厌女

What is this book about?

A landmark work of feminist sociology. Ueno sets out to explain one specific and pervasive phenomenon: why, in a society that treats women as secondary, even women come to despise women. She examines how men form complicity by jointly devaluing women, how women internalize that standard and are induced to compete for approval, and how the mechanism runs through family, workplace, and language. It does not describe individual cases; it supplies a framework for recognising something that happens every day.

Why read it?

Its place in Japanese feminist writing is closer to a manual for recognising a mechanism than to a book of cases: it names, with concepts, things that are otherwise hard to articulate. The gain is a vocabulary. After reading it, the same material in advertising, jokes, and family conversation can be called by its name.

Core Ideas

• Misogyny is a core mechanism of patriarchal society, expressed as the objectification and devaluation of women by men.
• Women also internalize that standard, producing self-disgust and competition among themselves.
• Men bond through jointly devaluing women, and that mode of bonding needs to be analysed in its own right.
• The mechanism runs through everyday language, the family, and the workplace, which is why it is hard to notice.

What questions does this book try to answer?

• Why do women themselves come to despise women?
• By what mechanism is pervasive sex discrimination produced and maintained?

Who should read it?

For beginners in gender studies and for anyone who wants to see how the machinery of gender works. No academic training is needed, but a willingness to have one's habitual intuitions questioned is.

How to Read It

Reading this is something like a worker reading Capital: scattered feelings of pressure suddenly arrange themselves into a mechanism you can see. One caution: it is concept-driven social analysis, in which cases serve as illustrations rather than subjects; the author's position is explicit, and she treats patriarchy as a structure that can be dismantled. For a complementary angle, read structural sociology alongside it.