Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

misogyny should not be understood as a monolithic, deep-seated psychological hatred of girls and women. Instead, it’s best conceptualized as the “law enforcement” branch of patriarchy—a system that functions to police and enforce gendered norms and expectations, and involves girls and women facing disproportionately or distinctively hostile treatment because of their gender, among other factors.

I think of misogyny as being a bit like the shock collar worn by a dog to keep them behind one of those invisible fences that proliferate in suburbia. Misogyny is capable of causing pain, to be sure, and it often does so. But even when it isn’t actively hurting anyone, it tends to discourage girls and women from venturing out of bounds. If we stray, or err, we know what we are in for.

my account of misogyny doesn’t require us to know what someone is feeling, deep inside, in order to say that they are perpetuating or enabling misogyny. What we need to know is something we are often in a much better position to establish: that a girl or woman is facing disproportionately or distinctively gendered hostile treatment because she is a woman in a man’s world—that is, a woman in a historically patriarchal society (which includes, I believe, most if not all of them).

women as well as men can engage in misogynistic behavior—for example, by dismissing other women, or engaging in the kind of moralism that tends to let male counterparts off the hook, while harshly blaming women for that same behavior.

Entitled tackles a wide range of ways in which misogyny, himpathy, and male entitlement work in tandem with other oppressive systems to produce unjust, perverse, and sometimes bizarre outcomes. Many of these stem from the fact that women are expected to give traditionally feminine goods (such as sex, care, nurturing, and reproductive labor) to designated, often more privileged men, and to refrain from taking traditionally masculine goods (such as power, authority, and claims to knowledge) away from them. These goods can in turn be understood as those to which privileged men are tacitly deemed entitled, and which these men will often garner himpathy for wrongfully taking from women—when it comes to sex, most obviously, though by no means exclusively.

All in all, this book shows that an illegitimate sense of male entitlement gives rise to a wide range of misogynistic behavior. When a woman fails to give a man what he’s supposedly owed, she will often face punishment and reprisal—whether from him, his himpathetic supporters, or the misogynistic social structures in which she is embedded.

What’s more, within this system, women are often unfairly deprived of their genuine entitlement to both feminine-coded and masculine-coded goods. This results in inequalities that range from a woman not receiving adequate care for her pain, to her not being able to take up traditionally male positions of power, to her not...

Incels believe they are entitled to, and have been deprived of, sex with “hot” young women, who are dubbed “Staceys.” Sometimes incels also express an abstract longing for love, or for a girlfriend—or, more concretely, a woman to provide them with the attention and affection that Rodger lamented lacking. But an incel will typically want sex and love not only, and perhaps not even primarily, for their own sake. His rhetoric betrays a desire to have these goods for instrumental reasons: as currency to buy status in masculine hierarchies, relative to the “Chads.” These are the supposed “alpha males,” whose masculine prowess contrasts with the incel’s (again, supposedly) lowly status. And an incel’s plans for revenge may therefore target not just women but also the men they perceive as besting and thwarting them.

an incel will typically want sex and love not only, and perhaps not even primarily, for their own sake. His rhetoric betrays a desire to have these goods for instrumental reasons: as currency to buy status in masculine hierarchies, relative to the “Chads.” These are the supposed “alpha males,” whose masculine prowess contrasts with the incel’s (again, supposedly) lowly status. And an incel’s plans for revenge may therefore target not just women but also the men they perceive as besting and thwarting them.

subtly, incels are but a vivid symptom of a much broader and deeper cultural phenomenon. They crystallize some men’s toxic sense of entitlement to have people look up to them steadfastly, with a loving gaze, admiringly—and to target and even destroy those who fail, or refuse, to do so. And, as will emerge here eventually, these men’s sense of entitlement to such affection and admiration is a trait they often share with the far greater proportion of men who commit acts of domestic, dating, and intimate partner violence.

Anyone can feel lonely. But a wrongheaded sense of entitlement to a woman’s sexual, material, reproductive, and emotional labor may result in incel tendencies prior to the relationship and intimate partner violence afterward, if he feels thwarted, resentful, or jealous. In other words, an incel is an abuser waiting to happen.

