Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

In other words, looked at from another angle, the perception of male stoicism may be the flip side of the perception that women are more likely to complain about comparatively little. In which case, this assumption would simply be another face of a prevalent gender bias.

Two recent studies have shown that, when presented with footage of a crying infant (dressed in gender-neutral clothing), people tended to rate the infant as experiencing more pain when told the infant was a boy rather than a girl.

But notice that, in this case, the belief itself is actually quite implausible, as this gender difference would have to be attributed to nature rather than nurture—not only that, but boys would have to be hardwired from infancy to express pain less intensely than girls do.

Do we think men’s pain should be taken more seriously because we tend to regard them as more stoical? Or do we regard them as more stoical because, at least in many settings, we tend to take their pain more seriously?

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.

The above studies suggest that when women try to testify to their pain, they are routinely dismissed by the medical establishment on both of these bases—impugned as incompetent and hysterical, on the one hand, or as dishonest malingerers, on the other. And these injustices are often vastly worse—sometimes not merely in degree but in kind—for women who are multiply marginalized, because they are Black, queer, trans, and/or disabled.

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).

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.

For many white, privileged women, prenatal care in the United States is comparatively good—albeit geared toward the needs of the fetus, rather than that of the mother. When it comes to postnatal care, however, there is a marked and radical shortfall, as documented by Angela Garbes, author of Like a Mother—particularly for women of color.

In a white supremacist milieu, a pregnant white woman, who is (presumptively and, in many cases, actually) carrying a white baby has the keys to the kingdom in her uterus.

In her recent book Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez documents the tendency to regard men’s bodies as the default—an instance of male-centeredness, or “andronormativity”—together with its pernicious effects on women’s health and well-being.

Either the fluctuations of the menstrual cycle make a difference when it comes to the safety and effectiveness of particular drugs, or they don’t. If they do, then isn’t it important that we know this? And if they don’t, then, again, menstruating bodies should be included in these studies—as should the bodies of a diverse range of trans, non-binary, and intersex people, who are chronically excluded from medical research.

In view of such disparities, medical researchers have coined the term “Yentl syndrome” to capture the way women may have to present with typical male symptoms before receiving appropriate treatment.

The received wisdom is that autism is some four times more common in boys than girls and that, when girls are affected, they are more profoundly affected (that is, more neuro-atypical or divergent). Recent research, however, suggests that girls’ socialization tends to mask signs of neuro-atypicality that ought to be recognized and appropriately accommodated.

The idea of a fetal heartbeat is clearly designed to tug on, well, the heartstrings. But calling it a heartbeat at six or eight weeks of someone’s pregnancy (dating from the first day of their last menstrual period) is very much a misnomer. At this stage, there is no heartbeat—not least because there is no heart (nor a brain, nor a face).

Ectopic pregnancies are generally agonizingly painful, almost never viable, and require urgent medical attention.18 And, typically, the only feasible treatment is an abortion, which can be medical, using methotrexate to cause the cessation of the pregnancy and the reabsorption of fetal tissue, or, far more often, surgical. Without such treatment, the fallopian tube will rupture in 95 percent of cases; these potentially fatal medical emergencies cause a substantial percentage of pregnancy-related deaths.

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.

The same was true of opposition to abortion in that era much more broadly. As Greenhouse and Siegel point out about the notorious anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly: “[Her] attack on abortion never mentioned murder; she condemned abortion by associating it with the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and child care.”

Indeed, a woman’s humanity is conceptually crucial to the whole enterprise: what she is supposed to give to men, here as elsewhere, is a distinctively human service. She is not just supposed to have the child, in the style of The Handmaid’s Tale, as an exercise in human breeding; she is meant to care for the child, afterward, in a self-effacing manner (and far in excess of the expectations placed on her male counterparts).

Under the auspices of the state, pregnant people have been arrested, incarcerated, and had time added to their sentences; they have been detained in hospitals, mental institutions, and treatment programs; and they have been subject to forced medical interventions, surgery included—such as a C-section even though they wanted to attempt a vaginal delivery.

