” thanks to the Freudian intervention of auto-correct. But Gillard did not want Slipper to resign; to her mind, he was still a serviceable minister. And she was not sanguine about Abbott “lecturing” her about how to be a feminist. So what began as Gillard’s response to Abbott’s moralistic demands and mansplaining became a speech about sexism and misogyny.

When Gillard’s speech became news, I realized that “misogyny” wasn’t one of my words. Indeed, I couldn’t remember ever having used it myself, nor could I find a precise definition of it in analytic feminist philosophy. It’s also a word that would have been useful to me earlier on in life. I had been one of three girls to attend a hitherto all-boys’ school, the year that it integrated, for my final two years in high school. The experience was not pleasant, to put it mildly. It was a confusing, demoralizing mess of seemingly disparate behaviors and isolated incidents, in a general atmosphere of male hostility — as well as institutional indifference to that hostility.

As I thought about Gillard’s case and others, I came to suspect a pattern. Girls and women subject to misogyny can be, and often will be, put down in whatever ways are salient or ready to hand — via more or less brazen expressions of visceral disgust, moral disgust, contempt, and indignation — such as Abbott’s “hypocrisy” accusation toward Gillard — by disparaging our intellects, our strength, our competence, our moral characters, our accomplishments, our voices, our bodies, our whatevers, our wherevers. A woman may be subject to lewd sexualization on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, and called an unf*ckable c*nt on the other days of the week. There will be various levels of post-hoc rationalization of the hostility, which need not be overtly gendered in quality.

The common theme is downranking and humiliating women who step out of line, or have ideas beyond their station. Misogyny is not usually about the way misogynists somehow “see” women; nor is it about disliking or hating any and every woman, or even women generally. Women may be liked just fine until they stray from the designated path, invade male spaces, or threaten to take masculine-coded perks and powers away from comparatively privileged men. Overall, on my account, misogyny is hostility certain women face because they are women in a man’s world — a historical patriarchy — not because they are represented as women in a misogynistic man’s mind.

So the title “Down Girl” refers to this down-ranking of women.

Yes, I wanted to get both at the indefinitely many ways girls and women can be degraded by these misogynistic “down girl” moves, and the fact that — sotto voce — it can be tempting to forestall being taken down by lying down, playing dead, or sort of groveling before one’s master — whether in an enthusiastic or hangdog manner. That is almost always unwitting and can encompass inculcated habits of body and mind that are painful and difficult for girls and women to break. But I still think it is worth it; having one’s will bent to that of dominant men being inimical to freedom.

Breaking the silence is a great first step to highlight the issues, and many people are speaking up, such as with the #MeToo movement, but how do we build on that?

I like the way you put the question, because I think the #MeToo movement has been highly valuable, and needs to be built on in a “Yes, and…” improv spirit. This is as opposed to the more or less contemptuous reactions — sometimes by self-described feminists — finding fault with the movement rather than identifying ways to expand it, or pointing out correctly, but hardly surprisingly, that it alone is far from everything we need to make feminist social progress. These forms of naysaying are predictable forms of backlash. I think we can make this and similar movements stronger and more expansive by paying attention to the women who originated them, in this case the Black feminist activist Tarana Burke. She intended the movement to center on less powerful and multiply marginalized women and, if I’m reading her right, to encompass forms of misogynistic domineering and belittling behavior that need not be explicitly sexual, but are similarly experienced as bodily domination and humiliation.

Since misogyny is not only about hating women, but smothering and intimidating them with the aim of controlling them and their narratives, how can we even begin to talk to people who think women should not challenge men’s dominance?

I’m not altogether sure we can. But I generally write not to persuade people of moral conclusions if they’re in fundamental disagreement with broadly feminist and egalitarian principles and values. I write for people with largely shared moral values, to try to change our collective moral priorities, to help us to recognize patterns, and — more than anything — to challenge some of the false moral conclusions we swallow with the Kool-Aid of patriarchal ideology.

What further steps can we take in our everyday lives, given that what’s required is a “moral and social overhaul,” which will come at a cost? Do you think we should assertively and constantly challenge the status quo, being “more radical, if acerbic,” as you say, or should we take a subtler approach of picking our battles and making incremental changes?

I think people have to fight these battles if, when, and how they can, and the best way to go about that depends enormously on social, personal, and material variables. I generally try to be self-critical and open to standing corrected for my own moral mistakes, but not too judgmental of others. We all screw up. We all have different styles, temperaments, skills, and sensitivities when it comes to mustering resistance. And it takes many kinds to dismantle a patriarchal village.

In your conclusion, you say, “So I give up. I wish I could offer a more hopeful message. Let me close just by offering a post-mortem” — because even trying to change this seems impossible or self-defeating. Can you talk about whether there is any hope of overcoming misogyny? What will it take?

I’ve realized with the wisdom of hindsight that that was overly coy writing on my part. The phrase “give up” was meant to be the operative one — a sort of liberating declaration that I’d done all I could for the moment, and was obliged (if unwilling, for many months) to step aside and let others decide what to make of my words and ideas, if anything. If I had it to do over, I might write something more like this instead: “So I give up for now — with the emphasis on the ‘I’ and the ‘now.’ I hope and trust that others will have more to offer by way of solutions moving forward. But liberation for, and as, women means not only breaking our silence when we have something to say that may cost a privileged man or boy in terms of pain, shame, or reputation. It also means an entitlement to say one’s piece and then, despite all that remains to be said, go quiet again; to finish.”

Skye C. Cleary PhD is a philosopher and author of Existentialism and Romantic Love.

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