So many instances of domestic, dating, and intimate partner violence have much the same shape—the innocent-seeming beginnings, the indications of jealousy, and the brutal acts of retribution for some supposed act of betrayal—yet have little to no impact on our collective consciousness. Two to three women are murdered by their current or former intimate partner every day in the United States, on average.33 And by far the most dangerous time for a woman with respect to intimate partner violence is when she either leaves, or threatens to leave, a relationship—thus provoking jealousy, rage, and feelings of abandonment in her male partner or ex-partner.

Numerous news stories referred to Turner’s swimming prowess and the loss of his bright future—never mentioning Miller’s.

The loss of Turner’s “happy-go-lucky” and “easy-going” demeanor struck his father as being a travesty, rather than the appropriate outcome of his son’s criminal wrongdoing.

Himpathy often radically distorts the framing of men’s violence against women, as well as children in some cases.20 Himpathy imaginatively transforms presumptively brutal murders into understandable acts of passion or, alternatively, warranted desperation. And it imaginatively turns other crimes, such as rape, into mere misunderstandings and alcohol-fueled mishaps.

When it comes to himpathy, herasure, and victim blaming, there’s no shortage of possibilities. And so we see that rape involves so much more than individual bad apples. It involves bad actors who are enabled, protected, and even fostered by a himpathetic social system.

While extremely high rates of exceptional clearances in rape cases may be news to many people, there is a growing awareness—in liberal circles, at least—of the problem of untested rape kits. Recent testing of some 10,000 previously untested rape kits (discovered during a routine tour of a Detroit police storage warehouse) resulted in the identification of 817 serial rapists. According to Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy, there are an estimated 400,000 untested rape kits nationwide, and the existing evidence suggests that rapists commit between seven to eleven rapes, on average, before being apprehended.

Another sobering reality: of the rape kits that had previously gone untested, some 86 percent of the victims were people of color—primarily girls and women. As Worthy puts it, “You’re not going to find too many blond-haired, blue-eyed white women [with untested kits]….Their kits are treated differently, their cases are solved….Race is at the center of this in many ways as well, unfortunately; we know that across the criminal justice system.”

sexual offenses perpetrated by (typically, adolescent) boys against girls count as misogyny. And this is so even if one holds that the perpetrators in such cases may themselves be in some sense the victims of misogyny and rape culture, which inflict moral damage partly via inculcating toxic behavior among those not yet old enough to know better—or even to know quite what they are doing, if they are very young.

The typical sexual assailant will commit his first offense during adolescence, according to self-report measures.

And so we see that, for boys and men—especially those endowed with privilege—being held accountable for misogynistic behavior is often the exception, not the rule, even in rape cases. Meanwhile, for many girls and women, particularly those who are oppressed along other axes—race, class, sexuality, and disability, for starters—not only does their rapist or abuser often go unpunished; the women themselves may be punished for protesting this injustice.

One obvious ethical obligation when it comes to sexual activity is to actively try to glean whether or not your partner wants, deep down, to engage in it. If there is any real uncertainty, better to err on the side of caution, and cease and desist with alacrity.

None of this is politically or aesthetically comfortable; all of it is realistic. And it raises the specter of sex that is unwanted, and even coerced, but not by any particular person. Rather, the pressure derives from patriarchal social scripts and the prevalent sense of male sexual entitlement that would make it feel rude, even wrong, for Margot to walk out on Robert.

Silverman, though doubtless well-meaning and acting on prevalent (and, plausibly, gendered) social norms, nonetheless indulged this man’s bad behavior. But not only was she not criticized for doing this; she was actively celebrated. And so it goes: when women do minister to men’s hurt feelings, they tend to be rewarded. And when they do not, they are liable to be punished.

It’s not just hyperprivileged men who can wield this kind of power, either. These things happen every day; they happen within marriages. In a recent Vox article, a woman wrote about what she described as “her deepest, darkest truth,” which she had finally divulged in couples counseling: she had felt sexually violated by her husband all throughout their eight-year marriage.20 “The unwanted sex at times made me sick,” she related. “Once I had to run straight from bed to the bathroom, where I retched into the toilet.” And yet, for the fifteen years following that counseling session, these awful realities were almost impossible for her to acknowledge. She was afraid to tell her husband that she didn’t want to have sex with him; she was afraid to reject him; and she was even afraid to admit to herself what was happening. Instead, she writes, “I bargained my way out of sex as often as I could. I gloried in being sick enough to have the right to refuse,” even though “I knew, intellectually, I was entitled to refuse sex” at any time. When she couldn’t get out of it, she let her husband have sex with her, while she read a book to distract herself.

