Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women

An urgent exploration of men's entitlement and how it serves to police and punish women, from the acclaimed author of Down Girl, which Rebecca Traister called "jaw-droppingly brilliant."

In this bold and stylish critique, Cornell philosopher Kate Manne offers a radical new framework for understanding misogyny. Ranging widely across the culture, from the Kavanaugh hearings and "Cat Person" to Harvey Weinstein and Elizabeth Warren, Manne shows how privileged men's sense of entitlement--to sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, medical care, bodily autonomy, knowledge, and power--is a pervasive social problem with often devastating consequences.

In clear, lucid prose, she argues that 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." Moreover, Manne implicates all of us in toxic masculinity: It's not just a product of a few bad actors; it's something we all perpetuate, conditioned as we are by the social and cultural currents of our time. The only way to combat it, she says, is to expose the flaws in our default modes of thought, while enabling women to take up space, say their piece, and muster resistance to the entitled attitudes of the men around them.

With wit and intellectual fierceness, Manne sheds new light on gender and power and offers a vision of a world in which women are just as entitled as men to our collective care and concern.

Kate Manne is an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell University, where she has taught since 2013. Before that, she did her graduate work at MIT and was a junior fellow in the Harvard Society of Fellows. The author of Down Girl, she has written for The New York Times, The Boston Review, HuffPost, The Times Literary Supplement, and Politico, among other publications. She was recently named one of the ＂World’s Top 10 Thinkers＂ by Prospect Magazine (UK).