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When women speak up, challenge authority, or refuse to comply with traditional expectations, they often face backlash ranging from dismissal to outright violence. This isn’t a coincidence, according to Kate Manne’s book Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women.

Keep reading for an overview of this provocative book and discover how invisible expectations impact everything from sexual consent to career advancement—and why recognizing them is the first step toward change.

Overview of Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

Kate Manne’s Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (2020) argues that we live in an inequitable society that teaches men to believe they are entitled to women’s compliance with traditional gender norms—and are also entitled to punish women who defy those norms.

A Cornell University professor of philosophy, Manne argues that the social and cultural mores of our still male-dominated society condition men to feel entitled to having women perform traditionally “feminine” services, such as taking care of others, doing domestic work, and providing men with sex and children. On the other hand, society expects women not to venture too far into traditionally “masculine” domains like knowledge and power. When women defy these gender norms, Manne says, they’re punished with everything from dismissal to violence.

(Shortform note: While some critics have praised the book Entitled for its analysis of current events, others have criticized it for ignoring historical feminist scholarship and relying on examples that are open to various interpretations other than or in addition to the ones Manne assigns them.)

Our overview of the book Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women explores Manne’s ideas about misogyny, gender norms, and how gender inequity is enforced.

Introduction to Key Concepts

Manne uses the example of the 2018 Supreme Court confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to demonstrate the concepts of male entitlement, “himpathy,” misogyny, and sexism.

Entitlement

During Kavanaugh’s confirmation process, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations that Kavanaugh had sexually assaulted her. Manne writes that the hearing demonstrated the concept of male entitlement: the perception that men are owed something simply because they are men. Kavanaugh’s demeanor during the hearing seemed to demonstrate resentment at having to respond to Blasey Ford’s allegations at all—as if he expected his confirmation simply to be rubber-stamped.

Manne says that throughout the hearing, Kavanaugh displayed a demeanor of entitlement: He was irritable, aggressive, and had frequent emotional outbursts, such as yelling or crying. Blasey Ford, on the other hand, maintained a calm and helpful demeanor, even when testifying about highly emotional subject matter.

“Himpathy”

Manne observes that Senator Lindsey Graham’s defense of Kavanaugh during the Blasey Ford hearing is a good example of what she calls “himpathy.” According to Manne, himpathy is sympathy for the male perpetrator of a misogynistic act, rather than for the female victim. This sympathy is often accompanied by suspicion, blaming, and aggression toward the victim for daring to accuse the perpetrator of wrongdoing. In the hearing, Graham portrayed Kavanaugh, rather than Blasey Ford, as the victim, emphasizing what a hardship it was for Kavanaugh to have to answer to Blasey Ford’s allegations and how they had the potential to ruin his life (as opposed to denying him a position because his actions disqualified him).

Misogyny

Manne also argues that the aftermath of the hearing demonstrates how misogyny works. Kavanaugh was confirmed to the Supreme Court; Blasey Ford received death threats for having testified against a powerful man.

While misogyny is commonly understood to be hatred of women, Manne defines it as the enforcement arm of the patriarchy: a system that punishes women who defy gender norms (and also acts as a deterrent to prevent women from violating these norms). She argues that misogyny is structural, rather than psychological. It’s not defined by how men feel, but by whether a woman experiences unequal treatment because of her gender.

Sexism

Manne defines sexism as the ideological arm of the patriarchy: a set of beliefs used to normalize patriarchal expectations. Men who don’t hold sexist beliefs can still be part of a misogynist system. For example, Kavanaugh argued that his employment of women attorneys showed that he wasn’t sexist. But Manne says this has no bearing on whether he committed a misogynistic act by assaulting Blasey Ford.

Entitlement and “Feminine” Gender Roles

Manne contends that misogynistic social structures teach men to feel entitled to women’s compliance with traditionally “feminine” gender roles. Society expects women to provide—and entitles men to receive—attention and admiration, sex, children, and care.

