SHEESH the blurb hooked me hard with this one!!! it's an intense read but a hugely important one, based on deep research and compelling facts, woven with stories and narrative in a way that is unputdownable and readable despite being unsettling and emotional to process at times. a must-read!

I don't read a lot of philosophy, but found Manne's previous book, Down Girl, interesting and eye-opening, enhancing my understanding of misogyny with her persuasive argument. Entitled offers more of the same, focusing on himpathy and how it harms women. Accessible for the non-philosopher, Manne's book will enlighten and enrage anyone who reads it.

This was an interesting exploration of how men's etitlement to sex, power, knowledge, and other things is pervasive and toxic to our social context - but most especially to women. Her arguments are well thought out and include a wide range of recent headliners (such as Brett Kavanaugh, Harvey Weinstein, and Brock Turner) to emphasize her points. She details how "himpathy" - a need to sympathize with men in their wrongdoing while erasing the woman's experience at the same time - has invaded our social and cultural mores, thus upholding this system that demands women work harder, longer, and better than their male counterparts.

Entitled doesn't cover any new ground beyond what other books of is kind of discussed, but the way the author frames misogyny within the framework of male entitlement adds increased depth to the discussion. Covering everything from sexual assault and the sometimes deadly outcome of the incel movement to the often unprofessional medical care of women, the author explores the very real day-to-day impact of misogyny. Rather than being presented as the ideological stance of sexism, it is discussed as the other natural outcome of male entitlement. When male desires, beliefs, and control are privileged, female experience naturally loses. Not earth-shattering, but a worthwhile addition to the feminist discourse.

📚Thanks @netgalley @crownpublishing for the ARC of Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women. Not gonna lie, I nabbed this off Netgalley because it intrigued me but I totally thought it was gonna be superficial feminist at best, super white feminism-y at worst. Wow, I was wrong! One of my favorite chapters was on Elizabeth Warren. I still have my Warren stickers on my car and there have been multiple instances where an entitled white man has berated me at a gas station or made me fear for my life by riding my taillight on the interstate as I see him waving his fists in my rear view mirror. She includes anecdotes from Tressie McMillan Cotton, whose book I read last year (Thick) that show the way Black women are discriminated against in medicine with consequences that are violent and deadly. She touches on Kavanaugh with insights I hadn’t considered before. She has a chapter on QAnon MRA’s and mass shootings. Her insights on sexual consent were very thought provoking and the section on gendered pain was enraging (maternal morality rates are as high as ever and racially exasperated, women are 72x more likely to be killed in a car accident wearing a seatbelt because crash dummies are primarily male, and women are less likely to be diagnosed with ADHD, autism, endometriosis, and heart attacks because women’s pain is often ignored). I had to go off birth control because my side effects were scarily bad and no doctors were listening to me. I had a great chat with Austin about domestic and emotional labor from a section in the book. This book was such a brilliant surprise and it is out now! Go read it - the last chapter may just make you cry.

A thorough, well-researched investigation on male privilege, citing several examples of disparities between men and women. In some cases, when it comes to writing about male privilege, books are normally discussed through a white women's perspective, but what I appreciated the most about Manne's work is the coverage and inclusion of women of color and their struggles with male entitlement. It is a tough subject to read, but Manne presents a readable fashion. An extremely important book.

