Praise for Entitled

“Kate Manne is the Simone de Beauvoir of the twenty-first century. In

Entitled, she compellingly lays out the stubborn social assumptions

behind our still-sexist cultural norms. Manne’s writing is as breezy as

it is sharp and unflinching, and will give any patriarchy-fighter the

ammo she needs to keep fighting.”

—AMANDA MARCOTTE, author of Troll Nation

“Manne’s brilliant breakdown of male entitlement is essential to

understanding the world we live in. Her thinking about this critical

and complex topic is characteristically incisive, perceptive, and

profound. Now, more than ever, Entitled is an absolute must-read!”

—SORAYA CHEMALY, author of Rage Becomes Her

“In Entitled, Manne gets right to the heart of gender, power, and

inequality: what men presume they deserve, and what women learn we

owe. The result is an unflinching indictment of male entitlement in

nearly every aspect of modern life. Entitled is exactly what we need to

understand our current moment—and to imagine something better.”

—JILL FILIPOVIC, author of The H-Spot

“Manne tackles the kaleidoscopic manifestations of male entitlement

with insights as invigorating as her subject matter is frustrating. Her

thinking is so elegant and her theory of male entitlement as a

symptom of a moral economy in which women are perpetually in

men’s debt is so groundbreaking that the book is sure to spark and

inspire other feminist writers. Entitled is the work of a once-in-a-

generation mind, and as always, Manne succeeds in leaving feminism

richer and more robust than when she found it.”

—MOIRA DONEGAN, columnist, The Guardian

“I wish this book didn’t have to exist. I wish there was no need for a

clear-eyed, razor-sharp deconstruction of male entitlement, and how

that entitlement is killing us. But it is necessary, and Kate Manne is

exactly the intellectual powerhouse I want to have written it.”

—CARMEN MARIA MACHADO, author of Her Body and Other Parties

“Entitled is a painful book that sets things right. Manne guides us

through some of the most violent traumas our culture has to offer

women, starting with #MeToo creeps and murderous incels and

descending from there through just about every level of female Hell.

Yet Manne’s marvelous clarity and cool in the face of the unthinkable,

her habit of crystallizing unspeakable problems into simple sentences

that stay with you for years, makes her the most trustworthy possible

guide through this house of horrors. One of the most essential voices

of our times.”

—SADY DOYLE, author of Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers

“Challenging, controversial, wide-ranging, and powerful, the eminent

young philosopher Kate Manne brings to bear her well-known theory

of patriarchy and misogyny on a range of contemporary issues,

providing powerful evidence of its ubiquity and pervasiveness on

everything from our ordinary interchanges with one another to our

healthcare systems and elections.”

—JASON STANLEY, author of How Fascism Works

“In lucid prose, Manne illustrates how male entitlement—to sex,

power, and knowledge; to women’s care, doctors’ attention, and the

benefit of the doubt—undergirds misogyny. Examining the special

effects of misogynoir and transmisogyny alongside hostile behaviors

that keep all women and non-binary people ‘in their place,’ Manne

provides a thorough (if by no means exhaustive) look at the ways we

prioritize cis men’s needs and desires, to the detriment of half the

population.”

—KATE HARDING, author of Asking for It

“Entitled is a brilliant analysis of the systematic advantages and

prerogatives awarded to men for nothing more than being men. Its

deep engagement with real-world examples, eloquent prose, and

compelling arguments provide a corrective lens through which to view

the world without the blur and distortion that we don’t even notice.

This is the world we live in, and although the clarity can be painful,

Manne also provides reason for hope.”

—SALLY HASLANGER, professor of philosophy and women’s and gender

studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

“With eloquent prose and irrefutable evidence, Kate Manne gives voice

to a twenty-first century rage. Entitled builds on Manne’s earlier work

on the forces of systemic patriarchy and the eternal frustration felt by

generations of women forced year after year to fight for egalitarianism

at the most fundamental levels. One of our most prophetic and gifted

feminist voices today, Manne’s work is as necessary as sunlight. Your

anger may not be quelled by the final page, but at least you’ll feel less

alone.”

—RACHEL LOUISE SNYDER, author of No Visible Bruises

Copyright © 2020 by Kate Manne

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin

Random House LLC, New York.

CROWN and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Hardback ISBN 9781984826558

Ebook ISBN 9781984826565

randomhousebooks.com

Book design by Susan Turner, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Anna Kochman

Cover image: © Jessica Backhaus

ep_prh_5.5.0_c0_r0

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Chapter One: Indelible—On the Entitlement of Privileged Men

Chapter Two: Involuntary—On the Entitlement to Admiration

Chapter Three: Unexceptional—On the Entitlement to Sex

Chapter Four: Unwanted—On the Entitlement to Consent

Chapter Five: Incompetent—On the Entitlement to Medical Care

Chapter Six: Unruly—On the Entitlement to Bodily Control

Chapter Seven: Insupportable—On the Entitlement to Domestic

Labor

Chapter Eight: Unassuming—On the Entitlement to Knowledge

Chapter Nine: Unelectable—On the Entitlement to Power

Chapter Ten: Undespairing—On the Entitlement of Girls

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Reading Group Guide

ONE

Indelible—On the Entitlement of Privileged Men

He was a picture of entitlement. Brett Kavanaugh, fifty-three, was

red-faced, petulant, and shouted most of his answers. Clearly, he

thought the proceedings were beneath him, a travesty. It was

September 2018, and Kavanaugh was being questioned by the Senate

Judiciary Committee regarding allegations that he had sexually

assaulted Dr. Christine Blasey Ford, fifty-one, when they were both in

high school. At stake was not only Kavanaugh’s appointment to the

U.S. Supreme Court; this was, more importantly, a tribunal on sexual

assault, male privilege, and the workings of misogyny.

America did not pass the test. Despite highly credible evidence

that Kavanaugh had indeed sexually assaulted a fifteen-year-old Ford

some thirty-six years prior, Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme

Court was confirmed by a slim majority.

Ford testified that she had been attacked by Kavanaugh, who,

together with his friend Mark Judge, had “corralled” her into a

bedroom at a party in Maryland. Ford alleged that Kavanaugh had

pinned her to the bed, groped her, and ground his crotch against her.

She said he tried to remove her clothes and covered her mouth to

prevent her from screaming. Ford said she was afraid that Kavanaugh

would accidentally smother and kill her. She said that she managed to

escape when Judge jumped on the bed, knocking the two of them

over.1

“Indelible in the hippocampus is the laughter,” said Ford—a

professor of psychology—in describing the incident and its traumatic

aftermath. But even for many of those who professed to believe her,

Ford’s experience just did not matter enough to be worth depriving a

man like Kavanaugh of his perceived due, given his background and

reputation. 2 And, of course, there were also people who refused to

believe her, saying she was either lying or mistaken. 3

—

By the time the Kavanaugh hearings were front-page news, I had been

thinking for quite some time about male privilege and the toll it takes

on girls and women. The case seemed to encapsulate many of the

social dynamics I’d been studying. It perfectly captured the concept of

entitlement: the widespread perception that a privileged man is owed

something even as exalted as a position on the U.S. Supreme Court. 4

This is a perception that Kavanaugh himself shared, judging by his

aggrieved, belligerent, and, at times, borderline unhinged conduct

during the hearings. In contrast with Dr. Ford’s calm, tempered

demeanor, and her poignant attempts to be “helpful” to the senators in

responding to their queries, Kavanaugh was furious about being

questioned. Especially, it might appear, when the questioner was a

woman. Senator Amy Klobuchar asked him, in a now notorious

exchange: “You’re saying there’s never been a case when you drank so

much that you didn’t remember what happened the night before, or

part of what happened?” “You’re asking about a blackout. I don’t

know, have you?” Kavanaugh replied, in a tone both contemptuous

and whiney. 5

The case also highlighted the phenomenon of himpathy: the way

powerful and privileged boys and men who commit acts of sexual

violence or engage in other misogynistic behavior often receive

sympathy and concern over their female victims. Senator Lindsey

Graham, fuming, epitomized such a himpathetic attitude:

GRAHAM: [ To Democrats] What you want to do is destroy this

guy’s life, hold this seat open and hope you win in 2020….[ To

Kavanaugh] You’ve got nothing to apologize for. When you

see Sotomayor and Kagan, tell them that Lindsey said “hello,”

because I voted for them. [ To Democrats] I would never do to

them what you’ve done to this guy….[ To Kavanaugh] Are you

a gang rapist?

KAVANAUGH: No.

GRAHAM: I cannot imagine what you and your family have

gone through. [ To Democrats] Boy, you all want power. God,

I hope you never get it. I hope the American people can see

through this sham….You had no intention of protecting Dr.

Ford—none. [ To Kavanaugh] She’s as much of a victim as

you are. God, I hate to say it, because these have been my

friends. But let me tell you, when it comes to this, you’re

looking for a fair process? You came to the wrong town at the

wrong time, my friend. Do you consider this a job interview?

KAVANAUGH: If the advice and consent role is like a job

interview.

GRAHAM: Do you consider that you’ve been through a job

interview?

KAVANAUGH: I’ve been through a process of advice and

consent under the Constitution, which—

GRAHAM: Would you say you’ve been through hell?

KAVANAUGH: I—I’ve been through hell and then some.

GRAHAM: This is not a job interview.

KAVANAUGH: Yes.

GRAHAM: This is hell.

According to Graham, it was unconscionably hellish—and, beyond

that, ridiculous—for a man in Kavanaugh’s position to have to respond

to serious, credible accusations of sexual assault, and undergo a

truncated FBI investigation, in order to ascend to one of the highest

positions of moral authority in America. And Kavanaugh clearly

shared, and was further emboldened by, Graham’s views here—not

wasting the opportunity to indulge in self-pity. No comparable

outpouring of feeling for Ford and her family was forthcoming from

Graham, despite his giving lip service to the idea that she was “as

much of a victim” as Kavanaugh in this process (referring to the

supposed attempt on the part of Democrats to discredit Kavanaugh for

political gain). “Miss Ford has got a problem, and destroying Judge

Kavanaugh’s life won’t fix her problem,” Graham fulminated on Fox

News, later. 6

Himpathy made Kavanaugh seem to Graham to be the real victim

in all of this. And not confirming a man like Kavanaugh to the

Supreme Court became tantamount to ruining his life, not just

withholding an opportunity.7 It wasn’t only men like Lindsey Graham

spouting this kind of rhetoric and casting such aspersions on Christine

Blasey Ford, either; many of the naysayers were women, and included

other senators, journalists, and laypeople. 8

Finally, the Kavanaugh case highlighted several aspects of

misogyny’s nature and function. In my previous book, Down Girl, I

argued that misogyny should not be understood as a monolithic, deep-

seated psychological hatred of girls and women. Instead, it’s best

conceptualized as the “law enforcement” branch of patriarchy—a

system that functions to police and enforce gendered norms and

expectations, and involves girls and women facing disproportionately

or distinctively hostile treatment because of their gender, among other

factors. 9 The sexual assault of Christine Blasey Ford (about which, for

the record, I believe her) would certainly fit this description, since girls

and women are significantly likelier to be subject to assaults of this

kind than are their male counterparts. 10 In addition to this, misogyny

is typically (though not invariably) a response to a woman’s violations

of gendered “law and order.” The fact that Ford received abusive

messages and death threats for speaking out about a powerful man’s

mistreatment of her exemplifies such punishment. 11

In general, I think of misogyny as being a bit like the shock collar

worn by a dog to keep them 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. 12 All the more

reason, then, why Ford’s testimony was so courageous.

In contrast to misogyny, I take sexism to be the theoretical and

ideological branch of patriarchy: the beliefs, ideas, and assumptions

that serve to rationalize and naturalize patriarchal norms and

expectations—including a gendered division of labor, and men’s

dominance over women in areas of traditionally male power and

authority. Though this book focuses more on misogyny than sexism,

it’s important to recognize that the two typically work in concert.

But we need to understand that someone can engage in

misogynistic behavior without necessarily having sexist beliefs about

women. Brett Kavanaugh’s defense of himself against the allegations

of sexual misconduct, on the grounds that he had employed an

unusually large number of female clerks, is really no defense at all.13 A

man may believe that a woman is intellectually capable in law,

business, or politics, say, and therefore be willing to have her serve as

his subordinate in this domain, while still subjecting her or other

women to misogynistic treatment—sexual assault, for example. More

broadly, a man may be happy to extend a certain amount of power to a

woman, as long as she does not threaten or challenge him. But if she

does, he may engage in misogynistic behavior to put her in her place,

and punish her for having ideas beyond her station. He would then be

more of a misogynist than a sexist, on my analysis.

On the whole, though, my account of misogyny counsels us to

focus less on the individual perpetrators of misogyny, and more on

misogyny’s targets and victims. This is helpful for at least two reasons.

First, some instances of misogyny lack any individual perpetrators

whatsoever; misogyny may be a purely structural phenomenon,

perpetuated by social institutions, policies, and broader cultural

mores. 14 Second, understanding misogyny as more about the hostility

girls and women face, as opposed to the hostility men feel deep down

in their hearts, helps us avoid a problem of psychological

inscrutability. It’s often difficult to know what someone’s innermost

states and ultimate motivations are, short of being their therapist (and

even then, such knowledge may be elusive). But my account of

misogyny doesn’t require us to know what someone is feeling, deep

inside, in order to say that they are perpetuating or enabling

misogyny. What we need to know is something we are often in a much

better position to establish: that a girl or woman is facing

disproportionately or distinctively gendered hostile treatment because

she is a woman in a man’s world—that is, a woman in a historically

patriarchal society (which includes, I believe, most if not all of them). 15

We don’t need to show that she is subject to such treatment because

she is a woman in a man’s mind—which, in some instances, can’t be

the issue. 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.

So I would argue that it is best to think of misogyny primarily as a

property of the social environments girls and women navigate,

wherein they are liable to be subject to hateful or hostile treatment

because of their gender—together, in many cases, with their gendered

“bad” behavior. Even so, I do not want to deny the reality of individual

people who do deserve to be called misogynists. Admittedly,

“misogynist” is a judgmental, pejorative term, and I don’t think we

should swing it about too freely, lest this important linguistic weapon

lose its characteristic “punch” and power. So I propose 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. This definition

helps us acknowledge the important truth that we are all to a certain

extent complicit in misogynistic social structures. But at the same

time, for many people, especially those who are actively engaged in

anti-misogynistic resistance efforts, it would be wrong to call us

misogynists on the whole. That label should be reserved for the chief

offenders. We will meet plenty of them in the ensuing pages.

—

When I wrote Down Girl, I focused on making an abstract argument

that misogyny should be understood as the hostility girls and women

face, which serves to police and enforce gendered norms and

expectations. But this definition raised many of the questions I’ve been

thinking about ever since: What are the gendered norms and

expectations that misogyny polices and enforces, especially in my own

milieu (the United States), with its reputation for being relatively

egalitarian? 16 How might the resulting, sometimes subtle social

dynamics constrain the possibilities for girls and women, together

with non-binary people, in various spheres of life? And how do boys

and men unfairly benefit from this system in its concrete daily

operations? Throughout the process of thinking through these issues,

I’ve become more and more cognizant of the way misogyny is

inextricably bound up with the related social ills that an intersectional

approach, as pioneered by Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, reminds us to

attend to. These include racism (in particular, white supremacy),

xenophobia, classism, homophobia, transphobia, and ableism, among

other things.17

There is no universal experience of misogyny—not least because

gendered norms and expectations always intersect with these other

unjust systems to produce novel forms of oppression faced by different

groups of girls and women. In what follows, I hope to shed some light

(without claiming to be an authority) on the specific forms of

misogyny faced by trans women and Black women in the United States

—transmisogyny and misogynoir, respectively. Here, as a cisgender,

heterosexual white woman myself, I have benefited immeasurably

from the insights of Talia Mae Bettcher, Tressie McMillan Cottom, and

Jazmine Joyner, among many other crucial voices on these topics.

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.

All in all, this book shows that an illegitimate sense of male

entitlement gives rise to a wide range of misogynistic behavior. When

a woman fails to give a man what he’s supposedly owed, she will often

face punishment and reprisal—whether from him, his himpathetic

supporters, or the misogynistic social structures in which she is

embedded.

What’s more, within this system, women are often unfairly

deprived of their genuine entitlement to both feminine-coded and

masculine-coded goods. This results in inequalities that range from a

woman not receiving adequate care for her pain, to her not being able

to take up traditionally male positions of power, to her not being

granted her rightful authority to speak about subjects in which she is

expert.

Some of the chapters that follow focus more on an illegitimate

sense of male entitlement; others home in on the way girls and

women, together with non-binary people, are deprived of goods to

which they truly are entitled. These concerns are two sides of the same

coin, in my book—though they will often require somewhat different

analyses and solutions.

Exposing the underlying logic of these and other moral biases

helps me address questions like the following: What do the anti-

abortion and anti-trans movements have in common? Why are women

still largely responsible for the “second shift” at home? Why do certain

men so routinely get away with sexually assaulting girls and women, as

well as other vulnerable people? And why is mansplaining still such a

common occurrence? 18

As I will show throughout this book, the forces that hold misogyny

in place are powerful and prevalent. In part, women are punished and

blamed—indeed, subject to misogyny—for daring to come forward and

speak out about the reality of the problem. Many people feel that men

are entitled not just to be deemed innocent until proven guilty, but to

be deemed innocent, period, regardless of their misdeeds. Moreover,

when misogyny makes its mark, the damage may be indelible. Dr.

Christine Blasey Ford was not only deeply traumatized by the original

sexual assault, and quite possibly retraumatized by fulfilling what she

felt was her civic duty to testify to its having happened; she was also

subsequently driven out of her home, due to death threats against her

and her family, following the hearings.19 Brett Kavanaugh was not only

appointed to the Supreme Court but may well soon play a role in

lending crucial SCOTUS support to the anti-abortion movement in this

country. At the time of writing, Donald Trump, credibly accused of

sexually assaulting and harassing dozens of women, remains the

nation’s president. 20

Still, progress fortunately does not rely—cannot, and has never

relied—on universal agreement that what is patently unjust is unjust

indeed. Instead, we can—and, I increasingly believe, must—take our

cues from the daily acts of courage, creativity, and political resistance

being undertaken, individually and collectively, in response to such

injustices. I do not know, by any means, that this will be enough to

bring about the right outcomes. But this I know: it is important and

worthwhile to fight. And we can fight better when we are clear about

what we are up against. It is with this conviction that I offer what’s to

follow.

TWO

Involuntary—On the Entitlement to Admiration

On Friday, May 23, 2014, just after nine-thirty P.M., there was a

loud knock on the door of the Alpha Phi sorority house at the

University of California, Santa Barbara. At least forty female students

would have been living there at the time. But it being Memorial Day

weekend, relatively few of them were home to answer the door. And

the knocking sounded unusually loud and aggressive, according to one

of the women inside. They decided not to open up, even when the

knocking continued for at least another full minute. In retrospect, it

was wise, not to mention fortunate, that they made the decision they

did. For the man who had come knocking, Elliot Rodger, twenty-two,

had a loaded gun in his hand and was planning to annihilate all of

them. 1

“For the last eight years of my life, since I hit puberty, I’ve been

forced to endure an existence of loneliness, rejection, and unfulfilled

desires, all because girls have never been attracted to me. Girls gave

their affection and sex and love to other men but never to me,” Rodger

explained in a YouTube video, which he uploaded immediately before

driving to UCSB. “I’m twenty-two years old and still a virgin, never

even kissed a girl….It has been very torturous. College is the time

when everyone experiences those things such as sex and fun and

pleasure. In those years I’ve had to rot in loneliness; it’s not fair,” he

complained. In a still more moralistic vein:

You girls have never been attracted to me. I don’t know why

you girls aren’t attracted to me, but I will punish you all for it.

It’s an injustice, a crime, because I don’t know what you don’t

see in me. I’m the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at

all these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme

gentleman.

Hence Rodger’s plan, on his envisaged “Day of Retribution”: “I am

going to enter the hottest sorority house at UCSB and I will slaughter

every single spoiled, stuck-up, blonde slut I see inside there. ”2

In the end, after being denied entry, he had to settle for shooting

three other women (students from a nearby sorority house, Tri Delta)

who were just then walking around the corner. He murdered two, and

wounded one of them. He went on to murder one man and injure

fourteen other people, in a subsequent drive-by shooting spree. 3

—

When Kate Pierson heard three sharp bangs on the wall behind her,

she thought the stereo in the hot yoga studio must have fallen from its

shelf. But it was gunfire. A walk-in client, Scott Paul Beierle, forty, had

driven more than two hundred miles to be there for the five-thirty P.M.

class in Tallahassee, Florida. He paid his twelve dollars via credit card

and asked how many people were expected. Disappointed that only

eleven had preregistered, he inquired about the studio’s busiest times

(Saturday mornings). Nevertheless, he stuck around as the women—

and one man—trickled in for the class. The yoga teacher told him to

stow his bag in the cubby outside the hot room. He told the teacher he

had a question. Then he donned a set of hearing-protection earmuffs

and pulled out a Glock. After pausing for a moment, gun in hand, he

pointed it at the woman closest to him. He opened fire, seemingly

indiscriminately: his objective being to kill women of the kind who had

so enraged him since adolescence, when he had penned a revenge

fantasy, “Rejected Youth.” He ended up shooting six and murdering

two of them.4

This was in November 2018. Prior to the shooting, Beierle had

posted a video online, citing Elliot Rodger as inspiration. So did Chris

Harper-Mercer, twenty-six, before he opened fire in a classroom at his

Oregon community college—murdering eight students and an

assistant professor, while injuring eight others. So did Alek Minassian,

twenty-five, before driving a van into pedestrians in Toronto, killing

ten people and wounding sixteen. “The Incel Rebellion has already

begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Staceys! All hail the

Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” wrote Minassian beforehand, on

Facebook. 5

—

The term “incel” stands for “involuntary celibate.” Ironically, the term

was coined by a woman named Alana—a bisexual, progressive

Canadian—who in the 1990s founded a website called Alana’s

Involuntary Celibacy Project. 6 It was intended to help others like her

deal with their dating-related loneliness and sexual dissatisfaction.7

But nowadays the term “incel” is used to self-identify almost

exclusively by heterosexual men, most of them fairly young, who

frequent anonymous or pseudonymous Internet forums devoted to

incel ideology.8 Incels believe they are entitled to, and have been

deprived of, sex with “hot” young women, who are dubbed “Staceys.”

Sometimes incels also express an abstract longing for love, or for a

girlfriend—or, more concretely, a woman to provide them with the

attention and affection that Rodger lamented lacking. But an incel will

typically want sex and love not only, and perhaps not even primarily,

for their own sake. His rhetoric betrays a desire to have these goods for

instrumental reasons: as currency to buy status in masculine

hierarchies, relative to the “Chads.” These are the supposed “alpha

males,” whose masculine prowess contrasts with the incel’s (again,

supposedly) lowly status. And an incel’s plans for revenge may

therefore target not just women but also the men they perceive as

besting and thwarting them. Elliot Rodger said, in his aforementioned

video:

All those girls I’ve desired so much, they would have all

rejected me and looked down upon me as an inferior man if I

ever made a sexual advance towards them [ scoffs] while they

throw themselves at these obnoxious brutes. I’ll take great

pleasure in slaughtering all of you.

You will finally see that I am in truth the superior one.

The true alpha male [ laughs]. Yes. After I’ve annihilated

every single girl in the sorority house, I will take to the streets

of Isla Vista and slay every single person I see there. All those

popular kids who live such lives of hedonistic pleasures while

I’ve had to rot in loneliness for all these years. They’ve all

looked down upon me every time I tried to go out and join

them, they’ve all treated me like a mouse.

Well now I will be a god compared to you.

It might be tempting to dismiss this rant and its ilk as the ravings

of lunatics. And that’s not wrong, exactly: these cartoon villain rants

are ludicrous, almost comical. But that is not sufficient reason to

disregard them, unfortunately. For one thing, some of these men are

obviously highly dangerous—all the more so because, often, by the

time they lash out, they are despairing and at rock bottom. They feel

they have nothing left to lose, and thus plan to take themselves out in a

maximally violent (and hence, by their lights, glorious and gratifying)

conflagration. Rodger, Beierle, and Harper-Mercer all ended their

rampages by shooting themselves fatally; only Minassian, of the four,

could be apprehended by law enforcement. And given the reality of

copycat behavior, it is natural to be concerned that such violence may

proliferate. So it’s important to understand its nature and sources.

Moreover, and more subtly, incels are but a vivid symptom of a

much broader and deeper cultural phenomenon. They crystallize some

men’s toxic sense of entitlement to have people look up to them

steadfastly, with a loving gaze, admiringly—and to target and even

destroy those who fail, or refuse, to do so. And, as will emerge here

eventually, these men’s sense of entitlement to such affection and

admiration is a trait they often share with the far greater proportion of

men who commit acts of domestic, dating, and intimate partner

violence.

—

As I’ve already suggested, it’s a mistake to think that incels are

primarily motivated by sex. Not only are some incels also interested in

love (or some outward simulacrum thereof), but their interest in

having sex with “Staceys” is at least partly a means to an end—the end

being to beat the “Chads” at their own game. Sex thus promises to

soothe these men’s inferiority complexes, at least as much as to satisfy

their libidos.

It’s also a mistake to accede too readily to an incel’s self-reports

about their lowly status in comparison with other men. With respect to

male beauty standards, for example, a recent article on incels in New

York magazine revealed photographs of perfectly ordinary-looking

young men—some of them even handsome. They nonetheless

hankered for different jaw lines, some going so far as to invest in

exorbitantly expensive plastic surgeries, such as cheek implants and

facial reshaping, to make them (in their own view) look more

masculine.9

Yet another mistake is to think that sex would provide a solution

to an incel’s supposed problem. If an incel does start having sex, or

gets into a relationship, who will he turn into? Contra several

commentators, my guess is: not a nice guy.10 A once-single incel may

well become a female partner’s tormentor. Anyone can feel lonely. But

a wrongheaded sense of entitlement to a woman’s sexual, material,

reproductive, and emotional labor may result in incel tendencies prior

to the relationship and intimate partner violence afterward, if he feels

thwarted, resentful, or jealous. In other words, an incel is an abuser

waiting to happen.

Incels differ in the degree to which they are proactive versus

reactive. Elliot Rodger was largely the latter: he never made a serious

effort to go on dates, by the lights of “My Twisted World,” his so-called

manifesto (really more of a memoir—and a lengthy one, at more than

one hundred thousand words). He seems not to have actually

approached the women of the Alpha Phi sorority house, simply

assuming that they would reject him (which might, of course, have

been an accurate prediction). Rather than try his hand, he preferred

not to run the risk of failure, instead stalking them from a distance.

Long before his final act of violence, he also engaged in numerous acts

of petty vengeance against the happy-looking couples he saw out and

about, who aroused his envy and outrage. He was particularly prone to

throwing beverages in their faces—one time, hot coffee; another time,

orange juice. This was about as close to physical contact with the

“Staceys” as Rodger ever got, if his account is accurate.

Scott Beierle, in contrast, had a nasty habit of touching women

without their consent. He was, in a word, handsy. At the time of the

shooting, he had been fired from a temporary teaching job for

touching a female student inappropriately (placing his hand on her

stomach, just below her bra line, and asking her if she was ticklish).

He had been discharged from the army for groping several women (an

honorable discharge, notably). And he had been banned from the

Florida State University campus in Tallahassee, where he had

graduated with a master’s degree in public administration and

planning, after a series of incidents on campus. During one such, he

had groped the buttocks of three young women in the dining hall—all

of whom were wearing yoga pants. 11

Beierle and Rodger were thus plausibly on different ends of a

spectrum of entitled male behavior: from the domineering to the

disappointed. While Beierle evinced his sense of entitlement to

women’s bodies by reaching out and subjecting them to unwanted

touching, Rodger evinced his by harboring deep resentments to the

women who did not reach out to him (metaphorically and literally).

Rodger evidently expected a woman to turn up in his lap, or at least on

his doorstep. And when one did not materialize, his sense of aggrieved

entitlement led him to arrive on her doorstep with a plan for enacting

vengeance.12

I do not want to suggest that either of these patterns of behavior is

better than the other; it is a behavioral distinction that may not make

for much of a moral difference. But it’s important to be aware of both

patterns, so that the superficial differences don’t obscure the

underlying similarities between the aggressive and the timid-seeming

incel. The latter, in particular, is liable to be mistaken for a harmless

“nice guy,” even well after we have definitive evidence to the contrary.

Incels are often virulent racists. This is not to say that all incels

are white; indeed, there are enough nonwhite incels to have given the

racist terms “curry-cels” and “rice-cels” currency.13 But incels who are

not white typically subscribe to white supremacist ideology. Elliot

Rodger, for example, was half Chinese and full of racist self-hatred, as

his writings made apparent. He bemoaned his lack of whiteness,

longing to be blond and Caucasian:

I was different because I am of mixed race. I am half White,

half Asian, and this made me different from the normal fully-

white kids that I was trying to fit in with.

I envied the cool kids, and I wanted to be one of them. I

was a bit frustrated at my parents for not shaping me into one

of these kids in the past. They never made an effort to dress

me in stylish clothing or get me a good-looking haircut. I had

to make every effort to rectify this. I had to adapt.

My first act was to ask my parents to allow me to bleach

my hair blonde. I always envied and admired blonde-haired

people, they always seemed so much more beautiful.14

Before driving to UCSB to attack the “hot, blonde sluts” whom he

(falsely) perceived as having rejected him, Rodger fatally stabbed his

two roommates and a guest of theirs. All three men were Asian—a

factor that may well have played a role in this, his first three of six

eventual murders. 15

Rodger was also brimming with anti-Black bigotry. In “My

Twisted World,” he railed against interracial couples, especially those

involving a Black man and a white woman. He described his first two

housemates in Isla Vista (not his eventual murder victims) as “nice”

but complained that

they kept inviting over this friend of theirs named Chance. He

was [a] black boy who came over all the time, and I hated his

cocksure attitude. Inevitably, a vile incident occurred

between me and him. I was eating a meal in the kitchen when

he came over and started bragging to my housemates about

his success with girls. I couldn’t stand it, so I proceeded to

ask them all if they were virgins. They all looked at me

weirdly and said that they had lost their virginity long ago. I

felt so inferior, as it reminded me of how much I have missed

out in life. And then this black boy named Chance said that

he lost his virginity when he was only thirteen! In addition,

he said that the girl he lost his virginity to was a blonde white

girl! I was so enraged that I almost splashed him with my

orange juice….

How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a

white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white

myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is

descended from slaves. I deserve it more. I tried not to

believe his foul words, but they were already said, and it was

hard to erase from my mind. If this is actually true, if this

ugly black filth was able to have sex with a blonde white girl

at the age of thirteen while I’ve had to suffer virginity all my

life, then this just proves how ridiculous the female gender is.