Entitlement to Attention and Admiration

Manne uses the example of incels to show how some men feel they’re entitled to sex and attention from women—and believe they’re justified in reacting with violence when they don’t get what they’re “owed.” Manne focuses on Elliot Rodger, a self-proclaimed incel who murdered six people and injured 14 others in Isla Vista, California, in 2014. Rodger wrote extensively about his incel beliefs and how they justified his actions.

Incels are self-identifying “involuntary celibates”: heterosexual men who can’t find sexual partners. Incels often frequent online forums dedicated to their belief that women who don’t want to engage in sex or have a relationship with them are depriving them of a “good” they’re entitled to. Manne says that in addition to receiving the sex they feel they’re denied, incels believe that female attention will let them advance up the hierarchy of male power. They think possessing feminine “goods” will enable them to gain the admiration of other men. By incels’ reasoning, not only are women to blame when incels are celibate, they’re also at fault when incels aren’t as powerful as they’d like to be in relation to other men.

Manne observes that incels often believe they are victims who have been traumatized by women. This is the case even when women have done nothing to hurt them and may not have interacted with them at all (such as the women Rodgers killed). Incels are particularly dangerous because seeing themselves as persecuted victims acts as a moral justification for violence.

Entitlement to Sex

Manne argues that social and cultural conditioning leads men to feel entitled to sex from women and, in some cases, leads women to consent to sex they don’t want.

Sexual Violence

Manne argues that our society downplays and normalizes sexual violence against women because, although most people believe rape is wrong, society operates on an understanding that certain men are entitled to sex from women. Manne claims that the justice system and the media systematically dismiss women’s allegations of sexual violence due to “himpathy” for male perpetrators—particularly those who are white, privileged, and young.

Manne recounts the story of Rae Florek, a woman who was raped by her boyfriend, Randy Vanett, while she was unconscious. Although Florek had audio recordings of Vanett’s confession, and he also confessed to the police, no charges were brought against him. The police and prosecutors said they didn’t pursue the case because it was a “he-said-she-said” situation, even though both parties’ accounts of the facts were identical. An officer also said the decision not to prosecute was influenced by the fact that Florek and Vanett were in a consensual relationship.

Manne says that the justice system and the media were similarly sympathetic to the perpetrator in the Brock Turner case, in which Turner raped an unconscious young woman, Chanel Miller. As in the Vanett case, there was no question that Turner committed the crime (in this case, he was caught in the act). Nonetheless, the judge in the case expressed concern about destroying the perpetrator’s future, and the media also focused on Turner’s promising future as a swimmer at Stanford University. Media outlets and Turner supporters emphasized that Miller had been drinking, thus blaming the victim for the perpetrator’s actions.

Manne also examines two law enforcement practices that she says demonstrate systemic failure to take sexual violence against women seriously: “exceptional clearance” and the large backlog of untested rape kits. “Exceptional clearance” means that a sexual assault case is closed without an arrest. Law enforcement experts say it’s supposed to happen only in exceptional circumstances, such as when the suspect is dead or the victim refuses to cooperate. However, an investigation of 60 jurisdictions showed that almost half used exceptional clearance to close the majority of rape cases, even when the victim wished to proceed and evidence existed to make an arrest.

In addition, police jurisdictions across the country are sitting on thousands of untested rape kits. There are about 400,000 untested rape kits nationwide. Manne says that in Detroit alone, testing of 10,000 backlogged rape kits identified 817 serial rapists.

Manne also points out that 86% of untested rape kits belong to victims of color. She argues that not only is the justice system (and society as a whole) more likely to dismiss sexual violence allegations involving privileged or powerful men, it’s also more likely to disregard these allegations if they involve less privileged women, including women of color, transgender women, and disabled women. 

Manne writes that women who report sexual violence are often punished for it. She provides examples of women who were prosecuted for supposedly filing false reports that later proved accurate, and others who faced severe legal consequences for defending themselves against sexual assault.