Overwhelmingly, and regardless of race, women in our study were economically disadvantaged, indicated by the fact that 71 percent qualified for indigent defense. Of the 368 women for whom information on race was available, 59 percent were women of color, including African Americans, Hispanic American/Latinas, Native Americans, and Asian/Pacific Islanders; 52 percent were African American. African American women in particular are overrepresented in our study, but this is especially true in the South….Nearly three-fourths of cases brought against African Americans originated in the South, compared with only half of the cases involving white women.

And like anti-abortion legislation, bathroom bills also rely on the construction of a notional victim. In the case of abortion, it is a heart-wrenchingly vulnerable fetus, who might also grow up to be the next Einstein; in the case of bathroom bills, it is a preyed-upon cis girl or woman. These notional victims then serve as a post hoc rationalization for the preexisting desire to police the supposed moral offenders.

In reality, the number of trans women or cis men merely purporting to be trans women who have preyed on any restroom user is vanishingly small. Since 2004, such a crime has been reported roughly once per year in the United States, according to recent research. Meanwhile, cis men not bothering to pretend to be trans women attack women in restrooms with much greater regularity: the same team of researchers found that this had occurred more than 150 times during the same time frame.

An important corollary of the dynamic Bettcher identifies is the sense of entitlement, upon taking in someone whose gender presentation is that of a woman, to know her genital arrangements at a glance—even when she is fully clothed—without doubt or ambiguity. The entitlement to know a woman’s reproductive capacities at a glance seems a plausible extension of this—which would imply her obligation not to present herself as a woman, if she is not capable of “giving” cisgender men heteronormatively sanctioned sex and biological children.

In one representative study of the situation in the nation today, the sociologists Jill Yavorsky, Claire Kamp Dush, and Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan found that for male-female partners who both worked full-time (roughly forty-hour weeks), first-time parenthood increased a man’s workload at home by about ten hours per week. Meanwhile, the increased workload for women was about twenty hours. So motherhood took double the toll as fatherhood, workwise. Moreover, much of the new work that fathers did take on in these situations was the comparatively “fun” work of engagement with their children—for example, playing with the baby. Fathers did this for four hours per week, on average, while dropping their number of hours of housework by five hours per week during the same time period. Mothers decreased their hours of housework by only one hour per week—while adding about twenty-one hours of child-rearing labor, including fifteen hours of physical child care—for instance, changing diapers and bathing the baby. And mothers still did more by way of infant engagement: about six hours per week, on average.

A 2018 Oxfam report showed that women doing twice as much as men by way of unpaid care work and domestic labor is on the low end, globally speaking. Around the world, women average between two and ten times more of this work than their male counterparts.

Studies show there is but one circumstance in which men’s and women’s household work will tend to approach parity: when she works full-time and he is unemployed. And even then, the operative word is approach. She will still do a bit more. Equality is elusive, even in the supposedly egalitarian U.S. context.

A recent Economist survey of parents in eight Western countries showed that while 46 percent of fathers reported being coequal parents, only 32 percent of mothers concurred with their assessment.8 It is possible, of course, that women are underreporting their partner’s contributions in time-use diaries, rather than men overreporting their own. But social scientists consider this unlikely.

Another reason men don’t do more is that, under such conditions, asking them to pull their weight is in itself a form of labor.

Emotional labor encompasses, among other things, the keeping track and anticipatory work that so often falls to women: knowing what is where, who needs what, the grocery list, the family’s budget, the family calendar, and so on—not to mention packing endless bags, from diaper bags to suitcases.

Admittedly, such an expansion of the term has been resisted by its progenitor, Arlie Russell Hochschild, who originally used it to refer to paid work that requires maintaining a certain emotional affect—the cheery demeanor required of flight attendants, for example.

Emotional labor also encompasses the work of managing the feelings around these kinds of tasks: not ruffling a male partner’s feathers, for example, by pointing out that he has done something badly, and avoiding asking for too much of his “help” or “support” within a household.

But another barrier may be their female partners’ preconceptions about the kind of work that befits a male partner’s dignity. The sociologist Ofer Sharone found that even when a middle-aged professional man who had lost his job was willing to take lower-paying work in a traditionally feminine industry, his wife would often encourage him to keep looking.

The exchange points to yet another reason why men often get away with this imbalance: many a woman unwittingly echoes and validates her male partner’s illegitimate sense of entitlement to her labor, and to his leisure time. Despite her frustrations, she subsequently gives him mixed messages, and she is reluctant to insist on a more equitable arrangement.

