The Complicit Woman

Internalised Misogyny, Patriarchal Complicity, and the Female Perpetrator

The image of the abuser is one that culture has overwhelmingly coded as male. He is the husband who controls, the producer who coerces, the predator who grooms. This framing, while rooted in statistical and structural reality, has allowed a more disquieting truth to remain underexamined: that women, too, can be the shapers of abuse, through the ways in which patriarchal systems have colonised their interior lives.

Internalised misogyny is the process by which women absorb and reproduce the misogynistic values of the societies that produced them. It is not necessarily an individual character flaw or personality quality, but rather, the predictable output of a system that teaches women, from birth, that their worth is conditional, that male approval is paramount, and that other women are rivals, threats, or objects. When these lessons are absorbed deeply enough, some women do not simply participate in patriarchal structures: they become their enforcers.

This essay examines the psychological architecture of internalised misogyny and traces its consequences through three historical and contemporary case studies: the complicity of women in the Salem witch trials of 1692, the enabling role played by women in Harvey Weinstein’s Hollywood abuse network, and the most forensically documented case of female complicity in modern sexual exploitation: that of Ghislaine Maxwell.

Taken together, these cases illuminate a pattern that is neither aberrant nor inexplicable, but the logical, if devastating, consequence of systems that reward women for policing one another.

I. The Psychology of Internalised Misogyny

The term internalised misogyny was theorised and expanded upon within second-wave

feminist scholarship, drawing on earlier psychoanalytic concepts of identification with

the aggressor.

The mechanism is broadly consistent: when a group is subjected to sustained subordination, members of that group may come to identify with the values and perspectives of those who dominate them. This identification can manifest as contempt for fellow group members, as a disavowal of shared identity, or as active participation in the structures of one’s own oppression.

Sandra Bartky, writing in Femininity and Domination (1990), described this process as a form of psychological colonisation- that the internalisation not merely of behaviours but of the evaluative gaze itself.

The woman who has internalised misogyny does not simply experience sexism from outside; she replicates it from within, measuring herself and other women against the standards of a patriarchal world and finding them, finding herself, perpetually wanting.

The clinical literature on trauma bonding and coercive control adds a further dimension. Judith Herman’s Trauma and Recovery (1992) demonstrated that prolonged exposure to coercive systems — whether domestic, institutional, or systemic—can produce profound alterations in identity, loyalty, and moral perception.

Survivors of such systems may identify with their abusers, enforce the rules of abusive environments upon others, and experience genuine cognitive dissonance when confronted with evidence of that environment’s harm.

This is a sophisticated adaptation of a mind under sustained duress.

Crucially, these dynamics are amplified by the material conditions of patriarchy.

Women who are economically dependent, socially isolated, or whose status derives entirely from proximity to powerful men have concrete incentives, beyond psychological compulsion, to protect those men and the systems they operate within.

Complicity, in this light, is rarely simple: it is frequently rational self- preservation within a system designed to make female independence costly.

II. Salem, 1692: Women Accusing Women

The Salem witch trials are typically narrated as a story about mass hysteria, Puritan theology, or the persecution of women by men. What this framing obscures is that women were among the most active accusers. Of the approximately 185 individuals accused of witchcraft in the Salem episode, a significant proportion were accused by other women- most notably by the group of young women whose testimony initiated the crisis.

The social structure of Puritan New England was one of the most rigidly patriarchal in the colonial world. Women had no formal legal personhood, no right to own property independently of their husbands, and no access to civic or religious authority. Their social capital was almost entirely relational, contingent on their reputations for piety, submission, and domestic virtue.

In this environment, accusation functioned as one of the few instruments of social power available to women.

Carol Karlsen’s foundational study The Devil in the Shape of a Woman (1987) demonstrated that the women most frequently accused of witchcraft in New England were those who disrupted normative patriarchal inheritance patterns — women who had inherited or stood to inherit property in the absence of male heirs, women who were economically independent, women whose behaviour deviated from prescribed female roles.