Consensual Sex

Manne also argues that social and cultural conditioning frequently leads women to consent to sex they don’t want. Because women are socialized to be “good girls” who are helpful, polite, and sweet—especially around male authority figures—they may agree to sex to avoid hurting a man’s feelings or being labeled as rude. Manne says women’s sense of obligation to perform a feminine gender role even when they’re being mistreated is a type of internalized misogyny.

Manne gives the example of “Grace,” a woman who claimed in an online publication that comedian Aziz Ansari repeatedly and forcefully pressured her for sex over the course of an evening in his apartment, despite her efforts to prevent this from happening. Manne notes that Grace received backlash for speaking out, with some commentators accusing her of trying to humiliate Ansari and ruin his career, and others saying the only thing Ansari was guilty of was not being able to read minds. Manne argues that this backlash is typical of how women are punished for refusing men’s advances or talking about men’s problematic sexual behavior.

Manne asserts that women who comply with men’s demands for sex even when they don’t want to are behaving similarly to the subjects of the 1960s Milgram experiment, which showed that most people feel compelled to comply with authority figures even when they’re uncomfortable doing so.

In the experiments, hundreds of subjects gave increasingly severe electric shocks to a stranger at the direction of another stranger, who wore a lab coat and was presented as a Yale researcher. (The shocks weren’t real, and the man receiving the shocks was an actor.) Even though the “victim” of the shocks screamed in pain and pounded on the wall—and even though the majority of the subjects expressed that they didn’t want to go on—they nonetheless continued to administer shocks that would have been fatal had they been real.

Entitlement to Police Women’s Bodies

Manne contends that men feel entitled to control what women do with their bodies, as evidenced most clearly by abortion restrictions, “bathroom bills” attempting to regulate transgender women’s use of public restrooms, and violence against transgender women. In particular, Manne argues that abortion bans are an extreme form of state control over women’s bodies and moral choices that society doesn’t allow in any other context. (For example, there are no laws prohibiting cheating on your partner.)

She contends that the purpose of laws regulating abortion isn’t actually to protect “life,” but rather to control women. She says this is demonstrated by 1) the intentional misinformation surrounding abortion, 2) anti-abortion activists’ failure to care about life in any context other than abortion, and 3) the way the Republican Party transformed abortion into a partisan, religious issue as a political strategy to win Christian votes.

Manne argues that anti-abortion activists promote misinformation about pregnancy and abortion. For example, the term “heartbeat law” is intentionally misleading because at six to eight weeks of pregnancy, when these abortion bans kick in, there is no heart, and there’s not even a fetus—there’s just a pea-sized embryo. Claims about late-term abortions are also misleading, as they make up less than 1% of abortions and are almost always due to fetal anomalies or the pregnant woman’s health issues.

In addition, Manne says those who rally around abortion bans because they purport to care about “unborn children” seem to care very little about children once they’re born. Many abortion opponents don’t support laws protecting poor children, expanding affordable health care, or addressing maternal mortality rates.

Also, while many people say they are against abortion because of their religious beliefs, Manne writes that Republicans have manipulated Christian beliefs to serve their political agenda. During Richard Nixon’s presidential campaign, Republicans tried to recruit Christian Democrats to their side by playing on fears of “immorality” using the “AAA” strategy: Acid, Amnesty, and Abortion. They attacked Nixon’s opponent as representing drugs, amnesty for Vietnam War draft dodgers, and abortion—which they condemned as contrary to traditional gender roles that required women to be wives and mothers. In other words, abortion was positioned as a violation of Christian family values. 

Manne argues that there are similarities between antiabortion laws and state “bathroom bills” attempting to regulate transgender people’s use of public restrooms. Both are centered on a false notion of an “immoral” female perpetrator and an innocent victim. A cisgender woman who gets an abortion is seen as a baby-killer, while a transgender woman who uses a women’s restroom is seen as a predator seeking to abuse cis girls and women.

