Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

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.

It thus appears to take little more than knowledge that a woman is successful at male sex–typed work to instigate interpersonally negative reactions to her.10

Perceived communality made an enormous difference for female but not male applicants. When it comes to demonstrable niceness, it’s an imperative for powerful women—and seemingly inconsequential for their male rivals.12

More to the point, perhaps, even for those who think that all of these stories about Klobuchar were of direct public concern and appropriately framed, there are comparable reports about male politicians that received relatively little uptake.

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.

Gillibrand’s supposed non-communal sin was quite different from Klobuchar’s, but it attracted at least as much outrage. Gillibrand was widely perceived to have “thrown Al Franken under the bus,” following allegations of sexual misconduct against the Minnesota senator—hence showing her to be disloyal, treacherous, selfish, and opportunistic.

For some people, there are few worse sins for a female leader than thwarting the power to which a man is tacitly deemed entitled, even if there are multiple credible reports of his being sexually inappropriate, lecherous, or handsy.

Communal behavior seems to

count in a woman’s favor only if it can be attributed to stable traits of character, or her own authentic nature.

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.30

There is a genuine entitlement under some circumstances to exhibit anger or even rage,

A potent double bind presents itself to women in this position: embrace the hope that you’re exceptionally communal and risk flaming out, when people are inevitably disappointed by some aspect of your history, views, or platform. Don’t present yourself as exceptionally communal, and run a greater risk that your campaign will never go anywhere, like Klobuchar and Gillibrand.45

People tend to unwittingly demand caring perfection from a female leader—while forgiving similar and worse lapses in her male counterparts.53

Whatever transpired—and it’s not clear that the two candidates’ versions of events are ultimately incompatible—Warren’s role in the conflict likely did her far more damage than Sanders’ did.59

All of this reflects the widespread—and, yes—misogynistic sense that, unlike their male rivals, women are not entitled to make mistakes, especially when it comes to supposed communal values.

And while they may be entitled to have power under certain conditions, they are not entitled to actively seek it, nor to take it away from the men they’re up against.

For one thing, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more voters are told that a certain candidate won’t win, the less likely that they’ll triumph. After all, electability isn’t a static social fact; it’s a social fact that we’re constantly, and collectively, in the process of constructing.

There is something deeply troubling about the degree to which concerns about electability emerged with unprecedented force during this election cycle, with such promising female candidates in the running (as well as male candidates of color63).

Perhaps most perniciously of all, the electability narrative framed voting for a woman in the 2020 Democratic primary as a selfish choice—as a political liability, given the existential threat of Trump being returned to the White House. As

we are entitled in such contexts to vote for the person we think would be the best person for the job.

Hope, to me, is a belief that the future will be brighter, which I continue not to set much store in. But the idea of fighting for a better world—and, equally importantly, fighting against backsliding—is not a belief; it’s a political commitment that I can get on board with.2

Entitlement, as I’ve written about it in these pages, has most often referred to some people’s undue sense of what they deserve or are owed by others.

But, for all that, entitlement is not a dirty word: entitlements can be genuine, valid, justified.

But I want her to at least be clear about her entitlements, and to be prepared to assert them when conditions make that possible. And when they do not, I want her to feel lucid anger, and to push for structural changes, on behalf of herself as well as those who are less privileged.

So it helps to keep the emphasis here on the future: on moral development. It’s also helpful, I believe, to emphasize these efforts as a facet of moral development. Learning what one is entitled to is—or at least should be—inextricably connected with learning what one owes to others.

It will also involve teaching her that she has special obligations to defend and support people subject to forms of marginalization and oppression from which she will be spared. She will be obligated not to tolerate, let alone participate in, the legal and extralegal policing practices that oppress Black and brown bodies in our society, for one obvious example. Similarly, she will be obligated not to “lean down” exploitatively on the emotional and material labor of women of color, as have so many white women before her. And her sense of warranted entitlement must always be tempered with a knowledge of what she is not entitled to do, to say, or to rely on, as a person who will be born into privilege, along multiple axes.

And I want my daughter to know that her own entitlements in these respects are crucially connected with some of her most important moral obligations: the obligation all of us share, regardless of our gender, to make this world one in which structural injustices are actively being rectified.

Together, we must fight for a world in which every girl or woman is safe and free to be her own person, rather than consigned to be predominantly a human giver of the sex, care, and love to which privileged boys and men are tacitly deemed entitled.