The accusers, by contrast, tended to be women whose social positions were more precarious and whose conformity to patriarchal norms was, in a sense, being rewarded by the act of accusation itself.

This does not require us to impute cynical motive to every accuser, many of whom were themselves traumatised, young, and operating within a theological framework in which they may have genuinely believed. What it does reveal is a structural logic: patriarchal systems create conditions in which women are incentivised to police one another, to identify threats to the normative order in other women, and to enact punishment upon those who deviate.

The witch trial is, in this reading, not an anomaly but an extreme expression of a dynamic that operates at lower intensities across patriarchal cultures in every era.

The women of Salem did not act in simple solidarity with male authority. Many were driven by genuine fear, by interpersonal grievance, by theological conviction, and by the experience of their own powerlessness. But the form their agency took, ie. accusation of other women as threats to the community, was shaped entirely by the patriarchal framework within which they existed. They weaponised the one instrument available to them, and they directed it, as the system invited them to, against women who had stepped outside its prescribed boundaries.

III. Hollywood and the Weinstein Network: The Female Enabler

When the New York Times and The New Yorker published their investigations into Harvey Weinstein in October 2017, the immediate cultural reckoning focused understandably, on the scale of male abuse of power in the entertainment industry.

Less scrutinised, but no less significant, was the question of the women who had operated as intermediaries, gatekeepers, and facilitators within the system that made that abuse possible.

The accounts that emerged from Weinstein survivors repeatedly described encounters in which women — assistants, executives, and agents — had played active roles in arranging meetings, dismissing complaints, and in some instances accompanying victims to the situations in which they were abused.

These were not women acting in ignorance. Many, according to testimony, were aware of Weinstein’s conduct or had directly witnessed it. Their participation was, in various degrees, knowing.

Understanding this requires grappling with the specific economics of Hollywood as a patriarchal institution. The entertainment industry has historically been an environment in which women’s careers are almost entirely contingent on male approval, in which professional advancement depends on proximity to powerful men, and in which the cost of resistance or disclosure is career termination.

In this environment, female complicity is not simply a psychological phenomenon: it is an occupational strategy, shaped by a system that punishes loyalty to other women and rewards loyalty to powerful men.

Several Weinstein survivors described how female assistants had been deployed as a form of social lubricant, ie. their presence at meetings providing a false sense of safety, their professional demeanour legitimising contexts that were in fact predatory.

This weaponisation of women’s perceived trustworthiness is itself an expression of misogynistic logic: women were used to lower other women’s defences precisely because their gender was assumed to signal safety.

The broader Hollywood ecosystem also sustained what might be described as an economy of female self-policing. Reporting on Weinstein’s behaviour was, for decades, professionally lethal for women. Those who remained silent, and those who actively assisted in maintaining silence, did so within a system that had made the alternative — speaking out, departing, refusing — economically catastrophic.

The moral analysis must account for the coercion embedded in the structure. Complicity is not the same as equivalence of culpability.

Yet the question of where the threshold of complicity becomes moral responsibility is not one that feminist analysis can avoid. The women who facilitated Weinstein’s access to victims, whatever the pressures they faced, contributed to the harm of other women.

Feminist solidarity was, in these instances, sacrificed to individual survival within a patriarchal system. Understanding the systemic pressures does not require us to absolve individual action. It requires us to identify the system that generated the conditions for that action and to hold both simultaneously in view.

IV. Ghislaine Maxwell: Complicity as Architecture

If the Weinstein case represents complicity as occupational adaptation, the case of Ghislaine Maxwell represents something more systematic: complicity as deliberate construction.

Maxwell, the British socialite convicted in December 2021 of sex trafficking and related offences in connection with the Jeffrey Epstein abuse network, was not a bystander who failed to act.

She was, according to the trial record and survivor testimony, a central architect of a system designed to recruit, groom, and sexually exploit girls and young women.

What makes Maxwell’s case analytically significant is not its extremity (though the

scale and severity of the harm she facilitated were extreme) but the ways in which her gender was instrumentalised within the structure of the abuse.

