Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women
Rate it:
Open Preview
Read between September 3 - September 6, 2020
2%
Flag icon
entitlement: the widespread perception that a privileged man is owed something even as exalted as a position on the U.S. Supreme Court.4 This is a perception that Kavanaugh himself shared, judging by his aggrieved, belligerent, and, at times, borderline unhinged conduct during the hearings.
2%
Flag icon
himpathy: the way powerful and privileged boys and men who commit acts of sexual violence or engage in other misogynistic behavior often receive sympathy and concern over their female victims.
3%
Flag icon
misogyny should not be understood as a monolithic, deep-seated psychological hatred of girls and women. Instead, it’s best conceptualized as the “law enforcement” branch of patriarchy—a system that functions to police and enforce gendered norms and expectations, and involves girls and women facing disproportionately or distinctively hostile treatment because of their gender, among other factors.
3%
Flag icon
In general, I think of misogyny as being a bit like the shock collar worn by a dog to keep them behind one of those invisible fences that proliferate in suburbia. Misogyny is capable of causing pain, to be sure, and it often does so. But even when it isn’t actively hurting anyone, it tends to discourage girls and women from venturing out of bounds. If we stray, or err, we know what we are in for.
4%
Flag icon
In contrast to misogyny, I take sexism to be the theoretical and ideological branch of patriarchy: the beliefs, ideas, and assumptions that serve to rationalize and naturalize patriarchal norms and expectations—including a gendered division of labor, and men’s dominance over women in areas of traditionally male power and authority.
4%
Flag icon
my account of misogyny counsels us to focus less on the individual perpetrators of misogyny, and more on misogyny’s targets and victims.
4%
Flag icon
understanding misogyny as more about the hostility girls and women face, as opposed to the hostility men feel deep down in their hearts, helps us avoid a problem of psychological inscrutability.
4%
Flag icon
a girl or woman is facing disproportionately or distinctively gendered hostile treatment because she is a woman in a man’s world—that is, a woman in a historically patriarchal society (which includes, I believe, most if not all of them).15 We don’t need to show that she is subject to such treatment because she is a woman in a man’s mind
4%
Flag icon
misogyny primarily as a property of the social environments girls and women navigate, wherein they are liable to be subject to hateful or hostile treatment because of their gender—together, in many cases, with their gendered “bad” behavior.
4%
Flag icon
So I propose defining a misogynist as someone who is an overachiever in perpetuating misogyny: practicing misogyny with particular frequency and consistency compared to others in that environment. This definition helps us acknowledge the important truth that we are all to a certain extent complicit in misogynistic social structures.
4%
Flag icon
There is no universal experience of misogyny—not least because gendered norms and expectations always intersect with these other unjust systems to produce novel forms of oppression faced by different groups of girls and women.
5%
Flag icon
women are expected to give traditionally feminine goods (such as sex, care, nurturing, and reproductive labor) to designated, often more privileged men, and to refrain from taking traditionally masculine goods (such as power, authority, and claims to knowledge) away from them.
9%
Flag icon
It is not hard, upon reflection, to recognize the obvious fact that a woman is fully human. The real challenge may be in recognizing that she is fully a human being, and not just a human giver of love, sex, and moral succor. She is allowed to be her own person, and to be with other people.
10%
Flag icon
More likely, they are looking for an unjust hierarchy to locate themselves on, thereby vindicating their preexisting feelings of inferiority and aggrieved resentment.
11%
Flag icon
Two to three women are murdered by their current or former intimate partner every day in the United States, on average.33 And by far the most dangerous time for a woman with respect to intimate partner violence is when she either leaves, or threatens to leave, a relationship—thus provoking jealousy, rage, and feelings of abandonment in her male partner or ex-partner.
12%
Flag icon
Misogyny takes down women, and himpathy protects the agents of that takedown operation, partly by painting them as “good guys.”
13%
Flag icon
Erasure is a form of oppression, the refusal to see.8
15%
Flag icon
And so we see that rape involves so much more than individual bad apples. It involves bad actors who are enabled, protected, and even fostered by a himpathetic social system.
18%
Flag icon
In 2009, for example, a young woman in Washington State who told police she had been raped at knifepoint was fined $500 for supposedly filing a false report—a report that, it later turned out, had been accurate.
20%
Flag icon
Why, and how, do we regard many men’s potentially hurt feelings as so important, so sacrosanct? And, relatedly, why do we regard women as so responsible for protecting and ministering to them?
22%
Flag icon
She may even be prevailed upon to be an active participant in his sexual hijacking of her person: she is just as averse to the sex as ever, but has been made more averse to continuing to say no to him. And so 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.
