Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

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.

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.

a substantial number of voters defected to a candidate from another party to avoid voting for a woman from their own—for example, Democratic voters chose a male Republican over Hillary Clinton. Given the strength of the tendency in recent decades for Americans to vote for their own party’s candidates, this study provides some naturalistic support for the “women can’t win” hypothesis,

communality”: the quality of being nurturing and pro-social, a deficit for which women tend to be harshly punished.

we are entitled in such contexts to vote for the person we think would be the best person for the job. For my money, that was not a man who recently defended working with segregationists and who lecherously sniffed the hair of a young Latina politician, nor a man who had a heart attack during his campaign and who subsequently refused to release his health records.65 It was a woman who is whip-smart, truly compassionate, and who seemed to have a plan for everything.

Learning what one is entitled to is—or at least should be—inextricably connected with learning what one owes to others.

want her to know that she is entitled to eat heartily, to take up space, to be loud, and to enjoy the kind of lack of bodily self-consciousness I can only dream of.

I want my daughter to know that she is entitled—and sometimes obligated—to speak her mind and to speak out against injustice, even if it makes some of the people around her uncomfortable. I want her to know that she is entitled to speak, period.