Survivor testimonies consistently described Maxwell’s role as that of the “safe” adult woman: it was she who initially befriended victims, who normalised the sexual nature of interactions with Epstein, who framed exploitation as education or opportunity, and whose female presence was used to neutralise the alarm that a lone older man might have triggered.

Maxwell grew up in an environment in which female worth was subordinated entirely to male power. Her father, Robert Maxwell, was a domineering and abusive patriarch whose attention and approval were the determining currency of family life.

Psychological analysis cannot be applied retrospectively with certainty, but the pattern that her adult behaviour represents — the seeking of male approval, the subordination of other women to that project, the deployment of her own femininity as an instrument of male power — is consistent with the operation of deep internalised misogyny in an individual who had learned, at formative depth, that women’s interests were expendable to men’s.

Maxwell’s own defence, both legally and in her post-conviction interview with journalist Jeremy Vine, was essentially one of non-recognition: she refused to acknowledge the harm of the conduct, referred to victims in dismissive terms, and framed her own actions as peripheral or innocent. This refusal of recognition is itself psychologically diagnostic.

One of the most consistent features of deeply internalised misogyny is the incapacity, or unwillingness, to recognise other women’s suffering as real and as mattering. The logic that women’s pain is less significant, their testimony less credible, their experience less worthy of protection is, at the extreme, a logic that permits the active facilitation of that pain.

The Maxwell case also forces a reckoning with the question of class and power. Maxwell was not a woman in a precarious position acting under duress. She was wealthy, educated, and possessed of considerable independent social standing. This removes some of the mitigating structural pressures that complicate analysis in cases like those of Weinstein’s lower-level female employees. Her complicity was not survival under coercion, or not primarily so. It was the exercise of power against women with less of it, in service of a man with more.

This is perhaps the purest expression of internalised misogyny at the extreme: the identification with patriarchal power so complete that other women become, in effect, a resource to be exploited.

V. Towards a Critical Framework

What can be extracted from these three cases, separated by centuries and cultures, is a consistent structural logic. Patriarchal systems do not merely oppress women, but rather, they create conditions in which women oppress one another.

They do so by making female status contingent on male approval, by incentivising the policing of female deviance, by punishing solidarity and rewarding complicity, and by teaching women that their own interests are best served by the interests of powerful men.

Internalised misogyny is not a defect of individual women. It is the predictable output of systems that have spent millennia teaching women to devalue themselves and one another. The women who acted as Epstein’s recruiters, who testified against their neighbours in Salem, who kept secrets in Weinstein’s corridors were not uniquely morally deficient. They were, in various degrees and under various pressures, enacting lessons that their societies had comprehensively taught them.

This analysis does not require us to abandon moral judgement. Maxwell committed crimes. Women who facilitated Weinstein’s abuse bear moral responsibility for the harm they enabled. The accusers of Salem sent innocent people to their deaths. The fact that these women operated within systems that shaped and incentivised their behaviour does not dissolve individual accountability… particularly where, as with Maxwell, that behaviour was sustained, deliberate, and unconstrained by economic necessity.

What it does require is that we expand our analysis beyond individual pathology to systemic architecture. If we wish to understand why women are sometimes complicit in the abuse of other women, we must examine the systems that make such complicity rational, rewarding, or psychologically necessary.

And if we wish to prevent it, we must dismantle those systems, not merely condemn the women they produce.

The feminist project has always understood that patriarchy harms women. The harder understanding — and the more complete one — is that patriarchy also works through women, that it enlists them as its instruments, and that the violence it perpetuates is sometimes delivered by female hands. Confronting this is not a concession to misogyny.

It is the fullest possible accounting of its damage.

References include:

Sandra Bartky, Femininity and Domination (1990); Judith

Herman, Trauma and Recovery (1992); Carol Karlsen, The Devil in the Shape of a

Woman (1987); trial testimony from United States v. Maxwell (2021); and

investigative reporting from The New York Times and The New Yorker (2017).