Misogyny is a phenomenon that, as much as we are quick to point out the worst examples of it in the news and online life, goes mostly uncommented upon in everyday life. At least it seems so from my experience. It is so pervasive that Kate Manne, in her new book Entitled (which releases August 11), proposes “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.” But Manne is not focused on this definitional misogynist in Entitled, but instead the sense of entitlement to people, power, and resources that men have historically been privileged to hold.
The most memorable chapters of Entitled take aim at men’s sense of entitlement to sex, bringing the phenomena of both rape and “incel” violence further into the light. “Incels”, if you have missed out on this disturbing corner of online culture, are self-described “involuntary celibates” who are angry at women for choosing not to have sex with them. Manne investigates the misogynistic nature of this online culture that threatens and often executes violence against women (and sometimes other men) because they feel entitled to sex. Incels even glorify other men who have committed mass acts of violence that have made the news. The chapter on rape is just as disturbing, as Manne details the structural forces that prevent people from reporting rape and sexual assault. The most shocking of the stories involves a woman whose boyfriend admitted to having sex with her multiple times while she was asleep, admitted it again twice while being recorded, then admitted it to the law enforcement officer who interviewed him. The girlfriend’s report was never taken seriously, however, and the boyfriend was never arrested or charged. These structural issues are widespread, but it is worse for people of color. As Manne writes:
Another sobering reality: of the (Wayne County, Michigan) rape kits that had previously gone untested, some 86 percent of the victims were people of color — primarily girls and women. As (Wayne County prosecuter Kym)Worthy puts it, “You’re not going to find too many blond-haired, blue-eyed white women [with untested kits].… Their kits are treated differently, their cases are solved. Race is at the center of this in many ways as well, unfortunately; we know that across the criminal justice system.”
Even in marriage, especially (speaking from my own experience) among Christians, entitlement to sexual consent runs deep. Manne relays the story of an author of an anonymous Vox article who “had felt sexually violated by her husband all throughout their eight-year marriage.” She quotes the anonymous author, who says “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.” I have never once heard of a man having anything close to a similar feeling. How deep does the misogyny go?
Manne’s analysis, however, does not confine itself to male sexual entitlement in all its forms. It reaches into healthcare: “Women who seek help are less likely than men to be taken seriously when they report pain and are less likely to have their pain adequately treated.” Most memorably for me, however, she details how men feel entitled to their wives doing almost all of the housework:
A 2018 Oxfam report showed that women doing twice as much work as men by way of unpaid care work and domestic labor is on the low end, globally speaking. Around the world, women average between two and ten times more of this work than their male counterparts. The global value of this work is estimated at $10 trillion. Based on the current state of affairs, estimates of how long we have to go before reaching child-care parity between men and women range from seventy-five years (by the fatherhood campaign MenCare) to a still more dismal two hundred years (by the United Nations International Labour Organization). Studies show there is but one circumstance in which men’s and women’s household work will tend to approach parity: when she works full-time and he is unemployed. And even then, the operative word is approach parity. She will still do a bit more. Equality is elusive, even in the supposedly egalitarian U.S. context.
This blew me away. Unemployed men don’t, on average, do more housework than the employed women they live with? Men are failing women, or society is failing men in preparing them for life. It has to be both. We can’t keep comparing ourselves to our fathers (where we usually come out ahead). We have to start asking ourselves if we are being fair to the women in our lives. And in most cases, the answer is no.
Kate Manne’s Entitled is fantastic, and it needs to be read widely. However, I feel that in the throes of writing about great progressive values, she sometimes begins speaking only to a progressive audience. She lost me, for instance, in her chapter on abortion. First, she describes the right to an abortion as “constitutionally protected”, which is not accepted as fact for most non-progressive Americans. Some, like me, feel strongly that the constitution does not reflect such a right and feel that the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision was extremely misguided on that front. But there is much more, if only in this passage:
The idea of a fetal heartbeat is clearly designed to tug on, well, the heartstrings. But calling it a heartbeat at six or eight weeks of someone’s pregnancy (dating from the first day of their last menstrual period) is very much a misnomer. At this stage, there is no heartbeat — not least because there is no heart (nor a brain, nor a face). There is no fetus, even: an embryo makes that transition at around week nine or ten. At six weeks of pregnancy, the embryo is approximately the size of a green pea. On an ultrasound, a pulsing of cells that are specializing to become cardiac may or may not be detectable. In some pregnancies, such activity will not be detected until significantly later.