They would give themselves to this filthy scum, but they

reject ME? The injustice! 16

Scott Beierle expressed similarly noxious sentiments in a series of

YouTube videos. For instance:

When I see an inter-racial couple I think one of two things…

either the guy couldn’t do any better, or the girl’s a

whore….The army had plenty of this, I saw officers with Asian

wives or black wives, and I thought, This is what you’re

resigning yourself to: you couldn’t do any better than this to

provide you with companionship. I mean, even mail order…

you can get a mail-order bride from Russia or the Ukraine.

You don’t have to resign yourself to some iguana, some

lizard.17

Such vicious anti-miscegenation bigotry is obviously tightly

connected with incels’ fixation on masculine hierarchies—for example,

the idea of a man lower down the racist social hierarchy gaining sexual

and emotional access to a white woman is enraging to an incel. 18 His

aggression toward both the man and the woman in this scenario may

well be equal, and he may not be white himself. Even so, his hatred is

clearly a product of white supremacist patriarchy and the sense of

entitlement it can generate.

—

The notion of involuntariness in “involuntary celibate” is revealing—

and jarring, upon reflection. Ordinarily, we use the modifier when the

relevant term would otherwise incorrectly imply that the act was

deliberately, intentionally, or freely undertaken. For example, the term

“involuntary manslaughter” refers to a killing that was unintentional,

albeit reckless. The term “involuntary servitude” similarly refers to

work that is improperly coerced, not freely undertaken as the result of

a negotiated contract.

The idea that a person’s celibacy is involuntary—as opposed to

merely a disappointing state of affairs—is therefore illuminating. It is

distinct from, and much less innocent than, the idea of a person who is

“single but looking” or “dateless and desperate.” There is a strong

implication that celibacy has somehow been imposed on the incel,

even forced on him, against his will. And when it comes to sex, that

implication is deeply wrongheaded. Inasmuch as an incel regards

himself as entitled to sex with women, and women as therefore

obligated to have sex with him, he evinces an indifference to what

would go against her will. For these reasons, it is clearly sexual

activity, not celibacy, that should be thought of as voluntary or

involuntary.

It might be tempting to conclude on this basis that incels are

oblivious to the inner lives of women—that they regard women as

mindless, thinglike, subhuman, or as nonhuman animals. And it’s

certainly possible to identify a basis for this temptation in some incels’

rhetoric: witness Scott Beierle’s slurring of the women above as

iguanas or lizards.

I think we should resist this idea as too simple and too

convenient. For one thing, an incel clearly does acknowledge the

mental lives of women, inasmuch as he wants—indeed, demands—to

be desired and admired by them. Rodger’s writings are typical of the

genre in this regard: he speculated bleakly, and at length, about why

the women he wanted didn’t seem attracted to him, and why they

chose to “throw themselves” at the “obnoxious brutes” they preferred

to him. “I don’t know what you don’t see in me,” he complained. It

seems clear that Rodger ascribed to these women agency, desires, and

even an autonomous sexuality. Hence his outrage when they preferred

other men to him, “the supreme gentleman.” 19

In other words, these women’s freedom—their capacity to make

choices for themselves—was not in doubt. But he resented that

freedom when their choices did not favor him.

Recall too the title of Scott Beierle’s novel, written during his

adolescence: Rejected Youth. Although it was never released, The

Washington Post described it as being

a 70,000-word revenge fantasy of a middle school boy

nursing hatred of the girls who had shunned and humiliated

him. The protagonist, Scott Bradley, critiques their looks,

ridicules their boyfriends and is enraged by their disdain.

“The hot ones all detest me, and I haven’t a clue why,” he

laments.

The boy murders them, brutally, one by one, even as he

admires their bodies. In the final scene, he cuts the throat of

the clique’s ringleader before he throws himself off a roof

with the cops closing in.20

Notwithstanding the parallels with Rodger’s memoir and acts of

violence, Beierle wrote this while he was in high school, in the late

1990s. Rodger was still in elementary school then—and, by his own

account of things, enjoying a happy childhood.

So why do incels sometimes resort to such dehumanizing and

objectifying language in speaking about women—for instance, by

calling women “femoids” (or “foids,” for short)? 21 As we have seen, it’s

not because they believe that women are literally nonhuman animals,

mere sexual objects, robots, or similar. There is a simple alternative

explanation: it is an expression of rage and the resulting desire to put

women down. Incels are passionately invested in social hierarchies,

including one that resembles the great chain of being, with god at the

top, nonhuman animals at the bottom, and various ranks of human

beings positioned in between them. So implying that a woman is

something nonhuman may serve as the ultimate insult. But her

supposed moral crime is a human, all too human, violation—the kind

of act only human beings can commit—as is her proposed punishment.

Nonhuman animals do not betray their owners, though they may

disappoint them. And people typically don’t take revenge on

nonhuman animals either.22 When they do, there is something

conceptually awry, as opposed to simply ethically wrong, about the

whole enterprise. That is the Cliffs Notes lesson of Moby-Dick, I take

it.

There is also something far too convenient about the idea that

incels don’t see women as being fully human. It allows other men, who

don’t resort to calling women pigs or dogs, but who may still share

aspects of an incel’s entitled ideology, to defend themselves too easily.

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. It is not hard, upon reflection, to recognize the obvious

fact that a woman is fully human. The real challenge may be in

recognizing that she is fully a human being, and not just a human

giver of love, sex, and moral succor. She is allowed to be her own

person, and to be with other people.

—

Incels are not amoral (though they are, of course, highly immoral);

they are deep believers in a specific moral order. They feel not merely

angry but aggrieved; they are not merely disappointed but resentful.

They feel not merely let down but positively betrayed, by women in

particular and by the world in general. They feel that the world owes

them certain favors. And they often believe that they are vulnerable,

victimized, and sensitive, even traumatized. Describing the first time

he felt humiliated by a girl, when he was eleven, at summer camp,

Rodger wrote:

I was innocently playing with the friends I made, and they

were tickling me, something people always did because I was

very ticklish. I accidently bumped into a pretty girl the same

age as me, and she got very angry. She cursed at me and

pushed me, embarrassing me in front of my friends. I didn’t

know who this girl was….But she was very pretty, and she was

taller than me. I immediately froze up and went into a state of

shock. One of my friends asked me if I was OK, and I didn’t

answer. I remained very quiet for the rest of the day.

I couldn’t believe what had happened. Cruel treatment

from women is ten times worse than from men. It made me

feel like an insignificant, unworthy little mouse.23 I felt so

small and vulnerable. I couldn’t believe that this girl was so

horrible to me, and I thought that it was because she viewed

me as a loser. That was the first experience of female cruelty I

endured, and it traumatized me to no end. It made me even

more nervous around girls, and I would be extremely weary

[ sic] and cautious of them from that point on.

The words “trauma” and “traumatized” appear in Rodger’s so-

called manifesto on some ten other occasions, always in reference to

himself. In this respect, he is far from an anomaly among his incel

brethren. Such themes are ubiquitous in their writings. An anonymous

user on incels.co wrote, “Our whole lives we’ve had to endure the pain

of being so physically repulsive to females that they’d never even

consider giving us a chance. We are actually so genetically inferior that

they HATE us.” He went on: “They need to suffer. Their hypocrisy is a

crime [punishable by] torture for the rest of their slutty lives.”

The sad truth is that, like many oppressors, incels perceive

themselves as being the vulnerable ones. They feel like the true

victims, even as they lash out violently against others. And they feel

they are in the right, even as they commit the most deplorable acts of

wrongdoing. All the more reason, then, that we should be skeptical

about incels’ self-reports about occupying a low rung, relative to other

men, on an unjust hierarchy of attractiveness. More likely, they are

looking for an unjust hierarchy to locate themselves on, thereby

vindicating their preexisting feelings of inferiority and aggrieved

resentment.24 Often, we might suspect, there is little to these

complaints: they are merely a post hoc rationalization for an extant,

and unwarranted, sense of victimhood—of being oppressed or

persecuted by people who aren’t in reality wronging, thwarting, or

even rejecting them. In particular, the women incels resent for these

supposed sins are often just living their own lives and minding their

own business.

These considerations also have implications for how we ought

(and ought not) to deal with someone with an incel’s entitled mind-set.

A general ethical mandate says that when someone is in pain, we

ought to try to soothe and assuage that pain if we can, all else being

equal. Even if we aren’t in a position to help, we should at least express

our sympathies. And incels are clearly often in pain (though that pain

may at times be overstated).25 But when someone is in pain precisely

because he has an overblown sense of entitlement to the soothing

ministrations of others, which have not been forthcoming, stepping in

to assuage his pain becomes an ethically fraught enterprise. Even

expressing our sympathies runs the risk of feeding into his false,

dangerous sense that other people—especially girls and women—exist

to pander to the incel’s needs and to gratify his ego.26 So here, as

elsewhere, we ought to resist the pressure to himpathize.

—

Incels have generated many headlines recently. It’s easy to understand

why, given the egregiously violent acts of misogyny some incels have

committed. In truth though, such behavior is on a continuum with

everyday occurrences that often slip under the radar, from domestic

violence to rape to sexual predation and coercion. So strong is the

continuity between the most extreme acts perpetrated by incels and

the most extreme kinds of intimate partner violence that the two are

sometimes mistaken for each other.

When Brandon Clark, twenty-one, killed Bianca Devins,

seventeen, some early reports on Twitter described him as an incel.

But, it seems, he wasn’t; there’s no evidence of his belonging to any

such Internet community. True, the two had met on social media—on

Instagram. However, they had dated for over two months in real life,

in upstate New York, the victim’s family clarified.27 He had, in fact,

become a trusted friend of the family during that time; therefore no

one was concerned when the couple made plans to attend a concert

together in New York City.28

It’s not completely clear what happened that night, but some

reports indicate that Bianca Devins flirted with or kissed another man

at the concert, thereby enraging Brandon Clark. It is clear that they

argued. He wound up slitting her throat so violently that some

described it as a beheading. He then threatened to kill himself and

wound up stabbing his own neck ineffectually, before the police

arrested him and took him to the hospital. (He has since made a full

recovery and been charged with second-degree murder.)29 Before

being apprehended, Clark posted pictures of his slain girlfriend, as

well as selfies of his own wounds, on the chat app Discord—telling

Bianca’s followers, “You’re gonna have to find somebody else to orbit.”

Seemingly, he begrudged her the attention she herself attracted, when

she didn’t give him quite enough of it.30

Of men like Clark, who post photographic evidence online of their

crimes against women, law professor and privacy expert Lori Andrews

commented, “They really expect viewers to empathize with them, to

think they’re entitled to teach her a lesson.” Pamela Rutledge, director

of the Media Psychology Research Center, noted that such behavior is

a “misguided attempt to achieve social validation and feel special.”

“The drive for these sources of ‘admiration’ override any concerns of

being caught,” she added. 31

As a result of Clark’s grisly exercise in self-promotion, the story

went viral. Even though he doesn’t seem to have been involved in any

incel-like forum, or even to have directly imbibed their ideology,

Devins’s murder was celebrated by incels on the Internet. “Her death

pleases me,” wrote one incels.co user. “Honestly, based on screenshots

the THOT [that ho over there] was a horrible person anyway and

reaped what she sowed,” wrote another. “He orbits her for god knows

how long, she belittles him makes him feel like human shit and treats

him this way,” offered yet another forum user, sporting an Elliot

Rodger avatar. 32

So many instances of domestic, dating, and intimate partner

violence have much the same shape—the innocent-seeming

beginnings, the indications of jealousy, and the brutal acts of

retribution for some supposed act of betrayal—yet have little to no

impact on our collective consciousness. Two to three women are

murdered by their current or former intimate partner every day in the

United States, on average. 33 And by far the most dangerous time for a

woman with respect to intimate partner violence is when she either

leaves, or threatens to leave, a relationship—thus provoking jealousy,

rage, and feelings of abandonment in her male partner or ex-

partner. 34 As the domestic violence expert Cindy Southworth put it,

his subsequent crimes are “about dominating her world and wanting

to be the only person who is important.” So too, Southworth

commented, when it comes to Bianca Devins:

This is not an Instagram story. This is a story about dating

violence and homicide, about power and control, about a man

who felt entitled to take a girl’s life and emboldened to post

photos of it on a gaming platform.35

The story of Clark and Devins is not an incels story, either. The

stories in this chapter are all stories, in the end, about the violence

wrought by male entitlement.

THREE

Unexceptional—On the Entitlement to Sex

Rae Florek, a Minnesota woman in her mid-fifties, had long been

battling throat cancer. As of 2013, she had had some fifteen surgeries.

She was often in pain. But that day, the pain was in her arm. “I had

shoveled snow the day before and kind of thought, ‘Wow, what did I

just do?’ ” Her voice scratches. 1

She had asked Randy Vanett, her on-again, off-again boyfriend, to

bring her cigarettes and a six-pack of Twisted Tea (a mildly alcoholic

beverage). He obliged, and laid down the receipt—seeming not to

notice Rae’s arm in a makeshift sling, fashioned from a dish towel. Rae

paid him back immediately, then offered to make him lunch to thank

him. But Randy didn’t want lunch; he wanted sex. Rae demurred,

saying: “I’m not feeling good, I just…no.” Randy replied: “Well, that’s

okay, babe, because last time I was here I took you two more times

after you crashed.”

Rae needed a few moments to absorb what she was hearing. “You

can’t do that,” she finally responded. “That’s date rape.”

Indeed, it’s rape simplicter. 2 On the night Randy was referring to,

Rae and Randy had consensual sex. Afterward, Rae took painkillers to

soothe her sore throat and drank two Twisted Teas. She fell asleep and

slept soundly. She slept through the two times Randy had sex with her

—raped her—while she was unconscious.

Rae later reported that she felt “so betrayed…I had no say in it. I

had no idea what he did to my unconscious body. ”3

After three weeks spent thinking over what to do, Rae contacted a

friend whose husband was in law enforcement, who in turn called the

sheriff. A deputy came to Rae’s house, and Rae proposed secretly

taping Randy confessing. The deputy said no, claiming—falsely—that

this would be entrapment. Rae proceeded anyway, after buying a video

camera at Walmart. She slit open the belly of a teddy bear and placed

the camera inside it. She surreptitiously recorded two conversations in

which Randy admitted to what he had done. In the first of these:

RAE: You knew I was out, passed out, because that’s what you

said that day in the kitchen. “Babe, that night after you

passed out, I had you two more times.”

RANDY: No, I didn’t say “passed out.”

RAE: What did you say? What did you say? I don’t think you

said “passed out.” “Crashed.”

RANDY: I have no idea. It wasn’t “passed…” Yeah, well, we

were sleeping.

RAE: “Crashed.”

RANDY: Sleeping. When you were sleeping. I had you when

you were sleeping.

RAE: “I had you when you were sleeping,” that’s right.

RANDY: Yeah.

RAE: Yeah.

RANDY: Yeah, and I did.

Rae wasn’t sure the first recording had worked properly, so she

invited Randy back over the next day. A snippet of their conversation

over pizza:

RAE: Rand, I had to be gross when I’m crashed and you’re

fucking me, God.

RANDY: You’re beautiful when you’re crashed and I’m fucking

you. Stop it. Stop bringing it up. You’re beautiful.

Rae went to the police with the recordings. Her throat was

bothering her particularly badly that day, so she spoke in a hoarse

whisper and was at times barely audible. However, she was quite clear:

Randy had had sex with her against her will, after she had taken her

medication. (“Is that what you’re reporting?” the detective, Dean

Sherf, asked her. “Absolutely,” Rae answered.) But Detective Sherf

warned her repeatedly:

There’s always two sides to every story, and nine times out of

ten in cases like this, it’s a he said–she said type deal, she

said–he said, however you want to put it.

A week later, Sherf called Randy into the police station. Their

conversation was cordial.

SHERF: Like I told you yesterday, I just want to talk to you

about what her report was and get your version of how things

played out. I’m not interested in locking you up or anything.

You…Whatever you tell me here today, you’re going to walk

out of here, okay? You’re not charged with anything, you’re

not under arrest or anything like that. It’s just…

RANDY: Really is a sad deal.

SHERF: Well, I know. It’s something no one wants to deal

with, but we gotta.

RANDY: I appreciate that.

SHERF: A report has been made, and in this case, it’s…She’s

alleging a fairly serious allegation, that there was some sexual

contact between you two when she was under the influence of

a prescription drug, is what she’s saying.

Randy told Sherf essentially the same story he’d told Rae: he’d

had sex with Rae while she was unconscious. “She didn’t say yes or

no,” he recalled. Randy denied that it was rape and described what had

happened as romantic. “This has and continues to be very painful to

me,” he added later, in an implicit bid for himpathy.

—

Recall that himpathy, as I construe it, is the disproportionate or

inappropriate sympathy extended to a male perpetrator over his

similarly or less privileged female targets or victims, in cases of sexual

assault, harassment, and other misogynistic behavior. Given that

misogyny often involves punishing and blaming a woman for her

“bad” behavior—bad by the lights of patriarchal norms and

expectations, that is—you can understand himpathy as the flip side of

misogyny; its understudied mirror image; its natural (albeit highly

unjust) complement. Misogyny takes down women, and himpathy

protects the agents of that takedown operation, partly by painting

them as “good guys.”

Himpathy goes hand in hand with blaming or erasing the victims

and targets of misogyny. When the sympathetic focus is on the

perpetrator, she will often be subject to suspicion and aggression for

drawing attention to his misdeeds. 4 Her testimony may hence fail to

gain the proper uptake. Instead, those who are himpathetic find

endless excuses for the perpetrator.

One striking case in point was that of Brock Turner, then

nineteen, who sexually assaulted Chanel Miller, twenty-two, after a

Stanford University fraternity party, while she was unconscious.5

Despite the fact that Turner was caught in the act of violating Miller

behind a dumpster (by two Swedish graduate students, who

performed a citizen’s arrest), many people expressed skepticism that

Turner could possibly be a rapist. 6 One of his friends opined that

Turner’s crime was “completely different from a woman getting

kidnapped and raped as she is walking to her car in a parking lot.”

“That is a rapist. I know for a fact that Brock is not one of these

people,” she wrote in a statement attesting to his good character. What

had transpired was due to a “camp-like university environment” where

“things get out of hand,” she claimed. And she asked the judge not to

base his sentencing on the testimony of “a girl who doesn’t remember

anything but the amount she drank.” Many people still cite Miller’s

alcohol consumption as a decisive factor in this case. This, of course, is

classic victim blaming. 7

Instead of blaming the victim, others who expressed himpathy

with Turner tried to erase Miller from the story—an act of “herasure,”

as I call it. Numerous news stories referred to Turner’s swimming

prowess and the loss of his bright future—never mentioning Miller’s.

Miller writes of Brock’s many supporters:

Even after the conviction, they believed he remained entitled

to impunity. Their support was unwavering, they refused to

call it assault, only called it the horrible mess, this

unfortunate situation. And still they said, Brock is not one to

believe that he is above the law or has any special

privilege….As a woman, I have never felt intimidated by him

whatsoever. In his mother’s three-and-a-half-page single-

spaced statement, I was not mentioned once. Erasure is a

form of oppression, the refusal to see. 8

Meanwhile, Turner’s father bemoaned the fact that his son could

no longer enjoy a nice rib-eye steak fresh off the grill, having lost his

appetite. The loss of Turner’s “happy-go-lucky” and “easy-going”

demeanor struck his father as being a travesty, rather than the

appropriate outcome of his son’s criminal wrongdoing. Yet more

shockingly, the judge in this case, Aaron Persky, was prepared to take

Turner’s family and friends’ word for it when it came to his being a

“good guy.” In response to Turner’s aforementioned female friend,

Persky said, “To me that just rings true. It sort of corroborates the

evidence of his character up until the night of this incident, which has

been positive.” Similarly, Turner’s father described his son’s crimes as

a mere “20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.”

But, as we know, those who commit sexual assault are often

repeat offenders—making these assumptions about Turner’s otherwise

good behavior likely too optimistic. After the trial it in fact emerged

that Turner had leered at and made inappropriate comments to female

members of the Stanford swimming team, for example.9 Two young

women had also reported Turner to the police for being “touchy” with

them, and dancing with them in a “creepy” way, at another Stanford

party at the same fraternity—just one week before he assaulted Miller

(though the reports came six months after he committed his crimes

against her). As Miller notes, these stories “were all absent from the

image his loved ones and the media projected.” The Washington Post

had even called him “squeaky clean” and “baby-faced.” 10

Following these exercises in himpathy and herasure, Turner was

sentenced to a mere six months in a county jail, of which he served just

three (plus three years’ probation). Persky worried that a lengthier

sentence would have a “severe impact” on Turner’s future. 11 What

about the woman he had victimized, and those he might victimize

going forward?

—

“Police: Maryland School Shooter Apparently Was Lovesick Teen,”

read the Associated Press headline. It was describing a seventeen-

year-old boy, Austin Rollins, who had shot two of his classmates—

including his ex-girlfriend, Jaelynn Willey. She was declared brain-

dead and taken off life support one day later, thus making Rollins a

murderer. Some people protested the sympathetic framing of the

headline; but it proliferated, having been syndicated by many major

news outlets, including ABC, MSN, and Time magazine. 12

“Texas School Shooter Killed Girl Who Turned Down His

Advances and Embarrassed Him in Class, Her Mother Says,” read a

headline in the Los Angeles Times.13 A seventeen-year-old boy,

Dimitrios Pagourtzis, subsequently confessed to opening fire and

murdering ten people—including Shana Fisher, a girl who had rejected

him. Shana “had four months of problems from this boy,” according to

her mother, Sadie Rodriguez. “He kept making advances on her and

she repeatedly told him no. ”14 Pagourtzis had reportedly increased the

pressure until Shana stood up to him in class, embarrassing him in

front of their classmates; he shot her a week later, along with seven

others and two teachers.

Pagourtzis’s family released a statement, saying they were “as

shocked and confused as anyone else by these events that occurred.”

Moreover:

We are gratified by the public comments made by other Santa

Fe High School students that show Dimitri as we know him: a

smart, quiet, sweet boy. What we have learned from media

reports seems incompatible with the boy we love. 15

These testaments to the shooter’s “sweetness” may have been

gratifying to his family. But they are grotesquely misleading and added

deep moral insult to the victims’ fatal injuries.

“Ex-NRL Player Rowan Baxter Dies Alongside His Three Kids,

Estranged Wife in Brisbane Car Fire Tragedy,” read one initial

headline;16 “Former NRL Star Rowan Baxter Appeared to Be a Fun-

Loving Father Who Was Always Showering His Three Young Children

with Love and Affection,” read a caption to a photo accompanying

another story about the incident.17 Baxter had killed his recently

estranged wife, Hannah Clarke, and their three children—Aaliyah,

Laianah, and Trey—by dousing their car with gasoline and setting fire

to it. Baxter died shortly after the incident, due to self-inflicted stab

wounds. Police detective Mark Thompson said he was keeping “an

open mind” about these events in Queensland, Australia. Australian

journalist Bettina Arndt commented on Twitter:

Congratulations to the Queensland police for keeping an

open mind and awaiting proper evidence, including the

possibility that Rowan Baxter might have been “driven too

far.” But note the misplaced outrage. How dare police deviate

from the feminist script of seeking excuses and explanations

when women stab their partners to death, or drive their

children into dams but immediately judging a man in these

circumstances as simply representing the evil violence that is

in all men. 18

Arndt was honored earlier in 2020 by being appointed a member

of the order of Australia (an honor similar to an OBE) “for significant

service to the community as a social commentator, and to gender

equity through advocacy for men. ”19

Himpathy often radically distorts the framing of men’s violence

against women, as well as children in some cases.20 Himpathy

imaginatively transforms presumptively brutal murders into

understandable acts of passion or, alternatively, warranted

desperation. And it imaginatively turns other crimes, such as rape,

into mere misunderstandings and alcohol-fueled mishaps.

—

In the case of Rae Florek, Randy Vanett was never arrested, or

charged, or prosecuted for the crimes to which he had admitted.21

Dean Sherf, the detective who interviewed Rae and Randy, a sheriff’s

deputy in the county for almost three decades, has subsequently

retired. Reporter Mark Greenblatt interviewed Sherf at his home about

why this case never resulted in an arrest:

GREENBLATT: Really, the substance of what the victim was

alleging was that Randy had had sex with her while she was

asleep or passed out.

SHERF: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

GREENBLATT: And that she didn’t consent to that.

SHERF: Right.

GREENBLATT: Is that a crime?

SHERF: It could be. Yeah, it is. I shouldn’t say could be, it is,

but are the rest of the elements there to convict him of that

crime?

GREENBLATT: What evidence would you need if the suspect

acknowledges having sex with someone while they were

asleep? Do you need more evidence than that?

SHERF: Well, yeah. You have two people that the victim’s

saying one thing and the suspect’s saying, “No, no, no, I

didn’t do that.” That’s what you have. There’s nothing…

There’s no other physical evidence or any sort of a witness

that you’re going to prove that case. You had the interviews,

you had no physical evidence, you had a he said–she said

type deal, you had a recording.

GREENBLATT: With respect, sir, what was he said–she said

about it? He’s acknowledging that he had sex with someone

that he thought was drunk and passed out. What’s he said–

she said about that?

It didn’t matter in this case—nor does it matter in many cases like

it—that it wasn’t a he said–she said scenario in reality. What matters is

the relevant clash of interests, even when there’s no direct

disagreement over the facts: no contradiction between what is asserted

(by her) and what is denied (by him). In some cases, as in this one, he

may just flat-out admit to his crime. But no action is taken against

him; and to some, as we’ll see, he may even be perceived as her victim.

The interview went on:

GREENBLATT: In your mind, what does it take to convince you

to make an arrest in a sexual assault case?

SHERF: A lot of things sometimes, and sometimes not….It’s a

case-by-case deal.

GREENBLATT: When the suspect admits to it in front of you in a

recorded interview, that’s…

SHERF: I’m not going to argue the law with you. I decided not

to arrest him. He didn’t get charged. That’s the way it is. I

moved on to the next case. I don’t know what else to tell you.

Earlier, the detective had commented on his rationale:

SHERF: Not to say that there wasn’t proof beyond a reasonable

doubt, but there just wasn’t solid enough probable cause to

make an arrest on that case. It was she said–he said, there

was a time lapse from the time it was reported, they were in a

consensual relationship. It wasn’t an arrestable case.

The idea that there could be proof beyond a reasonable doubt but

not probable cause is incoherent, it should be noted. The former

standard of evidence for a crime is much higher than the latter.22

The interview concluded:

GREENBLATT: Is it not the case that a woman can be raped

when she knows someone?

SHERF: Well, yeah. It can happen, but I would bet, if you went

and gathered all of the cases of that sort that were

investigated and compared it to how many people were even

charged, it’s going to be pretty minimal that were charged. It

just don’t happen for whatever reason. Again, that’s up to the

prosecutors and the courts and that’s our fine system. 23

The prosecutor, Todd Webb, said that one reason for their

declining to prosecute Randy Vanett was that the victim in this case

“cannot testify as to what happened because she has no personal

knowledge of what happened.” But that’s hardly surprising, given that

she was unconscious when she was assaulted. And the victims of a

murder are in a considerably worse position to testify to the crime

against them; but, somehow, prosecutors manage to press on in their

absence.

Another prosecutor, Jim Alstead, said he thought that the teddy-

cam recordings were unfair to Randy; he had been “set up.” When

asked why Rae would try to frame him—as opposed to having tried to

pursue justice—Alstead replied, “Maybe she’s on welfare.” Or maybe

she was lying about not being an illegal drug user, he then offered,

without evidence.

When it comes to himpathy, herasure, and victim blaming, there’s

no shortage of possibilities. And so we see that rape involves so much

more than individual bad apples. It involves bad actors who are

enabled, protected, and even fostered by a himpathetic social system.

—

When it comes to the failings of this system, there’s no shortage of

possibilities, either. It’s not just police officers declining to make

arrests on an ad hoc basis and prosecutors declining to file charges. In

many jurisdictions in the United States, rape cases are being routinely

disposed of by what is known as “exceptional clearance.” In 2018, The

Center for Investigative Reporting journalists, in conjunction with

reporters from ProPublica and Newsy, conducted a year-long

investigation into this practice. They filed Freedom of Information Act

requests to obtain data from 110 major cities and counties, although

they succeeded in securing records for only about 60. They found that

in almost half of these, police officers had used the designation of

exceptional clearance to close the majority of rape cases. 24

According to Lieutenant Tom McDevitt, commander of the sex

crimes unit in Philadelphia, this classification applies, or is meant to

apply, only to cases where “you know the crime, you’re able to prove a

crime occurred. You have a victim, you know where the person is and

who they are. And either the prosecutor doesn’t want to prosecute or

the victim doesn’t want to go forward with the case. ”25 A Department

of Justice official confirmed that exceptional clearances are supposed

to be just that—exceptional—and to apply only when, despite sufficient

evidence for an arrest, the arrest is unfeasible for some reason: for

example, the suspect is already incarcerated or deceased, or the victim

refuses to cooperate. 26 In cases of homicide, exceptional clearances

tend to make up only around 10 percent of clearances; this means that

around 90 percent of cleared cases are cleared by arrest (leaving, of

course, a significant proportion of cases uncleared, “unsolved,” or

open). 27

Yet when it comes to rape, many police departments appear to be

flouting their own policies. In one of the cases the journalists followed

from start to finish, a young woman had her rape case exceptionally

cleared, despite her determination to move forward with it. A rape kit

revealed that she had injuries and bruises consistent with the sexual

assault she had reported. She cooperated fully with the police and said

repeatedly she wanted justice. The police identified the man she had

accused (who claimed that the alleged attack was consensual). Two

years after going to the police, this woman received a letter out of the

blue saying her case had been cleared two weeks earlier, exceptionally.

There was nothing more she could do: case closed; it was over. 28

Meanwhile, many cities and counties boast of high clearance

rates, making no distinction between cases that actually resulted in an

arrest and those cleared via exceptional means. Exceptional clearances

thus threaten to skew public perception with regard to police efficacy.

While extremely high rates of exceptional clearances in rape cases

may be news to many people, there is a growing awareness—in liberal

circles, at least—of the problem of untested rape kits. Recent testing of

some 10,000 previously untested rape kits (discovered during a

routine tour of a Detroit police storage warehouse) resulted in the

identification of 817 serial rapists. According to Wayne County

prosecutor Kym Worthy, there are an estimated 400,000 untested

rape kits nationwide, and the existing evidence suggests that rapists

commit between seven to eleven rapes, on average, before being

apprehended. Worthy elaborated:

We had many jurisdictions across the states…that have found

these kits and are not doing anything. They’re saying it didn’t

happen on our watch….[But] I don’t know how anybody can

look at this problem square in the face and say that. No one

would be saying this, and you wouldn’t even have to ask that

question, if we were talking about homicides…but because it’s

sexual assault, for whatever reason, it’s very easy for some

folks to sweep this under the rug. 29

Another sobering reality: of the rape kits that had previously gone

untested, some 86 percent of the victims were people of color—

primarily girls and women. As 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. ”30

What explains this apathy, this hostile, pointed indifference?

Don’t we regard rape as a heinous, monstrous crime? Yes, in the

abstract. Very well then, but in practice, why do we refuse to hold

certain perpetrators accountable vis-à-vis certain victims?

