Entitled

Entitled

How Male Privilege Hurts Women

Summary

'Kate Manne is the Simone de Beauvoir of the 21st century' - Amanda Marcotte

'I want to press this book on every schoolgirl who thinks that feminism is uncool, any woman who thinks the most important gender battles are won, pretty much every man I know, and say, have you thought about this?' Sophie McBain, New Statesman

Male entitlement takes many forms. To sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, bodily autonomy, knowledge, power, even care. In this urgent intervention, philosopher Kate Manne offers a radical new framework for understanding misogyny.

In clear-sighted, powerful prose, she ranges widely across the culture to show how the idea that a privileged man is tacitly deemed to be owed something is a pervasive problem. Male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women's pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are 'unelectable'. The consequences for girls and women are often devastating.

As Manne shows, toxic masculinity is not just the product of a few bad actors; we are all implicated, conditioned as we are by the currents of our time. With wit and intellectual fierceness, she sheds new light on gender and power and offers a vision of a world in which women are just as entitled as men to be cared for, believed and valued.

Reviews

  • I want to press it on every schoolgirl who thinks that feminism is uncool, any woman who thinks the most important gender battles are won, pretty much every man I know, and say, have you thought about this?
    Sophie McBain, New Statesman

About the author

Kate Manne

Kate Manne is a philosopher, writer and associate professor at Cornell University. Her research is primarily in moral, social and feminist philosophy and she has written on moral and political topics for The New York Times, The Boston Review, the Huffington Post, the Chronicle of Higher Education and the Times Literary Supplement. The author of the acclaimed books Entitled and Down Girl, she was named one of the ‘World's Top 10 Thinkers’ by Prospect magazine.
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