Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

The case also highlighted the phenomenon of himpathy: the way powerful and privileged boys and men who commit acts of sexual violence or engage in other misogynistic behavior often receive sympathy and concern over their female victims.

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.

In addition to this, misogyny is typically (though not invariably) a response to a woman’s violations of gendered “law and order.” The fact that Ford received abusive messages and death threats for speaking out about a powerful man’s mistreatment of her exemplifies such punishment.

In general, 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.

In contrast to misogyny, I take sexism to be the theoretical and ideological branch of patriarchy: the beliefs, ideas, and assumptions that serve to rationalize and naturalize patriarchal norms and expectations—including a gendered division of labor, and men’s dominance over women in areas of traditionally male power and authority.

But we need to understand that someone can engage in misogynistic behavior without necessarily having sexist beliefs about women. Brett Kavanaugh’s defense of himself against the allegations of sexual misconduct, on the grounds that he had employed an unusually large number of female clerks, is really no defense at all.

More broadly, a man may be happy to extend a certain amount of power to a woman, as long as she does not threaten or challenge him. But if she does, he may engage in misogynistic behavior to put her in her place, and punish her for having ideas beyond her station. He would then be more of a misogynist than a sexist, on my analysis.

On the whole, though, my account of misogyny counsels us to focus less on the individual perpetrators of misogyny, and more on misogyny’s targets and victims. This is helpful for at least two reasons. First, some instances of misogyny lack any individual perpetrators whatsoever; misogyny may be a purely structural phenomenon, perpetuated by social institutions, policies, and broader cultural mores.14 Second, understanding misogyny as more about the hostility girls and women face, as opposed to the hostility men feel deep down in their hearts, helps us avoid a problem of psychological inscrutability.

So I would argue that it is best to think of misogyny primarily as a property of the social environments girls and women navigate, wherein they are liable to be subject to hateful or hostile treatment because of their gender—together, in many cases, with their gendered “bad” behavior.

weapon lose its characteristic “punch” and power. So I propose defining a misogynist as someone who is an overachiever in perpetuating misogyny: practicing misogyny with particular frequency and consistency compared to others in that environment.

I’ve become more and more cognizant of the way misogyny is inextricably bound up with the related social ills that an intersectional approach, as pioneered by Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, reminds us to attend to. These include racism (in particular, white supremacy), xenophobia, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism, among other things.

There is no universal experience of misogyny—not least because gendered norms and expectations always intersect with these other unjust systems to produce novel forms of oppression faced by different groups of girls and women.

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.

In part, women are punished and blamed—indeed, subject to misogyny—for daring to come forward and speak out about the reality of the problem. Many people feel that men are entitled not just to be deemed innocent until proven guilty, but to be deemed innocent, period, regardless of their misdeeds.

This was in November 2018. Prior to the shooting, Beierle had posted a video online, citing Elliot Rodger as inspiration. So did Chris Harper-Mercer, twenty-six, before he opened fire in a classroom at his Oregon community college—murdering eight students and an assistant professor, while injuring eight others. So did Alek Minassian, twenty-five, before driving a van into pedestrians in Toronto, killing ten people and wounding sixteen. “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Staceys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” wrote Minassian beforehand, on Facebook.

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.”

Moreover, and more 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.

As I’ve already suggested, it’s a mistake to think that incels are primarily motivated by sex. Not only are some incels also interested in love (or some outward simulacrum thereof), but their interest in having sex with “Staceys” is at least partly a means to an end—the end being to beat the “Chads” at their own game. Sex thus promises to soothe these men’s inferiority complexes, at least as much as to satisfy their libidos.

Incels are often virulent racists. This is not to say that all incels are white; indeed, there are enough nonwhite incels to have given the racist terms “curry-cels” and “rice-cels” currency.13 But incels who are not white typically subscribe to white supremacist ideology.

Such vicious anti-miscegenation bigotry is obviously tightly connected with incels’ fixation on masculine hierarchies—for example, the idea of a man lower down the racist social hierarchy gaining sexual and emotional access to a white woman is enraging to an incel.18 His aggression toward both the man and the woman in this scenario may well be equal, and he may not be white himself. Even so, his hatred is clearly a product of white supremacist patriarchy and the sense of entitlement it can generate.

Inasmuch as an incel regards himself as entitled to sex with women, and women as therefore obligated to have sex with him, he evinces an indifference to what would go against her will. For these reasons, it is clearly sexual activity, not celibacy, that should be thought of as voluntary or involuntary.

So why do incels sometimes resort to such dehumanizing and objectifying language in speaking about women—for instance, by calling women “femoids” (or “foids,” for short)?21 As we have seen, it’s not because they believe that women are literally nonhuman animals, mere sexual objects, robots, or similar. There is a simple alternative explanation: it is an expression of rage and the resulting desire to put women down. Incels are passionately invested in social hierarchies, including one that resembles the great chain of being, with god at the top, nonhuman animals at the bottom, and various ranks of human beings positioned in between them. So implying that a woman is something nonhuman may serve as the ultimate insult.

When accused of misogynistic behavior, men often respond by invoking their recognition of the humanity of their wives, sisters, mothers, or other female relatives. Far better that a man realize that no woman belongs to him—and that he is not entitled to have any woman’s love, care, and admiration in an asymmetrical moral relationship.