I’ll start with the truth here: she is right that it is not called a fetus until week nine or ten. Calling it by another name does nothing to further her argument. Now the falsehoods. The neural tube closes at 6 or 7 weeks, marking the separation of the brain from the spinal cord. The face develops around week 7. Manne zeroes in on “six or eight weeks” because these are usually the weeks after which “heartbeat bills” are designed to ban abortions. The heart begins to form around six weeks, and that is the first week at which a heartbeat can be detected, which is why some “heartbeat bills” are set to ban abortions after that week. The thinking is that the possibility of a heartbeat means there is human life, but that line of thinking is not represented in Manne’s point of view.
More than that, this view (of a heartbeat at six or eight weeks meaning essentially nothing) is not supported by the medical profession, at least in practice. Fetal heartbeats are used by medical professionals to make important medical decisions. I know this from experience.
In 2016, my wife was pregnant for the second time. When she was seven weeks pregnant, we went into the doctor and heard a heartbeat for the first time. (Manne is right, you can’t always detect a heartbeat this early.) A week later, we left Texas on vacation to Michigan. While there, my wife ran a 103-degree fever, and her doctor back in Texas said to go into the ER. When we get there, they check on the baby and… they can’t find a heartbeat. They try a couple of times, but they then tell us the baby has no heartbeat and my wife is going to miscarry. The baby had died. We were crushed. The next two days were almost unbearable, but my wife’s doctor asks us if we can come back to Texas because she wants to do a checkup on my wife. We fly back to Texas two days after the terrible news, and we go in to get a second ultrasound from her doctor. “There’s your heartbeat… and there’s the baby!” The ultrasound technician couldn’t believe it either. Our baby was still there, heartbeat and all, at 8 weeks even though the other doctors had told us that there was no heartbeat and no hope. My son Paxton is 3 now.
If Paxton’s heartbeat was a “misnomer”, if it can’t be reliably detected at 6 or 8 weeks, if it’s essentially meaningless, then why do doctors tell you to prepare for a miscarriage, even offer a D&C, if they can’t find a heartbeat? Because know a heartbeat is a life. Those doctors were wrong, but not in the way Manne purports they were. They were wrong because they saw no life when there was life.
I know my story doesn’t prove Kate Manne wrong, and there are other people and even doctors and scientists that share her opinion. What we have is a disagreement about where human life begins, and that is not reflected in her writing. She claims to have all the facts on her side when a whole lot of people, including many medical professionals, disagree with those facts. She is speaking to a progressive audience with progressive talking points, not willing to see the larger picture. This is especially true in one more passage:
It’s one thing for someone who might get pregnant to oppose abortion on a personal level — to be disinclined to have one herself, or even to feel that it would be wrong for anyone in such a position to do so, on the basis of religious views she doesn’t expect everyone to share, say. It’s another thing entirely to think — especially as someone who cannot get pregnant, as a cisgender man — that anyone who becomes pregnant should be forced to bear the pregnancy to term, using the coercive power of the state, regardless of their age, beliefs, life circumstances, the traumatic manner of their becoming pregnant, or the devastating outcomes if they are not allowed to end it. The former is a reasonable manifestation of individual differences; the latter is a deeply draconian, deeply troubling attitude. 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.
This sounds reasonable, except when you realize that the state does regulate certain behaviors, such as enslaving other human beings, that degrade human life. Substitute abortion for slavery in that argument and it falls apart. So the question when it comes to abortion is not “Is this a freedom to which I am entitled?”. It’s “Is this a human life?”. I am OK that Manne does not agree with me on the answer to that question, and it wouldn’t affect my opinion of her book if she were honest about that, but I would like to know that she sees where the disconnect lies. Talking to your side won’t bridge that divide.
(If I have misrepresented Manne’s argument in any way, I am open to her or someone else’s feedback on that matter.)
The proportionality of this review does not adequately reflect the extent to which I enjoyed Kate Manne’s book. She analyzes a lot of topics that liberals, conservatives, Christians, and agnostics need to understand. I just doubt that most people who hold the beliefs I do will read past her partisan arguments on abortion. Nevertheless, I hope people in my circles pick up Entitled, read it, and ask themselves “In what ways is this true?”. And I hope they come away with a lot of answers, learning to see things from someone else’s perspective, bridging that divide.
I received a review copy of Entitled courtesy of Crown Publishing and NetGalley, but my opinions are my own.