One explanation that has the virtue of not only parsimony but

sheer coherence is that we regard certain men as entitled to take sex

from certain women. A white man who is in a relationship with an

equally or less privileged woman, or who was once in such a

relationship, is often deemed sexually entitled to “have” her.31 This is

especially likely to be the case until she is otherwise spoken for—by

another no less privileged man, not a woman or a man of color, at least

typically. The most powerful of powerful men are deemed sexually

entitled to “have” virtually anyone, with minimal repercussions.

Consider Brett Kavanaugh; consider Donald Trump, who was credibly

accused of sexual assault by multiple women prior to his election as

president. 32 Consider too the now-notorious case of Jeffrey Epstein, a

prominent investment banker and money manager, who was accused

of sexual abuse by more than eighty girls, many of them underage. He

allegedly groomed and molested these girls at his Palm Beach

mansion, where he would ask them to give him a massage before

touching them or masturbating, and sometimes sexually assaulting

them. Yet until 2019, the consequences for him were minimal. 33

For girls and women who are marginalized in multiple ways—in

being Black, trans, or disabled, among other possibilities—the

proportion of men who may rape them with impunity tends to be so

large as to render their rape kit not worth testing. As such, the kit is

liable to languish—and, with it, their basic entitlement to moral

concern, to justice. “It was amazing to know I was going to get justice,”

said Tracy Rios, whose rape kit had gone untested for some fifteen

years, after her rapist lured her into an empty apartment in Tempe,

Arizona, in which he attacked her. “I lost faith in the system,” she said.

“I thought they didn’t care. ”34

Rios’s sexual assailant is now serving a seven-year sentence. But

this is a rare outcome. If rape is theoretically punishable by, say, life in

prison, what does it say about your value to society when your rapist

walks free, despite damning evidence against him? What does that

make you, other than a kind of cut-rate person?

This is not to say, of course, that rape should be punishable by life

in prison. (Like many of my liberal ilk, I would strenuously deny

this.)35 The point here is simply to identify the negligence and double

standards that plague certain victims with respect to certain

perpetrators. Whatever we’ve identified justice as being (rightly or,

most likely, wrongly), it’s very clear that it’s not being done in the vast

majority of rape cases. Statistics from RAINN, the Rape, Abuse and

Incest National Network, suggest that fewer than 0.6 percent of rapes

will result in the rapist’s incarceration.36 This is a far lower rate than

for comparable crime categories, including assault and battery,

robbery, and so on. 37

—

There is another aspect of rape culture that often goes under the radar:

the sad, confronting reality of juvenile offenders. This problem,

notably, defies both carceral solutions (whatever one’s views about

their viability in other cases) and ordinary notions of moral

responsibility. The offenders are often far too young to blame, at least

fully, for their wrongdoing. 38

Roxane Gay wrote, in her devastating memoir Hunger, of the

teenagers who brutally gang-raped her during her early adolescence.

They were “boys who were not yet men but knew, already, how to do

the damage of men.” She did not speak of the rape, let alone write

about it, for decades. Finally, in her book, she grappled with the

memory:

I remember their smells, the squareness of their faces, the

weight of their bodies, the tangy smell of their sweat, the

surprising strength in their limbs. I remember that they

enjoyed themselves, and laughed a lot. I remember that they

had nothing but disdain for me.39

And now, in the aftermath, as a woman of color, and a self-

described fat woman, she has faced multiple forms of marginalization,

myriad layers of hostile silence.

Recall from the introductory chapter that I take misogyny to be

the hostility girls and women face, due to patriarchal forces, rather

than the hostility men feel, deep down in their hearts. Given this, it

seems clear that the sexual offenses perpetrated by (typically,

adolescent) boys against girls count as misogyny. And this is so even if

one holds that the perpetrators in such cases may themselves be in

some sense the victims of misogyny and rape culture, which inflict

moral damage partly via inculcating toxic behavior among those not

yet old enough to know better—or even to know quite what they are

doing, if they are very young.

This bears directly on the lessons to be learned from the Me Too

movement, led by Tarana Burke for over a decade, and which

celebrities like Alyssa Milano have helped to popularize since October

2017. As powerful man after powerful man has been exposed as a

sexual wrongdoer, it’s tempting to conclude that the ground has finally

shifted. At last, we are taking their sexual misconduct seriously.

Another possibility: something has changed about the perpetrators.

The obvious factor is that they have gotten older, making it easier for

people to cast them as “dirty old men”—albeit a more powerful variant

of the ageist cultural trope, rather than a more pathetic figure.

Notably, older men also tend to be less useful than young earners from

the perspective of late-stage capitalism; their sell-by date is

approaching. And so, in some such cases, they are more disposable

than their younger counterparts.

But it is not as if sexual wrongdoers typically begin in their

dotage, or even in middle age. The typical sexual assailant will commit

his first offense during adolescence, according to self-report

measures. 40 Moreover, even making the necessary exception for

statutory offenses committed by younger persons (which make for

cases that are rife with moral complexities), a significant proportion of

sexual assault is committed by juvenile offenders—between a quarter

and a third in the United States, according to recent estimates. These

offenders are overwhelmingly male, just as with older perpetrators.41

The cases that generated the most headlines during the Me Too

moment have to some extent borne this out. The allegations against

Kevin Spacey and Harvey Weinstein currently date back to the early or

mid-1980s (respectively). Spacey would have been around twenty-

four; Weinstein, about thirty. We can readily envision each man as a

sexual wrongdoer, looking back on it now; we read the older him back

into the narrative, as recounted to us by his victims.

Yet when a woman came forward to testify that the English actor

Ed Westwick, then age thirty, had raped her three years prior, a

common attitude expressed on Twitter was: He’s too young and hot to

be a predator. Two more women have since testified against Westwick.

The allegations still somehow failed to “ring true” to many people. The

police dropped the charges, citing insufficient evidence. Plausibly,

Westwick’s youth and whiteness, among other forms of privilege,

prevailed. He remains a golden boy. Therefore (or because?), he

remains a moneymaker in Hollywood.

—

As we’ve seen, misogyny need not target girls and women universally;

it often singles out those who are “bad” by the lights of patriarchal

norms and expectations, and punishes them for their misdeeds, be

these real or apparent. It’s important not to misunderstand this point

by overgeneralizing it, however. There is ample room in my framework

to acknowledge the obvious fact that misogyny can target or victimize

almost any girl or woman, regardless of her individual, gendered

“good” behavior. This is partly because women are often treated as

representative of a certain “type” of woman, and effectively blamed or

punished for the misdeeds of the whole collective. It is also partly

because misogynistic aggression can stem from myriad forms of

dissatisfaction (resulting from men’s being subject to capitalist

exploitation, for example). And it may then involve displacement—

colloquially, “punching down” behavior, directed at those who are

vulnerable and available, who often happen to be women. If a woman

faces this displaced aggression because she lives in a historically

patriarchal world—in which men have long had, and continue to have,

social permission to “act out”—she is still a victim of misogyny,

according to my analysis. Finally, it bears mentioning that

misogynistic social structures may have a reach that vastly exceeds

their aim, and thus may punish a vast swath of women, beyond the

intended or first-line targets.

All the same, it is important to recognize the ways in which

women who directly flout patriarchal norms and expectations (as well

as those who are merely perceived as doing so) may find themselves

reliably subject to misogynistic reprisals. And the first rule of

misogyny is that you do not complain about such mistreatment.

In the most egregious instances, women will effectively be

punished for being, and claiming to be, the victims of misogyny. They

will then be systematically disbelieved and maligned, notwithstanding

strong evidence of the wrongdoing they have suffered.42 In 2009, for

example, a young woman in Washington State who told police she had

been raped at knifepoint was fined $500 for supposedly filing a false

report—a report that, it later turned out, had been accurate. This came

to light in 2011 because the rapist, who had a distinctive egg-shaped

birthmark on his calf, was subsequently accused of rape by another

female victim in a nearby district.43

Between 2009 and 2014, more than one hundred women in the

United Kingdom were prosecuted for making false rape allegations.

One such was Layla Ibrahim, who was sentenced to three years in

prison for perverting the course of justice. Her account of her sexual

assault has never wavered, and both her mother and her lawyer have

testified to the fact that she was regarded as a suspect almost from the

outset.44

In late 2018, in Australia, a case involving actor Geoffrey Rush

made headlines. Rush was publicly accused by his theater costar Eryn

Jean Norvill of sexual harassment: putting his hand under her shirt

and stroking her bare back, repeatedly making groping gestures, and

sending her a text message containing a salivating (or, perhaps,

panting) emoji—with the text “Thinking about you more than is

socially appropriate.” Norvill also alleged that Rush brushed her breast

during their final scene in King Lear. Despite the concrete evidence of

the harassment Norvill had provided, she was not believed.45 And

Rush was ultimately awarded nearly $2 million (or AUD$2.9 million)

in damages for defamation. 46

In 2006, seven queer women of color faced severe legal

consequences for fighting back against sexual assault and harassment.

Their assailant, a man named Dwayne Buckle, had become furious

after his catcall was rebuffed. (“Mister, I’m gay!” said one of the

women, trying to deter him.) He threatened to “rape them straight”;

punches were thrown—there is dispute about who swung the first one.

Buckle subsequently pulled hair from one of the women’s heads and

tried to strangle another. At some point, during the four-minute fight

that ensued, Buckle was stabbed with a kitchen knife and had to be

hospitalized. He described himself to The New York Times as “the

victim of a hate crime against a straight man.” Meanwhile, the women

were depicted in the media as a “wolf pack” of “killer lesbians.” In the

end, each of the seven women was charged with felonies, including

gang assault and attempted murder. Three of the seven wound up

pleading guilty to assault charges, while the remaining four—who

subsequently became known as “the New Jersey Four”—fought the

charges and lost. They were sentenced to between three and a half and

eleven years in prison. 47 Their supporters maintain that the women

were guilty only of defending themselves.

And so we see that, for boys and men—especially those endowed

with privilege—being held accountable for misogynistic behavior is

often the exception, not the rule, even in rape cases. Meanwhile, for

many girls and women, particularly those who are oppressed along

other axes—race, class, sexuality, and disability, for starters—not only

does their rapist or abuser often go unpunished; the women

themselves may be punished for protesting this injustice. 48

—

As for the story with which I began this chapter, it had a somewhat

happier—if not exactly happy—ending. Rae Florek was eventually

awarded $5,000 in emotional damages from Randy Vanett in a civil

law suit. After hearing the decision about the settlement, Rae

celebrated at a busy bar with her lawyer and some friends. Their

conversation went as follows:

FRIEND: Cheers. What do you want to say?

RAE: Justice.

FRIEND: Victory. Yay.

RAE: Justice. I’m just reeling. I’m just reeling. I got more

justice than I really ever expected.

She called it justice; he is contesting the verdict. Randy also

posted pictures of Rae online, topless, in the aftermath of the court

case. Such so-called revenge porn is punishable by jail time in

Minnesota. 49 It remains to be seen whether or not he will be punished.

FOUR

Unwanted—On the Entitlement to Consent

“Whore.” This—his—word is the last in the story, the story

being “Cat Person,” by Kristen Roupenian, which went viral late in

2017.1 It paints a vivid portrait of a sexual encounter between a man

and a woman: Robert, thirty-four, and Margot, twenty. Everything

that happened between them that night was consensual, fairly clearly.

But that’s not to say it wasn’t ethically problematic—not because of

force or interpersonal coercion, but due to subtler factors.

Certainly, there are many criticisms one could make of Robert

throughout the story. He is too old to be dating Margot, at least in my

estimation. And he appears to engage in petty deception in order to

attract her: ostensibly making up two cats to seem cuddlier by proxy.

There is also his textbook misogynistic outburst after Margot breaks

up with him. But the sex itself? It is bad, awkward, unpleasant; it

ought not to have happened. Yet it is difficult to fault Robert for not

realizing something that Margot took great pains to conceal: after her

initial enthusiasm wore off, she didn’t want to be there. She went

through with the sex only, or at least mainly, to avoid being rude to

Robert.

As readers, we don’t really know how Robert would have reacted

if Margot had begged off politely (though we can easily guess, from his

final word to her, what would have happened if she’d been candid or

simply departed). Inasmuch as we suspect that he would have reacted

badly, that counterfactual says something important about his

character. But it does not tell us much about how to assess his actions.

To channel New York Times columnist Bari Weiss’s commentary on a

different, albeit related case, some may hold that all Robert was guilty

of was not being a mind reader. 2

Weiss’s not guilty verdict was rendered about a real-life case that

unfolded a few weeks after “Cat Person” became an Internet

phenomenon. A woman using the pseudonym “Grace,” then twenty-

two years old, testified to Babe reporter Katie Way that the actor-

comedian Aziz Ansari, then thirty-four, had been responsible for a

terrible night that had left her badly shaken. 3 One vital difference,

however, between this and the fictional encounter in “Cat Person” was

that Grace tried repeatedly to slow down and then stop what was

happening: she was looking for an out, and Ansari was grossly

insensitive to her wishes. There are various ways of envisaging what

transpired between them—ranging from sexual assault via coercion to

unethical but legal sex. But it seems clear, if we take Grace’s word for it

(as I, for one, am prepared to), that Ansari could, at a minimum, have

done much more to glean that his date didn’t want to have sex with

him—if he didn’t already realize this, at least tacitly, which he may well

have. 4 This made Weiss’s judgment inapt in Ansari’s case, if not

downright disingenuous, as well as cringeworthily himpathetic. One

obvious ethical obligation when it comes to sexual activity is to actively

try to glean whether or not your partner wants, deep down, to engage

in it. If there is any real uncertainty, better to err on the side of

caution, and cease and desist with alacrity.

All that, however, leaves open a possibility that may obtain in

other cases: where the appearance of such unequivocal, enthusiastic

consent (whatever exactly that amounts to) is merely a performance.

And that is what “Cat Person” compels us to envisage. Margot is

repulsed by Robert’s body, his clumsy moves, his terrible kissing, and

his sexual self-deceptions. (He declares himself “so hard,” while being

noticeably less than.) But she decides to go through with it anyway,

and even manages to derive some sexual pleasure from the sense that

Robert is taking great pleasure in her young, nubile body. To heighten

the effect, she performs her role with ostensible enthusiasm, without

feeling a shred of it.

None of this is politically or aesthetically comfortable; all of it is

realistic. And it raises the specter of sex that is unwanted, and even

coerced, but not by any particular person. Rather, the pressure derives

from patriarchal social scripts and the prevalent sense of male sexual

entitlement that would make it feel rude, even wrong, for Margot to

walk out on Robert. We can imagine a variant of Robert who would

have taken this exercise in sexual autonomy perfectly well, who would

have handled the awkward aftermath with sensitivity and grace. Even

so, we can still picture Margot—not knowing this, or not wanting to

seem “spoiled and capricious” regardless—engaging in the same

performance, out of deeply ingrained social programming.

The question thus becomes: Why, and how, do we regard many

men’s potentially hurt feelings as so important, so sacrosanct? And,

relatedly, why do we regard women as so responsible for protecting

and ministering to them?

—

“Cunt.” This was a real-life case that began in much the same way “Cat

Person” ended: a man sent this epithet as a one-word tweet to

comedian Sarah Silverman—for no discernible reason, and with no

further elaboration. Silverman responded that she had pored over this

man’s Twitter feed and knew that he was in pain: she saw him, she

empathized, she believed in him, and so on. She forgave him and

offered to pay for his rehab program for his addiction to prescription

pain medication. This was generally presented as a heartwarming

story—indeed, a “masterclass in compassion,” according to one among

many similar news headlines.5

Nobody in the media said the obvious, to the best of my

knowledge: Silverman, though doubtless well-meaning and acting on

prevalent (and, plausibly, gendered) social norms, nonetheless

indulged this man’s bad behavior. But not only was she not criticized

for doing this; she was actively celebrated.

And so it goes: when women do minister to men’s hurt feelings,

they tend to be rewarded. And when they do not, they are liable to be

punished.

—

“The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari,” announced the headline by Caitlin

Flanagan. Her piece in The Atlantic bemoaned the “temporary power”

of “angry young women” like Grace—women who, the tagline

announced, had suddenly become “very, very dangerous. ”6 The piece

began with an expression of bafflement about Grace’s story. (“You

understand the vocabulary and the sentence structure, but all of the

events take place in outer space. You’re just too old.”) It then segued to

a breathless recognition of topicality. (“Like the recent New Yorker

story ‘Cat Person’—about a soulless and disappointing hookup

between two people who mostly knew each other through texts—the

account has proved deeply resonant and meaningful to a great number

of young women.”) Flanagan’s own description of what happened

removed any doubt about where her sympathies ultimately lay:

squarely with Ansari, rather than with the victim of behavior that was,

by Flanagan’s own admission, “not honorable. ”7

Within minutes of returning [from dinner], [Grace] was

sitting on the kitchen counter and [Ansari] was—apparently

consensually—performing oral sex on her (here the older

reader’s eyes widen, because this was hardly the first move in

the “one-night stands” of yesteryear), but then went on, per

her account, to pressure her for sex in a variety of ways that

were not honorable. Eventually, overcome by her emotions at

the way the night was going, she told him, “You guys are all

the fucking same,” and left crying. I thought it was the most

significant line in the story: This has happened to her many

times before. What led her to believe that this time would be

different?

As well as engaging in garden-variety victim blaming, Flanagan

takes liberties with Grace’s words here. There is nothing in her story

that would suggest that this had happened to her “many times before,”

as Flanagan surmises, rather than expressing Grace’s general

disappointment with entitled male sexual behavior of myriad varieties.

Flanagan goes on to recommend that women do what women of a

previous generation supposedly did in these situations: call her

famous date “fresh,” give him a slap, and thenceforth march out of

there. But in a culture that no longer encourages the right thing for the

wrong reasons—by giving a woman socially acceptable “outs” from

uncomfortable sexual encounters, albeit in the name of preserving not

her autonomy but her chastity—Grace probably feared much the same

thing the fictitious Margot did: being deemed rude, even a “bitch,” by

deflating a man’s sexual ego. Flanagan is right that there’s no real

evidence that Grace was “frozen, terrified, stuck” (although it would

certainly be understandable if she had felt that way). But she lacked a

socially graceful exit path. She must have known she was at risk of

doing the very thing that Flanagan is so furious with her for eventually

doing, albeit by another means: “humiliating” Ansari, causing him

pain, and impugning his “good guy” self-image. She would have

marched out of Ansari’s apartment into a world in which women are

regarded as feckless and irresponsible for drawing attention to a male

date’s genuinely feckless and irresponsible behavior. She will be the

one who is blamed, while he is swiftly forgiven. Flanagan rails against

Grace thus:

What she and the writer who told her story created was 3,000

words of revenge porn. The clinical detail in which the story

is told is intended not to validate her account as much as it is

to hurt and humiliate Ansari. Together, the two women may

have destroyed Ansari’s career, which is now the punishment

for every kind of male sexual misconduct, from the grotesque

to the disappointing.

“We certainly would be happy to make another season of Master

of None with Aziz,” said Netflix head of original content Cindy Holland

about his TV series, a mere six months after Flanagan’s dire

speculations. 8 The streaming service also subsequently produced

another of Ansari’s stand-up comedy specials. Of course, one suspects

that a white man may have enjoyed even more himpathetic rallying in

his defense, and an even surer road to public redemption.

Alternatively, as with the aforementioned rape allegations against Ed

Westwick, the story may not even have made much of a dent—leaving

his golden boy reputation largely untarnished.

—

Back to being rude, though: Why would a woman take such drastic

actions—acting against her own will in such a fundamental way—

simply to avoid this seemingly trifling social consequence? But we

know from social and moral psychology that people often do, as a

matter of fact, go to great lengths to avoid disrupting a social situation

in which their behavior is culturally scripted—especially when it is

prescribed or even suggested by some kind of authority figure.

This was revealed most dramatically in the famous Milgram

experiments, conducted in the early 1960s, in which participants were

directed by the experimenter to deliver an escalating series of electric

shocks to a seemingly innocent man.9 (In reality, he was a confederate

of the experimenter, and a trained actor.) Naïve subjects met him and

shook his hand; most reported finding him likable. They were also

given a sample real electric shock of 45 volts so that they would have

some sense of what he was in for if he gave incorrect answers to their

prompts, in what was billed as a study of the effect of punishment on

human memory. But despite participants’ awareness of what they were

putting the “learner” through, two-thirds of the subjects continued to

follow the experimenter’s instructions all the way, administering the

entire series of shocks to their hapless seeming victim (who kept giving

wrong answers). They went up to 450 volts, by pressing buttons with

labels like “Caution: Severe Danger” and the ultimate, marked only

“XXX.” And they did so despite the man’s audible moans, cries,

agonized screams, his begging them to stop, pounding on the wall,

and, eventually, eerie silence. To make matters even worse, he had

complained of having a heart condition.

These results are now well known. What is less known, and bears

careful reflection in this context, is that the vast majority of

participants were visibly and viscerally distressed by their task. “They

disagreed with what they were doing” even as they acted, according to

Milgram. 10 Far from being indifferent to the pain they were inflicting,

or operating with a “just following orders” mind-set pictured as rote

and robotic, most people protested and tried to get out of the situation.

In one recent analysis of audio footage for 117 subjects, 98 percent said

things like “I don’t want to” and “I can’t” at some point in the

proceedings.11 But the majority were nevertheless prevailed upon to

keep going by the experimenter’s prompting. Those who completed

their task did so while exhibiting stress in numerous ways: sweating,

chain-smoking, crying, and, in one case, chanting.

The content of this man’s chant was suggestive: “It’s got to go on;

it’s got to go on.” 12 This supports Milgram’s point, which he argued for

at length in his book Obedience to Authority, that participants labored

under a false but strong sense of moral obligation to comply with the

experimenter’s orders. 13 It wasn’t so much that people lost their moral

conscience in the moment. It’s that it was easy to instill a spurious but

overriding, conflicting sense of duty to comply with an ad hoc

authority figure in the form of the experimenter: in this case, a man in

a lab coat, billed as a Yale scientist. 14 The participants had never met

this man before, and he would play no foreseeable role in their lives

going forward. They had been paid a mere four dollars (plus fifty cents

for carfare) for their troubles. Yet most participants also saw

compliance with his wishes as something to which he was entitled.

When participants objected and tried to call a halt to the proceedings,

the experimenter would issue one of the following prompts, in this

order:

“Please continue” or “Please go on.”

“The experiment requires that you continue.”

“It is absolutely essential that you continue.”

And, as a last resort:

“You have no other choice, you must go on. ”15

Interestingly, the last and most overtly coercive prompt also

seems to have been the least effective. Each of the subjects who

received it wound up making an exit. 16

These experiments reveal the power of social scripts, especially

when an authority figure is involved in them—someone whom one

would have to resist, rudely, in order to break free of them. 17 Such

situations can make perfectly ordinary people go so far as to torture an

innocent victim, despite the strongest protestations of their

conscience. The lesson of the Milgram experiments is not only what

people are prepared to do to others, under such conditions. It is also

about what they are prepared to do despite themselves, given such a

setup.

—

“Please,” said Harvey Weinstein, eleven times, to Ambra Gutierrez, a

twenty-four-year-old model, over the course of two minutes. This was

in secretly taped audio footage, published late in 2017, that helped

occasion his downfall. 18 Weinstein, then sixty-five, had groped

Gutierrez’s breast the day before—hence her decision to go to the

police and to consent to wear a wire during their next meeting. He was

now determined to have her join him in his hotel room. He began in

an explicitly coercive vein. (Weinstein: “I’m telling you right now, get

in here.” And shortly thereafter: “You must come here now.” “No,”

Gutierrez responded, swiftly and decisively, albeit with audible

difficulty.) Weinstein then shifted gears, abruptly and slyly, to

something more like the first of Milgram’s prompts. (“Please?” being

his next utterance.) As he reiterated this “please” (as in, “please come

here”), it became harder and harder—since less and less socially

expected—for Gutierrez to keep demurring. Hence Weinstein’s

ostensibly light, but relentlessly applied, pressure. He was evidently

not only indifferent to Gutierrez’s mounting distress; he was aiming to

cause it, to make her accede to him. It’s not that Gutierrez’s no meant

yes to Weinstein, exactly; it’s that it meant nothing—it merely being

his cue to keep asking, prompting, needling. He repeatedly reminded

her of who he was (“I’m a famous guy”), as well as the script from

which she was deviating (“Now you’re embarrassing me”). She was

refusing to take direction; she was being impossible to work with.

Weinstein’s powerful persona—who he was in context, even

independently of what he had it within his power to do—would surely

have sufficed to make many of his targets vulnerable to his predation.

Such a man is liable to create a spurious sense of obligation, in

addition to (typically warranted) fear, in a female social subordinate

who would otherwise resist his overtures. She may even be prevailed

upon to be an active participant in his sexual hijacking of her person:

she is just as averse to the sex as ever, but has been made more averse

to continuing to say no to him. And so she may end up having sex she

doesn’t want for her own sake, nor for its own sake—not remotely. She

does so in order to avoid the fallout women are socialized to

circumvent.

Weinstein lured another of his targets, Emma de Caunes, to his

hotel room and followed his modus operandi to the letter. When he

emerged from the shower and asked her to lie down on the bed with

him, she refused point-blank. He was startled. “We haven’t done

anything!” she remembers him exclaiming. He tried to convince her

that the scenario was romantic. “It’s like being in a Walt Disney

movie!” he offered. (Another of his victims called his setup “a bad fairy

tale.”) De Caunes gathered her strength: “I looked at him and I said—it

took all my courage, but I said, ‘I’ve always hated Walt Disney movies.’

And then I left. I slammed the door.” Nevertheless, she was distraught,

shaking, petrified.19

It’s not just hyperprivileged men who can wield this kind of

power, either. These things happen every day; they happen within

marriages. In a recent Vox article, a woman wrote about what she

described as “her deepest, darkest truth,” which she had finally

divulged in couples counseling: she had felt sexually violated by her

husband all throughout their eight-year marriage.20 “The unwanted

sex at times made me sick,” she related. “Once I had to run straight

from bed to the bathroom, where I retched into the toilet.” And yet, for

the fifteen years following that counseling session, these awful realities

were almost impossible for her to acknowledge. She was afraid to tell

her husband that she didn’t want to have sex with him; she was afraid

to reject him; and she was even afraid to admit to herself what was

happening. Instead, she writes, “I bargained my way out of sex as often

as I could. I gloried in being sick enough to have the right to refuse,”

even though “I knew, intellectually, I was entitled to refuse sex” at any

time. When she couldn’t get out of it, she let her husband have sex

with her, while she read a book to distract herself. She did say no to his

kissing her. “That was the rule: You can fuck me, but you can’t kiss me,

and I don’t have to pretend to like it. This satisfied him.” She

continues:

Submitting to sex with a man who knew it was unwanted,

who knew I felt deep pain at our lack of emotional

connection, and who knew—who had been clearly told—that

it felt like a violation, broke something in me. Knowing that

he could still enjoy and feel emotionally fulfilled by that

unwanted sex shattered my idea of our marriage. I felt like a

sex doll. I felt unselfed.

But I blamed myself.

The author began to reconsider this only during the Me Too

movement, long after she’d left her husband. She writes:

As I witness so much outrage on the behalf of women who

have been shamed, coerced, and bullied into sex in so many

other contexts…I wonder: How could my husband listen to

me say what I said [about feeling sexually violated by him]—

even once, even timidly—and sleep well that night, much less

continue to insist on sleeping with me?

My answer, of course, is entitlement. But this story goes to show

just how difficult it can be for a woman to resist a sense of male sexual

entitlement that she has internalized, on his behalf. “How do you

assert your agency when its price is the pain of others?” the author

asks. At the time of writing, I have no real answer to this question.

The kicker? The author, who remained anonymous, is a

humanities professor who regularly teaches feminist theory. But, she

confesses, “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.”

—

In addition to being afraid of dire social consequences—from

professional retribution to marital estrangement—a woman may

experience intense guilt and shame for saying no to the men who feel

entitled not just to sex but to her eager consent and participation.

Seen in this light, Caitlin Flanagan’s concern about the

humiliation of Aziz Ansari is curiously (if characteristically) lopsided.

A woman who thwarts a man’s will on this score is often the one who

feels shame and humiliation in the aftermath. And those painful

emotions may then serve to secure her silence.21

This is essentially what the actor Salma Hayek wrote of Harvey

Weinstein in a powerful New York Times piece, in which she broke her

long-held silence about his abuse of her.22 Weinstein made Hayek’s

creative dreams seem feasible; he gave her the sense that she might be

somebody someday; and then, cruelly and vindictively, he lashed out

at her when she failed to give him satisfaction. When she denied him

sex, in particular, and said no to him in general, he treated her like a

nobody. He belittled and threatened to kill her; his sexual coercion

was just one move among many in his arsenal.23

When Hayek failed to play a sufficiently sexy Frida Kahlo for

Weinstein, this enraged the famous producer, according to her

narrative. Thus thwarted, he exploded: he isolated and humiliated her,

before forcing her to perform a topless sex scene against which her

very body protested. She writes of panicking, vomiting, and weeping at

the thought of his eyes on her naked body—a visceral manifestation of

the shame such men often weaponize against women.

But, again, it is not just powerful men like Weinstein who manage

to do this (which is not to deny that the powerful do have extra

leverage here). There are also those who are entitled but aggrieved,

crestfallen, and disappointed, either by life in general or by women’s

reactions to them in particular. Kristen Roupenian’s Robert is one

such example, portrayed as a slightly crumpled, and easily wounded,

person. Another is the character of Chuck Palmer, from HBO’s Girls.24

In the episode “American Bitch,” which aired early in 2017, Hannah

Horvath goes to the apartment of this acclaimed middle-aged writer.

Palmer has been accused of exploiting his intellectual stardom to sleep

with undergraduates while visiting college campuses around the

country, giving lectures and master classes. It’s not exactly clear

whether the sex was consensual; and, indeed, that is part of the point.

In a culture in which such men are deemed entitled to consent, the

question of consent isn’t all that needs to be asked, when it comes to

what they may have to answer for, ethically speaking. 25 True, the

consensual/nonconsensual distinction has come to mark the line

between legal and criminal sex acts, by default if not by design. But

there is more to ethical sex than merely not doing something criminal;

the same goes for most areas of human life and moral conduct. For

example, there is more to being honest than not committing fraud,

burglary, or grand larceny.

In the show, Hannah (played by Lena Dunham, Girls’ creator) is a

writer herself—at twenty-seven, considerably younger than Palmer,

and not yet famous. Hannah has written about Palmer’s indiscretions

—as he thinks of them—for an obscure feminist website. Despite his

advantage in age and professional status, Palmer sees himself as

Hannah’s victim, and as being highly vulnerable to young women’s

power in general. They are now empowered to ruin his reputation by

exposing his sexual exploits as exploitation. That is ostensibly why he

has invited Hannah to his lavish, tasteful Manhattan home: to tell her

his side of the story, as a pariah now racked with anxiety.