23%
Flag icon
“How do you assert your agency when its price is the pain of others?”
23%
Flag icon
The author, who remained anonymous, is a humanities professor who regularly teaches feminist theory. But, she confesses, “all the feminist texts I had read could not drown out what I had absorbed from society and popular culture: that it was my duty to satisfy my husband, regardless of my own feelings.” —
24%
Flag icon
Hence this particular form of internalized misogyny: the shame and guilt women often feel for not protecting a man who mistreats us. We do not want to hurt him or let him down; we want to be a good
26%
Flag icon
major finding is that women’s pain in the reviewed studies was psychologized….Women’s pain reports are taken less seriously, their pain is discounted as being psychic or nonexistent, and their medication is less adequate than treatment given to men.17
27%
Flag icon
the perception of male stoicism may be the flip side of the perception that women are more likely to complain about comparatively little. In which case, this assumption would simply be another face of a prevalent gender bias.
28%
Flag icon
when presented with footage of a crying infant (dressed in gender-neutral clothing), people tended to rate the infant as experiencing more pain when told the infant was a boy rather than a girl.
28%
Flag icon
Do we think men’s pain should be taken more seriously because we tend to regard them as more stoical? Or do we regard them as more stoical because, at least in many settings, we tend to take their pain more seriously?
28%
Flag icon
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.”32 Because the audience doubts or impugns the speaker’s competence, the speaker ends up effectively being silenced.
28%
Flag icon
Fricker argues that testimonial injustice has its roots in social stereotypes about either the competence or the truthfulness of a particular class of people.33
29%
Flag icon
women are regarded as more than entitled (indeed obligated) to provide care, but far less entitled to ask for and receive it.
33%
Flag icon
Remember, the state doesn’t regulate certain behaviors that most people think are immoral—lying to and cheating on one’s partner, say—or behaviors that some people think are tantamount to murder—eating meat, for example. The social costs of coercion here seem to radically outweigh those of the possibility that some people will choose to do things that others believe they should not do, given the kinds of freedom to which they are entitled.
33%
Flag icon
So, by all means, don’t have an abortion, if you’re personally opposed to them. But the state policing of pregnant bodies is a form of misogynistic social control, one whose effects will be most deeply felt by the most vulnerable girls and women. And this, in my book, is simply indefensible.
34%
Flag icon
The vast majority of those who support such anti-abortion legislation have done nothing to address the shockingly high maternal mortality rates in the United States (particularly for Black, Native American, and Alaska Native women);25 they show little to no interest in securing additional child support for children born into poverty; they appear unconcerned that poor-quality food and water (including, notoriously in Flint, Michigan) cause many Americans serious health problems; they actively work against the expansion of affordable healthcare; and they tend to be supremely indifferent to the ...more
37%
Flag icon
bathroom bills rely on the construction of
37%
Flag icon
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.48
40%
Flag icon
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.
40%
Flag icon
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
41%
Flag icon
So privileged white men’s dereliction of their duties have deleterious effects not just on their wives, but also, by extension, on more vulnerable women, who may end up being exploited to do the work these comparatively privileged women should not have to cope with single-handedly.20
41%
Flag icon
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.
42%
Flag icon
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.
43%
Flag icon
many a woman unwittingly echoes and validates her male partner’s illegitimate sense of entitlement to her labor, and to his leisure time. Despite her frustrations, she subsequently gives him mixed messages, and she is reluctant to insist on a more equitable arrangement. 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.
44%
Flag icon
given the social forces around them that tell them not to insist and to “take one for the team” in perpetuity. Jancee Dunn even writes, in How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids, of not feeling entitled to eat whole, undamaged crackers from the box. Instead, she eats the broken ones, saving the good ones for her husband and daughter.
44%
Flag icon
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.
45%
Flag icon
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.
45%
Flag icon
epistemic entitlement involves peremptorily assuming greater authority to speak, on the part of a more privileged speaker.8 Understood in this way, we can see that epistemic entitlement is a common precursor to, and cause of, testimonial injustice.9
45%
Flag icon
“testimonial smothering,” where a speaker self-silences, due to her anticipating that her word will not receive the proper uptake, and may instead place her in an “unsafe or risky” situation.
46%
Flag icon
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.
46%
Flag icon
If the truth is not our property, then neither is authority. Listening to women becomes superfluous, except for instrumental reasons—a mere performance, intended to mollify or, perhaps, to virtue-signal.
48%
Flag icon
Gaslighting can thus have a distinctively moral dimension, as well as an epistemic one: 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.20
« Prev 1