Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

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.