—

“Not rape, not quite that, but undesired nevertheless, undesired to the

core”—this is how the character of David Lurie, a fifty-two-year-old

professor, describes the sex he has with his twenty-year-old student

Melanie in J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace. “As though she had decided

to go slack, die within herself for the duration, like a rabbit when the

jaws of the fox close on its neck.” 26 Melanie moves of her own accord—

even lifting her hips to help David undress her—but not quite of her

own volition. When David knocked on her door that afternoon,

surprising her in her slippers, she was cast into a cultural script in

which such a man’s sexual desire has outsize ethical importance.

Melanie would have to make her will hard and steely in order to

resist David—soon to be disgraced and forced to resign from his

university, due to his sexual misconduct and subsequent lack of

remorse. Instead, Melanie goes limp. She is caught off guard; she

freezes.

This makes the sex not quite rape. But what makes it morally

gross, even to David himself—who slumps over his steering wheel,

fighting dejection and shame after leaving Melanie’s apartment—is

that he is aware that it might have been rape had she been prepared

for his onslaught. More precisely, if Melanie had had more in the way

of agency and a sense of entitlement to deny him, she likely would

have said no. And David, in knowing this, clearly took advantage (an

old-fashioned expression, but a useful one here, for all that).

As it is, when he arrives, “nothing will stop him,” and she does not

even try. “All she does is avert herself—avert her lips, avert her eyes.”

She turns her back and removes herself—“So that everything done to

her might be done, as it were, far away. ”27 And so he has his way with

her: his little death, his resurrection.

Later, Melanie arrives unannounced on David’s doorstep and asks

if she can stay with him. She plays her role in his life with some

ostensible enthusiasm for a short while, as if to rewrite the ugliness

and violence of that first time in her apartment. But “to the extent that

they are together, if they are together, he is the one who leads, she the

one who follows. Let him not forget that,” he tells himself.28 His words

ring hollow.

—

This lack of desire at the core, this sexual Milgram experiment, this

obedience to a culturally designated authority figure in the relevant

domain—it goes beyond sex, too. Most obviously, it extends to other

forms of manhandling that may or may not be sexual but are

nonetheless proprietary and presumptuous. An eleven-year-old

Hannah Horvath responded with a passivity similar to Melanie’s when

her English teacher, Mr. Lasky, was overly familiar with her, handsy

(to invoke another old-fashioned, but again suggestive, turn of

phrase). Hannah said she didn’t mind, that she liked it, even: but for

the wrong reasons, at the wrong time, in the wrong way, to invert

Aristotle’s famous formulation. She recalls to Chuck Palmer:

He liked me, he was impressed with me. I did special creative

writing: I wrote a little novel or whatever. Sometimes, when

he was talking to the class he would stand behind me and

he’d rub my neck. Sometimes he’d rub my head, rustle my

hair. And I didn’t mind. It made me feel special. It made me

feel like someone saw me and they knew that I was going to

grow up and be really, really particular….Anyway, last year

I’m at a warehouse party in Bushwick, and this guy comes up

to me and he’s like, “[Hannah] Horvath, we went to middle

school together, East Lansing!” And I’m like, “Oh my God,

remember how crazy Mr. Lasky’s class was? He was basically

trying to molest me.” You know what this kid said? He looks

at me in the middle of this fucking party like he’s a judge, and

he goes, “That’s a very serious accusation, Hannah.” And he

walked away.

Witness now David’s similarly ponderous, judgmental reaction to

Melanie’s eventual accusations against him. He is not only defensive

but deeply contemptuous, deeply patronizing:

Abuse: he was waiting for the word. Spoken in a voice

quivering with righteousness. What does she see, when she

looks at him, that keeps her at such a pitch of anger? A shark

among the helpless little fishies? Or does she have another

vision: of a great thick-boned male bearing down on a girl-

child, a huge hand stifling her cries? How absurd! Then he

remembers: they were gathered here yesterday in this same

room…[and] Melanie barely [came] to his shoulder. Unequal:

how can he deny that?29

How indeed could David deny the power imbalance between

them? But the basis on which he eventually affirms it—height—is

maddeningly irrelevant. The relevant inequalities are a product of a

patriarchal culture, and the subsequent threats and punishment

leveled at girls and women who resist and challenge the will of male

authority figures. Hence this particular form of internalized misogyny:

the shame and guilt women often feel for not protecting a man who

mistreats us. We do not want to hurt him or let him down; we want to

be a good girl.

—

In the aforementioned episode of Girls, Chuck Palmer charms Hannah

and wears down her defenses before too long. As they stand around

swapping stories, she pulls a book down off his shelf: When She Was

Good, by Philip Roth. Hannah says she loves the novel, loves Roth,

regardless of his misogyny. The book had an alternate title: American

Bitch, Hannah tells Palmer. He gives her his signed copy on the spot: a

little reward for not being one.

In the next scene, Palmer lies down on his bed and asks Hannah

to lie down next to him. He just wants to feel close to someone; he’s

not sleeping well; he’s lonely. He lies with his back turned toward her;

they are both fully clothed. Suddenly, uninvited, and without any

warning, he turns around, jeans unzipped, and rubs his semierect

penis against her thigh. He’s expectant—and Hannah reaches down to

jerk him off, instinctually. And then she jumps up, yelling, “I touched

your dick!” repeatedly. She is utterly humiliated.

Chuck Palmer grins sardonically, even sadistically, as Hannah

stands there yelling. He has won, and he knows it. She came to his

apartment in order to confront him about his sexual predation. In

showing her how it was done, and simultaneously undoing her, he has

gotten what he wanted; she, meanwhile, is left undermined, sickened,

flailing.

FIVE

Incompetent—On the Entitlement to Medical

Care

When the sociologist and writer Tressie McMillan Cottom was

four months pregnant, she began to bleed. She was at work at the time,

and after meeting her writing deadline, she called her husband to have

him come pick her up. As she dryly remarks, “When you are a black

woman, having a body is already complicated for workplace politics.

Having a bleeding, distended body is especially egregious. ”1

McMillan Cottom went to her obstetrics office, which, she

explains, she chose “based on the crude cultural geography of choosing

a good school or which TJ Maxx to go to: if it is on the white, wealthy

side of town, it must be good. ”2 But it wasn’t—at least not for her, as a

Black woman.

Despite having called ahead to alert the staff to her condition,

McMillan Cottom was left sitting for long enough that she began to

bleed through the waiting room chair. When her husband asked if she

could wait somewhere more private, the nurse “looked alarmed, about

the chair.” The doctor who eventually saw her “explained that [she]

was probably just too fat and that spotting was normal.” 3 He sent her

home.

McMillan Cottom’s pain began in earnest that night, “just behind

the butt muscle and off to the side.” After walking, stretching, and

calling her mother, she finally called the nurse. The nurse dismissed

the pain as constipation. 4

For three days, McMillan Cottom’s pain continued. She was

unable to sleep for more than fifteen minutes at a time, over an almost

seventy-hour period. When she went to the hospital, they admonished

her for having probably eaten something “bad” for her, and they

agreed to do an ultrasound only begrudgingly. What emerged was that

McMillan Cottom had been experiencing labor pains all along—but

they’d been discounted because the pain was in the “wrong” location.

McMillan Cottom writes:

The [ultrasound] image showed three babies, only I was

pregnant with one. The other two were tumors, larger than

the baby and definitely not something I had eaten. The doctor

turned to me and said, “If you make it through the night

without going into preterm labor, I’d be surprised.” With

that, he walked out and I was checked into the maternity

ward. Eventually a night nurse mentioned that I had been in

labor for three days. “You should have said something,” she

scolded me.5

McMillan Cottom’s ordeal was still far from over: she was denied

pain medication, since her pain wasn’t deemed bad enough for

narcotics. As she was wheeled into a delivery operating room, she

slipped in and out of consciousness. The pain was in fact so bad that,

at one point when she woke up, she screamed, “motherfucker.” The

nurse on duty told her to watch her language. When an

anesthesiologist finally arrived to give her the epidural she had

requested, his reaction was not one of compassion, or even

professional coolness. Rather, McMillan Cottom recounts: “he glared

at me and said that if I wasn’t quiet he would leave and I would not get

any pain relief.” Then:

Just as a contraction crested, the needle pierced my spine

and I tried desperately to be still and quiet so he would not

leave me there that way. Thirty seconds after the injection, I

passed out before my head hit the pillow.6

McMillan Cottom gave birth to her daughter, barely breathing,

who she was told had come four days too early for the hospital to

attempt any medical interventions. The baby died shortly afterward.

McMillan Cottom held her daughter, and consulted with the nurse

about how to handle her remains. The nurse then turned to her and

said: “Just so you know, there was nothing we could have done,

because you did not tell us you were in labor.” 7

—

According to recent estimates, Black women in the United States are

some three to four times more likely to die as the result of pregnancy

or childbirth than their white counterparts. 8 These alarming rates of

maternal mortality for Black women—which cannot be explained by

comparative poverty alone9—are finally beginning to be discussed in

white liberal circles, largely due to the intellectual labor of authors like

McMillan Cottom and Linda Villarosa.10 The harrowing experiences of

tennis superstar Serena Williams—who nearly died after childbirth

when her testimony about her history of blood clots was initially

ignored or at least downplayed by medical staff—has also been a

factor.11 Such increased awareness is, of course, salutary and long

overdue. But it also needs to be expanded beyond maternal healthcare.

McMillan Cottom’s essay “Dying to Be Competent,” in which she

narrates and analyzes the aforementioned experiences, sheds crucial

light on just how wide and deep are the failures of healthcare for Black

women, pregnant or no. As McMillan Cottom writes:

Everything about the structure of trying to get medical care

had

filtered

me

through

assumptions

of

my

incompetence….The healthcare machine could not imagine

me as competent and so it neglected and ignored me until I

was incompetent. Pain short-circuits rational thought. It can

change all of your perceptions of reality….When the medical

profession systematically denies the existence of black

women’s pain, underdiagnoses our pain, refuses to alleviate

or treat our pain, healthcare marks us as incompetent

bureaucratic subjects.12

The converse holds as well, of course: if one is marked as

incompetent, then one’s pain is liable to be taken far less seriously.

Women in general, and Black women in particular, routinely

encounter medical professionals who regard them as hysterical, and

subsequently treat their pain with skepticism.

In their groundbreaking and widely cited paper “The Girl Who

Cried Pain,” medical researchers Diane E. Hoffmann and Anita J.

Tarzian canvassed the existing literature on gender differences in the

experience and treatment of pain. For several painful procedures—

including abdominal surgery, coronary artery bypass grafts, and

appendectomies—they found that men received more pain medication

than women (controlling for weight, when appropriate). For the last of

these procedures, women were more likely to be given sedatives

instead of pain medication. In one study, women at a pain clinic were

prescribed “more minor tranquilizers, antidepressants, and non-

opioid analgesics than men. Men received more opioids than did

women.” 13 These trends were not restricted to adult patients, either.

For boys and girls who had undergone surgeries and subsequently

complained of pain, boys were significantly more likely to be given

codeine; girls, acetaminophen (the mild over-the-counter analgesic

marketed in the United States as Tylenol).14

All of this is despite the fact that, as Hoffmann and Tarzian

discuss in detail, there is some evidence that women may be prone to

experiencing slightly more pain than men on the basis of the same

noxious stimuli—submerging a person’s hand in very cold water being

a standard test for this—and would therefore presumably require more

aggressive pain management. There are also numerous painful

autoimmune and gynecological conditions for which girls and women

constitute the majority or the vast majority of patients, respectively

(along with, in the latter case, some trans and some non-binary

patients). So, as Hoffmann and Tarzian write:

Given that women experience pain more frequently, [and] are

more sensitive to pain…it seems appropriate that they be

treated at least as thoroughly as men and that their reports of

pain be taken seriously. The data do not indicate that this is

the case. 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.15

Moreover, women tended to be portrayed as “hysterical and

emotional” in the medical literature, resulting in more diagnoses of

psychosomatic illnesses and perceptions of their emotional volatility,

according to the researchers. Female chronic pain patients were hence

likelier to receive a diagnosis of “histrionic disorder” (defined by

“excessive” emotionality and attention-seeking behavior) than were

their male counterparts.16

Hoffmann and Tarzian published their landmark article in 2001,

and one might hope that the situation would have improved in the

interim. This hope is rather dashed by a 2018 survey of more recent

studies (published between 2001 and 2015), in which Anke

Samulowitz and her coauthors found that

women, compared to men, received less and less effective

pain relief, less pain medication with opioids, and more

antidepressants and got more mental health referrals….A

major finding is that women’s pain in the reviewed studies

was psychologized….Women’s pain reports are taken less

seriously, their pain is discounted as being psychic or

nonexistent, and their medication is less adequate than

treatment given to men.17

So, overall, the authors concluded: “the reviewed studies showed

gender bias in the [medical] encounter, along with gender bias in

prescribed medication. Differences in the treatment of men and

women in these studies could not be explained by different medical

needs.” 18

Samulowitz and her colleagues found a particular unwillingness

on the part of medical professionals to believe women’s pain reports

for conditions without obvious physiological markers, such as

fibromyalgia (which predominantly affects women).19 Overall, when it

came to such conditions, “women’s narratives about their experiences

with clinicians showed…how hard they have had to work to be taken

seriously, believed, and understood in medical encounters.” 20 And, in

general, “women with pain can be perceived as hysterical, emotional,

complaining, not wanting to get better, malingerers, and fabricating

the pain, as if it is all in her head. Other studies showed that women

with chronic pain…are assigned psychological [rather] than somatic

causes for their pain.” Meanwhile, “men were presented as being stoic,

tolerating pain, [and] denying pain….Further, men were described as

being autonomous, in control, avoiding seeking health care, [and] not

talking about pain.” 21

As we’ve seen, there is in fact some evidence that women may

experience more painful sensations than men, on average, on the basis

of the same noxious stimuli. But that doesn’t speak to the question of

whether men are more stoical than women—that is, whether they

simply “soldier through” equivalent pain more readily. If there were

good evidence for this proposition, then healthcare providers might

reasonably believe that if a man complains that he is in pain, he must

really be in pain—or indeed in truly terrible pain, well beyond what his

pain reports would indicate.

But despite its popularity, the notion that boys and men are

comparatively stoical and inexpressive about their pain does not

appear to have a robust empirical basis. True, some studies show that

women consult with medical practitioners more frequently than do

men, on average, particularly during their peak reproductive years.

But, as this addendum suggests, women may also have more reasons

to consult—for example, during pregnancy. So, as the researcher Kate

Hunt and her colleagues note, this leaves open the question of whether

women are more likely than men to seek consultations for the very

same painful conditions. Their paper set out to answer this question,

by comparing men’s and women’s consult rates for headaches and

back pain. They found that the evidence that women consulted more

than men for back pain was “weak and inconsistent.” The evidence

that women consulted more than men for headaches “was a little

stronger…but by no means fully consistent. ”22

As Hunt and her coauthors acknowledge, several qualitative

studies do show that men commonly vocalize their reluctance to seek

help from medical practitioners. However, as the researchers go on to

point out, most of these studies are not comparative: they do not show

that men are more reluctant than their female counterparts to seek

help.23 Notwithstanding this lack of data, “there is still a dangerous

(often implicit) tendency to assume that, if men employ a public

reluctance to seek help as one important way of demonstrating their

masculinity, then this must necessarily suggest that women are not

reluctant to seek help. ”24 But women may indeed be reluctant to seek

medical help, perhaps for different reasons (say, in anticipation of not

being taken seriously, as opposed to being loath to admit weakness).

So, as Hunt and her coauthors write, “The widespread assumption that

men consult more readily than women needs to [be] empirically

challenged and verified, refuted or refined” in order to ameliorate the

risk of perpetuating injustice. They observe:

As men’s “under-usage” of the health care system is

constructed as a social problem, there is a danger that a

contrasting presumption that women “overuse” health care,

consulting sooner and more often, sometimes for trivial

symptoms which are self-limiting or amenable to self-

management, is reinforced. 25

Moreover:

The often unchallenged but widespread assumption that

women will consult more readily for all symptoms or

conditions and that men will be more reluctant or will delay

consulting may result in health care providers assuming that

women have a lower level of symptom severity before

deciding to consult.26

In other words, looked at from another angle, the perception of

male stoicism may be the flip side of the perception that women are

more likely to complain about comparatively little. In which case, this

assumption would simply be another face of a prevalent gender bias.

This hypothesis is strengthened by evidence that people take male

cries of pain more seriously than female ones long before socialization

could possibly render boys hesitant to fully express their pain states.

Two recent studies have shown that, when presented with footage of a

crying infant (dressed in gender-neutral clothing), people tended to

rate the infant as experiencing more pain when told the infant was a

boy rather than a girl. 27 As the researchers note, the participants’

implicit belief that “boys are more stoic” and “girls are more emotive”

would neatly explain this finding.28 But notice that, in this case, the

belief itself is actually quite implausible, as this gender difference

would have to be attributed to nature rather than nurture—not only

that, but boys would have to be hardwired from infancy to express

pain less intensely than girls do.29 And even if this belief does turn out

to be true, we do not yet have compelling evidence for its being true.

This suggests that the documented tendency to perceive boys’ pain

cries as indicating greater pain is merely reflective of gender bias.

All in all, the evidence that boys and men are more stoical than

girls and women seems significantly weaker than the corresponding

assumption to that effect. And, in a way, this is not surprising. Such an

unwarranted assumption serves a potent social function in a society in

which men’s experiences generally tend to be privileged over women’s.

In this case in particular, we should ask: 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? The latter

hypothesis is also bolstered by evidence that, when women are in pain,

they are more likely than men to continue to perform household labor

and family duties. Indeed, “an overload of responsibility for family,

work, household, their pain, and their wellbeing seemed to be an

obstacle for recovery for women with pain,” researchers observed

recently. 30

None of this is to deny that there are extraordinarily stoical men.

But there are extraordinarily stoical women too. Moreover, men may

exhibit stoicism largely in certain contexts—for example, in front of

other male peers or in certain hypermasculine, competitive settings.

Around women and others who care for them, it may be a different

story.

—

Whether or not it is true, the common presumption that boys and men

are stoical means that their pain reports are generally taken seriously

— appropriately seriously, in the vast majority of cases. When a

privileged boy or man complains that he is in pain, there is a default

tendency to believe that he really is in pain. 31 In virtue of this, he

deserves sympathy and care, as well as medical attention and

treatment, if required. This is all as it ought to be. But many people are

not so fortunate. When girls and women complain of pain, they are

liable to be dismissed, as the above research shows. The same

plausibly holds for non-binary people, as well as many of the men who

are not privileged, in terms of race, disability, sexuality, or class,

among myriad other social factors. And, of course, for women who are

subject to multiple, compounding forms of oppression on such bases,

the situation is often far worse than for women who are privileged

along these axes.

Pain thus turns out to be a powerful site of testimonial quieting, a

concept developed by the philosopher Kristie Dotson, wherein “an

audience fails to identify a speaker as a knower. ”32 Because the

audience doubts or impugns the speaker’s competence, the speaker

ends up effectively being silenced. She may complain of her pain, but

her pain cries go unheeded. As Dotson shows, this kind of silencing is

often enacted against Black women in America.

A similar kind of silencing occurs when someone’s word is taken

to be less credible than it ought to be, due to a prevalent prejudice

against members of that social group. The philosopher Miranda

Fricker calls this “testimonial injustice.” To take one of her best-known

examples, consider Marge Sherwood in the film The Talented Mr.

Ripley. When Marge tries to air her warranted suspicions that her

fiancé, Dickie Greenleaf, may have been harmed by his friend Tom

Ripley, Marge is immediately dismissed by Dickie’s father, Greenleaf

Senior. “Marge, there’s female intuition, and then there are facts,” he

tells her—relegating the basis of her utterance to the former, dismal

category. Mr. Greenleaf treats Marge like the proverbial hysterical

woman, whose word is not to be trusted. In other cases, women (as

well as other minorities) may be dismissed not as hysterical or

incompetent but as dissemblers or liars. Fricker argues that

testimonial injustice has its roots in social stereotypes about either the

competence or the truthfulness of a particular class of people.33

The above studies suggest that when women try to testify to their

pain, they are routinely dismissed by the medical establishment on

both of these bases—impugned as incompetent and hysterical, on the

one hand, or as dishonest malingerers, on the other. And these

injustices are often vastly worse—sometimes not merely in degree but

in kind—for women who are multiply marginalized, because they are

Black, queer, trans, and/or disabled. Tressie McMillan Cottom’s essay

“Dying to Be Competent” and her contrast between the experiences of

white women and her own, as a Black woman, at her obstetrics office,

draw vital attention to the compounding of injustice upon injustice

here. This is misogynoir, to use a term coined by Black queer feminist

Moya Bailey to capture the intersection of misogyny and anti-Black

racism in America. 34

Consider too in this connection the testimony of the Black

disabled femme writer Jazmine Joyner. In seventh grade, Joyner

began to experience sharp, throbbing pain in her lower left abdomen,

during her track and field practices. “It felt like I was being burned and

stabbed at the same time—it took the breath from my lungs,” she

recalls in a piece entitled “Nobody Believes That Black Women Are in

Pain, and It’s Killing Us.” 35 “The pain would often show up as soon as I

started running and I would fall to my knees on that dead grass,

gasping for air and holding my side.” Joyner’s coach dismissed her

pain as menstrual cramps, and Joyner tried to take her word for it,

despite the pain’s severity and constancy. When Joyner went to see her

doctor and voiced her concern that the pain was relentless—not just

there when she had her period—she was once again dismissed. She

was told she was “overreacting and that it was normal” by the (female)

doctor.

When Joyner’s pain became more severe still—at least as bad, she

later discovered, as the end stage of labor contractions—she hobbled to

her mother’s room in the middle of the night. Her mother (who had

been a nurse for more than twenty years) took one look at her

daughter and rushed her to the hospital. There, Joyner yet again

encountered the insistence that she was just experiencing a bad

period. It took her mom over an hour to persuade the staff to give her

daughter an ultrasound. When they did—begrudgingly—they

discovered a softball-sized cyst growing on her left ovary that had

caused her fallopian tube to twist into a corkscrew shape. This

agonizing cyst could have ruptured at any time, sending a blood clot to

Joyner’s heart, killing her. Fortunately, at this point, a lifesaving

emergency surgery was performed. But Joyner lost her left ovary and

fallopian tube—losses that were preventable, had her testimony been

taken seriously to begin with. 36 Moreover, Joyner writes, this

experience was merely a vivid preview of what was to come for her, as

a Black, disabled woman, in the U.S. medical system:

Over the years I have been diagnosed with several ailments

and am both chronically ill and disabled. Each diagnosis took

years to obtain. I have been gaslit by the medical community

my entire life. My pain and knowledge of my body has been

questioned at every turn by white doctors whose education

has been historically steeped in anti-Blackness.

So, as helpful as Fricker’s idea of testimonial injustice is for

diagnosing part of the problem here, one may have doubts about

whether it is equipped to do full justice to the relevant intersectional

considerations. One cannot understand either McMillan Cottom’s

experiences or Joyner’s as involving wholesale stereotypes about

women; the testimonial injustice they faced was particular, and

particularly egregious, due to their being positioned as Black women

in a specific social context. As Joyner writes:

Yes, historically women have been dealt a shitty

hand….Rather than being diagnosed with physical or mental

illnesses, including depression and anxiety, women were

routinely diagnosed with hysteria….But to ignore the specific

misogynoir Black women and femmes experience within, and

outside of the medical institutions of the United States, is to

erase the history of pain and disrespect Black women’s bodies

experience every day.37

There is also a question about whether stereotypes, even about

specific groups of women, provide the best explanation of the

phenomenon of testimonial injustice (or, perhaps better, testimonial

injustices). After all, for many women, their testimony is considerably

less likely to be dismissed in closely related medical settings: when

they are testifying as to the health of children in their care, for

example. Women are indeed often regarded as supremely competent,

trustworthy caregivers for their charges, until proven otherwise (in

which case the punishment for failures of “good womanhood” may be

harsh, swift, and disproportionate).38

Why is the default to trust women in some contexts but not others

(as closely related as these may be)? A plausible explanation in this

instance is that women are regarded as more than entitled (indeed

obligated) to provide care, but far less entitled to ask for and receive it.

Suppose she is positioned as the nurse or the mother or the “mammy”

(to invoke Patricia Hill Collins’s brilliant dissection of the “controlling

image” of the “loving, nurturing, and caring” Black woman who tends

to “her White children and ‘family’ better than her own”). 39 Then, when it comes to the well-being of the children who are her charges,

she will often be regarded as at least as trustworthy as her male

counterpart. But when she is the patient who is in pain—and asking for

nurture, rather than giving it—she will tend to be regarded with much

more suspicion and, sometimes, consternation. She will hence be in

for dismissive, skeptical, and even contemptuous reactions.40

The problem then, at heart, may not be stereotypes about the

trustworthiness of certain groups of women—for, as we’ve seen, these

are deployed in an ad hoc manner to justify dismissing them in some,

but only some, settings. The deeper problem here may be the sense

that a woman is not entitled to ask for care for her own sake, or for its

own sake—simply because she is in pain, and because that pain

matters.

By the lights of this analysis, an exception will tend to arise when

a woman clearly needs care for the sake of others, and for sanctioned

instrumental reasons—for example, to help her be a better caregiver to

those who are regarded as mattering more deeply. This helps explain

some of the (superficially) bright and (truly) bleak spots when it comes

to women’s healthcare. For many white, privileged women, prenatal

care in the United States is comparatively good—albeit geared toward

the needs of the fetus, rather than that of the mother. When it comes

to postnatal care, however, there is a marked and radical shortfall, as

documented by Angela Garbes, author of Like a Mother—particularly

for women of color. And for women of color, like Garbes, even prenatal

care tends to be far from adequate. The same goes for many lesbian,

queer, and non-binary people, who, as Garbes writes, “know that the

‘normal’ or ‘average pregnant’ person discussed in books does not

refer to us. ”41

Seen through this lens, there is nothing accidental about such

shortfalls in material care and moral concern for less privileged

women. In a white supremacist milieu, a pregnant white woman, who

is (presumptively and, in many cases, actually) carrying a white baby

has the keys to the kingdom in her uterus. 42 Pregnant women of color,

in contrast, may be perceived as dispensable, as disposable, or even as

threats to white supremacy. Hence the resulting intolerable healthcare

disparities described by McMillan Cottom and Villarosa—and their

tragic outcomes, all too often.

—

There are still other structural sources of the aforementioned

injustices. In her recent book Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez

documents the tendency to regard men’s bodies as the default—an

instance of male-centeredness, or “andronormativity”—together with

its pernicious effects on women’s health and well-being. She writes:

The evidence that women are being let down by the medical

establishment is overwhelming. The bodies, symptoms and

diseases that affect half the world’s population are being

dismissed, disbelieved and ignored. 43

Criado Perez attributes these disparities in large part to “the still

prevalent belief, in the face of all the evidence that we do have, that

men are the default humans. They are not. They are, to state the

obvious, just men. ”44 Yet:

Historically it’s been assumed that there wasn’t anything

fundamentally different between male and female bodies

other than size and reproductive function, and so for years

medical education has focused on a male “norm,” with

everything that falls outside that designated “atypical” or

even “abnormal.” References to the “typical 70kg man”

abound, as if he covers both sexes (as one doctor pointed out

to me, he doesn’t even represent men very well). When

women are mentioned, they are presented as if they are a

variation on standard humanity. Students learn about

physiology, and female physiology. 45

It’s important to add here that men and women differ not only

from each other but also among themselves—sometimes in radical and

fundamental ways. (Consider, for example, trans women, who would

be particularly ill-served by this default conception of human

embodiment.) All the more reason, then, to be concerned that a single

“standard” (read: cisgender, white, nondisabled male) body is being

treated as the paradigm.

In addition to this problem with medical training, many diseases

are predominantly researched and understood with respect to such

“standard” bodies.46 This disparity is sometimes justified on the basis

of people who menstruate being “difficult” research subjects, due to

their characteristic monthly hormonal fluctuations. But, inasmuch as

this isn’t just an excuse for andronormativity, it is pretty cold comfort

to the roughly half of the population whose bodies hence end up being

underresearched. Either the fluctuations of the menstrual cycle make a

difference when it comes to the safety and effectiveness of particular

drugs, or they don’t. If they do, then isn’t it important that we know

this? And if they don’t, then, again, menstruating bodies should be

included in these studies—as should the bodies of a diverse range of

trans, non-binary, and intersex people, who are chronically excluded

from medical research.

Such negligence can have disastrous results for diagnosis and

treatment. Take the case of cardiac resynchronization therapy devices

(CRT-D), a newer alternative to pacemakers that send electrical

impulses to both lower chambers of the heart to help them beat

together in synchronicity. As Criado Perez notes, women made up only

around 20 percent of participants in trials for this device, according to

a 2014 review of the FDA trial database. These numbers were so small

that, until the results for men and women were combined and sex-

disaggregated, no statistically significant difference between these

different groups’ needs was noticed—or used as a basis for different

treatment. So the recommendation for men and women wound up

being the same: they should have the device implanted only if their

heart took 150 milliseconds or longer to complete a full electrical cycle.

But when the more sophisticated data analysis was finally performed,

it turned out that this recommendation was 20 milliseconds too long

for women. Women with an electrical wave between 130–149

milliseconds enjoyed just over a 75 percent reduction in heart failure

and death when they had a CRT-D implanted. Thus, as current

guidelines stood, many women with heart trouble weren’t getting the

benefit of these devices. 47

Failing women with respect to their hearts is hardly an anomaly,

either. Cardiovascular disease has been the most common cause of

death for women in the United States for the last three decades. And

following a heart attack, women are more likely than men to die—

partly due to the fact that women’s symptoms (stomach pain,

breathlessness, nausea, and fatigue) are often missed, since these signs

are deemed to be “atypical,” instead of typical for women. In Sweden,

women suffering from heart attacks are given lower priority for

ambulances and have to wait an average of twenty minutes longer at a

hospital before receiving treatment.48 In the United Kingdom, women

are 50 percent more likely to be misdiagnosed following a heart attack.

And young women who suffer from heart attacks are almost twice as

likely to die in the hospital, compared with their male counterparts.

Yet in the United Kingdom, research funding for coronary artery

disease in men far exceeds that for women. 49

This lack of research on non-male bodies has negative effects

when it comes to more mundane medical matters too. Several

common medications, including antidepressants and antihistamines,

show menstrual-cycle effects, meaning they will affect a person who

menstruates differently at different stages in their cycle. As a result of

this, many of us may be taking the wrong dosage of the drugs we

ingest on a daily basis.50

In view of such disparities, medical researchers have coined the

term “Yentl syndrome” to capture the way women may have to present

with typical male symptoms before receiving appropriate treatment.