Submitting to sex with a man who knew it was unwanted, who knew I felt deep pain at our lack of emotional connection, and who knew—who had been clearly told—that it felt like a violation, broke something in me. Knowing that he could still enjoy and feel emotionally fulfilled by that unwanted sex shattered my idea of our marriage. I felt like a sex doll. I felt unselfed. But I blamed myself.

The kicker? The author, who remained anonymous, is a humanities professor who regularly teaches feminist theory. But, she confesses, “all the feminist texts I had read could not drown out what I had absorbed from society and popular culture: that it was my duty to satisfy my husband, regardless of my own feelings.”

In addition to being afraid of dire social consequences—from professional retribution to marital estrangement—a woman may experience intense guilt and shame for saying no to the men who feel entitled not just to sex but to her eager consent and participation.

The relevant inequalities are a product of a patriarchal culture, and the subsequent threats and punishment leveled at girls and women who resist and challenge the will of male authority figures. Hence this particular form of internalized misogyny: the shame and guilt women often feel for not protecting a man who mistreats us. We do not want to hurt him or let him down; we want to be a good girl.

Women in general, and Black women in particular, routinely encounter medical professionals who regard them as hysterical, and subsequently treat their pain with skepticism.

Women who seek help are less likely than men to be taken seriously when they report pain and are less likely to have their pain adequately treated.

Moreover, women tended to be portrayed as “hysterical and emotional” in the medical literature, resulting in more diagnoses of psychosomatic illnesses and perceptions of their emotional volatility, according to the researchers. Female chronic pain patients were hence likelier to receive a diagnosis of “histrionic disorder” (defined by “excessive” emotionality and attention-seeking behavior) than were their male counterparts.

women, compared to men, received less and less effective pain relief, less pain medication with opioids, and more antidepressants and got more mental health referrals….A major finding is that women’s pain in the reviewed studies was psychologized….Women’s pain reports are taken less seriously, their pain is discounted as being psychic or nonexistent, and their medication is less adequate than treatment given to men.

overall, the authors concluded: “the reviewed studies showed gender bias in the [medical] encounter, along with gender bias in prescribed medication. Differences in the treatment of men and women in these studies could not be explained by different medical needs.”

Samulowitz and her colleagues found a particular unwillingness on the part of medical professionals to believe women’s pain reports for conditions without obvious physiological markers, such as fibromyalgia (which predominantly affects women).19 Overall, when it came to such conditions, “women’s narratives about their experiences with clinicians showed…how hard they have had to work to be taken seriously, believed, and understood in medical encounters.”20 And, in general, “women with pain can be perceived as hysterical, emotional, complaining, not wanting to get better, malingerers, and fabricating the pain, as if it is all in her head.

Other studies showed that women with chronic pain…are assigned psychological [rather] than somatic causes for their pain.” Meanwhile, “men were presented as being stoic, tolerating pain, [and] denying pain….Further, men were described as being autonomous, in control, avoiding seeking health care, [and] not talking about pain.”

But women may indeed be reluctant to seek medical help, perhaps for different reasons (say, in anticipation of not being taken seriously, as opposed to being loath to admit weakness).

Pain thus turns out to be a powerful site of testimonial quieting, a concept developed by the philosopher Kristie Dotson, wherein “an audience fails to identify a speaker as a knower.”32 Because the audience doubts or impugns the speaker’s competence, the speaker ends up effectively being silenced. She may complain of her pain, but her pain cries go unheeded. As Dotson shows, this kind of silencing is often enacted against Black women in America.

There is also a question about whether stereotypes, even about specific groups of women, provide the best explanation of the phenomenon of testimonial injustice (or, perhaps better, testimonial injustices). After all, for many women, their testimony is considerably less likely to be dismissed in closely related medical settings: when they are testifying as to the health of children in their care, for example. Women are indeed often regarded as supremely competent, trustworthy caregivers for their charges, until proven otherwise (in which case the punishment for failures of “good womanhood” may be harsh, swift, and disproportionate).