The good news is you only have to wait until Tuesday 8/11 to read Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women from author Kate Manne. There is absolutely no better time to get the run down on male privilege, since it’s loud and proud all over social media and the news. Manne compiles a group of related charges and proves each beyond a reasonable doubt. (Not that I’m a lawyer or a doubter, mind you.)

First, she explains the basic concepts of male privilege, including mansplaining and himpathy. The people impacted by these behaviors and systemic inequities are intersectional—women of color, white, gay, straight, trans. Anyone presenting as a woman. But the men in this position of privilege are overwhelmingly white, cis gender, and straight.

Sex and the patriarchy
As you can imagine, the next two chapters cover sexual aspects of this privilege. Using the involuntarily celibate or “incel” movement as her entry point, Manne discusses cases where men harm and even kill women who didn’t pay them attention they believe they deserve. From there she moves to cases of rape and domestic sexual abuse. Here she also includes the way cases like are treated by police and courts—in a word, himpathy.

But let’s say it’s not a violent episode, what happens when women would prefer not to consent to sex, even within a committed relationship? And yet, due to a variety of factors, we do. Again, the male ego often determines women’s actions. As with all her chapters, Manne illustrates her point with cases you’ve heard of and some less well known.

Trusting women to understand their bodies
As a woman living with chronic illness and pain, this topic always hits me in the gut. Manne uses sociologist Tressie Cottom McMillan’s essay, “Dying to be Competent” here. I read it earlier this year, so was familiar with the story. And there are so many more. Women are not considered equal partners in their own medical care, especially if they are women of color or LGBTQIA+.

And, to be crystal clear, these systemic beliefs come from female health care providers as well as male ones. That’s because the entire system lacks trust in women’s own understanding of their bodies.

And from here Manne moves to the recent anti-choice, anti-abortion laws put in place by the conservative right. Again, men with power believe they should limit a woman’s right to bodily autonomy. Rather than repeating other work on the topic, Manne refers us back to entitlement and male privilege as the reason behind this trend.

What women know and what we do after work
I recently watched an ad for a window cleaning products that illustrates this point perfectly. In the ad, all the climbing on ladders and lugging heavy buckets around is done by a woman. Then she finds this much easier product, attaches it to her garden hose, and presto, her windows are clean. The only two men in the ad are the sales guy—mansplaining about how windows are tough to clean. And the man who cleans one single window and smiles like he built the whole damn house.

This is my long story to say that in this chapter Manne makes it clear that women do the bulk of the domestic duties. When they and their male partner both work outside the home, women do an even larger percentage. And men in that situation still feel entitled to “time off” to exercise, hang out with friends, or whatever. Women generally don’t have the same feelings of entitlement. But I bet if you’re female, you already know this.

Speaking of mansplaining, Manne reminds us that women are regularly questioned for knowing things. They’re doubted, talked down to, and treated with arrogance from men around them. But what I found most meaningful here was her extended and detailed explanation of gas lighting. Although I’m familiar with the term, I didn’t know everything about its origins. Now I’m clearer on it.

Power and the power to change
You knew that somewhere in this book would be the discussion of political power for women, right? Manne makes a strong case for male entitlement and how it damages women. So strong that she could almost have left the political implications out. But we can’t ignore this. As nations around the world elect women leaders, the United States still has old, white men at the top of the ticket. And our political races are more divisive than ever.

In this chapter, Manne discusses female candidates and the concept of “communality.” This term implies that women are expected to be socially sensitive and demonstrate concern for others. Yet, this isn’t the standard for male candidates. So, we expect female candidates to be both tough politicians and still demonstrate communality. We judge the way they treat staff, even though we laud men who behave badly with theirs. And so on. The electability standards for women are substantially higher because of this double bind.