Even when it comes to disabilities and differences that should not be

understood on a disease or illness model, but that may still require

diagnosis, support, and management, girls and women are sometimes

at a marked disadvantage. The received wisdom is that autism is some

four times more common in boys than girls and that, when girls are

affected, they are more profoundly affected (that is, more neuro-

atypical or divergent). Recent research, however, suggests that girls’

socialization tends to mask signs of neuro-atypicality that ought to be

recognized and appropriately accommodated.51

And when it comes to consumer safety, the tendency to treat

privileged male bodies as the default may have far-reaching adverse

outcomes. When women wearing seatbelts are involved in car crashes,

they are 73 percent more likely than men to be killed or seriously

injured. This appears to be due to the fact that, until very recently, all

crash test dummies were modeled on cisgender men—ignoring

potentially important differences between cis men and women in

typical fat distribution, skeletal structure, and so on. When “female”

crash test dummies were finally added, they were typically lighter and

shorter than most actual women.52

Finally, medical problems that typically affect pregnant people are

often chronically underresearched and underfunded. For example,

more than eight hundred people around the world die every day from

complications of pregnancy. Uterine failure, which results in weak

contractions, accounts for around half of these deaths. Currently, there

is only one available treatment for this condition: the hormone

oxytocin, which typically works in only about half of these cases to

allow the laboring person to give birth vaginally. Those for whom

oxytocin doesn’t work will require an emergency C-section. And there

is currently no clinical test to tell whether or not a patient is likely to

respond to oxytocin. Predictively speaking, it’s a coin flip.

Imagine, then, the excitement of research that showed that

patients with contractions too weak to allow them to give birth had

more acid in their myometrial blood (located in the part of the uterus

that initiates contractions). This was the finding of Susan Wray, a

professor of cellular and molecular physiology and the director of the

Centre for Better Births, in the United Kingdom. It had tremendous

potential to improve outcomes—all the more so when Wray and her

colleague Eva Wiberg-Itzel conducted a randomized control trial of a

possible treatment for uterine failure consisting of a pantry staple:

sodium bicarbonate, or baking soda. Those who did not receive this

treatment were able to give birth vaginally in 67 percent of cases; for

patients whose blood was made less acidic in this way, the number

rose to 84 percent.53 As the researchers noted, this treatment could

potentially be made even more effective were it tailored to body weight

and the amount of acid already in the patient’s blood, and

administered in repeat doses. So, as Criado Perez writes, the

significance of this research can hardly be overstated: it could

transform healthcare outcomes for the tens of thousands of pregnant

people annually who undergo potentially avoidable major surgery.

And it could be a lifesaver in contexts where C-sections are either

unavailable or risky, such as in low-income countries. (“Not that you

have to live in a low-income country for a C-section to be risky,” as

Criado Perez remarks. “You could just be a black woman living in the

United States.”)54

But if you’re feeling optimistic, slow your roll. Wray’s application

for funding to continue her research in low- and middle-income

countries was turned down. The research was “not a high enough

priority,” according to the British Medical Research Council. 55 The

council members might as well have just come out and said it: the

health of women—especially nonwhite and poor women—matters very

little.

SIX

Unruly—On the Entitlement to Bodily Control

On May 14, 2019, twenty-five white Republicans—all men—voted

to pass the most restrictive abortion bill the United States had seen in

decades, in the state of Alabama. 1 The bill was signed into law the

following day by a white woman, Kay Ivey, Alabama’s Republican

governor. The law was ultimately blocked in federal court, but if it had

gone into effect as planned that November, it would have criminalized

abortions in the state—banning the procedure in almost every

instance, including in cases of rape and incest.2 The only exception

would have been when carrying the fetus to term would jeopardize the

physical or mental health of the person who would otherwise be forced

to remain pregnant. Notably, the bill banned abortions at every

developmental stage, thus violating the constitutionally protected right

to obtain an abortion until the fetus reaches the point of viability

(usually at around week twenty-four of pregnancy). 3

Alabama’s attempted abortion ban, extreme as it was, is only one

of a litany of restrictive abortion laws recently passed in quick

succession. Most of them have similarly received the bulk of their

support from white Republican men, with conservative white women

also playing an important role in crafting and promoting such

legislation. So-called heartbeat bills, which seek to ban abortion after

the point at which cardiac activity in the embryo can be detected, were

engineered by one such conservative white woman, Janet Porter.

Porter’s chief contribution to the anti-abortion movement has been to

further moralize abortion by depicting those who would choose to

have one as cruel, callous, unfeeling. “To ignore that indicator, that

heartbeat, is heartless,” Porter declared, helping to shift the cutoff for

abortion from around twenty-four weeks to just six or eight weeks

(depending on the state in question).4 At that stage in a pregnancy,

many people do not know they are pregnant—and for those who do

know, it was typically a planned outcome. So a heartbeat bill’s ban on

abortion would be close to total. 5

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). 6 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. 7 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.

Meanwhile, when it comes to heartlessness, the shoe is on the

other foot. The same day the Alabama law passed, news came to light

that an eleven-year-old girl in Ohio had been abducted, raped multiple

times, and was now pregnant.8 A month earlier, Ohio had passed a

heartbeat bill; it was slated to go into effect ninety days later, but it too

was blocked by a federal court. 9 Under this law, the girl would have

been forced to carry the pregnancy to term—thus compounding the

trauma of one violation with what surely constitutes another. As the

feminist writer Laurie Penny remarked about this case, “It’s easy to

see, by any sane moral measure, how a regime that forces a child to

carry this pregnancy to full term and give birth is monstrous,

heartless, and immoral.” 10 Quite so; but, somehow, anti-abortion

activists still purport to have the moral high ground.

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.

So, by all means, don’t have an abortion, if you’re personally

opposed to them. But the state policing of pregnant bodies is a form of

misogynistic social control, one whose effects will be most deeply felt

by the most vulnerable girls and women. And this, in my book, is

simply indefensible.

—

“The baby is born. The mother meets with the doctor. They take care

of the baby. They wrap the baby beautifully, and then the doctor and

the mother determine whether or not they will execute the baby.”

These words—outright lies—were uttered by President Donald Trump,

during a rally in Wisconsin. 11 Many recent discussions of abortion

have focused on early terminations, for understandable reasons, given

the increasing impetus to ban them. But we should make sure that

abortions that take place later aren’t misrepresented either.

Of course, the heightened moral scrutiny of so-called late-term

abortions belies the fact that only slightly more than 1 percent of

abortions are performed after twenty weeks (about halfway through a

typical pregnancy).12 And these procedures are almost always

undertaken due to severe fetal anomalies or serious health risks for the

patient, should the pregnancy continue.

In one such case, Elizabeth (a pseudonym) was thrilled to be

pregnant for a second time. (Her first pregnancy had ended at ten

weeks, in a miscarriage.) At first, everything seemed to be going well.

But at sixteen weeks, there were signs of serious trouble: the umbilical

cord was positioned at the very edge of the placenta (instead of in the

center), she was bleeding heavily, and her blood tests showed high

levels of a protein that is meant to be mostly isolated in the fetus. A

scan also showed that the fetus had club feet—not a big deal in itself,

but potentially a sign of other developmental problems. This fear

increased when doctors found that the fetus’s fists were always closed

during ultrasounds, which made them suspect muscular anomalies.

Despite these and other issues, and her mounting sense of

trepidation, Elizabeth didn’t seriously consider having an abortion at

that stage. She and her husband wanted this baby badly; they

nicknamed their son Spartacus, figuring that he should have a warrior

name, given the odds he was up against. They were focused on seeing

the pregnancy through various milestones—after week twenty-eight,

their child would have a 75 percent chance of surviving, doctors told

them. And he was still growing. At thirty weeks, they celebrated.

At thirty-one weeks, fetal growth had declined dramatically, from

the thirty-seventh percentile right down to the eighth. And he wasn’t

swallowing. “This was the first time that we had been presented with

this idea that there was something deeply wrong with the baby,”

Elizabeth told Jia Tolentino, in a moving interview.13

Elizabeth and her husband were finally confronted with the

shocking news: her baby wouldn’t be able to breathe, due to a

muscular condition “incompatible with life,” according to her doctors.

If she carried the baby to term, Elizabeth would need a C-section,

because a brain surgery she’d undergone two years earlier would make

a vaginal delivery dangerous. Her doctors were afraid that if she

pushed, she might suffer a fatal aneurysm. So at that point, they were

considering putting her through major abdominal surgery for a baby

that was never going to survive. There was also a significant risk that if

she went into labor prematurely, she could suffer neurological

complications—again, potentially fatal ones.

Under the circumstances, an abortion seemed to her the better

option. Elizabeth had to fly to Colorado from her home state of New

York (where the procedure would have been illegal) to have the

procedure performed at thirty-two weeks, at a cost of $10,000. “To be

clear,” she said, “if the doctors thought there was any way he might

make it, I would have taken that chance. I truly would have put myself

through anything. What I came to accept was the fact that I would

never get to be this little guy’s mother—that if we came to term, he

would likely live a very short time until he choked and died, if he even

made it that far. This was a no-go for me. I couldn’t put him through

that suffering when we had the option to minimize his pain as much as

possible.”

In this case, and others like it, the choice to have a third-trimester

abortion—by giving the fetus an injection that would stop his beating

heart—was anything but heartless.14 And yet, increasingly, those who

are pregnant are not trusted to make such devastating decisions for

themselves, in consultation with medical practitioners. Instead, they

are maligned, policed, and even demonized.

—

As we’ve already begun to see, medical misinformation is a ubiquitous

feature of anti-abortion activism. In 2012, Todd Akin, then a

Republican representative from Missouri, opined that pregnancies

resulting from rape were exceedingly rare—because “if it’s a legitimate

rape, the female body has ways to try to shut the whole thing down. ”15

Akin thereby evinced magical thinking about the sorting power of the

uterus, and mooted the category of “legitimate rape,” which raises the

question: Which rapes are illegitimate?

Such woeful ignorance of pregnant bodies has not deterred many

of those who continue to try to regulate them. In February 2015, at a

hearing to discuss a bill that would prohibit the prescription of

abortifacients via telemedicine, a GOP lawmaker suggested to a doctor

giving testimony that she and her colleagues might have patients

swallow a camera to determine the state of their pregnancies—in a

procedure similar to a colonoscopy. “Can this same procedure then be

done in a pregnancy? Swallowing a camera and helping the doctor

determine what the situation is?” No, she responded; the stomach

does not provide a path to the uterus. 16

Another GOP lawmaker suggested, in May 2019, that ectopic

pregnancies should not be aborted: they should be reimplanted in the

uterus from (in the vast majority of cases) the fallopian tubes.17 This is

manifestly not a thing. Ectopic pregnancies are generally agonizingly

painful, almost never viable, and require urgent medical attention. 18

And, typically, the only feasible treatment is an abortion, which can be

medical, using methotrexate to cause the cessation of the pregnancy

and the reabsorption of fetal tissue, or, far more often, surgical.

Without such treatment, the fallopian tube will rupture in 95 percent

of cases; these potentially fatal medical emergencies cause a

substantial percentage of pregnancy-related deaths.19 And even if the

patient does survive, they will often have trouble getting and staying

pregnant in the future. So this stance makes little sense, even from the

perspective of forced-birtherism.

Despite all of this, the conservative online magazine The

Federalist recently published an article entitled “Is Abortion Really

Necessary for Treating Ectopic Pregnancies? ”20 The piece, by pundit

Georgi Boorman, advocated ending all legal abortion, including for

ectopic pregnancies, despite the fact that this policy would cost lives.

“Abortion is never the answer,” she opined. Instead, she proposed

leaving the affected fallopian tube to rupture, in the hopes that a small

minority of embryos would somehow reimplant themselves “in a safer

location.” True, Boorman admitted, “knowing that a medical condition

carries a very small chance of death is scary,” but “is that very small

chance enough to prompt you to suffer through purposely destroying

your own child? Would you rather live with that on your conscience,

knowing that in all likelihood it wasn’t necessary?” In response to this

combination of junk science (we know the chance of death is extremely

high) and guilt-mongering, the world-renowned gynecologist Dr. Jen

Gunter, author of The Vagina Bible, commented on Twitter: “STOP

TRYING TO MAKE ‘ECTOPIC PREGNANCIES ARE BABIES TOO’ A

THING. If you have never treated a woman with a belly full of blood

from an ectopic you should shut the fuck up and sit down and learn

before you get someone killed. ”21 Exactly.22

There are evidently many men who feel entitled to regulate

pregnant bodies without having the remotest idea about, or interest in

learning, how they work. And there are evidently some women who

are prepared to paint others as heartless for balking at these attempts

to police and enforce their pregnancies.

—

The idea that extremely restrictive abortion laws are about protecting

life is increasingly implausible. Many if not most of the Republicans

who support these bans are also supporters of an administration that

has overseen the tragic deaths of at least seven migrant children in

detention during its tenure (while “losing” or, more accurately,

stealing thousands of other children).23 Many of the Republicans who

support these bans also support the death penalty. A day after signing

the most extreme anti-abortion legislation in the United States into

law in Alabama, Kay Ivey declined to grant reprieve to a man sitting on

death row; he was subsequently executed. Another man, who has a

cognitive disability, awaits a similarly terrible death at the time of

writing, due to be delivered via lethal injection.24 Is life sacred or not?

One wonders.

The vast majority of those who support such anti-abortion

legislation have done nothing to address the shockingly high maternal

mortality rates in the United States (particularly for Black, Native

American, and Alaska Native women);25 they show little to no interest

in securing additional child support for children born into poverty;

they appear unconcerned that poor-quality food and water (including,

notoriously in Flint, Michigan) cause many Americans serious health

problems; they actively work against the expansion of affordable

healthcare; and they tend to be supremely indifferent to the police

violence and state-sanctioned executions to which the Black Lives

Matter movement has drawn urgent attention.26

Finally, anti-abortion activists are unmoved by the point that

when abortion is made legal, the rates of abortion do not tend to go up.

Rather, girls and women no longer need to seek out illegal abortions. 27

And illegal abortions have far worse health outcomes—sometimes

harrowing ones, death included.

So the anti-abortion movement is not plausibly about life. It is not

plausibly about religion, either—at least in the sense of owing directly

to Christian religious doctrines now culturally associated with the

movement. True, individual people may be sincere and truthful when

they maintain that their anti-abortion stance is the result of their

Christianity—understood as their participation in a local religious

culture. But it’s important to recognize that, in many cases, this local

religious culture could easily have been otherwise. In particular,

Evangelicals’ attitudes toward abortion were deliberately manipulated

in recent memory, for explicitly political purposes.

These purposes have drawn on anti-feminist sentiment from the

outset. In an important series of papers, legal scholars Linda

Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel have shown that the contemporary

anti-abortion movement in the United States had its roots in the “AAA

strategy,” spearheaded prior to the Roe v. Wade decision. The idea

was to recruit Americans who had traditionally voted Democrat to the

Republican Party by stressing the supposed moral threat of “acid”

(LSD), amnesty (for so-called draft dodgers from the Vietnam War),

and, finally, abortion—envisaged as a threat to the nuclear family.

Greenhouse and Siegel write:

As [Nixon’s] campaign progressed, Republican strategists

increasingly deployed abortion as a symbol of cultural trends

of concern to social conservatives distressed about loss of

respect for tradition. In an August 1972 essay for The New

York Times entitled “How Nixon Will Win,” realignment

strategist Kevin Phillips boasted of imminent Republican

victory premised on the strategy of courting Southerners who

supported [George] Wallace in 1968….

Phillips promised that a theme that the Republicans

would “attack aggressively is social morality,” warning that in

the fall campaign Republicans would be “tagging [Democratic

frontrunner George] McGovern as ‘the triple A candidate—

Acid, Amnesty and Abortion,’ ” and observing that “tactics

like this will help link McGovern to a culture and morality

that is anathema to Middle America. ”28

Moreover, as the authors explain, “In this usage, attacks on

abortion were about more than abortion.” 29 In a book published the

previous year, Greenhouse and Siegel had noted:

Triple-A attacks on McGovern condemned abortion rights as

part of a permissive youth culture that was corrosive of

traditional forms of authority. The objection to abortion

rights was not that abortion was murder, but that abortion

rights (like the demand for amnesty) validated a breakdown

of traditional roles that required men to be prepared to kill

and die in war and women to save themselves for marriage

and devote themselves to motherhood.30

The same was true of opposition to abortion in that era much

more broadly. As Greenhouse and Siegel point out about the notorious

anti-feminist Phyllis Schlafly: “[Her] attack on abortion never

mentioned murder; she condemned abortion by associating it with the

Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) and child care.” 31

All in all, then, anti-abortion activism has co-opted religion for

the sake of supposed family values, rather than being driven by any

grassroots religious movement. And these (again, supposed) family

values aren’t even about policing sex per se: witness the relative lack of

interest in controlling men’s sexual behavior or reproductive freedom.

As Michelle Oberman and W. David Ball have recently pointed out,

men have been almost entirely exempt from the wrath of anti-abortion

activists, despite the fact that nine out of ten unwanted pregnancies

happen within heterosexual relationships, and most patients who have

abortions say that their partners agreed with their decision. Yet

attempts to criminalize men’s participation in such choices—still less

their ill-considered ejaculations—are thin on the ground. As Oberman

and Ball put it:

The novelty of prosecuting men for abortion—despite the

sound legal footing of such charges—tells us something

important about the way we have, until now, framed the

debate. Boys will be boys, but women who get pregnant have

behaved irresponsibly. We are so comfortable with regulating

women’s sexual behavior, but we’re shocked by the idea of

doing it to men. Though it might seem strange to talk about

men and abortion, it’s stranger not to, since women don’t

have unwanted pregnancies without them.32

It would be easy to continue detailing the hypocrisy of anti-

abortion crusaders, while showing the thinness of such theoretical

defenses as there may be. (Someone might argue, for example, that

one can consistently support the death penalty while still opposing

abortion vis-à-vis innocent life. Perhaps, in theory; but in practice, this

defense falters, given the ubiquity of false convictions, particularly for

Black Americans.) In many ways, though, there is no need: the words

of anti-abortion activists increasingly betray them. “The egg in the lab

doesn’t apply. It’s not in a woman. She’s not pregnant,” said Alabama

state senator Clyde Chambliss, explaining why a bill claiming to

protect fertilized eggs, embryos, and fetuses would not affect the

legality of IVF procedures that involve selecting the strongest embryos

for implantation and discarding the remainder. 33 This was a

particularly brazen comment that made crystalline the true logic of

anti-abortion activism: not preserving life, but controlling girls and

women, and enforcing the prevalent expectation that women “give”

designated men children.34

This is not to say that women are thereby perceived as subhuman

creatures, nonhuman animals, or even mere vessels. 35 Indeed, a

woman’s humanity is conceptually crucial to the whole enterprise:

what she is supposed to give to men, here as elsewhere, is a

distinctively human service. She is not just supposed to have the child,

in the style of The Handmaid’s Tale, as an exercise in human

breeding; she is meant to care for the child, afterward, in a self-

effacing manner (and far in excess of the expectations placed on her

male counterparts). But even if her humanity is not in doubt, it is

perceived as owed to others. She is positioned not as a human being

but, rather, as a human giver—of reproductive as well as emotional

labor, material support, and sexual gratification, insofar as her male

partner wants these. And he, correspondingly, is deemed entitled to

take these goods from her, as a matter of his birthright. He is also

deemed entitled to waive these goods. For many powerful Republican

men, the most important exception to an abortion ban would be for a

so-called mistress who got pregnant with a child who was, for him,

unwanted.36

—

We can therefore conceptualize the anti-abortion movement as one of

many misogynistic enforcement mechanisms designed to compel

women’s caregiving. A woman is not to opt out of the role of

motherhood that the “AAA strategy” implicitly underlined. When she

is pregnant, her habits of consumption will be subject to vigorous

cultural policing—notwithstanding the evidence that the occasional

alcoholic beverage, say, is unlikely to be harmful. 37 When she

contemplates childbirth, so-called “natural” (that is, vaginal,

unmedicated) birth will be lionized far in excess of the evidence of its

benefits, either for her or for the infant.38 And once she has an infant,

she will be deemed obligated not only to care for her child with utter,

selfless devotion but also to do so in a very specific manner. Consider

the pressure to breastfeed, for example, which massively outstrips the

evidence, or likely magnitude, of its benefits in contexts where clean

water is available for formula as an alternative.39 Heaven forbid that whatever putative benefits breastfeeding has for the infant should be

soberly weighed against the pain, exhaustion, and lack of freedom it

entails for many of those who try to do so. 40 (Of course, to make

matters even more difficult, she is not to breastfeed in public, lest her

unruly body result in squeamishness and shaming.)

Then, once a mother, she is always a mother—held

disproportionately responsible for the emotional, material, and moral

needs of those around her, in ways that extend well beyond being

overtasked with the care of her own children. She is to be a mother to

others too: a giver of succor and soothing, of nurture and love and

attention. As we saw in the last chapter, she will be empowered to ask

for such moral goods for her own sake comparatively seldom. And, as

we’ll see in the next, if she has children with a male partner, then he

will be under comparatively little pressure to perform his fair share of

their joint caregiving duties.

Given the perpetuity of maternal responsibilities, the urge to

make women notional mothers at an earlier and earlier stage in their

pregnancies is not difficult to explain. Nor is it hard to predict what

will tend to happen if she attempts to resign from, or preempt her

occupancy of, this role: she will be perceived as a bad woman. And she

will be subject to misogyny, in the form of threats, punishment, and

the impugning of her character. Designate her a mother as early as is

imaginatively possible, by reenvisaging a tiny cluster of developing

human cells as a fully fledged human being—indeed, a “natural

person,” to use an increasingly popular legal term of art. And once this

notionally fully fledged human being is in the picture, terminating a

pregnancy becomes a killing, becomes a murder—and the pregnant

person, a murderer. For people who believe this, like Kevin

Williamson, a correspondent for National Review, those who have

abortions may even deserve the death penalty. As Williamson recently

put it on a podcast:

I would totally go with treating [abortion] like any other

crime up to and including hanging—which kind of, as I said,

I’m kind of squishy about capital punishment in general, but

I’ve got a soft spot for hanging as a form of capital

punishment. I tend to think that things like lethal injection

are a little too antiseptic.

To which the blogger Charles Johnson aptly responded on

Twitter: “You don’t just want these women to die, you want them to

suffer.” 41

That many women—especially white women—have internalized

this moral code and would now consider themselves bad women for

having an abortion is not difficult to explain, either. For those women

who have much to gain by abiding by the norms of good womanhood,

vis-à-vis the values of our white supremacist patriarchy, taking such a

position is likely to be especially tempting. Witness the prominence of

privileged white women, in particular—Kay Ivey, Janet Porter, Georgi

Boorman, and Phyllis Schlafly—in this story already. Research shows

that these women are not anomalous; in some states, white women are

even likelier to oppose abortion than their white male counterparts.42

The predictability of their views does not, of course, absolve these

women of moral culpability for their role in the anti-abortion

movement. For when pregnancies are policed, it is predominantly

poor and nonwhite women who are liable to pay for it—and not only

with respect to access to abortion. One study on what has been dubbed

“reproductive oppression,” where pregnant people’s physical liberty

was restricted by means of law and public policy, canvassed more than

four hundred such cases between 1973 and 2005. Under the auspices

of the state, pregnant people have been arrested, incarcerated, and had

time added to their sentences; they have been detained in hospitals,

mental institutions, and treatment programs; and they have been

subject to forced medical interventions, surgery included—such as a C-

section even though they wanted to attempt a vaginal delivery. 43 The

majority of these measures were responses to supposed threats that

these pregnant individuals posed to their fetuses. And, as is the case

with other forms of misogynistic social control, some women are

believed to pose more of a threat than others. The researchers, Lynne

M. Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin, found that:

Overwhelmingly, and regardless of race, women in our study

were economically disadvantaged, indicated by the fact that

71 percent qualified for indigent defense. Of the 368 women

for whom information on race was available, 59 percent were

women of color, including African Americans, Hispanic

American/Latinas, Native Americans, and Asian/Pacific

Islanders; 52 percent were African American. African

American women in particular are overrepresented in our

study, but this is especially true in the South….Nearly three-

fourths of cases brought against African Americans

originated in the South, compared with only half of the cases

involving white women.44

One such case was that of Regina McKnight, an African American

woman from South Carolina. McKnight was twenty-one when she

suffered an unexpected stillbirth—the result of an infection, as

evidence would show later. But the state blamed McKnight’s cocaine

use. The jury took just fifteen minutes to deliberate, before

pronouncing her guilty of homicide. McKnight was sentenced to

twelve years in prison. Her conviction was eventually vacated, in 2008

—but not before McKnight had spent some eight years incarcerated.45

—

Controlling pregnant bodies is only one of many ways in which the

bodies of girls and women are regulated, policed, and, increasingly,

(over)ruled. A particularly interesting—if often missed—parallel is

with the anti-trans movement and its fixation on policing the bodies of

trans girls and women, including by legal means. Take “bathroom

bills,” which propose to restrict access to multiuser restrooms, locker

rooms, and other historically gender-segregated facilities, on the basis

of the sex someone was assigned at birth. Bills of this nature have been

considered in sixteen states in the United States at the time of writing,

and in 2017, one was passed in North Carolina—though it was

subsequently struck down in the federal courts. 46 Such legislation

would force trans people to use a restroom that does not match their

gender identity, subjecting them to potential social humiliation,

increased risk of physical attacks, and the prospect of gender

dysphoria. A recent survey of almost twenty-eight thousand

transgender people showed that, unsurprisingly, even the routine

extralegal policing of bathroom access has a significant negative

impact: nearly 60 percent had avoided using a public restroom at least

once during the previous year, due to a fear of being attacked or

confronted.47

Like anti-abortion legislation, bathroom bills rely on the

construction of an immoral—indeed, reprehensible—figure. In the case

of abortion, it is a heartless cisgender woman, intent on killing her

“unborn child”; in the case of bathroom bills, it is a predatory trans

woman—or, alternatively, a cis man merely pretending to be a trans

woman in order to gain restroom access. And like anti-abortion

legislation, bathroom bills also rely on the construction of a notional

victim. In the case of abortion, it is a heart-wrenchingly vulnerable

fetus, who might also grow up to be the next Einstein; in the case of

bathroom bills, it is a preyed-upon cis girl or woman. These notional

victims then serve as a post hoc rationalization for the preexisting

desire to police the supposed moral offenders. 48

In reality, the number of trans women or cis men merely

purporting to be trans women who have preyed on any restroom user

is vanishingly small. Since 2004, such a crime has been reported

roughly once per year in the United States, according to recent

research. Meanwhile, cis men not bothering to pretend to be trans

women attack women in restrooms with much greater regularity: the

same team of researchers found that this had occurred more than 150

times during the same time frame. 49 So why do we hear so much from

certain sources about the supposed threat of trans women (or, again,

cis men purporting to be trans women), and so little about the very

real threat that undisguised cis men pose to all women? The answer,

surely, is transphobia—and, in particular, the transmisogyny that

represents the dangerous, toxic intersection of misogyny and

transphobia faced by trans girls and women. 50

The fixation on the idea of predatory trans women, or predatory

men pretending to be women, is not accidental. The disjunction

conceals the fact that the two disjuncts—the two sides of the “or”

statement—are often taken to be tantamount to the same thing by

people steeped in transphobia. And when this is the case, violence

against trans women is an all too likely and common outcome.

In an important series of articles, the philosopher Talia Mae

Bettcher has shown that both the idea that gender presentation is code

for genital presentation, and the insistence on an “alignment” of the

two in the name of all that is natural and moral, lie deep in the heart of

transphobic bigotry. She writes that, within a cis-sexist society,

penises and vaginas [are] seen…as ‘‘legitimate possessions’’

to which males and females respectively have moral

entitlements. In effect, the natural attitude about the

metaphysics of sex is also a view about a moral order. This

notion is useful in understanding a kind of transphobia

thoroughly imbued with both moral and metaphysical

considerations. It isn’t uncommon for a trans person to be

represented as “really a so and so, disguised as a such and

such.” A trans woman, for example, may be represented as

engaging in a kind of “sexual deception. ”51

Specifically, a trans woman may be seen as either an “evil

deceiver,” pretending to be something she is not, or as a mere

pretender, a faulty simulacrum of femininity. 52 For, as Bettcher writes,

the trans woman’s body is taken as intimately male. As such

her vagina is seen as illegitimate, in part because it’s not the

completion of the moral structure of her body. In this case,

the trans woman has not only “misrepresented” the structure

of her body, she has “misrepresented” the genitalia to which

she’s entitled and which is the moral completion of that

structure. 53

An important corollary of the dynamic Bettcher identifies is the

sense of entitlement, upon taking in someone whose gender

presentation is that of a woman, to know her genital arrangements at a

glance—even when she is fully clothed—without doubt or ambiguity.

The entitlement to know a woman’s reproductive capacities at a glance

seems a plausible extension of this—which would imply her obligation

not to present herself as a woman, if she is not capable of “giving”

cisgender men heteronormatively sanctioned sex and biological

children. Hopefully needless to say, this putative obligation is not a

real one. 54

As we’ve seen, the anti-abortion movement’s supposed

preoccupation with life belies the fact that it undermines the health

and lives of cis girls and women, along with other people who may also

become pregnant. Similarly, the anti-trans movement’s supposed

preoccupation with sexual safety belies the fact that it undermines the

safety and lives of a particularly vulnerable class of people: namely,

trans girls and women, who are disproportionately liable to be

attacked, assaulted, and murdered, at rates that recently prompted the

American Medical Association to declare this an epidemic.55

In one article, Bettcher considers the well-known case of Gwen

Araujo, a seventeen-year-old trans girl from California who was

viciously beaten and murdered in 2002. 56 Before her murder, Araujo

had attended a party, where suspicions about her genitals had resulted

in her being publicly and violently “outed,” via forced genital exposure.

As Bettcher notes, the subsequent declaration that “he is really a man”

appears to have precipitated the vicious attack on Araujo by four

young cis men—Jason Cazares, Michael Magidson, Jaron Nabors, and

Jose Merel—who were eventually charged with her first-degree

murder.57 Notably, two of the men (Merel and Magidson) had had

sexual contact with Araujo in the days prior to the party. Their

subsequent violent rage was plausibly rooted in a sense of entitlement

—to have Araujo’s genitals and the sex she was assigned at birth match

their expectations, given her gender presentation and their sexual

desire for her. 58

Rather than holding these young men responsible for Araujo’s

murder—after which they buried her battered body some 150 miles

away, in the Sierra wilderness, before stopping at McDonald’s—many

people expressed empathy and support for them.59 As Bettcher shows,

they made excuses for the perpetrators, while embracing victim-

blaming logic. “If you find out the beautiful woman you’re with is

really a man, it would make any man go crazy,” said one of their

mothers. “He was not honest with them and had he been, none of this

would have happened,” opined the student journalist Zach Calef—

thereby misgendering Araujo, to add gross insult to moral injury. And

despite the fact that these young men had already been speculating

about Araujo’s genitals several days prior to the killing, they were held

to have acted “in the heat of passion,” out of “extreme shock,

amazement, and bewilderment,” according to one of their attorneys.

