Magpie 3: Gender and Kwaku’s Car

David Edgerton, The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (2006).

Dorothy Littell Greco, For the Love of Women: Uprooting and Healing Misogyny in America (2025).

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a woman in possession of misfortune, must be in want of a theory. This theory must explain her discomfort. It should give an account of the temperature at which offices are set and the misfortune of any particular woman who is not promoted at her job. It should explain why female pianists injure their wrists more than males—due to the keyboard span on the piano, which is more suited to the size of male hands. It should correct the clothing design of firemen and the military, as well as accommodate for the inconveniences of women’s reproductive cycles and fertility. This theory should universally explain any personal comments that any woman might experience as hostile, uncomfortable, or uncalled for.

It’s a high bar. In For the Love of Woman, Dorothy Littell Greco has pursued such a theory. Identifying it as misogyny, Greco points to the pervasive and persistent reality of male superiority and female inferiority that is prevalent in every sphere of life. My concern is less whether her theory fails to track onto reality. My concern is what happens if her theory succeeds.

Critiques of misogyny have been pervasive in popular literature of the last decade. Perhaps the most celebrated is Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017), which rambles from observations about Donald Trump, Rush Limbaugh, Andrew Puzder, and Elliot Rodger, the young adult “incel” who murdered several young women in California in 2014.

Manne’s book has much to recommend it. She argues that we move beyond a “naïve view” of misogyny—one where “misogyny is primarily a property of individual misogynists, who are prone to hate women qua women.” This hatred moves beyond particular instances of despicable women toward a hatred of women as a category.

The limitations of such a view, according to Manne, is that accusing someone of misogyny would entail finding out if they, in fact, disliked women. It would become a therapeutic endeavor as much as a theoretical one. Manne’s view, as well as Greco’s, is that misogyny does not reside in the minds or consciousness of individuals but rather in social structures as a whole. It is the lingering “law enforcement” wing of residual patriarchy, the codes and norms left over from a world where men were in charge.

With these assumptions, it is easy to give an account of such a world. Indeed, the design of piano keyboards and iPhones, the lack of consistent maternity leave policy and the inattention to medical care designed for women’s bodies would seem to be downstream of a world that was designed by and for men. Have you encountered hostility at work? It is misogyny. Do you struggle to keep track of your children’s school paperwork? Also misogyny. Does your husband always forget to sort through the mail? Misogyny.

Greco’s desire is for Christians to recognize and address this lingering patriarchal design of the world in order to promote the flourishing of women. To address the difficulties unwed mothers face, she suggests that the government provide free condoms, subsidize childcare, and cover the cost of full maternity leave. To honor women, her argument goes, we need to redesign the world to ameliorate the difficulties women face.

This desire to move the cost of care from the individual and the family toward the government is a common one in recent feminist work (see Mere Orthodoxy’s discussion of Leah Libresco Sargeant’s work on the subject here, here, and here—with Sargeant’s own response here). But it also reflects an inattention to the deeper logic at work within critiques of the world as “misogynist.” Kate Manne’s work on misogyny insists that women have “equal moral purchase” to men, and that the expectation that women are caring and nurturing exhibits a “tyranny of vulnerability.”

With regard to “equal moral purchase”, Manne offers a thought experiment. If cis men were to become pregnant, she asks, how would the workplace treat them? Would they encounter the workplace as a “man’s world”, or one more conducive to their reproductive status? This question unravels what, for me, is a weak point in both accounts of misogyny.

I suspect that it is in fact the very case that women’s bodies conceive that has led to the uneven treatment and consideration of professional women. To borrow a quote attributed to Oswald Chambers, the “unguarded strength” of female reproduction—which grants women a certain form of visibility, status, dignity and power—can easily become a “double weakness” insofar as reproduction brings with it also certain demands, needs, and complications. Whether it is design or accident, the fact that women conceive and gestate children will necessarily bear with it certain needs and demands that only women hold. The system that is thought to take place due to this reality—what is called misogyny—is really, then, a hatred for the weak.

