Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

One obvious ethical obligation when it comes to sexual activity is to actively try to glean whether or not your partner wants, deep down, to engage in it.

raises the specter of sex that is unwanted, and even coerced, but not by any particular person. Rather, the pressure derives from patriarchal social scripts and the prevalent sense of male sexual entitlement that would make it feel rude, even wrong, for Margot to walk out on Robert.

Why, and how, do we regard many men’s potentially hurt feelings as so important, so sacrosanct?

when women do minister to men’s hurt feelings, they tend to be rewarded. And when they do not, they are liable to be punished.

It wasn’t so much that people lost their moral conscience in the moment. It’s that it was easy to instill a spurious but overriding, conflicting sense of duty to comply with an ad hoc authority figure in the form of the experimenter: in this case, a man in a lab coat, billed as a Yale scientist.14

most participants also saw compliance with his wishes as something to which he was entitled.

The lesson of the Milgram experiments is not only what people are prepared to do to others, under such conditions. It is also about what they are prepared to do despite themselves, given such a setup.

she may end up having sex she doesn’t want for her own sake, nor for its own sake—not remotely. She does so in order to avoid the fallout women are socialized to circumvent.

It’s not just hyperprivileged men who can wield this kind of power, either. These things happen every day; they happen within marriages.

this story goes to show just how difficult it can be for a woman to resist a sense of male sexual entitlement that she has internalized, on his behalf.

“How do you assert your agency when its price is the pain of others?” the author asks. At the time of writing, I have no real answer to this question.

woman may experience intense guilt and shame for saying no to the men who feel entitled not just to sex but to her eager consent and participation.

The relevant inequalities are a product of a patriarchal culture, and the subsequent threats and punishment leveled at girls and women who resist and challenge the will of male authority figures.

We do not want to hurt him or let him down; we want to be a good girl.

According to recent estimates, Black women in the United States are some three to four times more likely to die as the result of pregnancy or childbirth than their white counterparts.

Women in general, and Black women in particular, routinely encounter medical professionals who regard them as hysterical, and subsequently treat their pain with skepticism.

men received more pain medication than women

Men received more opioids than did women.”

there is some evidence that women may be prone to experiencing slightly more pain than men on the basis of the same noxious stimuli—submerging

Women who seek help are less likely than men to be taken seriously when they report pain and are less likely to have their pain adequately treated.

Female chronic pain patients were hence likelier to receive a diagnosis of “histrionic disorder” (defined by “excessive” emotionality and attention-seeking behavior) than were their male counterparts.16

women, compared to men, received less and less effective pain relief, less pain medication with opioids, and more antidepressants and got more mental health referrals….A

there is in fact some evidence that women may experience more painful sensations than men, on average, on the basis of the same noxious stimuli.

the notion that boys and men are comparatively stoical and inexpressive about their pain does not appear to have a robust empirical basis.

When a privileged boy or man complains that he is in pain, there is a default tendency to believe that he really is in pain.

When girls and women complain of pain, they are liable to be dismissed,

Pain thus turns out to be a powerful site of testimonial quieting, a concept developed by the philosopher Kristie Dotson, wherein “an audience fails to identify a speaker as a knower.”

As Dotson shows, this kind of silencing is often enacted against Black women in America.

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.

medical researchers have coined the term “Yentl syndrome” to capture the way women may have to present with typical male symptoms before receiving appropriate treatment.

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.

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

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

For many powerful Republican men, the most important exception to an abortion ban would be for a so-called mistress who got pregnant with a child who was, for him, unwanted.

anti-abortion movement as one of many misogynistic enforcement mechanisms designed to compel women’s caregiving.

in some states, white women are even likelier to oppose abortion than their white male counterparts.

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.

the anti-abortion movement’s supposed preoccupation with life belies the fact that it undermines the health and lives of cis girls and women, along with other people who may also become pregnant. Similarly, the anti-trans movement’s supposed preoccupation with sexual safety belies the fact that it undermines the safety and lives of a particularly vulnerable class of people: namely, trans girls and women, who are disproportionately liable to be attacked, assaulted, and murdered, at rates that recently prompted the American Medical Association to declare this an epidemic.

Although men’s participation in child-rearing duties did increase in the United States from 1980 to 2000 (as women’s labor force participation increased dramatically), there has been subsequent stagnation.

In 2000, they found that working women took on around two-thirds of at-home child-care responsibilities, while their male partners did the remaining one-third.

Around the world, women average between two and ten times more of this work than their male counterparts. The global value of this work is estimated at $10 trillion annually.

men appear to overestimate their contributions to shared household work.

potent double bind: 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.

Economists have observed that men often prefer unemployment to taking on jobs in nursing (for example, as a nurse’s assistant), elder care, or working as a home healthcare aide.

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.

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.

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.

The modern father is far more involved, on average, than his predecessor.