Indeed, they had experienced a provocation for the murder “so deep

it’s almost primal”—which sprang from Araujo’s “sexual fraud,

deception, betrayal.” These claims reflect the idea that not only were

these men entitled to read Araujo’s genital status off her clothed

appearance, they were entitled to “go crazy,” even to slay her, when

that sexual entitlement was challenged.

Dramatic as this example may be, there is a prevalent sense of

entitlement on the part of privileged men to regulate, control, and rule

over the bodies of girls and women—cisgender and trans alike. And as

the direct result of this, those subject to such misogynistic policing are

often impugned as moral monsters, even though they’re the ones

being made to suffer horribly.

SEVEN

Insupportable—On the Entitlement to Domestic

Labor

“Men simply feel entitled to our labor,” writes Darcy Lockman,

author of All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal

Partnership. “The glow of this entitlement shines so bright.” 1 It also

casts a long shadow over many heterosexual households: mothers with

male partners are doing far more than their fair share of the child-

rearing and housework. And women’s “second shift”—to use a term

coined by sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild in the late 1980s, to

capture the extra month of “home” work that women perform annually

—hasn’t budged in decades.

This bleak picture of domestic inequality at home may be

surprising. The image of the modern, involved father is prevalent in

depictions of contemporary heterosexual couples—but it is,

unfortunately, misleading. Although men’s participation in child-

rearing duties did increase in the United States from 1980 to 2000 (as

women’s labor force participation increased dramatically), there has

been subsequent stagnation. In one representative study of the

situation in the nation today, the sociologists Jill Yavorsky, Claire

Kamp Dush, and Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan found that for male-female

partners who both worked full-time (roughly forty-hour weeks), first-

time parenthood increased a man’s workload at home by about ten

hours per week. Meanwhile, the increased workload for women was

about twenty hours. So motherhood took double the toll as

fatherhood, workwise. Moreover, much of the new work that fathers

did take on in these situations was the comparatively “fun” work of

engagement with their children—for example, playing with the baby.

Fathers did this for four hours per week, on average, while dropping

their number of hours of housework by five hours per week during the

same time period. Mothers decreased their hours of housework by

only one hour per week—while adding about twenty-one hours of

child-rearing labor, including fifteen hours of physical child care—for

instance, changing diapers and bathing the baby. And mothers still did

more by way of infant engagement: about six hours per week, on

average.2

A similar picture emerged via time-use diary statistics collected by

Pew Research and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2000, they

found that working women took on around two-thirds of at-home

child-care responsibilities, while their male partners did the remaining

one-third. Again, women did double the work. And disturbingly, over

the past two decades, these figures have held steady. 3

A 2018 Oxfam report showed that women doing twice as much 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 annually.4 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). 5 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. She will still do a bit more.

Equality is elusive, even in the supposedly egalitarian U.S. context. 6

If anything, time-use studies may paint an overly rosy picture of

male household participation. “I question what we know from time-

use diaries,” Kamp Dush told Lockman. “Our pattern of results,

looking at couples on the same day, is different. It shows that men do

even less. ”7 Consistent with this is the fact that men appear to overestimate their contributions to shared household work. A recent

Economist survey of parents in eight Western countries showed that

while 46 percent of fathers reported being coequal parents, only 32

percent of mothers concurred with their assessment. 8 It is possible, of

course, that women are underreporting their partner’s contributions

in time-use diaries, rather than men overreporting their own. But

social scientists consider this unlikely. As sociologist Scott Coltrane

put it:

Because of the potential benefit of sharing family work, the

rapid increase in women’s labor force participation, and

increasing popular endorsement of equity ideals in marriage,

many…predicted that the division of household labor would

become more gender-neutral. Nevertheless, studies…seem to

offer little support for this notion. This left researchers with a

major unanswered question: “Why don’t men do more? ”9

One reason why men don’t do more may well be obliviousness—a

willful, and comparatively blissful, state of ignorance. As Kamp Dush

writes, commenting on her own studies:

Interestingly, new fathers don’t seem to realize that they

aren’t keeping up with their partners’ growing workload.

When we asked, both men and women perceived that they

increased their total work by more than 30 hours a week each

after they became parents. But our more accurate time

diaries told a different story, one where parenthood added

much more work for women than men.10

Another reason men don’t do more is that, under such conditions,

asking them to pull their weight is in itself a form of labor.

—

In the opening of All the Rage, Darcy Lockman recounts one of the

incidents that led her to write her book. She had asked her husband,

George, for a brief reprieve for Mother’s Day: taking their two

daughters to visit his mother, giving Lockman a rare opportunity to

have some time for herself. Part of the tacit deal was that George

would pack the children’s suitcase, for the first time in the six and a

half years since their eldest daughter’s arrival. Lockman recalls her

frustration at being asked if there was anything he might forget, and

struggling to respond with equanimity. Shortly thereafter, the guilt

kicked in. She writes:

The devil on my shoulder—the one internalized over decades

of white noise about women and their responsibilities and

their relative place—eggs me on: You’re not being fair to him.

He’s taking them away, after all. Just throw some stuff

together. It’s only a one-night trip. It’ll take you thirty

seconds. What’s the goddamn big deal? I gather the iPad and

some toys and put them in a bag, an offering to the devil, and

to my husband, to whom I wish above all else to be fair. 11

This inner dialogue captures the complex toll emotional labor

often takes. Emotional labor encompasses, among other things, the

keeping track and anticipatory work that so often falls to women:

knowing what is where, who needs what, the grocery list, the family’s

budget, the family calendar, and so on—not to mention packing

endless bags, from diaper bags to suitcases. (After Lockman declined

to provide further assistance, her husband forgot their girls’ pajamas;

they ended up sleeping in their bathing suits.)

Including all of these forms of work under the heading of

emotional labor is now fairly standard. In a recent guide to emotional

labor pitched to a male audience, the concept received the following

definition:

Free, invisible work women do to keep track of the little

things in life that, taken together, amount to the big things in

life: the glue that holds households, and by extension, proper

society, together.12

Admittedly, such an expansion of the term has been resisted by its

progenitor, Arlie Russell Hochschild, who originally used it to refer to

paid work that requires maintaining a certain emotional affect—the

cheery demeanor required of flight attendants, for example.13 But this

strikes me as an instance where the term has naturally evolved, in

order to keep pace with the needs of language users. The idea of

emotional labor is naturally construed as encompassing a multitude.

As Gemma Hartley, author of Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and

the Way Forward, puts it:

Housework isn’t the only thing that becomes a drag. I am also

the schedule keeper who makes appointments and knows

what is on the calendar at all times. I am the person who has

all the answers to where my husband left his keys, what time

that wedding is, and what type of dress code is necessary, do

we have any orange juice left, where is that green sweater,

when is so-and-so’s birthday, and what are we having for

dinner? I carry in my mind exhaustive lists of all types, not

because I want to, but because I know no one else will.14

Emotional labor also encompasses the work of managing the

feelings around these kinds of tasks: not ruffling a male partner’s

feathers, for example, by pointing out that he has done something

badly, and avoiding asking for too much of his “help” or “support”

within a household. As a result, many women face a potent double

bind: Don’t ask, and you’ll be saddled with far more than your fair

share of material, domestic, and emotional labor. Do ask, and you’ll be

violating the implicit social code that tells women to keep the peace,

nurture others, and not be too demanding. Hartley:

Asking, and asking in the right way, is an additional layer of

labor. Delegating, in many situations, requires repeating

requests, which is often perceived as nagging. Sometimes it is

simply not worth the effort of asking again and again, and

continually asking in the right tone (and still risking being

called a nag). So I do the task myself. 15

Hartley’s book begins with an incident strikingly similar to

Lockman’s opening anecdote: asking, for Mother’s Day, for a

housecleaning service for the bathrooms and floors of the apartment

she shares with her husband and children. She explains:

The gift, for me, was not so much the cleaning itself but the

fact that for once I would not be in charge of the household

office work. I would not have to make calls, get multiple

quotes, research and vet each service, arrange payment, and

schedule the appointment. The real gift I wanted was to be

relieved of the emotional labor of a single task that had been

nagging at the back of my mind. The clean house would

simply be a bonus.16

But, alas, it was not to be. Hartley’s husband elected to save the

money and deep-clean the bathrooms himself. Meanwhile, she was

tasked with caring for their children single-handedly, while the rest of

the house fell into disarray around her. She described her subsequent

anger at the “compilation of years and years of slowly taking on the

role of the only person in our household who cared.” 17

It’s easy to dismiss this as a first-world problem. It’s also a red

herring. The relevant comparison here is not between these women

and their less privileged counterparts, who undoubtedly do face many

distinctive problems—some of which we’ve already encountered, and

of which more later. It’s between women and their male counterparts

who fail to take on an equitable proportion of the household caregiving

burden. And there is no good reason for men’s failures on this score:

the all too convenient, sexist hypothesis that men and women

“naturally” have different child-care proclivities or preferences has

been debunked in part by studies showing that when men are the

primary caregivers, their brains—being malleable—come to resemble

those of women who are primary caregivers. 18 Men’s failures in spite

of this to participate properly in household and child-rearing labor

appear to affect women in every demographic group. 19 This is not to

say that rich and poor women are affected in exactly the same way, of

course: when higher-income, predominantly white men fail to care,

and their similarly wealthy (and, again, typically white) female

partners become exhausted and desperate, they often end up “leaning

down” and calling upon the labor of nonwhite and poorer women. So

privileged white men’s dereliction of their duties have deleterious

effects not just on their wives, but also, by extension, on more

vulnerable women, who may end up being exploited to do the work

these comparatively privileged women should not have to cope with

single-handedly. 20

—

It’s not just within the context of a household that men either fail or

refuse to care. Even paid care work among men is strikingly

unpopular. Economists have observed that men often prefer

unemployment to taking on jobs in nursing (for example, as a nurse’s

assistant), elder care, or working as a home healthcare aide. Yet these

are increasingly the jobs that are available and need doing, as

traditionally male blue-collar work disappears from the U.S. economy.

A New York Times article from June 2017 put the matter bluntly: “It

seems like an easy fix. Traditionally male factory work is drying up.

The fastest-growing jobs in the American economy are those that are

often held by women. Why not get men to do them?” 21

One barrier to male participation in paid care work is

undoubtedly men’s sense of entitlement to more traditionally

masculine jobs: factory or bust, in other words, particularly for white

men. But another barrier may be their female partners’ preconceptions

about the kind of work that befits a male partner’s dignity. The

sociologist Ofer Sharone found that even when a middle-aged

professional man who had lost his job was willing to take lower-paying

work in a traditionally feminine industry, his wife would often

encourage him to keep looking.22 Meanwhile, the percentage of men

out of the labor force entirely (as opposed to being either employed, or

unemployed but actively searching for work) has doubled—from just

under 15 percent of men in 1950 to just over 30 percent of men in

2018. 23

There has been much ink spilled about the crisis of modern

American (predominantly white) masculinity. In many communities,

especially rural ones, white men are increasingly not working. They

are also at increasing risk for depression, drug dependency (especially

on opiates), and even suicide. This can plausibly be read as, among

other things, the result of a crisis in meaning: a lack of fulfilling roles

that men have access to in these milieus. Yet care work not only needs

doing; it is meaningful, not inherently exploitative, and has other

advantages over many forms of traditionally masculine blue-collar

labor, in generally tending to be less physically and environmentally

damaging. In this case, men’s sense of entitlement is not only hurting

other vulnerable parties; it is hurting men themselves, and standing in

the way of solutions to a gap between role supply and demand that

desperately needs filling.

—

If men often feel entitled to certain kinds of paid work, they also feel

entitled to far more by way of leisure, as compared with their female

partners. As Darcy Lockman notes, multiple studies have found that

“fathers who work long hours have wives who do more child care,

while mothers who work long hours have husbands who sleep more

and watch lots of television. ”24

Herein lies one of the answers to the question of how men are

spending their time outside of paid work hours. But a chicken-egg

question remains: Do men do so little because they engage in more

leisure activities than their female partners? Or do they engage in

more leisure activities in order to do so little?

When Gemma Hartley’s husband, Rob, was laid off from work,

they agreed that he would take over the morning routine, so that she

could finish her book. She described one afternoon, about a month

into this arrangement:

When I emerged from my home office, the two-year-old

hadn’t eaten lunch yet. I scrambled to make him ramen

noodles and quickly put him down for a nap while Rob

changed into his riding gear….Abandoned coloring books,

crayons, markers, printer paper…pencil shavings, and a

library book I feared to look inside blanketed [the dining

table]. There was kinetic sand in two colors, both of which

were scattered in small lumps outside their designated trays

and all over the floor. There were dishes from breakfast, half-

eaten food taken off the plates, and milk hardening on the

finished wood top of the table….The house wasn’t just a little

messy. It was a disaster.25

While Hartley worked to resolve the chaos, her husband went

mountain-biking. Fed Up makes it clear that this occurrence was far

from unusual.

Jancee Dunn’s husband, Tom, was also fond of bike riding; he got

into the habit of going for long-distance rides when their daughter,

Sylvie, was an infant. Dunn’s book, somewhat ominously named How

Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids, is a less scholarly work than

either Lockman’s or Hartley’s. It is also addressed to a more particular

audience: not to the men who might be behaving in loathsome, unfair

ways, but to their female partners, who must find a way not to loathe

them, somehow. This despite the fact that, in the case of Dunn and her

husband—both freelance journalists with similar work schedules—he

does just 10 percent of the housework. Dunn writes:

I wish his 10 percent effort was enough, but it isn’t. I feel like

he’s a guest at the hotel I’m running. I’m constantly taking a

silent feminist stand to see if he’ll step up and lend a hand.

The scorekeeping never ends. Adding to my resentment is

that on weekends, Tom somehow manages to float around in

a happy single-guy bubble. A typical Saturday for him starts

with a game of soccer with his friends or a five-hour bike ride

(he seemed to take up endurance sports right around the

time our baby’s umbilical cord was cut, like the sound of the

snip was a starter’s pistol to get the hell out of Dodge). This is

followed by a leisurely twenty-minute shower, a late

breakfast, a long nap, and then a meandering perusal through

a variety of periodicals. Meanwhile, I am ferrying our

daughter to birthday parties and playdates. On weekend

evenings, Tom doesn’t check with me before he meets friends

for drinks; he just breezes out the door with the assumption

that I’ll handle bath time and bed. 26

Dunn wonders whether her anger at the resulting situation is fair,

given that she has “allowed this pattern to unfold.” The answer, it

seems to me, is yes, given that her husband is the one to have actually

committed the bad behavior. A marriage counselor Dunn and her

husband visited during this period—the well-known Boston-based

therapist Terry Real, who charges $800 an hour for the benefit of his

insights—is similarly unequivocal in his judgment about their

situation. After Real asks them to walk him through a typical fight,

Dunn explains that Tom had just returned from a bike trip through the

Italian countryside for a magazine story he was writing. He was jet-

lagged upon his return home, so he slept for two days, while Dunn

continued to play single parent. When Tom finally woke up, Dunn was

angry and yelled at him. “I got news for ya,” Real says to Dunn: “I’m

on your side.” 27

The therapist doesn’t excuse some of Dunn’s behavior in response

to her husband’s “selfishness and preciousness” (as Real calls it).

Indeed, not mincing words, Real even labels Dunn verbally abusive

(for regularly calling Tom an “asshole” and a “shitbag”). But Real is

also clear in his assessment that, although Dunn’s way of expressing

her anger may be unacceptable, her anger itself is justified. “Volatile

women generally don’t feel heard,” Real offers. 28

—

Part of the reason why men get away with doing so little may be that,

as recent research suggests, women in heterosexual couples are held to

higher standards than their mates. 29 That is, women are more likely to

be shamed and blamed for a messy home, eccentrically dressed

children, or a lack of a perfect bento lunch box for Junior on every

school day. 30 And another part of the reason may be that, even when

men are doing woefully little, these are nevertheless the good guys,

comparatively speaking. As Lockman writes:

While father involvement in two-parent families has

increased in recent decades, there are also fewer father-

present families. Clearly, the men who stick around to love

and shepherd their offspring are not only to be maligned. 31

With the bar for men in general set so low, there is a temptation to

compare a present male partner and father to his absent counterparts,

and to find him morally admirable rather than wanting. Another

invidious comparison turns on the fact that, currently, fathers do far

more than their fathers usually did. The modern father is far more

involved, on average, than his predecessor. But, again, it is vital to be

clear about the most morally relevant comparison to make here:

between male and female partners. And seen through this lens, women

remain massively overburdened, while men often fail to do their fair

share. This is particularly so because a man’s female partner is

nowadays much likelier to bring in a comparable amount of income,

and to work comparable hours of paid labor. 32 So why should she do

far more work than him at home, all else being equal? The answer, of

course, is she shouldn’t.

Despite this, women like Jancee Dunn struggle to recognize this.

During their marathon five-hour therapy session, Real asks her and

her husband why they don’t split the domestic chores evenly, given

their similar professional roles and commitments. Anything other than

fifty-fifty would be unfair, he points out. Interestingly, that’s when

Dunn begins to make excuses for her husband. “But I think men have

a problem with fifty-fifty,” she ventures. “We’re not talking about men,

we’re talking about Tom,” Real replies. Then:

[Real] asks Tom if he has a problem with splitting down the

middle. “Well, entropy takes over sometimes, and I…,” Tom

begins. “Look, I know what you’re talking about,” Real breaks

in. “The inertia, the laziness. But it’s also entitlement. And it’s

dumb. ”33

The exchange points to yet another reason why men often get

away with this imbalance: many a woman unwittingly echoes and

validates her male partner’s illegitimate sense of entitlement to her

labor, and to his leisure time. Despite her frustrations, she

subsequently gives him mixed messages, and she is reluctant to insist

on a more equitable arrangement. She exhibits himpathy—the

disproportionate or inappropriate sympathy for a man who behaves in

misogynistic or, I would now add, entitled ways, over his female

victims—even though she herself is his victim in this scenario. During

the beginning of their session, Dunn writes,

To my profound discomfort, sudden tears are coursing down

my cheeks. “I want to be kinder to Tom,” I say, snuffling. “But

I also want him to do more work around the house and not

leave it all to me.” I rub my eyes. “I wore mascara, how stupid

was I?” Real pushes a box of tissues toward me.34

Similarly, Dunn recalls her emotional state during Real’s

dressing-down of her husband: she feels protective of him, even pities

him, “jump[ing] in to add that with Sylvie, he is utterly unselfish, kind,

and attentive.” Such virtues are all to the good, of course; but the issue

on the table, as Real points out, is how Tom treats Dunn, not how he

treats their daughter. And, given the grim realities on this score, her

pity is surely misplaced. But it is also understandable—and relatable.

When a woman internalizes her putative obligations to care for others

at the expense of herself, there is affective as well as behavioral fallout.

She is likely to feel guilt and shame for holding a male partner

accountable—and, as Lockman points out, to feel an excessive sense of

gratitude toward him, even for falling far short of fairness.35

—

Part of the problem here, then, may be women’s sense of entitlement—

or lack thereof. Some women may not feel entitled to equitable

domestic arrangements and leisure time for themselves, on par with

that of their husbands. Or they may feel entitled to this in theory but

be unable to insist in reality, given the social forces around them that

tell them not to insist and to “take one for the team” in perpetuity.

Jancee Dunn even writes, in How Not to Hate Your Husband After

Kids, of not feeling entitled to eat whole, undamaged crackers from the

box. Instead, she eats the broken ones, saving the good ones for her

husband and daughter. In the conclusion of her book, one of her take-

home lessons reads as follows:

You don’t always have to eat the broken crackers.

One of the most difficult things I had to do was develop a

little entitlement of my own, and get fully behind the idea

that I need help around the house, as well as rest and leisure

time. It was tough to shake the attendant guilt, and the sense

that somehow I should be able to handle everything….[But]

when I take time for myself, I come back and I’m more the

mother I want to be. By taking care of myself, I become a

better caretaker.36

Progress though this may be, there is something sad about the

framing here. A woman is entitled to more than just “help” or

“support” from a male partner. And she is entitled to as much rest and

leisure time as he is for her own sake, not just for the sake of becoming

a better caregiver.37

—

In Dunn’s case, the involvement of her husband remained

depressingly minimal by the end of the fourteen months during which

she worked on both the book and her marriage. Her conclusion lists

some good ideas for women in her situation, including getting couples

counseling. (“Especially,” writes Dunn, “if you can find a therapist who

yells at your husband, ‘Stop with your entitled attitude, get off your

ass, and help her out!’ ”38) But it also canvasses some ideas that,

throughout the book, seem to be addressing different, and much less

pressing, problems than the sense of male entitlement that evidently

dogs their marriage. The result is a Gretchen Rubin–style Happiness

Project for partnership, rather than an egalitarian shake-up. Dunn and

her husband engage in a variety of exercises—everything from a

“sexperiment” (having sex ten days in a row, on the theory that the

more you have, the more you want), to decluttering their apartment, to

getting their daughter involved in chores. She even encourages Tom to

employ official FBI strategies for “talking someone down,” in an

attempt to assuage her anger. Again, it seems to me that—whatever the

acceptability of her means of expressing it—Dunn’s anger was

warranted. She recounts that, in the end, Tom has taken to making

dinner one night a week; he occasionally takes his daughter to the park

for forty-five minutes; and, for the first time ever, he attended a

parent-teacher conference and took his daughter to the doctor. Dunn

writes:

I don’t care that it is not equal—I feel supported, and that

perception is important. I am amazed (and sometimes a little

dismayed) at how much mileage some of Tom’s largely

symbolic gestures have resonated with me. He doesn’t need

to toil with me side by side. 39

Meanwhile, Dunn remains “the reluctant house manager, and

likely always will be. I still must continually insist, quietly but firmly,

that Tom do his share around the house.” 40 By her reports, he still

doesn’t. Despite this, Dunn’s book concludes with an expression of

profound gratitude toward him: “And, most importantly, I am forever

grateful to my husband, Tom. I can’t think about what you mean to me

without reaching for a box of tissues. ”41

EIGHT

Unassuming—On the Entitlement to Knowledge

On February 9, 2019, The Guardian tweeted out an article called

“Me and My Vulva: 100 Women Reveal All. ”1 The article featured an

intimate photo series by Laura Dodsworth that was intended to

destigmatize and educate people about the vulvas of women (both cis

and trans), as well as of gender-nonconforming people with the

relevant body part. Shortly thereafter, a man saw fit to weigh in on the

article’s title. “The correct word is vagina,” opined one “Doktor Paul

Bullen” on Twitter. The corrections came swiftly and in no short

supply: “vulva” is, of course, the correct terminology for the external

anatomy pictured; the vagina is an internal organ leading to the

uterus, comparatively difficult to photograph. The corrections also

came from authoritative sources—gynecologists, for example.2 Even

Dictionary.com got involved—with a tweet that read, “Well. Actually”

and a link to the word “vulva” ’s online definition. 3

Paul Bullen was not deterred, however. In a truly remarkable feat

of doubling down, he maintained that his usage was, in fact, the

correct one. He wrote (in a since-deleted tweet): “I consider the recent

attempt to replace vagina with vulva as an affectation. ”4 In response to

the inevitable and apt point that this was an especially egregious case

of mansplaining, Bullen was similarly recalcitrant. “That’s an incorrect

use of the word mansplaining,” he chimed in. “Not that I want to

legitimize the term, but by its own definition it requires more than just

having a man who is explaining something. Even if some in the

audience are women.”

Bullen was actually right about “mansplaining” meaning more

than just a man explaining something. But his tweet did meet the

further relevant conditions. A paradigmatic act of mansplaining

consists of a man presuming to “explain” something incorrect(ly) to a

more expert female speaker or set of speakers—and in an overly

confident, arrogant, or overbearing manner, which often results in his

not backing down or admitting to his mistake after it has been

authoritatively pointed out to him. So, when it came to mansplaining,

Paul Bullen’s tweet was a perfect exemplar. (Indeed, his after-the-fact

quibbling only cemented its status.)

One can argue about whether an action that deviates somewhat

from this paradigm still counts as mansplaining; as with the concepts

expressed by most terms in natural language, its extension can be

fuzzy and shift over time. (In which case, I’d be tempted to understand

the key questions as being: How ought we to understand the term?

How would it most productively be defined and understood?)5 But for

the purposes of this discussion, I’m more interested in the kind of

attitude that underlies and perpetuates mansplaining.6 And my

answer, in short, is entitlement: entitlement of the epistemic variety,

which relates to knowledge, beliefs, and the possession of information.

In particular, I believe that mansplaining typically stems from an

unwarranted sense of entitlement on the part of the mansplainer to

occupy the conversational position of the knower by default: to be the

one who dispenses information, offers corrections, and authoritatively

issues explanations. This is objectionable when and partly because he

is not so entitled: when others, namely women, happen to know more

than he does—and he ought to anticipate this possibility, rather than

assuming his own epistemic superiority from the get-go. Dr. Paul

Bullen ought to have anticipated, for example, that the woman who

produced the photo series and was subsequently interviewed for an

article entitled “Me and My Vulva,” Laura Dodsworth, would know the

correct terminology with which to refer to her own subject matter—not

to mention, her own anatomy.7

—

Earlier in this book, I introduced Miranda Fricker’s concept of

epistemic injustice—specifically, testimonial injustice, where a

speaker’s word is taken to be less credible than it should be, due to

prejudices against members of her social group (for example, as a

Black woman) in the relevant domain of knowledge (such as her bodily

experiences, pain, illness, and so on). Her status as a knower vis-à-vis

that subject matter is thereby unfairly denied or disregarded. The

concept of epistemic entitlement, which I’m introducing here, is

obviously closely related to the idea of testimonial injustice. But they

are distinct and complementary. Whereas testimonial injustice

involves unfairly dismissing a less privileged speaker—typically, after

she has attempted to make a contribution—epistemic entitlement

involves peremptorily assuming greater authority to speak, on the part

of a more privileged speaker. 8 Understood in this way, we can see that

epistemic entitlement is a common precursor to, and cause of,

testimonial injustice.9

On other occasions, manifestations of epistemic entitlement may

result in a less privileged speaker deciding not to make her intended or

fitting contribution to the conversation. This will then often constitute

what the philosopher Kristie Dotson calls “testimonial smothering,”

where a speaker self-silences, due to her anticipating that her word

will not receive the proper uptake, and may instead place her in an

“unsafe or risky” situation.10 This may happen because there is

something about the specific content of her testimony that makes it

unsafe or risky for a speaker like her to utter. Or she may self-silence

because it is unsafe or risky for a speaker like her to venture to say

anything at all, or to interrupt the relentless flow of a man’s

pontificating. A mansplainer may be nigh on uninterruptable.

This point is epitomized by an incident recounted by Rebecca

Solnit, in her classic and galvanizing essay “Men Explain Things to

Me.” (Solnit did not herself coin the term “mansplaining,” and she

reports a degree of ambivalence about it; but her essay nevertheless

inspired the coinage and much of the subsequent discourse.) Solnit

had attended a dinner party with a female friend, where she’d been

prevailed upon by the older, “distinguished” male host to linger after

dinner to talk about her writing. “I hear you’ve written a couple of

books,” he offered genially. “Several, actually,” she ventured. “And

what are they about?” he inquired, in a patronizing tone—much “the

way you encourage your friend’s seven-year-old to describe flute

practice,” as Solnit puts it. She nevertheless obliged and began to

describe her most recent book at the time, which was about Eadweard

Muybridge, an English American photographer and pioneer of motion

pictures. She didn’t get far, however. Solnit recalls:

He cut me off soon after I mentioned Muybridge. “And have

you heard about the very important Muybridge book that

came out this year?” So caught up was I in my assigned role

as ingénue that I was perfectly willing to entertain the

possibility that another book on the same subject had come

out simultaneously and I’d somehow missed it. He was

already telling me about the very important book—with that

smug look I know so well in a man holding forth, eyes fixed

on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority. 11

The very important book, Solnit’s female friend soon realized, was

Solnit’s. The friend tried to interject this point three or four times. But

the mansplainer failed, somehow, to hear her. When he finally

registered this news, his face fell; he turned “ashen.” Solnit writes:

That I was indeed the author of the very important book it

turned out he hadn’t read, just read about in the The New

York Times Book Review a few months earlier, so confused

the neat categories into which his world was sorted that he

was stunned speechless—for a moment, before he began

holding forth again.

Of the many insights Solnit offers us here into the nature of

mansplaining, one of the most striking is the way both speakers in this

exchange are assigned roles, which are then difficult to break from.

Solnit’s host was the authority, of course; and she was cast as the naïve

one—“an empty vessel to be filled with [his] wisdom and knowledge,”

she writes, “in some sort of obscene impregnation metaphor.” Because

of the social dynamics in play here, it then became very difficult to

change the course of the conversation. Even Solnit’s female friend’s

powers of intervention were strictly limited. And without such an

active bystander, one wonders whether the correction would have

been issued whatsoever. In part, it would depend on whether Solnit

had the confidence to insist that the book was indeed her own—which,

as she points out, as a distinguished and prolific author (not to

mention a white woman), she was in a comparatively good position to

muster. It still wouldn’t have been easy for many of us, me included.

And, at least as importantly, it would also have depended on whether

Solnit was willing to do something socially jarring, liable to be

perceived as rude, in asserting herself in this manner. Of course, she

would have been completely within her rights—entirely entitled—to do

so. But the skewed sense of epistemic entitlement that structured the

exchange left her host’s face “ashen” when he finally registered his

error. She was in danger of humiliating him. Still, he was only

momentarily deterred: he proceeded to explain other things when

unceremoniously deprived of that fledgling site of epistemic

domination.

Such incidents serve as a powerful reminder to women “that the

truth is not [our] property, now or ever.” They keep us in our place.

Sure, women can be arrogant, and “explain” things to more expert

parties incorrectly on occasion, as Solnit freely acknowledges. But the

point here is that mansplaining is systemic; it is part of a (much)

broader system. Solnit aptly describes this system as a male

“archipelago of arrogance”—and, I would add, entitlement.

If the truth is not our property, then neither is authority.

Listening to women becomes superfluous, except for instrumental

reasons—a mere performance, intended to mollify or, perhaps, to

virtue-signal. Of course, this problem is far worse, and sometimes in

sui generis ways, for women who are subject to multiple compounding

forms of oppression. In her brilliant essay “Girl 6,” Tressie McMillan

Cottom writes of calculating the number of Black women whom David

Brooks and Jonathan Chait each followed on Twitter at the time. The

number was 6 apiece. Just 6, out of 322 and 370, respectively.

McMillan Cottom:

A Professional Smart Person can be so without ever reading a

black woman, ever interviewing a black woman, ever

following a black woman, or ever thinking about a black

woman’s existence. 12

Black women are not just dismissed, then; they are not heeded in

the first place by many of those overly endowed with epistemic

privilege.

—

As we’ve seen, a sense of epistemic entitlement can be maintained

blithely, with utmost (unearned) confidence. It can also be jealously

guarded and defended—sometimes to the point of engaging in creepy,

controlling, and even abusive behavior. One of the darkest

manifestations of epistemic entitlement in this vein is gaslighting.

