Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

queer feminist Moya Bailey to capture the intersection of misogyny and anti-Black racism in America.34

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).38

women are regarded as more than entitled (indeed obligated) to provide care, but far less entitled to ask for and receive it.

The deeper problem here may be the sense that a woman is not entitled to ask for care for her own sake, or for its own

sake—simply because she is in pain, and because that pain matters.

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.42 Pregnant women of color, in

contrast, may be perceived as dispensable, as disposable, or even as threats to white supremacy.

It’s important to add here that men and women differ not only from each other but also among themselves—sometimes in radical and fundamental ways. (Consider, for example, trans women, who would be particularly ill-served by this default conception of human embodiment.) All the more reason, then, to be concerned that a single “standard” (read: cisgender, white, nondisabled male) body is being treated as the paradigm.

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.

Cardiovascular disease has been the most common cause of death for women in the United States for the last three decades. And following a heart attack, women are more likely than men to die—partly due to the fact that women’s symptoms (stomach pain, breathlessness, nausea, and fatigue) are often missed, since these signs are deemed to be “atypical,” instead of typical for women.

As a result of this, many of us may be taking the wrong dosage of the drugs we ingest on a daily basis.50

“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.51

When women wearing seatbelts are involved in car crashes, they are 73 percent more likely than men to be killed or seriously injured. This

Not that you have to live in a low-income country for a C-section to be risky,” as Criado Perez remarks. “You could just be a black woman living in the United States.”)

The council members might as well have just come out and said it: the health of women—especially nonwhite and poor women—matters very little.

Porter’s chief contribution to the anti-abortion movement has been to further moralize abortion by depicting those who would choose to have one as cruel, callous, unfeeling. “To

Remember, the state doesn’t regulate certain behaviors that most people think are immoral—lying

Many recent discussions of abortion have focused on early terminations, for understandable reasons, given the increasing impetus to ban them. But we should make sure that abortions that take place later aren’t misrepresented either.

medical misinformation is a ubiquitous feature of anti-abortion activism.

There are evidently many men who feel entitled to regulate pregnant bodies without having the remotest idea about, or interest in learning, how they work. And there are evidently some women who are prepared to paint others as heartless for balking at these attempts to police and enforce their pregnancies.

The idea that extremely restrictive abortion laws are about protecting life is increasingly implausible. Many

Finally, anti-abortion activists are unmoved by the point that when abortion is made legal, the rates of abortion do not tend to go up. Rather, girls and women no longer need to seek out illegal abortions.27 And illegal abortions have far worse health outcomes—sometimes harrowing ones, death included.

Triple-A attacks on McGovern condemned abortion rights as part of a permissive youth culture that was corrosive of traditional forms of authority. 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.30

All in all, then, anti-abortion activism has co-opted religion for the sake of supposed family values, rather than being driven by any grassroots religious movement.

men have been almost entirely exempt from the wrath of anti-abortion activists, despite the fact that nine out of ten unwanted pregnancies happen within heterosexual relationships, and most patients who have abortions say that their partners agreed with their decision.

The novelty of prosecuting men for abortion—despite the sound legal footing of such charges—tells us something important about the way we have, until now, framed the debate. Boys will be boys, but women who get pregnant have behaved irresponsibly. We are so comfortable with regulating women’s sexual behavior, but we’re shocked by the idea of doing it to men. Though it might seem strange to talk about men and abortion, it’s stranger not to, since women don’t have unwanted pregnancies without them.32

not preserving life, but controlling girls and women, and enforcing the prevalent expectation that women “give” designated men children.34

This is not to say that women are thereby perceived as subhuman creatures, nonhuman animals, or even mere vessels.

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

m...

But even if her humanity is not in doubt, it is perceived...

We can therefore conceptualize the anti-abortion movement as one of many misogynistic enforcement mechanisms designed to compel women’s caregiving.

Then, once a mother, she is always a mother—held disproportionately responsible for the emotional, material, and moral needs of those around her, in ways that extend well beyond being overtasked with the care of her own children.

As we saw in the last chapter, she will be empowered to ask for such moral goods for her own sake comparatively seldom.

That many women—especially white women—have internalized this moral code and would now consider themselves bad women for having an abortion is not difficult to explain, either. For those women who have much to gain by abiding by the norms of good womanhood, vis-à-vis the values of our white supremacist patriarchy, taking such a position is likely to be especially tempting.

Research shows that these women are not anomalous; in some states, white women are even likelier to oppose abortion than their white male counterparts.42

For when pregnancies are policed, it is predominantly poor and nonwhite women who are liable to pay for it—and not only with respect to access to abortion.

“reproductive oppression,” where pregnant people’s physical liberty was restricted by means of law and public policy,

Controlling pregnant bodies is only one of many ways in which the bodies of girls and women are regulated, policed, and, increasingly, (over)ruled. A particularly interesting—if often missed—parallel is with the anti-trans movement and its fixation on policing the bodies of trans girls and women, including by legal means.

“bathroom bills,” which propose to restrict access to multiuser restrooms, locker rooms, and other historically gender-segregated facilities, on the basis of the sex someone was assigned at birth.

Like anti-abortion legislation, bathroom bills rely on the construction of an immoral—indeed, reprehensible—figure. In the case of abortion, it is a heartless cisgender woman, intent on killing her “unborn child”; in the case of bathroom bills, it is a predatory trans woman—or, alternatively, a cis man merely pretending to be a trans woman in order to gain restroom access. 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.

the supposed threat of trans women (or, again, cis men purporting to be trans women), and so little about the very real threat that undisguised cis men pose to all women? The answer, surely, is transphobia—and, in particular, the transmisogyny that represents the dangerous, toxic intersection of misogyny and transphobia faced by trans girls and women.50

Specifically, a trans woman may be seen as either an “evil deceiver,” pretending to be something she is not, or as a mere pretender, a faulty simulacrum of femininity.

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. Hopefully needless to say, this putative obligation is not a real one.54

These claims reflect the idea that not only were these men entitled to read Araujo’s genital status off her clothed appearance, they were entitled to “go crazy,” even to slay her, when that sexual entitlement was challenged.

Dramatic as this example may be, there is a prevalent sense of entitlement on the part of privileged men to regulate, control, and rule over the bodies of girls and women—cisgender and trans alike.

And as the direct result of this, those subject to such misogynistic policing are often impugned as moral monsters, even though they’re t...