Sargeant has in her book identified this as such. But even in her emphasis on dependence, she mimics the same sort of optimism that Manne and Greco’s critiques contain. Manne speaks of the possibility that reproductive labor might one day, through the advent of reproductive technologies, be shared across genders. Sargeant calls for a more vigorous and supportive social safety net that will buffer so many of the costs that fall disproportionately on women. But for every recognition of dependence as the state of all humans, male and female alike, there is an equal but missing recognition of limits as the state of all human creatures. Persons, after all, are not abstract considerations. They are irreducibly particular. They exist only as themselves. “Misogyny” gives a weak account of what it means to be a person; and any optimism regarding how the state might buffer the needs of persons by my read must be undertaken with the limits implicit in such an endeavor leading the charge. Put more simply, we are as limited as we are dependent. We are for that reason just as likely to make things worse with our attempt to lessen the burden of care as we are to alleviate it. Worse, we might in fact come to experience each other as burdens, or to consider that such burdensome care is the responsibility of the state.

We have forced our bodily needs into systems that don’t admit the reality of difference. We’ve then theorized these systems and made them total. A world where every pregnant woman becomes the Virgin Mary serves none of us well.

It would be unfair to criticize Greco’s book wholesale, alongside quick blows at Leah Libresco Sargeant and Kate Manne, without giving an attempt at my deeper concerns that linger in all three. After all, I too have experienced the uneven treatment and expectations of a professional world that feels “built for men.” To work in such a world includes discomfort. It can feel stretching. But theories make demands that individual persons cannot comply with, and I refuse to adhere to a view of the world that is so boring in its demands.

It may seem unlikely to take the Peugeot 504 as a solution to this problem of heavy-handed theory. It’s even unlikelier still to take this Peugeot—a French import to Ghana, now owned by an entrepreneurial taxi driver named Kwaku—as the illustration. For Kwaku’s car had veered quite far from its original design. It has undergone repairs that were not quick fixes as much as complete alterations, as David Edgerton explains in The Shock of the Old: “All the fuses in the Peugeot were repaired with copper wire, because original ones could not be found or were too expensive. At several places nails were used as lock pins. Some rubber tubes were fixed with iron wire, whereas others which evidently were out of use were closed with old spark-plugs, butterfly nuts or even pieces of wood.”

As was common in cars in Ghana, Kwaku’s car had been repaired in a way that relied on what David Edgerton calls “creole technologies.” Creole technologies invert expectations about what makes a “technology” useful. A technology is often assumed to be novel, replacing the old and insufficient with something new, profoundly different, and clearly superior. Such a view of technology pairs well with a view of progress as inevitable, as an advancement distinct from the past.

Kwaku’s car presents an alternative view of technology. Instead of seeking routine maintenance, Kwaku added greasy paper to cushion the worn-out bearings. He considered using soap-suds instead of brake fluid. He sometimes sought prayer or exorcisms for the car’s difficulties. His “creole” techniques might be haphazard workarounds, but they kept his car running and his livelihood as a taxi-driver intact. Kwaku “raised the oil level in his shock-absorbers beyond normal so that he could drive more comfortably on roads full of potholes” and even relied on his body to smell, to suck petrol out of the gas tank to attempt a repair or even to stick his tongue to the battery to feel if it was charged.

Kwaku relied on very old, even primitive methods to find solutions to new problems. David Edgerton describes “creole technologies” as workarounds that are “earthy, local, genuine, vulgar, and popular.” They take account of the facts on the ground and the materials at hand, and privilege what works over the false promise of a permanent, perfect solution. Kwaku’s car offers a perfect example of “creole” technologies because it reflects this pattern of ad hoc, creative interventions. But it also reveals another bias in academic work—towards the theoretical and away from world of material things. Scholarship on vehicles in Africa shares this bias toward theory, thinking about cars sociologically or symbolically. In doing so, scholars can overlook the way the car actually functions in everyday life. Just like theories of misogyny, scholarly theories about “Africa” and about “gender” prefer to consider reality at a remove.

Kwaku’s relationship with his car focused on the car itself. His relationship to it derived not from a focus on an “ideal” car, but from an observation of the vehicle as it exists. It was moved to action by noting the limitations of the vehicle as it interacted with varying terrain—the Peugeot was now driving not in France, but in Ghana—and invented repairs and hacks that addressed the problems that occurred. In this way, the “creole technology” of Kwaku’s car repair revealed a knowledge of the Peugeot that was actually greater than that held by a licensed mechanic. Because Kwaku responded to the car’s needs as they appeared, he was not stuck in a constant cycle of attempted repair, a cycle that can sometimes cause further harm. Neither was he alienated by the kind of “blind confidence” that can arise from someone who regularly drives a car that they have never attempted to get to know. He was not alienated from his technology.

