Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

So what do I want my daughter to know, when it comes to what she is entitled to? I want my daughter to know that she is entitled to feel pain—be it physical or emotional—and that she is subsequently entitled to cry out or ask for help, and to be cared for, soothed, nurtured. I want her to know that she is entitled to be believed about her physical and emotional needs, and that she is as worthy of care—medical and otherwise—as any other person.

For two classic and groundbreaking pieces on intersectionality by Crenshaw, see her “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99, and her “Beyond Race and Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew,” in Words That Wound, edited by Mari J. Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

For an excellent history of incel culture, from these early and (by all reports) ostensibly benign beginnings to the present-day misogynistic horror show, see Zack Beauchamp’s article “Our Incel Problem: How a Support Group for the Dateless Became One of the Internet’s Most Dangerous Subcultures,”

However, it’s worth noting that in Minnesota, rape committed by someone with whom the victim is in “an ongoing voluntary relationship” was still prosecuted under a different code at the time. This led to some successful deployments of the “voluntary relationship defense,” which entailed a de facto marital rape exception—including in a case of a woman raped by her ex-husband, while their divorce was still pending. He made a video of the rape, filmed while their four-year-old child slept nearby. He was sentenced to just forty-five days in jail, for “invasion of privacy.” Fortunately, this statute was repealed in May 2019, following a public outcry.

See Paul Bloom, “The Dark Side of Empathy,” The Atlantic, September 25, 2015,

Danielle Keats Citron, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace

And, the theme continues, the emotional price people pay when they face a situation in which they must act by their own lights contrary to what they think are others’ lights is embarrassment. People who must act in such circumstances are confused and inhibited by the anticipation of embarrassment, and that we argue is the lesson to be drawn from social psychological research. People are also, we suggest, unaware of how potent fear of embarrassment is as a motivation for behavior.

A recent analysis of births in New York City found that “Black college-educated mothers who gave birth in local hospitals were more likely to suffer severe complications of pregnancy or childbirth than white women who never graduated from high school”—noting that highest educational level attained is a fairly reliable proxy for income.

Similarly, when women testify against powerful men, e.g., about their sexual and other abuses, there is a marked tendency to discount their word—as opposed to when they testify in these men’s favor, whereupon testimonial injustice becomes much less of an issue. So, again, such dismissals are neither random nor universal for speakers who belong to a particular social category. Instead, they often work to uphold and sustain existing social hierarchies.

Even nonhuman animal studies exhibit this prevalent bias: a 2014 survey found that some 80 percent of the studies that specified sex used only male animals, despite the somewhat greater variability of, e.g., male rats than female rats.

Emotional labor, as I introduced the term in The Managed Heart, is the work, for which you’re paid, which centrally involves trying to feel the right feeling for the job. This involves evoking and suppressing feelings.

Testimonial smothering, ultimately, is the truncating of one’s own testimony in order to insure that the testimony contains only content for which one’s audience demonstrates testimonial competence….Three circumstances…routinely exist in instances of testimonial smothering…: 1) the content of the testimony must be unsafe and risky; 2) the audience must demonstrate testimonial incompetence with respect to the content of the testimony to the speaker; and 3) testimonial incompetence must follow from, or appear to follow from, pernicious ignorance.

Abramson’s “Turning Up the Lights on Gaslighting,” Philosophical Perspectives

The researchers showed one further way in which this gender bias could be overcome: including information that the target of the evaluation was a parent. Women were seen in a more favorable light when they were mothers; for men, again, this appeared to make no difference—that is, there was no appreciable “boost” in likability or boss desirability for fathers, as opposed to men without children. But, as Heilman and Okimoto note, this result is of somewhat limited applicability, since numerous studies have shown that women are subject to a potent motherhood bias, whereby mothers are often perceived as less competent and committed to the job than their child-free counterparts.