Manne notes that cis men are much more likely than trans women (or cis men allegedly posing as trans women) to prey on someone in a public restroom.

Manne says transphobic men feel that presenting as female when you have (or used to have) male genitalia is a form of deception. These men feel entitled to know immediately whether a person can provide them with what they see as the primary services of womanhood: heternormative sex and biological children. This entitlement can lead to violence against trans women. Manne cites the 2002 case of Gwen Araujo, a 17-year-old trans girl who was murdered by four cis men (two of whom had previously had sex with her without realizing she was trans) after a forced search of her body revealed she had male genitalia.

Entitlement to Care

Manne argues that society’s expectations for heterosexual women require that they care for their male partners, their shared home, and their children. On the flip side, men are deemed entitled to receive care, both from the women in their lives and the entire medical profession; women, as caregivers, are not seen as entitled to receive care.

Domestic Work

Manne says that men’s sense of entitlement to their female partner’s domestic labor is so entrenched that women have been doing at least an extra month of housework and childcare every year since the 1980s, a phenomenon sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild called women’s second shift.

Worldwide, women do between two and 10 times as much domestic labor as men.

The discrepancy is particularly pronounced if a heterosexual couple has children. Studies consistently show that even when both partners work full-time jobs, women do twice as much childcare as men—and the childcare that men do usually involves activities like playing with the kids. In contrast, the childcare women do involves responsibilities like bathing the kids or getting them ready for school.

While some people claim that women are naturally better at childcare, Manne cites studies showing that when men are the primary caregivers for their kids, their brains change to become more like those of women who are primary caregivers.

Manne notes that a woman’s domestic labor doesn’t just encompass everything she gets done, but also includes keeping track of and preparing for everything that needs to be done for everyone in the family: making appointments, making grocery lists, remembering where everything is, delegating tasks, knowing what needs to be packed for trips, and more. These are all forms of emotional labor.

Medical Care

Manne writes that women’s pain and medical issues are often ignored, underdiagnosed, and undertreated compared to men’s—even though women tend to be more sensitive to pain than men (and experience more painful conditions unique to women). Women’s physical pain is much more likely to be treated as a psychological issue than men’s pain. Manne points to studies showing that men are given more pain medication than women for the same painful operations. When it comes to boys and girls who experience pain after surgery, boys are more likely to be given codeine; girls, Tylenol.

Manne says the health care industry takes men’s pain more seriously than women’s pain in part because it deems men less likely to complain about pain and more deserving of prompt, effective treatment when they do. However, there is very little evidence that men are actually more stoic than women.

Manne also observes that medical research and training often assume that a male body represents a typical human; many medical studies are still performed exclusively or primarily on men. This can result in doctors failing to catch serious problems like heart attacks in women because women’s symptoms are different from men’s. Similarly, treating men as the “standard” can mean women don’t get the benefit of important new medical developments because research performed primarily on men deems those developments unnecessary for women.

Entitlement and “Masculine” Gender Roles

Just as society expects women to provide men with certain “feminine” services, says Manne, so too are women excluded from the traditionally “masculine” domains of knowledge and power.

Entitlement to Knowledge

Manne argues that some men believe they are the exclusive repository of knowledge on any given subject. They take the approach that not only are women’s thoughts or opinions wrong, but women shouldn’t be speaking (or writing) at all. To illustrate this point, Manne points to the behaviors of mansplaining and gaslighting.

Mansplaining is a term that became popular following the publication of author Rebecca Solnit’s essay, “Men Explain Things to Me.” In it, she describes an incident in which, upon learning that she’d written a book about photographer Eadweard Muybridge, a man she’d just met pontificates at length concerning an important book about Muybridge. When he finally realizes that Solnit is the author of the very book he’s explaining to her, he’s shocked. This is mansplaining: when a man explains something to a woman in a way that presumes she knows nothing about a topic she’s an expert in.