But, Manne ends her book with a hopeful and poignant chapter about become the mother of a daughter. She admits that after writing two books about the patriarchy holding women down, it was hard to feel positive about her daughter’s future. But she finds that hope and shares it with her readers. It’s the perfect end to a troubling but fantastic book.

My conclusions
It feels like women are swimming in an ocean of male privilege without a life raft. Entitled is that life raft. It is one woman, and all the people who buy the book and read it, saying to women everywhere, “I see you” and “You matter.” As hard as it is to read nine chapters of how women are hurt, Entitled also offers hope. Shining a light on the way women live daily with small and large damages from male privilege is an important step in changing the world. We can teach our daughters and granddaughters better, and make their world a better place to be a woman. Thank you, Kate Manne.

Acknowledgements
Many thanks to NetGalley, Crown Publishing, and the author for the opportunity to read a digital ARC in exchange for this honest review.

Kate Manne is remarkably effective at using the methods of philosophical inquiry to shine a light on the role misogyny plays in the West during the 21st century. Reading almost like an extended footnote to Down Girl, Entitled explores the ways in which male entitlement structures all aspects of the lives of women from their career options, to their domestic relationships, even impacting the circumstances surrounding their deaths. The book is well-written and interesting, though less eye-opening considering that many (if not most) of the examples used feature well known, already much discussed news items (i.e. Brett Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court Confirmation hearings, etc.) Entitled is brief, though certainly worth reading, but it does best succeed if viewed in conjunction with and as an addendum to Down Girl.

Entitled is a brilliant and devastating analysis of men’s entitlement, the myriad ways that it manifests, and how it harms women. One of the book’s greatest strengths is that it centers on women, rather than the default of focusing on everything from men’s perspective. Moreover, it acknowledges how entitlement exponentially affects people at the intersections of race, ability, transgender, and other oppressions.

It doesn’t give much of a roadmap for the future, but that’s not part of the project in this book; its sharp focus and deep dive into understanding the problem is a hugely important first step. Manne does, however, conclude with a delightful and optimistic chapter on the ways in which she hopes to raise her baby girl, making sure she feels welcome and supported in a world that was largely built around men’s needs and concerns.

Entitled is a clear and smooth read that includes heart-wrenching examples and challenging discussions. I hope that everyone reads this book, that it raises our collective awareness about the ongoing issues of misogyny, and that it inspires people to do something to address the injustices that so many women face.

I really liked Manne’s previous Down Girl, despite not having much of an appetite for philosophical throat-clearing; Manne’s philosophical approach did illuminate important distinctions between sexism and misogyny (the enforcement arm of sexism, not requiring any particular sexist attitudes of enforcers) and the importance to misogyny of recognizing women’s humanity, but only as a servile humanity (despite comparisons to animals, misogyny regards women as distinctively owing men particular kinds of deference and service). Manne is also a witty writer with a weakness matching my own for chiasmus. Here, though, there’s not much you can’t get from any other feminist writer—if you haven’t read Down Girl, definitely do that instead. Manne writes about things like entitlement to sex—which can work well in a system that theoretically punishes rape harshly, because when it doesn’t punish many rapes at all, it demonstrates that the law and its enforcers regard victims as “cut-rate persons.”

Manne also discusses research such as that explored in Caroline Criado-Perez’s Invisible Women (also recommended). For example, she nicely explores the idea that men are reluctant to ask for help, especially medical help. This idea means that when they do complain, their complaints are taken more seriously, and it also means that women are assumed to seek help readily (and disregarded when they do), even though women may have very good reasons for their own reluctance to seek help except in the worst situations. So while male under-usage of health care is constructed as a social problem, we get a contrasting expectation that women overuse health care—without additional inquiry into whether that is true. At the same time, men and women overvalue male pain: crying infants are rated as experiencing more pain when observers think they are male. “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?”

For another bit of infuriating research, Manne points to work on women in power. Women leaders who are perceived as just as competent as men are perceived as much less likeable. This perception can be fought if observers think the leader is caring and thoughtful for subordinates—but only, importantly, if they think it’s a character trait and not something done for instrumental reasons. And there’s the trap: many people think that anything a powerful woman does is inauthentic.