“Gaslighting” takes its name from the 1938 Patrick Hamilton play

Angel Street, which was performed onstage as Gas Light.13 The play was heavily adapted into two different movies by the latter name—a

British and an American version—both of which have become better

known than the original. But the play is to my mind richer than either

film, and so forms the basis of the discussion here.

In Gas Light (as I’ll refer to it), Jack Manningham appears to be

intent on driving his wife, Bella, insane. His original motives for doing

so become apparent only during the play’s second act, but—

importantly—his behavior is intelligible right from the beginning,

lending the play its claustrophobic, indeed suffocating, atmosphere.

Act One is a vivid depiction of domestic terror. Mr. Manningham

wrong-foots and undermines his wife at every turn—humiliating her in

front of their servants, correcting her constantly, and even impugning

the anxiety he is thereby instilling in her as irrational and baseless.

(Mr. Manningham: “Why are you so apprehensive, Bella? I was not

about to reproach you.” Mrs. Manningham: [ Nervously…] “No, dear. I

know you weren’t. ”14 He goes on to reproach, indeed berate, her

shortly thereafter.)

In a particularly cruel, long-running series of manipulations, Mr.

Manningham leads his wife to believe that she is going out of her

mind, and losing possession of her rational faculties, by regularly

hiding their belongings and then holding her responsible for their

disappearance. And he holds her responsible not merely causally, but

morally: depicting her as mischievous and wicked, as well as confused

and delusional. (He also accuses her—most painfully of all—of

deliberately hurting their pet dog, thus painting her as the cruel and

abusive one.) This combination of accusations is of course incoherent,

as Bella Manningham tries repeatedly to point out to her husband. If

she really is confused and delusional, and cannot help her behavior,

then surely he ought to treat her kindly and try to help her, rather than

getting angry. 15 But Mr. Manningham ignores this, as he does all of his

wife’s attempts to prevail upon his goodwill. She is truly powerless,

utterly subject to her husband’s control, within their household. And

she is nobody outside of it, since her husband has deliberately isolated

her from all of her friends and relatives.16 She hence has no choice but

to defer to him—and, even then, it does little to appease his seething

temper.

The effect of Mr. Manningham’s behavior—a devastating portrait

of a recognizable pattern of abuse that subsequently became known as

gaslighting, for reasons that will emerge shortly—is to deprive Bella of

her own sense of entitlement to state even the most basic realities.

Toward the end of Act One, in an arguably disappointing deus ex

machina, a detective comes to visit her and ultimately tells her the

terrible, albeit liberating truth: her husband is the diabolical Sydney

Power, who murdered the former owner of their house, Alice Barlow,

in order to steal her rubies. He slit Alice’s throat to silence her, some

fifteen years prior, before prevailing on Bella to use her inheritance to

buy the residence. But he may never have managed to locate the

rubies, Detective Rough suspects, as he confides to Bella. Might Power

still be looking for the jewels on the top floor of their home—which is

shut up, off-limits to her and even to the servants? He might indeed,

Bella realizes:

MRS. MANNINGHAM: It all sounds so incredible [but] when I’m

alone at night I get the idea that—somebody’s walking about

up there—[ Looking up. ] Up there—At night, when my

husband’s out— I hear noises, from my bedroom, but I’m too

afraid to go up—

ROUGH: Have you told your husband about this?

MRS. MANNINGHAM: No. I’m afraid to. He gets angry. He says I

imagine things which don’t exist—

ROUGH: It never struck you, did it, that it might be your own

husband walking about up there?

MRS. MANNINGHAM: Yes—that is what I thought—but I thought

I must be mad. Tell me how you know.

ROUGH: Why not tell me first how you knew, Mrs.

Manningham.

MRS. MANNINGHAM: It’s true, then! It’s true. I knew it. I knew

it! 17

Bella Manningham did indeed know, deep down, that her

husband was creeping about upstairs. For, as she goes on to explain,

ten minutes after he ostensibly left the house every evening (before, in

fact, sneaking straight back into their attic via a skylight), the gas light

would ebb. Then, ten minutes before he came through the front door

again, it would return to its former full flame. That meant another

light must have been turned on, then off again, somewhere in the

house—since the glow of each light would diminish as another lamp

siphoned gas pressure away from it. But Bella Manningham was

forced to deny—and could barely admit to herself—what she knew.

Her husband’s epistemic domination over her was so total that she

didn’t dare question his movements, let alone his motives. And his

sense of epistemic entitlement—to maintain that kind of domination,

to dictate the terms of her reality—was so great that she was the one

who felt guilty for entertaining even the slightest doubts about her

scurrilous, lying husband. From the very beginning of the play,

exchanges like the following show how little latitude she has to

question either the rightness of his beliefs or the benevolence of his

actions. In Act One, she ventures hopefully:

MRS. MANNINGHAM: Oh, Jack dear. You have been so much

kinder lately. Is it possible you’re beginning to see my point

of view?

MR. MANNINGHAM: I don’t know that I ever differed from it,

did I, Bella?

MRS. MANNINGHAM: Oh, Jack dear. It’s true. It’s true.18

In the context of the play as a whole, it is clear that she is not

allowed to question his kindness: a particular cruelty.

—

Gaslighting can thus have a distinctively moral dimension, as well as

an epistemic one: via a variety of techniques, the victim may effectively

be prohibited from disputing the gaslighter’s version of events, his

narrative, or his side of the story.19 She would be committing a

grievous sin within the context of the relationship by questioning his

authority, challenging his claims to knowledge, or even disagreeing

with him regarding certain matters.20 As the philosopher Kate

Abramson argues in her groundbreaking work on gaslighting, “What

makes the difference between the fellow who ignores or dismisses

evidence…and the one who gaslights is the inability to tolerate even

the possibility of challenge.” 21

Real-life cases of gaslighting scarcely less extreme than the

foregoing fictional one are not hard to come by. And they highlight the

fact that gaslighting is a common occurrence within families, as well as

in intimate relationships. Take Kyle Stephens, one of the many girls

the Michigan State University gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar

victimized. She was forced to apologize to him for impugning his good

name by reporting his abuses to her parents. Who forced her to

apologize? Her parents. Her parents. It’s not just that they didn’t

believe her (which would be bad enough, in this context). They also

punished her for coming forward, and regarded her as having wronged

the good doctor—whose narrative about what transpired became

effectively unimpeachable. And, like many victims of such gaslighting,

Stephens subsequently came to doubt her own memory. “I began to

feel brainwashed,” she testified in court, during Larry Nassar’s trial in

January 2018. “It was as if I had never accused him. I felt I was losing

my grip on reality. I started to question whether the abuse ever

happened.” She would replay the traumatizing incidents again and

again in her mind, in an effort to retain her hold on the truth—and so

she wouldn’t forget that she wasn’t the liar.22

Another real-life case of gaslighting was explored at length in the

recent hit podcast Dirty John. The eponymous John’s victim, Debra

Newell, a divorcée in her late fifties, had entered the dating scene after

a previous relationship had ended. Initially, John Meehan—who she

met online—swept her off her feet. He was romantic, attentive, and,

she believed, gainfully employed as an anesthesiologist. After the pair

moved in together, and had gotten married, Debra discovered that her

new husband’s backstory was almost entirely fabricated (as her

children had long suspected). 23 He was not, as he claimed, an

anesthesiologist or, indeed, any kind of doctor but, rather, had trained

as a nurse anesthetist. And he was no longer that either, his license

having been suspended after he’d stolen drugs intended for patients

(some of whom were on the operating table at the time, and thus

would have been left in agony). When Debra and John first met, he

had just gotten out of prison for felony drug theft—unbeknownst to

her, until much later. He had a long-standing addiction to prescription

pain medication. And he had a long history of broken relationships

with women—including a previous marriage—that had ended in their

taking out a restraining order against him. He was a con artist, but

more than that; many people who met him reported finding his

presence deeply unsettling, with a threat of violence lurking just

beneath the surface. Here, in part, is how he earned his moniker:

John would pick up women on dating websites; often he used

match.com or Plenty of Fish. On dates, he would wear

medical scrubs and pretend to be a doctor. He would induce

women to send him intimate photos of themselves, which he

then used to blackmail them. He sent them to their families.

He sent them to their kids’ school. An Irvine woman told me

that he cut and pasted her photo for match.com and sent

flyers to our neighbors, calling her a slut and a home wrecker.

A judge gave her a 5-year restraining order and he retaliated

by asking for a restraining order on her. A Porter Ranch

woman told police he wrote her an anonymous letter

insinuating that he had raped her while she was unconscious

and had taken photos of it. “You are my project for years to

come,” he wrote, “this I promise. Do you think I joke? Every

breath I take will be to ruin your surgically implanted life.

Thanks for the pictures. ”24

“Just the most devious person I’ve ever met…the most devious,

dangerous, deceptive person” was how one career cop described John

Meehan.

After discovering documents in his possession revealing much of

his past (police reports, restraining orders, and jail and prison

records), Debra moved out of their luxury home in Newport Beach,

California. She hid out in hotels—changing locations every few days, to

avoid being tracked down by him, on the recommendation of a

detective whose help she had solicited. In the meantime, John went

into the hospital for back surgery and was laid up with a bowel

obstruction. Los Angeles Times journalist and Dirty John host

Christopher Goffard recounts:

[John] began texting [Debra] accusations that she could not

make sense of. That she had hit him, that she’d stolen

$10,000 from his wallet. He threatened to call the police on

her. He had become unrecognizable….He had seduced her

with lavish, unending compliments about her beauty. Now he

denigrated her looks, mocked her age, ridiculed her attempts

to stay attractive at 59. “Five marriages and a family that

hates you. You want to see how this plays out? I sure do. You

want to see how bad this turns out? You hit me. You

threatened me.” She replied, “Enough. You’re evil.”

Notwithstanding Debra’s initial assertiveness, and the fact that

there was absolutely no truth to these accusations, John continued to

paint himself as her victim. And somehow, eventually, despite

everything, she forgave him. Here’s Debra’s account of how this

happened:

DEBRA: So twenty-three days go by [while he’s in the hospital]

and I just want to look him straight in the face and ask him

why he did this. So I went in there and he said that those

stories are wrong, that he was set up. He was trying to tell me

so many times that he was set up and had to go to jail. Please

forgive him. He just knew that I wouldn’t understand until he

had all the evidence in front of him.

GOFFARD: All a big misunderstanding?

DEBRA: All a big misunderstanding and he had an answer for

everything; and it was so convincing that I thought, “Okay.”

He, literally, had convinced me, at this point, that he is not

this person.

GOFFARD: Despite all of the paperwork?

DEBRA: Yes. All the facts were right there in front of me and

he is that convincing….I was also in love with him. It’s so

hard, when you’re in love, to listen. You’re listening to your

heart, not your head.

GOFFARD: Did you ask about his nickname, Dirty John?

DEBRA: He said it wasn’t true. He said, “I don’t know where

you got that from.” It was as if everything…He was able to

convince me. He was so good at it, it could be a cold day out

and he could convince me that it’s 95 degrees, that’s how

good he was. To where you questioned yourself.

GOFFARD: It’s almost like he convinced you that all the facts

about his life were some kind of hallucination on your part?

DEBRA: Yes, he made me out to be the one…That he was this

great guy and that everyone else had done him wrong is what

he had said….He always, again, he always had a story. He told

me that he had lied because he thought he’d lose me, that he

feels so lucky that I’m such a forgiving person who, hell, I’m

the love of his life, that I’ve made him a better person. Just all

this kind of stuff….I felt guilty, to some degree, that I’d

married him and that he’s in the hospital, but at the same

time, I feared…

GOFFARD: Explain that to me. Guilty why?

DEBRA: Because I made a commitment. I made a commitment

to marriage—for better, for worse.

As this exchange brings out, making someone question their own

rationality, or think they’re positively crazy, is only one way to achieve

the kind of epistemic domination that I’ve argued gaslighting aims

at.25 (Though, even so, it may well be a knock-on effect of such

treatment; Debra did question her own judgments, though not her

own sanity.) Sometimes, as here, the gaslighter may manage to make

believing his story and forgiving his extant sins into a moral

imperative for his victim. 26 He may depict himself as the victim of

other people or of his victim herself, and as vulnerable in myriad other

ways—here, with John claiming to be suffering from multiple sclerosis

(which there’s no evidence he had) and to be potentially suicidal,

rather than (as was in fact the case) a homicidal maniac.

Plying someone into submission by appealing to her sense of

loyalty or sympathy—such that she won’t question his story about

himself, however implausible, out of a misplaced sense of guilt—can

have much the same effect as making her doubt her rational capacities.

The intended implication being that, if she questions him, there’s

something fundamentally wrong with her—either epistemically (she’s

“crazy,” delusional, paranoid) or morally (she’s a heartless bitch,

incapable of trust, cruelly unforgiving, or similar). And the result will

be much the same as well: someone who will not, cannot, challenge

him. 27

Gaslighting thus results in a victim who feels a false sense of

obligation to believe his story over her own. She has been epistemically

dominated—colonized, even. It’s not hard to see how evil this is. It

goes beyond harming someone. When successful, gaslighting robs the

victim of the ability to name the harm done to her—and, equally, who

did it.

The tactics John Meehan employed to win back Debra Newell and

make her buy his thinly veiled lies and excuses were by no means an

anomaly. He used them again and again, even after she had filed for a

divorce from him. (He then claimed to be dying from cancer. “I’m

dying, Deb. Slowly dying. Please, just come up with something so we

can move on,” he texted her. “I’m not doing well, Deb. I’m doing

horrible without you. I need you.”) And, according to Christopher

Goffard, these plaintive self-depictions were entirely consistent with

“John’s master narrative of his life in which he was the perpetual

victim.” In reality, John had victimized at least eight other women in

Laguna Beach, for starters, using many of the same techniques he

employed with Debra Newell. Part of what he wanted was their money,

to be sure. Goffard interviewed the attorney, Michael R. O’Neil, who

tried to help Debra Newell extricate herself from this terrible situation:

GOFFARD: His goal was to get into people’s lives, marry them,

and then take half their stuff, right?

O’NEIL: No, to take all their stuff….He believed, after all, he

was entitled to it. He was entitled to it.

But John Meehan’s sense of entitlement, as we’ve seen, went far

beyond the fiscal. In fact, fleecing his female victims may have been

merely a means to an end—a financial form of the domination over

women for which his appetite seemed insatiable. That was what made

him so frightening, and so dangerous. Goffard:

Running through the stories [about John Meehan’s

victimization of women] was a streak of sadism and single-

minded vindictiveness. They showed a man taking pleasure

in the mechanics of a dark craft he had mastered. It seemed

to go beyond just [extorting their] money. He seemed

obsessed with humiliating anyone who defied his will.

Setting aside his preferred gaslighting tactics, Dirty John was in

many ways a real-life Mr. Manningham. And in some respects at least

his motives were even clearer. Though he also wanted money, “his

endgame, it was the game,” as Michael O’Neil put it. He was

determined to win (over) these women, and he couldn’t abide the

possibility of losing in his mind games of seduction, deception, and

domination. Gaslighting thus represented a unique solution to the

problem he would have faced, given his warped perspective: how to

maintain the illusion of having a partner and interlocutor in these

women,

someone

with

an

independent

perspective,

while

simultaneously destroying their ability to oppose him. That he had no

compunction about literally destroying a victim, and thereby erasing

her perspective, emerged in the final episode of the podcast—which

detailed how he tried to kidnap and, in all likelihood, murder Debra’s

daughter Terra. 28 But by gaslighting the majority of his victims, rather

than resorting to cruder methods of obliteration, he could also feel

that he was attracting, charming, convincing them, while

simultaneously precluding the possibility of challenge.

—

As Kate Abramson has argued, gaslighting someone is typically a long-

term project. Manufacturing the sense of epistemic obligation to go

along with the gaslighter’s story takes time and, typically, quite a bit of

effort (though that effort need not be consciously aimed at the end that

gaslighting tries to achieve, of epistemic domination). 29 But epistemic

entitlement can also result in a mistaken sense that others are not

entitled to issue a contrary or threatening point of view, even if they in

fact have every right to do so. This can lead to a man’s systematic

attempts to shut a woman up forever, or just his momentary outrage

over her expressing her opinion. But even in the latter sort of case, the

moments of outrage often exhibit a violent or threatening

undercurrent. It’s not for nothing that, as Rebecca Solnit observes, her

classic essay on mansplaining began with a relatively benign-seeming

incident and ended with rape and murder—a woman trying to testify

to sexual assault and being permanently silenced.30

Examples of men becoming enraged at women for expressing

their views online are not hard to come by, to put it mildly. I have

experienced such anger myself, on many occasions, and have gradually

learned to expect, and to live with, such misogyny. Even so, men’s

vitriol toward me and other girls and women threatens to take my

breath away, on occasion.31 When I was writing this chapter, a right-

wing radio host in Australia, Alan Jones, who has a long history of

misogynistic comments,32 took exception to the views expressed about

climate change by Jacinda Ardern, the female prime minister of New

Zealand. During a Pacific Islands Forum attended by international

leaders, Ardern stated, correctly, that Australia will “have to answer to

the Pacific [Islands],” which will be devastatingly affected by rising sea

levels, given Australia’s current inaction on climate change. She also

reiterated her commitment to have New Zealand do its bit to reduce

carbon emissions to zero by 2050.33 It wasn’t surprising that these

comments provoked Alan Jones’s ire: studies have shown that, when it

comes to climate change, conservative white men feel particularly

entitled to their opinion, however incorrect, to the effect that what is

happening is not happening.34 (Such denial of basic realities is in some

respects the attempted gaslighting of the planet.)

So Jones’s anger may have been predictable. 35 But the way he

chose to express it nevertheless made headlines. “Here she is

preaching on global warming and saying we’ve got to do something

about climate change,” Jones said with outrage on his radio show. “I

just wonder whether [Australian prime minister] Scott Morrison is

going to be fully briefed to shove a sock down her throat. ”36 In

response to widespread condemnation of these threatening remarks—

which veritably reveled in the prospect of Ardern’s being silenced by a

man in a position of comparable authority to her—Alan Jones initially

refused to apologize. He merely tried to deflect in the most implausible

way. Critics had willfully misconstrued his words, he said; he had

actually meant that Ardern ought to shove her own sock down her

own throat. Which is little better, and just not credible. 37

There is a certain kind of man who is unable or unwilling to cope

with others expressing views that threaten his own sense of what has

happened, or ought to happen. Such men cannot abide girls and

women, in particular, evincing their own, legitimate sense of epistemic

entitlement to state what is happening in the world, or what has to

change, going forward. They do not react merely by strenuously

disagreeing with a girl or woman in this position. Indeed, they often

seem to lack the wherewithal—or, again, the willingness—to disagree

with her whatsoever. They instead want to shut her up, or to head off

the very possibility of disagreement, by denying that her word has any

meaning or merit whatsoever (she’s crazy, or she’s evil—so, either way,

anything she says is beneath consideration). Or such a man instead

imaginatively conjures up a world in which he and his ilk have the

power to make her eat her words—in this case, by shoving something

down her throat, thus silencing her forever. Strikingly, he is liable

throughout this to feel like the justified, or even aggrieved, party.

As The Guardian reported, the CEO of the anti–domestic violence

body Our Watch, Patty Kinnersly, voiced her concern over Jones’s

“verbal threat of violence”—pointing to the “power of words [to] create

an environment where violence against women is seen as acceptable or

can be justified.” “You can disagree with someone without wanting to

silence them,” Kinnersly added, sensibly. 38

Well, I assume you can, dear reader. But not everyone is so

capable.

NINE

Unelectable—On the Entitlement to Power

Following Hillary Clinton’s surprise loss to Donald Trump in the

2016 U.S. presidential election, questions about women’s electability

in this country have been widely, and understandably, regarded as

pressing. 1 An abundance of research shows that these questions are far

from silly—though, as we’ll see here eventually, the answers are

vulnerable to manipulation and misinterpretation. But when it comes

to the question of who is deemed entitled to hold power, women are

subject to marked disadvantages under many (though not all)

circumstances. And given that defeating Donald Trump in the 2020

election is, for many of us, a maximally urgent political imperative, it

would be reckless to disregard the evidence about the difficulties

women face in getting elected, at least as compared with their

privileged male counterparts. We need to establish how strong this

evidence is, and to ask whether or not these difficulties are likely to be

insuperable. We should also ask who the “electability” framework

tends to work in favor of—but that’ll come later.

In a landmark study, Madeline Heilman and her collaborators

asked participants to evaluate a hypothetical man versus a

hypothetical woman—named “James” and “Andrea,” respectively—

based on information in a personnel file.2 Both James and Andrea

were described as holding down the same male-coded leadership

position as an assistant vice president at an aircraft company. By

swapping the names on the personnel files (such that the names on

each file were switched for every second participant), the researchers

were able to ensure that there was no substantive difference in the

information participants received, on average, about the two people to

be evaluated. Yet participants showed a marked, consistent bias

toward the male leader. Specifically, when information about their

competence was equivocal, participants judged “James” to be more

competent than “Andrea” in some 86 percent of cases—though there

was no significant difference between how the participants judged the

candidates in terms of their likability. When the file contained

information that made their high degree of competence unambiguous

(by stating that each was in the top 5 percent of all employees at that

level), the results shifted. This time, “James” was judged to be more

likable than “Andrea” 83 percent of the time (though there were no

significant differences in rankings of their relative competence).

Interestingly, breaking the results down by participant gender made

no difference to these findings: men and women exhibited the same

biased tendencies. 3

The upshot: regardless of their own gender, people tend to

assume that men in historically male-dominated positions of power

are more competent than women, unless this assumption is explicitly

contradicted by further information. And when it is so contradicted,

women are liable to be disliked and regarded, in particular, as

“interpersonally hostile,” a measure that, in this study, encompassed

being perceived as conniving, pushy, selfish, abrasive, manipulative,

and untrustworthy. The researchers described this effect as

“dramatic”—and, they might well have added, depressing. How could a

woman win, given the prevalence of these biases?

Further evidence of this difficulty comes in the form of a study

that canvassed likely voters two years prior to the 2008 presidential

election. The researchers, David Paul and Jessi Smith, had

participants consider three Republicans—Rudy Giuliani, John

McCain, and Elizabeth Dole—and two Democrats—John Edwards and

Hillary Clinton. A female candidate lost to a male one in every single

head-to-head matchup (both intraparty and interparty). Perhaps most

strikingly, a substantial number of voters defected to a candidate from

another party to avoid voting for a woman from their own—for

example, Democratic voters chose a male Republican over Hillary

Clinton. Given the strength of the tendency in recent decades for

Americans to vote for their own party’s candidates, this study provides

some naturalistic support for the “women can’t win” hypothesis, at

least when it comes to women running for the presidency.4 Further

(and similarly depressing) evidence for this hypothesis comes from

recent findings showing that many Americans (including a slim

majority of American men) are still not “very comfortable” with the

idea of a female president. 5

Of course, we also have ample evidence that women can win

elections, including against male rivals: the 2018 U.S. midterm

election saw a record number of female politicians elected to Congress,

just for one example. 6 But social psychologists have speculated that

there’s something about women who seek the highest positions of

power and the most masculine-coded authority positions that people

continue to find off-putting. In one study, hypothetical female

politicians who were described as running for the Senate experienced

little gender bias until they were explicitly portrayed as power-seeking

—in which case the gendered backlash effects were striking. Further,

as the researchers note, it doesn’t take much to be perceived as power-

seeking: It may be enough simply to run for the presidency. As they

put it, “Backlash may occur more often in political roles requiring

more of a commanding, decisive, and authoritative style (e.g.,

president of the United States, speaker of the House of

Representatives). ”7 They speculate that similar penalties may apply to

women seeking more humdrum positions of power—for example, as a

boss or a manager—that are also perceived as highly masculine-coded.

So we can’t just satisfy ourselves with the fact that large numbers

of women are being elected to Congress or even to the Senate. We have

to ask: What, if any, are the conditions under which the least palatable

forms of female power become easier to swallow?

—

Further research by Heilman sheds crucial light on how and why

women’s power can sometimes be well tolerated. Heilman, together

with her colleague Tyler Okimoto, set out to investigate the basis of the

bias against women who occupy historically male-dominated power

positions. They wanted to know why, “even when unequivocal

evidence exists that a woman is successful in male gender–typed work,

she faces career-hindering problems in work settings—problems of

being disliked and interpersonally derogated. ”8 The researchers

hypothesized that such problems stem from a perception that a

woman who succeeds in such a position must be lacking in

“communality”: the quality of being nurturing and pro-social, a deficit

for which women tend to be harshly punished. For, as Heilman and

Okimoto point out, there are widespread prescriptions that “specify

that women should behave communally, exhibiting nurturing and

socially sensitive attributes that demonstrate concern for others, such

as being kind, sympathetic, and understanding. ”9 Such social norms

tend to be far more stringently enforced for women than for their male

counterparts, as I have argued throughout this book. The researchers

also noted that women don’t have to actively demonstrate uncaring

attributes in order to be perceived as uncommunal, and punished

accordingly. Such a deficit will often be inferred or assumed, based

simply on a woman’s success in a male-coded leadership role. Heilman

and Okimoto write:

Several investigations have found that when research

participants were told only that female managers had been

successful (with no additional behavioral information

supplied), they characterized these managers as lacking the

prescribed favorable interpersonal qualities related to

communality and as instead possessing traits such as

selfishness, deceitfulness, deviousness, coldness, and

manipulativeness….It thus appears to take little more than

knowledge that a woman is successful at male sex–typed

work to instigate interpersonally negative reactions to her. 10

But can such inferences be blocked? Can such assumptions be

canceled?

They can. Heilman and Okimoto decided to investigate this

question using a research paradigm similar to the setup in the opening

study, with one crucial difference: in the experimental condition, they

included information that implied that both “James” and “Andrea”

had a communal mind-set. (In the control condition, their mind-sets

were not mentioned, and both were portrayed as highly competent.)

The results? Bias against Andrea, and toward James, remained in full

force in the control condition (thus replicating the results of the

previous study). But when participants were explicitly told that Andrea

had been described by her subordinates as someone who is

“understanding and concerned about others,” that she “encourages

cooperation and helpful behavior,” and that she “has worked to

increase her employees’ sense of belonging,” this pattern was reversed:

participants were significantly more likely to choose Andrea as the

more desirable boss, the more likable of the pair, and judged her as no

more interpersonally hostile than James. And remember, this held

even though James was similarly described in this condition as having

communal attributes. 11 Perceived communality made an enormous

difference for female but not male applicants. When it comes to

demonstrable niceness, it’s an imperative for powerful women—and

seemingly inconsequential for their male rivals.12

So it would be a mistake to assume that male presidential

candidates will inevitably have an easier time garnering support over

similarly or even more qualified women. 13 The above research reveals

that, under specific conditions, women can be perceived as entitled to

wield power in such male-dominated domains—as much as, or even

more than, the men they’re up against. That is the good news. The bad

news? These specific conditions will often go unmet. Being perceived

as communal in presidential races turns out to be an uphill battle for

many female candidates.

—

“SALAD FIEND AMY KLOBUCHAR ONCE BERATED AN AIDE FOR FORGETTING A

FORK,” read one headline, breathlessly. 14 The story had broken in a

New York Times article titled, more soberly, “How Amy Klobuchar

Treats Her Staff.” That report combined valid concerns about the

Minnesota senator—who had announced her presidential bid less than

two weeks prior—with anecdotes that bordered on prurient in their

framing. Most notably, this one:

Senator Amy Klobuchar was hungry, forkless and losing

patience.

An aide, joining her on a trip to South Carolina in 2008,

had procured a salad for his boss while hauling their bags

through an airport terminal. But once onboard, he delivered

the grim news: He had fumbled the plastic eating utensils

before reaching the gate, and the crew did not have any forks

on such a short flight.

What happened next was typical: Ms. Klobuchar berated

her aide instantly for the slip-up. What happened after that

was not: She pulled a comb from her bag and began eating

the salad with it, according to four people familiar with the

episode.

Then she handed the comb to her staff member with a

directive: Clean it. 15

It’s telling that the article opened with this (now more than ten-

year-old) incident, recounted from the perspective of the aide, and

seemingly written so as to maximize embarrassment to the senator—

rather than starting with behavior of hers detailed later in the story

that was, to my mind, considerably more worrisome: throwing objects

at aides and assigning them inappropriate tasks, such as regularly

washing her dishes. And while concerns about Klobuchar’s being

positively abusive toward staffers certainly deserved to be taken

seriously, there’s no doubt that the story also raised the hackles of

people who simply couldn’t abide a female boss who displayed

moments of anger, however understandable or human. More to the

point, perhaps, even for those who think that all of these stories about

Klobuchar were of direct public concern and appropriately framed,

there are comparable reports about male politicians that received

relatively little uptake. According to one story, for instance:

Joe Biden’s outward appearance of geniality and good humor

belie a fierce temper behind the scenes, with the former vice

president routinely lashing out at staff, a new report

says….“Everyone who works for him has been screamed at,” a

former adviser told the magazine….

The revelation about Biden echo those reported about

2020 rival Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota senator, shortly

before she announced her presidential run in February.16

The echoes may have been there, but the reverberations were very

different. When it came to Biden, essentially, there were crickets.

Bernie Sanders has also been described as “unbelievably abusive”

by a former subordinate. In an article entitled “Anger Management:

Sanders Fights for Employees, Except His Own,” published during his

2016 presidential bid, Paul Heintz disputed the grandfatherly image of

Sanders:

According to some who have worked closely with Sanders

over the years, “grumpy grandpa” doesn’t even begin to

describe it. They characterize the senator as rude, short-

tempered and, occasionally, downright hostile. Though

Sanders has spent much of his life fighting for working

Vermonters, they say he mistreats the people working for

him.

“As a supervisor, he was unbelievably abusive,” says one

former campaign staffer, who claims to have endured

frequent verbal assaults. The double standard was clear: “He

did things that, if he found out that another supervisor was

doing in a workplace, he would go after them. You can’t treat

employees that way.”…Others echoed the former employee’s

story, saying the senator is prone to fits of anger. “Bernie was

an asshole,” says a Democratic insider who worked with

Sanders on the campaign trail. “Just unnecessarily an

asshole.” 17

Yet another male presidential hopeful, Beto O’Rourke, behaved

like an “asshole” to staffers too, by his own admission. In a

documentary called Running for Beto, which followed his

unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in Texas, O’Rourke was shown

“dropping f-bombs…complaining about having to ‘dance’ for the press,

and snapping at his staff….‘I know I was a giant asshole to be around

sometimes,’ O’Rourke acknowledges at one point in the documentary

to his top aides, who do not dispute him on the point,” read one news

story, released prior to O’Rourke’s announcement that he had decided

to run for president.18

Compared with the reports about Klobuchar’s treatment of her

staff, such stories about Biden, Sanders, and O’Rourke have attracted

little interest, and even less consternation. This jibes well with the

finding that a perceived lack of communality in a powerful woman will

tend to be harshly punished, while the same trait in her male

counterparts will remain a matter of relative indifference. And

however seriously one thinks we should take such moral lapses in a

presidential candidate, there is obviously no excuse for gendered

double standards here.