Kwaku’s car and Edgerton’s “creole technologies” may appear an odd entry point to Dorothy Greco’s For the Love of Women, but I can think of no better one. I cannot say it is a bad book—it is clearly written and peppered with compelling illustrations that serve to support Greco’s point. The problem is that Greco’s thesis—that misogyny is endemic in America and especially in the church—is not that compelling. If misogyny exists, I am against it. But that in 2025 the persistence of misogyny is “subtle and insidious,” creating uneven health outcomes, professional prospects, and spiritual harm remains difficult for me to accept. The book reads to me as if it were alienated from the experience of many people for whom “gender” and the relationship between men and women is much more of a workaround, much more earthy and particular, much more “creole”, than she wishes to consider. I find the categories—"misogyny” and its wholesale corruption, as well as the attendant repair—too brittle a tool for the repair needed.

Critiques of misogyny fall prey to the same critiques of technological progress that David Edgerton takes up. Edgerton argues that technologies do not move linearly, taking the place of prior technologies completely and rendering the former obsolete. Rather, old technologies stick around and some widely-celebrated “new” technologies fail. Additionally, some technologies that are new take hold simply because they are trendy, and not because they are better than what existed prior; in fact, they are often worse. They might reflect, too, a widespread preference for replacement over repair. By contrast, to repair something, as Kwaku came to find out, requires both a knack for improvisation and a knowledge of the technology and the conditions it would encounter. Kwaku observed what was needed and figured it out.

What I think is happening with the misogyny critiques, writ large, is this sort of misunderstanding of technological progress that Edgerton is critiquing. The assumption is that the new—in this face, gender norms inflected by feminism—will inevitably outpace and replace the former. But in this preference for novelty, what has been ignored is the sort of skillful craftsmanship of those who came before us and could just wing it because they understood how the machine worked. The preference for replacement has led us to think we could craft a new system that would be missing the weaknesses and flaws of the former. But it turns out the flaws are just part of the world. The “blind confidence” of the man who seeks out the dealership when the check-engine light goes on reveals not knowledge but ignorance; he is alienated from the machine because has not the first idea how it works. So, too, the doubly employed couple who seek out a new theory of gender when they are bickering after too many sleepless nights with a new baby. What they need is not a new theory, but maybe a more skillful observation of the world and its limits, of the facts on the ground. Perhaps more paid leave would help a bit. But more likely, demands are just the shape of the world. Attempts to make caregiving less demanding—especially in order that we might be more skillful employees—is one of the few things able to make a radical out of me.

Settling on “misogyny” as an account of what is wrong with the world, to me, is like preferring the novelty of a machine that “just works” to the reality of a world that is riven through with unpredictable demands. Like a car, such a system alienates us from the reality we are trying to move across. These theories also demand compliance. Any workplace friction or disappointment can be counted toward its tally, any interpersonal difficulty seen as evidence of its existence. For the same reason, these theories are non-falsifiable. When any experience of cross-sex friction can count toward misogyny’s tally, there is simply no way to discredit its account.

Like divinity, misogyny does not admit of degrees. And like technological progress, it prefers the shape of its own novel forms over the haphazard workarounds of former generations. These workarounds weren’t always attractive, but they got a lot of people where they needed to go.

Like Kwaku’s car, gender is a wide collection of experiences, genetics, dispositions, aptitudes and culture. It creates many and vast opportunities for cross-sex relations, ones we might emulate and ones we might not wish to. But we cannot grasp at universal diagnoses and solutions for realities that are so embodied and so particular. When we seek out and settle for accounts of misogyny as “what’s wrong with us,” we risk preferring theory that will “fix” us for the abiding, demanding realities of the lives we’ve been given. It seems sometimes that such accounts demand a world that cannot exist. Lamenting the shape of a piano keyboard, designed around 1700, and using it as evidence of a bias against women is more than just chronological snobbery. It’s a demand for a world that was built with only your interests in mind. Some men’s hands are too big; some women’s too small. Might that not be what makes us interesting?

Like Kwaku’s car, we need to jerry-rig our own ways through the world that we have. It might be gritty and a bit unreliable—but also like Kwaku’s car, it’ll get you where you need to go.