Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

But even for many of those who professed to believe her, Ford’s experience just did not matter enough to be worth depriving a man like Kavanaugh of his perceived due, given his background and reputation.2 And, of course, there were also people who refused to believe her, saying she was either lying or mistaken.3

It perfectly captured the concept of entitlement: the widespread perception that a privileged man is owed something even as exalted as a position on the U.S. Supreme Court.4

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.

According to Graham, it was unconscionably hellish—and, beyond that, ridiculous—for a man in Kavanaugh’s position to have to respond to serious, credible accusations of sexual assault, and undergo a truncated FBI investigation, in order to ascend to one of the highest positions of moral authority in America.

not confirming a man like Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court became tantamount to ruining his life, not just withholding an opportunity.

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.”

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.12

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.

man may believe that a woman is intellectually capable in law, business, or politics, say, and therefore be willing to have her serve as his subordinate in this domain, while still subjecting her or other women to misogynistic treatment—sexual assault, for example.

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 ...

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.

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.

But 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.

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. This definition helps us acknowledge the important truth that we are all to a certain extent complicit in misogynistic social structures.

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.17

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.

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.

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.

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.

progress fortunately does not rely—cannot, and has never relied—on universal agreement that what is patently unjust is unjust indeed. Instead, we can—and, I increasingly believe, must—take our cues from the daily acts of courage, creativity, and political resistance being undertaken, individually and collectively, in response to such injustices.

the term “incel” is used to self-identify almost exclusively by heterosexual men, most of them fairly young, who frequent anonymous or pseudonymous Internet forums devoted to incel ideology.8 Incels believe they are entitled to, and have been deprived of, sex with “hot” young women,

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.

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 domes...

Sex thus promises to soothe these men’s inferiority complexes, at least as much as to satisfy their libidos.

Yet another mistake is to think that sex would provide a solution to an incel’s supposed problem. If an incel does start having sex, or gets into a relationship, who will he turn into? Contra several commentators, my guess is: not a nice guy.10

A once-single incel may well become a female partner’s tormentor. 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.

Incels are often virulent racists.

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.

There is a strong implication that celibacy has somehow been imposed on the incel, even forced on him, against his will. And

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.

So why do incels sometimes resort to such dehumanizing and objectifying language in speaking about women—for

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.

There is also something far too convenient about the idea that incels don’t see women as being fully human. It allows other men, who don’t resort to calling women pigs or dogs, but who may still share aspects of an incel’s entitled ideology, to defend themselves too easily.

When accused of misogynistic behavior, men often respond by invoking their recognition of the humanity of their wives, sisters, mothers, or other female relatives.

The real challenge may be in recognizing that she is fully a human being, and not just a human giver of love, sex, and moral succor. She is allowed to be her own person, and to be with other people.

Incels are not amoral (though they are, of course, highly immoral); they are deep believers in a specific moral order.

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.

More likely, they are looking for an unjust hierarchy to locate themselves on, thereby vindicating their preexisting feelings of inferiority and aggrieved resentment.24 Often,

And incels are clearly often in pain (though that pain may at times be overstated).25 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.26 So here, as elsewhere, we ought to resist the pres...

In truth though, such behavior is on a continuum with everyday occurrences that often slip under the radar, from domestic violence to rape to sexual predation and coercion.

Of men like Clark, who post photographic evidence online of their crimes against women, law professor and privacy expert Lori Andrews commented, “They really expect viewers to empathize with them, to think they’re entitled to teach her a lesson.”

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.

Misogyny takes down women, and himpathy protects the agents of that takedown operation, partly by painting them as “good guys.”

Himpathy goes hand in hand with blaming or erasing the victims and targets of misogyny.