In particular, I believe that mansplaining typically stems from an unwarranted sense of entitlement on the part of the mansplainer to occupy the conversational position of the knower by default: to be the one who dispenses information, offers corrections, and authoritatively issues explanations.

But they are distinct and complementary. Whereas testimonial injustice involves unfairly dismissing a less privileged speaker—typically, after she has attempted to make a contribution—epistemic entitlement involves peremptorily assuming greater authority to speak, on the part of a more privileged speaker.

“I began to feel brainwashed,” she testified in court, during Larry Nassar’s trial in January 2018. “It was as if I had never accused him. I felt I was losing my grip on reality. I started to question whether the abuse ever happened.” She would replay the traumatizing incidents again and again in her mind, in an effort to retain her hold on the truth—and so she wouldn’t forget that she wasn’t the liar.

Gaslighting thus results in a victim who feels a false sense of obligation to believe his story over her own. She has been epistemically dominated—colonized, even. It’s not hard to see how evil this is. It goes beyond harming someone. When successful, gaslighting robs the victim of the ability to name the harm done to her—and, equally, who did it.

It wasn’t surprising that these comments provoked Alan Jones’s ire: studies have shown that, when it comes to climate change, conservative white men feel particularly entitled to their opinion, however incorrect, to the effect that what is happening is not happening.34 (Such denial of basic realities is in some respects the attempted gaslighting of the planet.)

Specifically, when information about their competence was equivocal, participants judged “James” to be more competent than “Andrea” in some 86 percent of cases—though there was no significant difference between how the participants judged the candidates in terms of their likability. When the file contained information that made their high degree of competence unambiguous (by stating that each was in the top 5 percent of all employees at that level), the results shifted. This time, “James” was judged to be more likable than “Andrea” 83 percent of the time (though there were no significant differences in rankings of their relative competence).

The upshot: regardless of their own gender, people tend to assume that men in historically male-dominated positions of power are more competent than women, unless this assumption is explicitly contradicted by further information. And when it is so contradicted, women are liable to be disliked and regarded, in particular, as “interpersonally hostile,” a measure that, in this study, encompassed being perceived as conniving, pushy, selfish, abrasive, manipulative, and untrustworthy.

A female candidate lost to a male one in every single head-to-head matchup (both intraparty and interparty). Perhaps most strikingly, a substantial number of voters defected to a candidate from another party to avoid voting for a woman from their own—for example, Democratic voters chose a male Republican over Hillary Clinton.

The researchers hypothesized that such problems stem from a perception that a woman who succeeds in such a position must be lacking in “communality”: the quality of being nurturing and pro-social, a deficit for which women tend to be harshly punished.

The researchers also noted that women don’t have to actively demonstrate uncaring attributes in order to be perceived as uncommunal, and punished accordingly. Such a deficit will often be inferred or assumed, based simply on a woman’s success in a male-coded leadership role.

But when participants were explicitly told that Andrea had been described by her subordinates as someone who is “understanding and concerned about others,” that she “encourages cooperation and helpful behavior,” and that she “has worked to increase her employees’ sense of belonging,” this pattern was reversed: participants were significantly more likely to choose Andrea as the more desirable boss, the more likable of the pair, and judged her as no more interpersonally hostile than James.

This jibes well with the finding that a perceived lack of communality in a powerful woman will tend to be harshly punished, while the same trait in her male counterparts will remain a matter of relative indifference.

The more the Left loves them (partly on the grounds of their extraordinary communality in fighting for future generations), the more the Right resents it—especially in view of their sense that this girl or woman is actually hurting people’s (read: their own) interests and impugning their good character.

People tend to unwittingly demand caring perfection from a female leader—while forgiving similar and worse lapses in her male counterparts.

We expect too much from women. And when a woman we like or respect disappoints us, even in minor and forgivable ways, she is liable to be punished—often by people who think they have the moral high ground, and are merely reacting to her as she deserves, rather than helping to enact misogyny via moralism.

If we all give up on women prematurely under such conditions, because they are women, then they will never get anywhere. Effectively, moreover, they will be subject to misogyny: a barrier they face as women in a man’s world, whatever the good intentions of at least some of those killing their prospects.