5 Key Teachings: ENTITLED, by Kate Manne

TRANSCRIPT:

So I’m going to beg you all to read Kate Manne’s Entitled. She also wrote Down Girl, which is fantastic, it’s slightly more academic. But Entitled is really accessible, and in it, she’s talked about some of these concepts that she’s coined, like “himpathy,” which is the way that our sympathy, culturally, typically goes toward powerful white men, rather than the people they persecute. She uses Brock Turner as an example. ANd she also teases out the differences between sexism and misogyny, misogyny being what she calls the “shock collar” of sexism. It’s the invisible fence that confines women and keeps us from speaking out, acting out, and telling the truth about our experiences and our lives. It’s a really important book, particularly in the time of Roe v. Wade and all these other assaults on the freedom of women. She gives meaning and voice to a lot of things that we feel and have not yet expressed.

CAPTION:

If you read one book to understand white privilege, sexism, and misogyny, this should be it. Philosopher Kate Manne coined the term "himpathy"—the way in which we extend our cultural sympathy to men of privilege rather than their victims (i.e. Brock Turner). She is an excellent tour-guide of concepts like this that we might be able to recognize by their pattern, but have never really named. I also love her definition of misogyny: "I think of misogyny as being a bit like the shock collar worn by a dog to keep him 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." In her wide-ranging, accessible Entitled (she's also the author of Down Girl, which is more academic), she explores the way male privilege curtails the lives of women, and also the ways in which women abide by and support the system as well.

Most perversely, as Manne writes: “When accused of misogynistic behavior, men often respond by invoking their recognition of the humanity of their wives, sisters, mothers, or other female relatives. Far better that a man realize that no woman belongs to him—and that he is not entitled to have any woman’s love, care, and admiration in an asymmetrical moral relationship.”

Please, please read Kate Manne’s Entitled.

6 KEY TEACHINGS:

1. Below is Manne on why Entitled needed to be written—and why it’s for all of us, not just men, to understand how misogyny lives in us and is expressed by us.

After all, as I noted earlier, women as well as men can engage in misogynistic behavior—for example, by dismissing other women, or engaging in the kind of moralism that tends to let male counterparts off the hook, while harshly blaming women for that same behavior.

…

Entitled tackles a wide range of ways in which misogyny, himpathy, and male entitlement work in tandem with other oppressive systems to produce unjust, perverse, and sometimes bizarre outcomes. Many of these stem from the fact that 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 goods can in turn be understood as those to which privileged men are tacitly deemed entitled, and which these men will often garner himpathy for wrongfully taking from women—when it comes to sex, most obviously, though by no means exclusively.

2. Manne’s views on the conflation of morality and abortion are FIRE. She really helped me to also put words as to why this conflation is so wrong and terrifying for all women.