Manne notes that the term gaslight originated from a 1938 play called Gas Light and its two movie adaptations. In the play, a husband tries to drive his wife crazy by (among other things) telling her she’s imagining things and hiding items that he then accuses her of losing. He does this to obscure his criminal activity: He killed the former owner of their house for her rubies, but then was unable to find them, so he sneaks around the attic every night looking for the gems.

The wife notices that each night after her husband disappears, the gaslight dims; just before he reappears, the light becomes bright again. This indicates that her husband has turned on a light in the attic during his absence. However, her husband’s constant undermining of her perceptions makes her question everything she knows, even her own observations. This is the phenomenon we now call gaslighting. Manne notes that the wife feels it’s impossible to challenge her husband because she’s made to feel crazy if she tries.

Manne argues that while both mansplaining and gaslighting are a product of men feeling entitled to be the sole possessors of knowledge, gaslighting is more egregious because men who engage in it exercise complete control over another person’s reality—in effect substituting a man’s understanding of reality in place of a woman’s.

Entitlement to Power

Manne notes that people are much more comfortable with male leaders than female leaders. She cites studies showing that, all other things being equal, people see men as more competent in leadership positions than women. What’s more, people tend to dislike women in traditionally male leadership roles simply because they’re successful. However, if study participants are told that both a male leader and a female leader are helpful and community-minded, participants are more likely to choose the female leader as a boss and to judge her more likable.

Manne argues that the double standard around leadership means that male politicians can get away with being jerks, while female politicians are punished if they display any anger or lack of compassion. A female politician can be successful only if she’s seen as authentically caring and compassionate. Manne argues, however, that this can be difficult to accomplish because both authenticity and compassion are open to interpretation. 

Manne gives the example of Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, who was widely perceived as kind and a team player at the beginning of her presidential campaign (she even made personal calls to small donors to thank them for their campaign contributions). However, every minor misstep she made was criticized. Manne opines that Warren may have lost the most support when she and Bernie Sanders disagreed about something Sanders said during a private meeting. Manne argues that even though their disagreement was a classic “he said-she said” scenario, Warren was likely perceived as attacking Sanders and challenging his authority.

When it comes to the presidency, US voters consistently choose a male candidate over a female one, even if it means voting against their own party. Manne notes that the concept of a woman being “unelectable” to the presidency is in some ways a self-fulfilling prophecy: If people believe a woman is “unelectable,” they won’t vote for her, and then she becomes unelectable. Manne cites a June 2019 poll finding that most people planned to vote for Joe Biden, but if they could have anyone they wanted as president, they’d choose Elizabeth Warren.

Valid Entitlement 

Manne says that while she’s focused on men’s unjustified entitlement to women’s services, there are forms of valid entitlement that she hopes women and girls can reclaim. Inspired by the imminent birth of her daughter, Manne writes that she wants her daughter to feel entitled to:

  • Being believed and cared for when she expresses her needs or desires, whether emotional or physical/medical
  • Bodily autonomy, including consent to being touched, consent to sex, and reproductive choice
  • Shared domestic labor
  • Feeling unself-conscious about her body
  • Being LGBTQ
  • Speaking up and sharing her knowledge
  • Not feeling required to change herself to please others
  • Being powerful, but also being allowed to make mistakes

Manne concludes that we are all obligated to fight for a world in which women and girls are no longer subject to male control and entitlement.

Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women (Kate Manne)

Elizabeth Whitworth

Elizabeth has a lifelong love of books. She devours nonfiction, especially in the areas of history, theology, and philosophy. A switch to audiobooks has kindled her enjoyment of well-narrated fiction, particularly Victorian and early 20th-century works. She appreciates idea-driven books—and a classic murder mystery now and then. Elizabeth has a Substack and is writing a book about what the Bible says about death and hell.

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