Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

by Kate Manne

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.

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.

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.12 All the more reason, then, why Ford’s testimony was so courageous.

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.

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.

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.

these men’s sense of entitlement to such affection and admiration is a trait they often share with the far greater proportion of men who commit acts of domestic, dating, and intimate partner violence.

these women’s freedom—their capacity to make choices for themselves—was not in doubt. But he resented that freedom when their choices did not favor him.

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.

Two to three women are murdered by their current or former intimate partner every day in the United States, on average.

This is not an Instagram story. This is a story about dating violence and homicide, about power and control, about a man who felt entitled to take a girl’s life and emboldened to post photos of it on a gaming platform.

Misogyny takes down women, and himpathy protects the agents of that takedown operation, partly by painting them as “good guys.”

Himpathy imaginatively transforms presumptively brutal murders into understandable acts of passion or, alternatively, warranted desperation. And it imaginatively turns other crimes, such as rape, into mere misunderstandings and alcohol-fueled mishaps.

When it comes to the failings of this system, there’s no shortage of possibilities, either.

rapists commit between seven to eleven rapes, on average, before being apprehended.

The most powerful of powerful men are deemed sexually entitled to “have” virtually anyone, with minimal repercussions.

fewer than 0.6 percent of rapes will result in the rapist’s incarceration.

Another possibility: something has changed about the perpetrators. The obvious factor is that they have gotten older, making it easier for people to cast them as “dirty old men”—albeit a more powerful variant of the ageist cultural trope, rather than a more pathetic figure. Notably, older men also tend to be less useful than young earners from the perspective of late-stage capitalism; their sell-by date is approaching.

misogyny can target or victimize almost any girl or woman, regardless of her individual, gendered “good” behavior. This is partly because women are often treated as representative of a certain “type” of woman, and effectively blamed or punished for the misdeeds of the whole collective. It is also partly because misogynistic aggression can stem from myriad forms of dissatisfaction (resulting from men’s being subject to capitalist exploitation, for example). And it may then involve displacement—colloquially, “punching down” behavior, directed at those who are vulnerable and available, who often happen to be women.

the first rule of misogyny is that you do not complain about such mistreatment.

Between 2009 and 2014, more than one hundred women in the United Kingdom were prosecuted for making false rape allegations.

He described himself to The New York Times as “the victim of a hate crime against a straight man.” Meanwhile, the women were depicted in the media as a “wolf pack” of “killer lesbians.”

for many girls and women, particularly those who are oppressed along other axes—race, class, sexuality, and disability, for starters—not only does their rapist or abuser often go unpunished; the women themselves may be punished for protesting this injustice.48

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?

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

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.

He was evidently not only indifferent to Gutierrez’s mounting distress; he was aiming to cause it, to make her accede to him. It’s not that Gutierrez’s no meant yes to Weinstein, exactly; it’s that it meant nothing—it merely being his cue to keep asking, prompting, needling.

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.

Submitting to sex with a man who knew it was unwanted, who knew I felt deep pain at our lack of emotional connection, and who knew—who had been clearly told—that it felt like a violation, broke something in me. Knowing that he could still enjoy and feel emotionally fulfilled by that unwanted sex shattered my idea of our marriage. I felt like a sex doll. I felt unselfed. But I blamed myself.

“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.”

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.

“an overload of responsibility for family, work, household, their pain, and their wellbeing seemed to be an obstacle for recovery for women with pain,” researchers observed recently.

For many white, privileged women, prenatal care in the United States is comparatively good—albeit geared toward the needs of the fetus, rather than that of the mother.

References to the “typical 70kg man” abound, as if he covers both sexes (as one doctor pointed out to me, he doesn’t even represent men very well).

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.

She is not just supposed to have the child, in the style of The Handmaid’s Tale, as an exercise in human breeding; she is meant to care for the child, afterward, in a self-effacing manner (and far in excess of the expectations placed on her male counterparts). But even if her humanity is not in doubt, it is perceived as owed to others. She is positioned not as a human being but, rather, as a human giver—of reproductive as well as emotional labor, material support, and sexual gratification, insofar as her male partner wants these. And he, correspondingly, is deemed entitled to take these goods from her, as a matter of his birthright. He is also deemed entitled to waive these goods. 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.

Their subsequent violent rage was plausibly rooted in a sense of entitlement—to have Araujo’s genitals and the sex she was assigned at birth match their expectations, given her gender presentation and their sexual desire for her.

These claims reflect the idea that not only were these men entitled to read Araujo’s genital status off her clothed appearance, they were entitled to “go crazy,” even to slay her, when that sexual entitlement was challenged.

I carry in my mind exhaustive lists of all types, not because I want to, but because I know no one else will.

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.

“fathers who work long hours have wives who do more child care, while mothers who work long hours have husbands who sleep more and watch lots of television.”

women in heterosexual couples are held to higher standards than their mates.

many a woman unwittingly echoes and validates her male partner’s illegitimate sense of entitlement to her labor, and to his leisure time.

You don’t always have to eat the broken crackers.

A paradigmatic act of mansplaining consists of a man presuming to “explain” something incorrect(ly) to a more expert female speaker or set of speakers—and in an overly confident, arrogant, or overbearing manner, which often results in his not backing down or admitting to his mistake after it has been authoritatively pointed out to him.

“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.

“You can disagree with someone without wanting to silence them,”

there are widespread prescriptions that “specify that women should behave communally, exhibiting nurturing and socially sensitive attributes that demonstrate concern for others, such as being kind, sympathetic, and understanding.”9 Such social norms tend to be far more stringently enforced for women than for their male counterparts,

When it comes to demonstrable niceness, it’s an imperative for powerful women—and seemingly inconsequential for their male rivals.