Incels are not amoral (though they are, of course, highly immoral); they are deep believers in a specific moral order. They feel not merely angry but aggrieved; they are not merely disappointed but resentful. They feel not merely let down but positively betrayed, by women in particular and by the world in general. They feel that the world owes them certain favors. And they often believe that they are vulnerable, victimized, and sensitive, even traumatized.

The sad truth is that, like many oppressors, incels perceive themselves as being the vulnerable ones. They feel like the true victims, even as they lash out violently against others. And they feel they are in the right, even as they commit the most deplorable acts of wrongdoing.

But when someone is in pain precisely because he has an overblown sense of entitlement to the soothing ministrations of others, which have not been forthcoming, stepping in to assuage his pain becomes an ethically fraught enterprise. Even expressing our sympathies runs the risk of feeding into his false, dangerous sense that other people—especially girls and women—exist to pander to the incel’s needs and to gratify his ego.

Recall that himpathy, as I construe it, is the disproportionate or inappropriate sympathy extended to a male perpetrator over his similarly or less privileged female targets or victims, in cases of sexual assault, harassment, and other misogynistic behavior. Given that misogyny often involves punishing and blaming a woman for her “bad” behavior—bad by the lights of patriarchal norms and expectations, that is—you can understand himpathy as the flip side of misogyny; its understudied mirror image; its natural (albeit highly unjust) complement.

Instead of blaming the victim, others who expressed himpathy with Turner tried to erase Miller from the story—an act of “herasure,” as I call it. Numerous news stories referred to Turner’s swimming prowess and the loss of his bright future—never mentioning Miller’s.

Meanwhile, Turner’s father bemoaned the fact that his son could no longer enjoy a nice rib-eye steak fresh off the grill, having lost his appetite. 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.

In 2018, The Center for Investigative Reporting journalists, in conjunction with reporters from ProPublica and Newsy, conducted a year-long investigation into this practice. They filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain data from 110 major cities and counties, although they succeeded in securing records for only about 60. They found that in almost half of these, police officers had used the designation of exceptional clearance to close the majority of rape cases.

Meanwhile, many cities and counties boast of high clearance rates, making no distinction between cases that actually resulted in an arrest and those cleared via exceptional means. Exceptional clearances thus threaten to skew public perception with regard to police efficacy.

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.

Given this, it seems clear that the 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.40 Moreover, even making the necessary exception for statutory offenses committed by younger persons (which make for cases that are rife with moral complexities), a significant proportion of sexual assault is committed by juvenile offenders—between a quarter and a third in the United States, according to recent estimates. These offenders are overwhelmingly male, just as with older perpetrators.

This is partly because women are often treated as representative of a certain “type” of woman, and effectively blamed or punished for the misdeeds of the whole collective. It is also partly because misogynistic aggression can stem from myriad forms of dissatisfaction (resulting from men’s being subject to capitalist exploitation, for example). And it may then involve displacement—colloquially, “punching down” behavior, directed at those who are vulnerable and available, who often happen to be women. If a woman faces this displaced aggression because she lives in a historically patriarchal world—in which men have long had, and continue to have, social permission to “act out”—she is still a victim of misogyny, according to my analysis.

All the same, it is important to recognize the ways in which women who directly flout patriarchal norms and expectations (as well as those who are merely perceived as doing so) may find themselves reliably subject to misogynistic reprisals. And the first rule of misogyny is that you do not complain about such mistreatment.

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.

All that, however, leaves open a possibility that may obtain in other cases: where the appearance of such unequivocal, enthusiastic consent (whatever exactly that amounts to) is merely a performance.

The question thus becomes: Why, and how, do we regard many men’s potentially hurt feelings as so important, so sacrosanct? And, relatedly, why do we regard women as so responsible for protecting and ministering to them?

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.

But we know from social and moral psychology that people often do, as a matter of fact, go to great lengths to avoid disrupting a social situation in which their behavior is culturally scripted—especially when it is prescribed or even suggested by some kind of authority figure.

It’s not that Gutierrez’s no meant yes to Weinstein, exactly; it’s that it meant nothing—it merely being his cue to keep asking, prompting, needling.

True, the consensual/nonconsensual distinction has come to mark the line between legal and criminal sex acts, by default if not by design. But there is more to ethical sex than merely not doing something criminal; the same goes for most areas of human life and moral conduct. For example, there is more to being honest than not committing fraud, burglary, or grand larceny.

In their groundbreaking and widely cited paper “The Girl Who Cried Pain,” medical researchers Diane E. Hoffmann and Anita J. Tarzian canvassed the existing literature on gender differences in the experience and treatment of pain. For several painful procedures—including abdominal surgery, coronary artery bypass grafts, and appendectomies—they found that men received more pain medication than women (controlling for weight, when appropriate).

These trends were not restricted to adult patients, either. For boys and girls who had undergone surgeries and subsequently complained of pain, boys were significantly more likely to be given codeine; girls, acetaminophen (the mild over-the-counter analgesic marketed in the United States as Tylenol).

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.

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.”

But despite its popularity, the notion that boys and men are comparatively stoical and inexpressive about their pain does not appear to have a robust empirical basis.

As Hunt and her coauthors acknowledge, several qualitative studies do show that men commonly vocalize their reluctance to seek help from medical practitioners. However, as the researchers go on to point out, most of these studies are not comparative: they do not show that men are more reluctant than their female counterparts to seek help.23 Notwithstanding this lack of data, “there is still a dangerous (often implicit) tendency to assume that, if men employ a public reluctance to seek help as one important way of demonstrating their masculinity, then this must necessarily suggest that women are not reluctant to seek help.”