Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

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.

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.

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.

Interestingly, new fathers don’t seem to realize that they aren’t keeping up with their partners’ growing workload.

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.

Free, invisible work women do to keep track of the little things in life that, taken together, amount to the big things in life: the glue that holds households, and by extension, proper society, together.12

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.

Don’t ask, and you’ll be saddled with far more than your fair share of material, domestic, and emotional labor. Do ask, and you’ll be violating the implicit social code that tells women to keep the peace, nurture others, and not be too demanding.

Hartley’s husband elected to save the money and deep-clean the bathrooms himself. Meanwhile, she was tasked with caring for their children single-handedly, while the rest of the house fell into disarray around her.

It’s between women and their male counterparts who fail

to take on an equitable proportion of the household caregiving burden.

And there is no good reason for men’s failures on this score: the all too convenient, sexist hypothesis that men and women “naturally” have different child-care proclivities or preferences has been debunked in part by studies showing that when men are the primary caregivers, their brains...

This is not to say that rich and poor women are affected in exactly the same way, of course: when higher-income, predominantly white men fail to care, and their similarly wealthy (and, again, typically white) female partners become exhausted and desperate, they often end up “leaning down” and calling upon the labor of nonwhite and poorer women.

It’s not just within the context of a household that men either fail or refuse to care. Even paid care work among men

is strikingly unpopular.

to do them?”21 One barrier to male participation in paid care work is undoubtedly men’s sense of entitlement to more traditionally masculine jobs: factory or bust, in other words, particularly for white men. But another barrier may be their female partners’ preconceptions about the kind of work that befits a male partner’s dignity. The

This can plausibly be read as, among other things, the result of a crisis in meaning: a lack of fulfilling roles that men have access to in these milieus. Yet care work not only needs doing; it is meaningful, not inherently exploitative, and has other advantages over many forms of traditionally masculine blue-collar labor, in generally tending to be less physically and environmentally damaging. In this case, men’s sense of entitlement is not only hurting other vulnerable parties; it is hurting men themselves, and standing in the way of solutions to a gap between role supply and demand that desperately needs filling.

If men often feel entitled to certain kinds of paid work, they also feel entitled to far more by way of leisure, as compared with their female partners.

Dunn wonders whether her anger at the resulting situation is fair, given that she has “allowed this pattern to unfold.” The answer, it seems to me, is yes, given that her husband is the one to have actually committed the bad behavior.

Part of the reason why men get away with doing so little may be that, as recent research suggests, women in heterosexual couples are held to higher standards than their mates.

But, again, it is vital to be clear about the most morally relevant comparison to make here: between male and female partners. And seen through this lens, women remain massively overburdened, while men often fail to do their fair share.

many a woman unwittingly echoes and validates her male partner’s illegitimate sense of entitlement to her labor, and to his leisure time.

She exhibits himpathy—the disproportionate or inappropriate sympathy for a man who behaves in misogynistic or, I would now add, entitled ways, over his female victims—even though she herself is his victim in this scenario. During

When a woman internalizes her putative obligations to care for others at the expense of herself, there is affective as well as behavioral fallout. She is likely to feel guilt and shame for holding a male partner accountable—and, as Lockman points out, to feel an excessive sense of gratitude toward him, even for falling far short of fairness.35

Some women may not feel entitled to equitable domestic arrangements and leisure time for themselves, on par with that of their husbands.

A woman is entitled to more than just “help” or “support” from a male partner. And she is entitled to as much rest and leisure time as he is for her own sake, not just for the sake of becoming a better caregiver.37

A paradigmatic act of mansplaining consists of a man presuming to “explain” something incorrect(ly) to a more expert female speaker or set of speakers—and in an overly confident, arrogant, or overbearing manner, which often results in his not backing down or admitting to his mistake after it has been authoritatively pointed out to him.

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. This is objectionable when and partly because he is not so entitled: when others, namely women, happen to know more than he does—and he ought to anticipate this possibility, rather than assuming his own epistemic superiority from the get-go.

The concept of epistemic entitlement, which I’m introducing here, is obviously closely related to the idea of testimonial injustice.

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.

one of the most striking is the way both speakers in this exchange are assigned roles, which are then difficult to break from.

Because of the social dynamics in play here, it then became very difficult to change the course of the conversation.

She was in danger of humiliating him. Still, he was only momentarily deterred: he proceeded to explain other things when unceremoniously deprived of that fledgling site of epistemic domination.

mansplaining is systemic; it is part of a (much) broader system. Solnit aptly describes this system as a male “archipelago of arrogance”—and, I would add, entitlement.

A Professional Smart Person can be so without ever reading a black woman, ever interviewing a black woman, ever following a black woman, or ever thinking about a black woman’s existence.

As we’ve seen, a sense of epistemic entitlement can be maintained blithely, with utmost (unearned) confidence. It can also be jealously guarded and defended—sometimes to the point of engaging in creepy, controlling, and even abusive behavior. One of the darkest manifestations of epistemic entitlement in this vein is gaslighting.

And his sense of epistemic entitlement—to maintain that kind of domination, to dictate the terms of her reality—was so great that she was the one who felt guilty for entertaining even the slightest doubts about her scurrilous, lying husband.

via a variety of techniques, the victim may effectively be prohibited from disputing the gaslighter’s version of events, his narrative, or his side of the story.19 She would be committing a grievous sin within the context of the relationship by questioning his authority, challenging his claims to knowledge, or even disagreeing with him regarding certain matters.

“What makes the difference between the fellow who ignores or dismisses evidence…and the one who gaslights is the inability to tolerate even the possibility of challenge.”21

this exchange brings out, making someone question their own rationality, or think they’re positively crazy, is only one way to achieve the kind of epistemic domination that I’ve argued gaslighting aims at.

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.

gaslighting someone is typically a long-term project. Manufacturing the sense of epistemic obligation to go along with the gaslighter’s story takes time and, typically, quite a bit of effort (though that effort need not be consciously aimed at the end that gaslighting tries to achieve, of epistemic domination).

But epistemic entitlement can also result in a mistaken sense that others are not entitled to issue a contrary or threatening point of view, even if they in fact have every right to do so. This can lead to a man’s systematic attempts to shut a woman up forever, or just his momentary outrage over her expressing her opinion.

There is a certain kind of man who is unable or unwilling to cope with others expressing views that threaten his own sense of what has happened, or ought to happen. Such men cannot abide girls and women, in particular, evincing their own, legitimate sense of epistemic entitlement to state what is happening in the world, or what has to change, going forward. They do not react merely by strenuously disagreeing with a girl or woman in this position. Indeed, they often seem to lack the wherewithal—or, again, the willingness—to disagree with her whatsoever. They instead want to shut her up, or to head off the very possibility of disagreement, by denying that her word has any meaning or merit whatsoever (she’s crazy, or she’s evil—so, either way, anything she says is beneath consideration). Or such a man instead imaginatively conjures up a world in which he and his ilk have the power to make her eat her words—in this case, by shoving something down her throat, thus silencing her forever. Strikingly, he is liable throughout this to feel like the justified, or even aggrieved, party.

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.

In one study, hypothetical female politicians who were described as running for the Senate experienced little gender bias until they were explicitly portrayed as power-seeking—in which case the gendered backlash effects were striking.

They wanted to know why, “even when unequivocal evidence exists that a woman is successful in male gender–typed work, she faces career-hindering problems in work settings—problems of being disliked and interpersonally derogated.”

there are widespread prescriptions that “specify that women should behave communally, exhibiting nurturing and socially sensitive attributes that demonstrate concern for others, such as being kind, sympathetic, and understanding.”