An exceedingly well-researched, clearly written book on the timely subject of (mostly white) male privilege in 21st century America, "Entitled" is difficult to read because of its focused precision. Manne takes her readers through various arenas in which American men's privilege assumes their entitlement to knowledge, to sex, and to power, among others. That assumed entitlement ends up hurting women and girls.

I appreciated the author's detailed and clear writing. She more than substantiated her argument in every chapter. Manne is very consistent about centering women's experiences of being on the other side of men's entitlement. She doesn't talk about how the men think of themselves in relation to women. This was refreshing!

At the end, Manne talks about all that her daughter and all girls are entitled to, simply by being human. There's an air of hopefulness that change is possible. I needed that hope at the end, and would have liked a bit more. What does it look like when women claim their entitlement to their own bodies, their own knowledge, their own power? How might American society look different?

This will be useful in spurring conversations on gender and power imbalances in communities, in personal relationships, and on the national and global stage.

Definitely not a book for the faint of heart (it's quite graphic!), as Manne details the ways in which male privilege underlies and biases our views on gender, specifically with a focus on sexual assault and harassment. She highlights Weinstein and Kavannah, as examples of this kind of male ego power trip that often happens with men of high status, particularly when mixed with a toxic view of masculinity. This sense of entitlement, she argues, is what allows men to commit these crimes in the first place, as our society has allowed them to get away with not having consciousness or feeling entitled to get what they want.

The book goes takes a bit of a turn to argue that women can, and perhaps should, experience this same kind of entitlement, to even the score. It struck me as a two-wrongs-don't-make-a-right kind of argument that I felt weekend some of her earlier points, since it seems that it's better to take away inherent entitlement if it's causing social ill and crime, rather than equally bestowing it to women. The book lost me a bit with that logic, but overall it's a thought-provoking read.

Totally agree with the previous reviewer that this is a tough but necessary read. I was furious from about page 3 of this book till the end (actually, I've been furious since November 2016, but who's counting) but it is such a well-written commentary on what is happening in our society right now, and takes on timely topics like Brett Kavanaugh and the way his entitlement played a role in his confirmation. I was especially blown away by chapter 3, "On the Entitlement to Sex," which is a feminist topic I have never seen framed in this particular way and I have to wonder why not? The chapter on the Entitlement to Medical Care was also completely mind-blowing.

You might have to take some breaks while reading this to breathe or perhaps throw your Kindle across the room but you will be better for reading this when you are done. I wish the white men in my life (even the woke white men) would also read this book and consider their entitlements and their effect on the world. Kate Manne follows in the excellent footsteps of Susan Faludi with exceptionally researched and well-documented work on how far behind women still are in terms of equality.

*****WARNING: THIS NOT AN EASY READ****VERY GRAPHIC*****

This read is not for the faint of heart or those with a weak stomach. Anyone with a real conscience can empathize with the each individual woman who was sexually assaulted. All these cases have one thing in common; the men in question are rich and successful, so these heinous actions don't seem like a big deal to them. The author highlights Harvey Weinstein and Brett Kavanaugh just to name a few tat were big in the media and on television; as well as discussing how men have been the masterminds of mass shootings over the last twenty years. I like how she uses the term "toxic masculinity." Our current commander in chief falls into this category as well but that's all I'm going to say about that.

At some point in these insights, the author switches gears to explain that women are just as capable of these actions and sense of entitlement as men. This book doesn't make the male gender look very good as a whole especially in today's world. Very grim mood throughout the book also fused with anger about the senseless violence.

I think this is a necessary book and is a topic that shouldn't be taboo or an afterthought. I think this should be read by every man in politics and in a leadership role and be taken seriously to bring these horrific cases to a lower number. This needs to stop, PERIOD. Anyone and anything with heartbeat deserves more than that

Thanks to NetGalley, Kate Manne, and Crown Oublishing for an ARC in exchange for an honest review. All opinions are my own.
Available: 8/11/20