Is Seeing Women as Human Really the Problem?

On this International Women’s Day, we need to get clear on the true source of misogyny.

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“When will women be human? When?” asked feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon, plaintively, in 1999. All around the world, girls and women were being raped, trafficked, abused, and unhelped—unheld—in their most basic needs and interests. Twenty-five years on, in the US today, we have lost federal protections for abortion, and may soon face a federal ban. Girls and women are being forced to give birth against their will; girls and women are going septic during miscarriage. In many ways, MacKinnon’s question echoes more powerfully than ever this International Women’s Day.

MacKinnon’s diagnosis—that women aren’t viewed or treated as fully human—remains a common explanation of what underlies misogyny. Just last week, Jessica Grose wrote in The New York Times, about the importing of rapist and sex trafficker Andrew Tate to the US, at the behest of Donald Trump: “What chills me is a sincere fear that [my daughters]—and all the other girls who have never known politics without Trump—will not be treated as fully human by the men and boys in their lives.”

The fear is not only sincere but deeply understandable. It is also, I believe, the wrong thing to be afraid of.