Good womanhood

Why is the default to trust women in some contexts but not others (as closely related as these may be)? A plausible explanation in this instance is that women are regarded as more than entitled (indeed obligated) to provide care, but far less entitled to ask for and receive it.

The problem then, at heart, may not be stereotypes about the trustworthiness of certain groups of women—for, as we’ve seen, these are deployed in an ad hoc manner to justify dismissing them in some, but only some, settings. The deeper problem here may be the sense that a woman is not entitled to ask for care for her own sake, or for its own sake—simply because she is in pain, and because that pain matters.

The evidence that women are being let down by the medical establishment is overwhelming. The bodies, symptoms and diseases that affect half the world’s population are being dismissed, disbelieved and ignored.

Cardiovascular disease has been the most common cause of death for women in the United States for the last three decades. And following a heart attack, women are more likely than men to die—partly due to the fact that women’s symptoms (stomach pain, breathlessness, nausea, and fatigue) are often missed, since these signs are deemed to be “atypical,” instead of typical for women. In Sweden, women suffering from heart attacks are given lower priority for ambulances and have to wait an average of twenty minutes longer at a hospital before receiving treatment.48 In the United Kingdom, women are 50 percent more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack. And young women who suffer from heart attacks are almost twice as likely to die in the hospital, compared with their male counterparts. Yet in the United Kingdom, research funding for coronary artery disease in men far exceeds that for women.

This.

This lack of research on non-male bodies has negative effects when it comes to more mundane medical matters too. Several common medications, including antidepressants and antihistamines, show menstrual-cycle effects, meaning they will affect a person who menstruates differently at different stages in their cycle. As a result of this, many of us may be taking the wrong dosage of the drugs we ingest on a daily basis.50

And when it comes to consumer safety, the tendency to treat privileged male bodies as the default may have far-reaching adverse outcomes. When women wearing seatbelts are involved in car crashes, they are 73 percent more likely than men to be killed or seriously injured. This appears to be due to the fact that, until very recently, all crash test dummies were modeled on cisgender men—ignoring potentially important differences between cis men and women in typical fat distribution, skeletal structure, and so on. When “female” crash test dummies were finally added, they were typically lighter and shorter than most actual women.52

just be a black woman living in the United States.”)54 But if you’re feeling optimistic, slow your roll. Wray’s application for funding to continue her research in low- and middle-income countries was turned down. The research was “not a high enough priority,” according to the British Medical Research Council.55 The council members might as well have just come out and said it: the health of women—especially nonwhite and poor women—matters very little.

The vast majority of those who support such anti-abortion legislation have done nothing to address the shockingly high maternal mortality rates in the United States (particularly for Black, Native American, and Alaska Native women);25 they show little to no interest in securing additional child support for children born into poverty; they appear unconcerned that poor-quality food and water (including, notoriously in Flint, Michigan) cause many Americans serious health problems; they actively work against the expansion of affordable healthcare; and they tend to be supremely indifferent to the police violence and state-sanctioned executions to which the Black Lives Matter movement has drawn urgent attention.

These purposes have drawn on anti-feminist sentiment from the outset. In an important series of papers, legal scholars Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel have shown that the contemporary anti-abortion movement in the United States had its roots in the “AAA strategy,” spearheaded prior to the Roe v. Wade decision. The idea was to recruit Americans who had traditionally voted Democrat to the Republican Party by stressing the supposed moral threat of “acid” (LSD), amnesty (for so-called draft dodgers from the Vietnam War), and, finally, abortion—envisaged as a threat to the nuclear family.

Triple-A attacks on McGovern condemned abortion rights as part of a permissive youth culture that was corrosive of traditional forms of authority. The objection to abortion rights was not that abortion was murder, but that abortion rights (like the demand for amnesty) validated a breakdown of traditional roles that required men to be prepared to kill and die in war and women to save themselves for marriage and devote themselves to motherhood.

As Michelle Oberman and W. David Ball have recently pointed out, men have been almost entirely exempt from the wrath of anti-abortion activists, despite the fact that nine out of ten unwanted pregnancies happen within heterosexual relationships, and most patients who have abortions say that their partners agreed with their decision. Yet attempts to criminalize men’s participation in such choices—still less their ill-considered ejaculations—are thin on the ground.