Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

When I wrote Down Girl, I focused on making an abstract argument that misogyny should be understood as the hostility girls and women face, which serves to police and enforce gendered norms and expectations. But this definition raised many of the questions I’ve been thinking about ever since: What are the gendered norms and expectations that misogyny polices and enforces, especially in my own milieu (the United States), with its reputation for being relatively egalitarian?16

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.

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.