BBC News – Indian girl ‘humiliated’ by village elders found dead

One quiet, largely unasked, question about the persistence of misogyny across cultures and generations involves cultural mechanisms achieving this persistence.  This is where a certain paradox seems to arise.  Women are the principal victims of misogyny, if only by definition.  Women are also the principal means whereby mores, folk-ways and cultural values are transmitted from one generation to another.  Why, then, have women and mothers not been better at raising male children to become more wholesome, inclusive adults?

I think this question does not come up for two related reasons.  The first is that men are identified as misogynistic in normative, moralizing ways - i.e., that they choose to behave abominably and that this choice is consciously made.  This means that men originate misogyny and that it does not flow from proximate cultural sources.

So understanding the problem, the victims of misogyny are encouraged to overlook their own complicity - even if this complicity amounts to nothing more than being an unwitting conduit of culturally-embedded mischief.

BBC News - Indian girl 'humiliated' by village elders found dead.