Reasonable minds can disagree about how much more traction

Klobuchar’s presidential bid would likely have received, had these

stories not been circulating. 19 But there’s another female presidential

candidate whose prospects were surely hindered by a perceived lack of

communality: New York senator Kirsten Gillibrand. 20 Gillibrand’s

supposed non-communal sin was quite different from Klobuchar’s, but

it attracted at least as much outrage. Gillibrand was widely perceived

to have “thrown Al Franken under the bus,” following allegations of

sexual misconduct against the Minnesota senator—hence showing her

to be disloyal, treacherous, selfish, and opportunistic.21 And though

Gillibrand was only one of around thirty Democrats to call for

Franken’s resignation, which he gave voluntarily early in 2018, the fact

that she was the first to do so was, for many people, unforgivable. 22

After Gillibrand announced that she was dropping out of the

presidential race, in August 2019, a Politico article summarized the

situation nicely:

At one point, Gillibrand looked on paper like a legitimate, if

not formidable, presidential candidate—one with flaws but

also the pluses of a perfect electoral record and a distinctly

feminist message that looked like a compelling counter to

Donald Trump. But Gillibrand, dogged by criticism for

pushing for Sen. Al Franken’s resignation, never took

flight….Hours after Gillibrand’s announcement Wednesday

night, both she and Franken trended on Twitter together,

seemingly inextricably linked.

“Franken was definitely a problem in terms of

fundraising,” the person familiar with the Gillibrand

campaign said. “He just kept coming up, over and over

again.” Jen Palmieri, Clinton’s former communications

director, said there was “no question” that the Franken ordeal

had a “huge, outsized impact on her.” “The sub-current of her

entire candidacy was the Franken resignation and people

unfairly pinning that on her,” Palmieri said. “It’s a crowded

field, and it’s hard for all the candidates, but that really

hampered her.” 23

For some people, there are few worse sins for a female leader than

thwarting the power to which a man is tacitly deemed entitled, even if

there are multiple credible reports of his being sexually inappropriate,

lecherous, or handsy.

—

In their investigation of the bias against powerful women, Heilman

and Okimoto undertook two further experiments. In one of these, they

again included information that “Andrea,” as well as “James,” had

behaved in communal ways. But this time, they left the motivation for

such behavior unclear, implying that it was part of a broader

department or company-wide initiative, and therefore “might have

been performed [merely] to fulfill a job responsibility.” 24 In one of two

such similar descriptions (which were again alternately applied to

“James” and “Andrea”), participants read: “In his/her last year at

[unnamed company], James/Andrea worked for a supervisor who was

known for placing high importance on employee relations.” For the

other target of evaluation, participants read: “In recent years,

[unnamed company] has updated their mission statement, placing

greater importance on understanding the concerns of employees. As

part of this company-wide initiative, James/Andrea…” After reading

descriptions of both candidates’ engagement in communal behavior,

participants went on, as before, to complete the evaluation.

Would the fact that Andrea had demonstrated care and

consideration toward her subordinates still be enough to overcome the

tendency to dislike her and judge her to be interpersonally hostile? No.

When participants had no way to tell that Andrea’s communal

behavior was due to her personal characteristics, they once again

exhibited the marked gender bias evinced in the previous studies (and,

again, replicating these findings).25 Communal behavior seems to

count in a woman’s favor only if it can be attributed to stable traits of

character, or her own authentic nature.

This isn’t particularly surprising. But it has troubling implications

in the political arena, where it’s difficult for prominent female

politicians to be perceived as authentically anything. Accusations of

being “fake,” inauthentic, and merely trying to gain power have

dogged several prominent female politicians—not only Hillary Clinton,

but also Julia Gillard, the first female prime minister of Australia.26

Clinton’s approval rating was sky-high when she served as secretary of

state, and it began to tank only when she initiated her bid for the

presidency—which coincided with, and is partly explained by, her

being portrayed in the media as cruelly indifferent to the fates of

people in Benghazi, Libya, and to matters of national security (via the

faux scandal of her emails). Julia Gillard was a fairly popular politician

in Australia until she became prime minister—whereupon she was

widely portrayed in the media as fake, selfish, opportunistic, cynical,

and backstabbing (having toppled the former leader, Kevin Rudd, in

an internal party challenge).27

Given the abundance of information about any person in the

public eye, it is not too difficult to find a way to portray a prominent

woman as having been, at some point in time, insufficiently caring,

considerate, or cognizant of others. We should be wary not only of

outright character assassinations and smear campaigns against her,

but even of subtler, potentially valid concerns about her being

accorded outsize importance.

The right way to take these points is a matter of some delicacy.

Being communal is an important virtue. But there are many virtues we

expect leaders to possess, and it is neither realistic nor fair to expect

every person in a position of power to be extraordinarily communal

(as opposed to reasonably kind, empathetic, considerate, and so on).

There is also the simple point that, to the extent that our communal

expectations of women are indeed reasonable, we often have a long

way to go in holding men to the same warranted moral standards.

Another complexity worth pausing over is that perceptions about

communality may differ radically depending on one’s own political

values. Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for example, is

widely (and, I believe, quite rightly) perceived by people on the left as

exceptionally communal. But to those on the right, she could hardly be

considered less so, judging by the kind of consternation she attracts on

Fox News and in other conservative outlets. The same goes for other

prominent girls and women who are devoted to environmental causes,

among other issues of social justice. Witness the polarized reaction to

environmental activist Greta Thunberg’s address to the United

Nations, in which she resisted the feminine-coded pseudo-obligation

to give hope to her audience. Instead, she righteously, and movingly,

excoriated them:

You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your

empty words. And yet I’m one of the lucky ones. People are

suffering. People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing.

We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can

talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic

growth. How dare you!” 28

The power dynamics explored in this chapter help explain the

misogyny

to

which

Ocasio-Cortez

and

Thunberg

are

disproportionately subject, even relative to the rather grim standards

for female public figures.29 The more the Left loves them (partly on

the grounds of their extraordinary communality in fighting for future

generations), the more the Right resents it—especially in view of their

sense that this girl or woman is actually hurting people’s (read: their

own) interests and impugning their good character. 30

There are also tricky issues about how perceptions of

communality may interact with various kinds of marginalization,

along with gender biases. Someone who is neuro-atypical or highly

introverted, for example, may not be comfortable showing that they

care via prolonged or extensive interpersonal interactions. They may

nevertheless be deeply oriented to moral matters, and staunchly

committed to social justice. We must make room for different ways of

manifesting communal moral virtues.

And we must not let our vision of a communal leader devolve into

a vision of bland niceness. There is a genuine entitlement under some

circumstances to exhibit anger or even rage, as has been persuasively

argued by the philosophers Myisha Cherry and Amia Srinivasan, the

political theorist Brittney Cooper, and the political commentators and

writers Soraya Chemaly and Rebecca Traister.31 A nuanced

understanding of communality should allow for such emotions to be

freely expressed—especially on behalf of people who are wronged,

oppressed, or marginalized. “I am angry and I own it,” read the subject

line of a recent email from Elizabeth Warren to her supporters, in

response to Joe Biden’s insinuation that she was excessively up in

arms about things. In light of the injustices occurring in the wealthiest

country in the world, we ought to be incensed, she wrote. Yet “over

and over we are told that women are not allowed to be angry,” she

pointed out. “It makes us unattractive to powerful men who want us to

be quiet.” 32

So there are several reasons why it may be difficult for an aspiring

female political leader to improve the public’s perception of her—even

if she is a genuinely caring, kind, considerate person who should, in

theory, be benefitting from the sort of communality boost Heilman

and Okimoto found in their study. And there is also the point that

having to show oneself to be authentically communal may present

special difficulties for almost anyone, regardless of their gender. How

do you show that you really care, and are not simply kissing babies for

the photo opportunity? For that matter, is it reasonable to expect that

kissing the baby will always be more than a photo opportunity? Given

the number of demands on a politician’s time and energy, expecting

deep human engagement with each and every person who she meets

on the campaign trail might seem tantamount to expecting her to be

socially superhuman—a kind of female unicorn.

—

Enter Elizabeth Warren, who became well-known for making personal

phone calls to minor donors, and who had taken some one hundred

thousand selfies with individual voters by early in 2020.33 The

comedian and actor Ashley Nicole Black asked, in jest, on Twitter,

whether Warren had a plan to fix her love life. “DM me and let’s figure

this out,” Warren responded, before arranging a phone call that was

apparently very helpful.34

When Warren’s main rival on the left, Bernie Sanders, had a heart

attack on the campaign trail, she not only sent him kind get-well

messages (as did many presidential candidates). Warren went one

better, and sent his staffers dinner and cookies while Sanders was in

the hospital recovering.35

“Elizabeth Warren always knows exactly what she wants when she

gets to the front of the Starbucks line and never holds everyone else

up. ”36 “Elizabeth Warren has never asked a bartender ‘What whiskeys

do you have?’ She’s already checked the shelf. ”37 “Elizabeth Warren

never takes up too much space on the sidewalk or the subway. She

checks her own privilege and shares public space.” 38

Tweets of this sort, which briefly became a popular meme on

Twitter, reflected a widespread perception that Elizabeth Warren is

exceptionally communal: kind, caring, compassionate, attentive to

others’ needs, and so on. And in light of the empirical evidence

canvassed in this chapter, this perception helps to explain Warren’s

moment of great popularity during her bid for the presidency, with her

becoming the frontrunner in the race by October 2019. 39 It also helps

to explain her rapid, dramatic downfall—with her coming in no better

than third in any of the early primaries, including in Warren’s home

state of Massachusetts. 40

This was despite the fact that, in addition to her communal

virtues, Warren was arguably the most experienced, prepared, poised,

and smartest of any of the Democratic candidates. She was famous for

her comprehensive plans, from tackling climate change to the

coronavirus pandemic. And when she made mistakes, such as

undergoing DNA testing to confirm her (negligible) Native ancestry,

she not only apologized, but learned from her missteps. 41 As Kimberlé

W. Crenshaw put it, on Twitter:

I voted for @ewarren today [because] she listens to Black

women, understands that “Economic justice has not ever

been sufficient to ensure racial justice,” admits mistakes, is a

tough broad, and [because] we now see how not having a

leader [with] a plan costs lives.42

I couldn’t agree more with this. And, in the interests of full

disclosure, I write what follows as an avid Warren supporter. She had

my vote from the outset. 43 I think she would have made an

outstanding president, and I am gutted that, on the day of writing, her

campaign has been suspended.

But while there is reasonable disagreement over whether Warren

deserved to win the nomination, there has been considerable surprise

and consternation that she didn’t at least do better than she did—

losing contests to various white men, in the form of Bernie Sanders,

Joe Biden, and sometimes even Pete Buttigieg or Mike Bloomberg—

especially given her erstwhile popularity.44 The studies canvassed in

this chapter shed light on this puzzling outcome.

For the problem with perceptions of communality is that they are

likely to be volatile. They hence constitute a dangerous—if, as we have

seen, necessary—facet of a female politician’s appeal. A potent double

bind presents itself to women in this position: embrace the hope that

you’re exceptionally communal and risk flaming out, when people are

inevitably disappointed by some aspect of your history, views, or

platform. Don’t present yourself as exceptionally communal, and run a

greater risk that your campaign will never go anywhere, like Klobuchar

and Gillibrand. 45

Of course, Warren also faced straight-up misogyny and the

associated gender biases during her presidential campaign. Her

righteous anger was off-putting and even unsettling to some people.

(“Mean and angry Warren is not a good look,” tweeted conservative

writer Jennifer Rubin. 46) Warren’s professorial background, when

instantiated in a woman, was an anathema to others. 47 Still others may

have liked her well enough to embrace Warren as their second choice,

but preferred a male candidate, at least when the moment of truth

came at the voting booth. Sometimes this was likely an expression of

the aforementioned gender biases (which is not to deny, of course, that

some people had legitimate reasons, relative to their own values, for

preferring Biden or Sanders).48 Such biases are often unconscious,

and subject to post hoc rationalization—including via the common

trope that women are unelectable. (To which an apt response,

emblazoned on a T-shirt, was: “She’s electable if you f***ing vote for

her.” The shirt is also happily available in an uncensored version.49)

And remember that, as this chapter has shown, such biases have been

empirically demonstrated in women as much as men, as well as in

people who are still young, as millennials.50

But subtler forms of misogyny would likely have afflicted

Warren’s chances too. 51 When she was pressed for details—far more

strenuously than was her progressive rival, Sanders—about how she

would implement Medicare for All, Warren eventually announced a

comprehensive plan to expand the coverage provided under the

Affordable Care Act, before passing a sweeping healthcare bill

implementing a single-payer system during her third year in the White

House.52 Whatever one thought of this plan (and, for my own part, I

am inclined toward a good dose of epistemic humility when it comes to

exactly how to realize key progressive values), Warren was roundly

and, to my mind, disproportionately condemned for supposedly

backpedaling. The fact that it was a perceived failure vis-à-vis care

that cost her so dearly does not seem likely to have been accidental.

People tend to unwittingly demand caring perfection from a female

leader—while forgiving similar and worse lapses in her male

counterparts.53

Similarly, Warren plausibly lost a significant amount of support in

some progressive quarters due to her decision, during the death throes

of her campaign, to accept super-PAC money. Whether one agrees

with this decision or not, it’s at least unclear that, for a would-be

Warren supporter, it should have been a deal-breaker. But, again,

women are held to gendered double standards, when it comes to both

their steadfastness and their purity: any supported lapse on this front

tends to be seized on mercilessly.54 And of course their

trustworthiness is often doubted for no legitimate reason.55

We expect too much from women. And when a woman we like or

respect disappoints us, even in minor and forgivable ways, she is liable

to be punished—often by people who think they have the moral high

ground, and are merely reacting to her as she deserves, rather than

helping to enact misogyny via moralism. Meanwhile, no such

perfection is demanded of her male rivals. Sanders paid essentially no

penalty for flipping his 2016 position on whether the candidate with a

plurality of delegates should automatically become the Democratic

nominee, when that outcome stood to his potential advantage in

2020. 56 Nor did Biden face much criticism for his hazy public-option

health plan, or for the embellished stories he told on the campaign

trail—not to mention, his history of plagiarism. 57

But perhaps the most important occasion of lost support during

Warren’s campaign was a rare moment of conflict between her and

Sanders. This was following leaked details of their meeting during

December 2018, when Warren told Sanders she was planning to run

for president. According to Warren insiders, and later confirmed by

Warren, Sanders said he didn’t think a woman could win against

Trump. Sanders, meanwhile, vehemently denies having said this.

Rather, he maintains, he said that sexism would be weaponized by

Trump against a female candidate.58

Whatever transpired—and it’s not clear that the two candidates’

versions of events are ultimately incompatible—Warren’s role in the

conflict likely did her far more damage than Sanders’ did.59 When a

woman challenges the epistemic and moral authority of a trusted male

figure, she is likely to be the one who comes off as incorrect or

immoral, all else being equal. And in this instance, to make matters

worse, she was also perceived as whiney: as accusing Sanders of

sexism, despite her never having made this accusation. This, together

with perceptions of Warren as betraying the progressive cause by

failing to “play nice” with Sanders, likely cost her dearly. And that’s

despite the fact that, by and large, this was a symmetrical

disagreement: each held that the other was failing to tell, or perhaps

simply to remember, the full story. But when he says she’s lying,

people tend to believe him. When she says that he is, she’s perceived as

attacking him cruelly. Following this incident, a meme depicting

Warren as a snake proliferated on Twitter. The symbolism is obvious:

When a man and a woman clash, she is the one who is venomous and

sneaky.

All of this reflects the widespread—and, yes—misogynistic sense

that, unlike their male rivals, women are not entitled to make

mistakes, especially when it comes to supposed communal values.

They are not entitled to accept money. They are not entitled to

challenge the narrative put forward by their male counterparts. And

while they may be entitled to have power under certain conditions,

they are not entitled to actively seek it, nor to take it away from the

men they’re up against. Until we face these facts, we will not have a

female president.

Yet this isn’t to endorse the narrative that Warren was unelectable

in retrospect. The future remained open until the relevant votes were

cast, in the primaries. And the electability framework had several

decisive drawbacks.

For one thing, it is a self-fulfilling prophecy: the more voters are

told that a certain candidate won’t win, the less likely that they’ll

triumph. After all, electability isn’t a static social fact; it’s a social fact

that we’re constantly, and collectively, in the process of constructing. 60

A June 2019 poll showed that, when voters were asked who they would

vote for in an election held that day, Joe Biden was the frontrunner,

followed by Bernie Sanders. But when they were asked who they would

want to be president if they could wave a magic wand, Elizabeth

Warren emerged as the narrow favorite. 61

So concerns about electability plausibly led some people to give

up on Warren prematurely, despite her being their favored Democratic

candidate. This was especially true for women. As Nate Silver of the

election forecasting website 538 put it, “There are a lot of women who

might not vote for a woman because they’re worried that other voters

won’t vote for her. But if everyone just voted for who they actually

wanted to be president, the woman would win! ”62

The electability narrative also served as a convenient

rationalization for other people’s biased, unfair preferences. And it

obscured the fact that other candidates may have equally or more

potent barriers to their being elected, albeit for different reasons.

There is something deeply troubling about the degree to which

concerns about electability emerged with unprecedented force during

this election cycle, with such promising female candidates in the

running (as well as male candidates of color63). There always seems to

be something that fills in the lacuna in the sentence “I’d vote for her,

but she’s just not…” Whether the sentence continues by airing worries

about her competence, her likability, or—now—her electability, this

will often serve as a pretext for a foregone conclusion: voting for yet

another white male candidate. In some cases, that is a reflection of the

person’s own unconscious gender biases. In others, it involves

kowtowing to the imagined biases of others.64 Either way, this is a

recipe for conservatism writ large. And hence, as such, it constitutes a

collective action problem. If we all give up on women prematurely

under such conditions, because they are women, then they will never

get anywhere. Effectively, moreover, they will be subject to misogyny:

a barrier they face as women in a man’s world, whatever the good

intentions of at least some of those killing their prospects.

Perhaps most perniciously of all, the electability narrative framed

voting for a woman in the 2020 Democratic primary as a selfish choice

—as a political liability, given the existential threat of Trump being

returned to the White House. As such, it preyed on the conscience of

some of the people most likely to be attracted to Warren’s politics:

those who value communality, and who therefore might have been

willing to sacrifice their voting preference for the sake of the

supposedly bigger picture.

But the bigger picture is surely partly this: we are entitled in such

contexts to vote for the person we think would be the best person for

the job. For my money, that was not a man who recently defended

working with segregationists and who lecherously sniffed the hair of a

young Latina politician, nor a man who had a heart attack during his

campaign and who subsequently refused to release his health

records.65 It was a woman who is whip-smart, truly compassionate,

and who seemed to have a plan for everything.

TEN

Undespairing—On the Entitlement of Girls

Ifinished my first book, Down Girl, in a spirit of despair. “I give up,”

I wrote. “I wish I could offer a more hopeful message.” Instead, I

concluded by offering a postmortem—a grim overview of the reasons I

was pessimistic about getting people to take the problem of misogyny

seriously, or even to face it as a problem whatsoever.

Although I am still far from hopeful, I am not so despairing

anymore. In part, that’s because I think I made an intellectual mistake

the first time around: I confused the intransigence of some people with

the unwillingness of most people to think soberly and deeply about the

problems facing girls and women. In the interim, I have been

pleasantly surprised—shocked, even—to hear from many readers who

have been prepared, even eager, to think through these problems with

me, with the aim of combating them. There is still an enormous

amount of energy that goes into denying and minimizing misogyny, of

course, as this book has sadly made all too clear. But there is also a lot

of momentum—extant and building—in the efforts to resist it.

Another reason I’m no longer as despairing is more personal. I

wrote much of this book while pregnant with my first child, and I came

to feel that my previous despair had been something of a luxury—a

luxury I can now ill afford to indulge in. I am still pessimistic about the

possibility of making much-needed feminist social progress without

incurring destructive, toxic backlash.1 But giving up no longer feels

like a viable option. I increasingly feel the need to keep fighting,

regardless of the outcome. Hope, to me, is a belief that the future will

be brighter, which I continue not to set much store in. But the idea of

fighting for a better world—and, equally importantly, fighting against

backsliding—is not a belief; it’s a political commitment that I can get

on board with. 2

These sentiments were further fueled when my husband and I

were told we were having a girl. We were delighted—and terrified. It is

difficult to reconcile the desires we naturally have for our child with a

sober acknowledgment of the realities of misogyny and the male

entitlement that often gives rise to it. As we’ve seen throughout this

book, girls and women are all too frequently punished for not giving a

man what he is tacitly deemed entitled to—and not just because of his

own overblown sense of what he deserves, but by dint of the social

structures that work to enable, foster, and sustain male privilege.

Clearly, as parents, we want better for our daughter.

At the same time, I must admit that the news that we were having

a girl—or, more accurately, a child who’s provisionally a girl3—came as

a slight relief to me. The prospect of raising a boy to be confident and

joyful, yet appropriately mindful of his own privilege, seemed like a

particularly daunting moral challenge. It’s obvious that no child

should grow up with the grim sense of himself as a potential villain

haunting his childhood. That would be unproductive, unethical, and

even abusive, if taken to extremes. So when it comes to how to strike

the right balance here, my husband and I look forward to learning

from others with the requisite wisdom and experience.4 The same goes

for endless parenting questions, most of which apply regardless of a

child’s gender. I do not want to present myself in what follows as being

any kind of expert; indeed, at this point in my life, I could hardly be

less so.

But over the course of writing this book, I did find myself with

some thoughts about what I want our daughter to feel entitled to.

These are goods that all people are entitled to, whatever their gender;

yet girls and women are often socialized to feel not only less important

than or inferior to boys and men, but also less entitled to certain forms

of basic humanity and common decency. Entitlement, as I’ve written

about it in these pages, has most often referred to some people’s

undue sense of what they deserve or are owed by others. But, for all

that, entitlement is not a dirty word: entitlements can be genuine,

valid, justified.

And I think the prospective parental lens is conceptually helpful

here, for at least two reasons. One is that when it comes to what

women truly deserve or are owed, it’s all too easy to fall into the trap of

victim blaming. In the unjust social world we occupy, I will rarely fault

a woman for not being in touch with what she is morally entitled to, or

for being reticent about claiming it. But there’s a difference between

stating—retrospectively, and often judgmentally—that a woman ought

to have asserted herself in some way, versus hoping that my daughter

and her cohort will be empowered to do so in a forward-looking

manner. That doesn’t mean, of course, that it will always be feasible or

safe for her to lay claim to what she has a right to: that’s part of what

misogyny polices and prohibits. But I want her to at least be clear

about her entitlements, and to be prepared to assert them when

conditions make that possible. And when they do not, I want her to

feel lucid anger, and to push for structural changes, on behalf of

herself as well as those who are less privileged.

So it helps to keep the emphasis here on the future: on moral

development. It’s also helpful, I believe, to emphasize these efforts as a

facet of moral development. Learning what one is entitled to is—or at

least should be—inextricably connected with learning what one owes

to others. Among many other things, it is vital that our daughter

become aware of her own privilege, as a white girl born to two highly

educated,

comparatively

wealthy,

middle-class,

cisgender,

heterosexual, and largely non-disabled parents. This goes beyond the

admittedly crucial task of teaching her to understand and embrace

human difference, diversity, and various kinds of vulnerability. It will

also involve teaching her that she has special obligations to defend and

support people subject to forms of marginalization and oppression

from which she will be spared. She will be obligated not to tolerate, let

alone participate in, the legal and extralegal policing practices that

oppress Black and brown bodies in our society, for one obvious

example. Similarly, she will be obligated not to “lean down”

exploitatively on the emotional and material labor of women of color,

as have so many white women before her. And her sense of warranted

entitlement must always be tempered with a knowledge of what she is

not entitled to do, to say, or to rely on, as a person who will be born

into privilege, along multiple axes.

—

So what do I want my daughter to know, when it comes to what she is

entitled to? I want my daughter to know that she is entitled to feel pain

—be it physical or emotional—and that she is subsequently entitled to

cry out or ask for help, and to be cared for, soothed, nurtured. I want

her to know that she is entitled to be believed about her physical and

emotional needs, and that she is as worthy of care—medical and

otherwise—as any other person.

I want her to know that she is entitled to bodily autonomy—to

choose whether, when, and how she is touched by anyone who

expresses a desire to do so (and yes, they must ask for, rather than just

assuming, her consent). I want her to know that hugs and kisses,

however well-meaning, are always optional. I want her to feel no guilt

or shame in saying “no” to anyone’s potential encroachment upon her

body. When the time comes, I want her to know that she is entitled to

full control over her reproductive capacities, and that the decision

about whether or not to bear children is her own and no one else’s.

I want her to know that her presumed gender is just that, a

presumption, on our part—which she is entirely entitled to tell us

we’ve been wrong about. I want our child to know that being a boy or

being non-binary are not only viable options but will be positively

embraced and supported within our household—and that we will fight

at every turn to make the world a place in which all trans and non-

binary children and adults can flourish.

I want my daughter to know that women, as much as men, along

with non-binary people, are entitled to support from others in

fulfilling adult responsibilities. I am relieved that she will grow up in a

household where she is just as likely (if not likelier) to see her father as

her mother making meals, doing the dishes, or putting in a load of

laundry. Studies show that the school-aged daughters of fathers tend

to be more ambitious when he does his fair share of housework—

saying they want to be a lawyer or a doctor, for example, rather than

that they want to follow a specifically feminine-coded path, as a

teacher, a nurse, or staying at home with children. 5 And this pattern

holds even if both parents in a household where the mother does more

of the housework explicitly espouse gender egalitarian beliefs: actions

speak louder than words here, seemingly. Whether or not this

translates into long-term life goals and career choices, it shows that

children pick up more than one might think, in terms of gendered

divisions of labor.

I want my daughter to know that she is entitled to use and enjoy

her body in a huge variety of ways: to play sports, to play music, to

dance, to stim, to express joy or grief or fear or sheer silliness. I want

her to know that she is entitled to eat heartily, to take up space, to be

loud, and to enjoy the kind of lack of bodily self-consciousness I can

only dream of. Even during my pregnancy, I can anticipate being

willing to cheerfully kill anyone who makes her feel ashamed of her

body, whatever its shape, size, disabilities, typicality, and so on. (To be

clear, I am perfectly well aware that I am not entitled to do this.)

I want my daughter to know that human sexuality comes in so

many different forms—that she is entitled to be straight, queer,

bisexual, asexual, and so on. As she grows older, I want her to know

that she is entitled to thoroughly enjoy her sexuality, whatever that

turns out to be, without the slightest shame or stigma. I want her to

know that she is entitled to say no to sex, without the slightest shame

or stigma, either. I also want her to know—and this is hard to write—

that any abuse, harassment, or assault she may face, sexual or

otherwise, is a moral abomination. I have not yet figured out how, or

how much, to tell her about the realities of male sexual entitlement

and violence that have so occupied my consciousness over the past

several years, including while pregnant with her, in writing the book

you’ve been reading. Here, words fail me.6

I want my daughter to know that she is entitled—and sometimes

obligated—to speak her mind and to speak out against injustice, even

if it makes some of the people around her uncomfortable. I want her to

know that she is entitled to speak, period. Studies show that in the

classroom, boys continue to be called on vastly more than girls—a

pattern that is particularly entrenched in STEM fields.7 I want her to

know that this is deeply unjust, if typically unintentional, and to

understand that, if it happens, the fault lies not with her but with the

system. I want her to know that she is entitled to know things and to

explain them to other people, without the prospect of subsequent

backlash or peremptory mansplaining. Obviously, I also want her to be

a good listener—cognizant and alive to the knowledge of those more

expert than she is.

I want her to know that it’s not her job to tailor truths about her

body or mind to suit other people’s feelings—including ours, as her

parents. Indeed, I believe that one reason why gaslighting is such an

insidious phenomenon, and liable to occur even in loving, well-

meaning, and apparently well-functioning families, is that children are

not given the scope by their parents to experience and air their feelings

fully. “You can’t feel that” and “You mustn’t say that” are expressions

that can easily be used to make a child feel crazy or guilty, unless she

buries her true emotions. I want my daughter to know that she is

entitled to be angry, sad, anxious, or simply uncertain.

I want my daughter to know that she is entitled to be powerful

and, on occasion, to compete with other people, including privileged

boys and men. I want her to know that if she does end up winning or

otherwise outranking them, she may well be entitled to occupy a

position of power or authority over them. I want her to be a kind and

fearless leader. I want her, of course, to be a graceful loser. I want her

to be communally minded and altruistic. At the same time, I want her

to feel entitled to make mistakes, moral mistakes included. I want her

to know, unlike so many girls and women, that she is lovable and

forgivable, even if and when she falters. I want her to be prepared to

make amends and admit to her mistakes, fully and freely, when she

inevitably makes them.

And I want my daughter to know that her own entitlements in

these respects are crucially connected with some of her most

important moral obligations: the obligation all of us share, regardless

of our gender, to make this world one in which structural injustices are

actively being rectified. Together, we must fight for a world in which

girls and women are valued, cared for, and believed, within our social,

legal, and medical institutions. Together, we must fight for a world in

which the bodies of girls and women are not routinely controlled,

sexualized, harassed, assaulted, and injured—or even destroyed

altogether. Together, we must fight for a world in which every girl or

woman is safe and free to be her own person, rather than consigned to

be predominantly a human giver of the sex, care, and love to which

privileged boys and men are tacitly deemed entitled. These are only a

fraction of the structural changes that desperately need to happen, of

course, in order to achieve justice for all members of our moral

community; even so, they are radical. Indeed, at the time of writing,

they are difficult to envision.

So, as I write this, I can’t imagine successfully teaching my

daughter all of these things. There is so much counter-messaging in

our culture; and there is so much here to teach her that I never learned

myself—not properly, not fully. I still have tremendous difficulty

picturing a world in which girls and women can reliably lay claim to

what they are entitled to, let alone one in which they get it. It will be a

long, perhaps interminable fight. But, for her, I can say: I am in it.

To my daughter

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

So many people helped me with this book—which was nearly six years

in the making, though a shorter time in the writing—that I despair of

giving everyone the thanks I surely owe them. But, for an incomplete

and inadequate beginning: I’m deeply indebted to my editor at Crown,

Amanda Cook, for her brilliant insights and editorial vision, as well as

for her unfailing support and belief in me during this project. I’m also

tremendously grateful to my editor at Penguin UK, Casiana Ionita, for

astute comments that improved this book tremendously—and, again,

for the kind of support that is every author’s dream come true. And

although we didn’t work together on this particular project, I would

never have been able to even conceive of it without my editor for my

first book, Peter Ohlin at Oxford University Press, who oversaw the

writing of Down Girl with extraordinary patience, kindness, and

insight.

Huge thanks to my agent, Lucy Cleland, who has been yet another

amazing source of ideas and support throughout the execution of this

book. I’m also grateful to Stephanie Steiker for crucial help during the

development stages.

I owe thanks to audiences at Fordham University, the University

of Michigan, the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, MIT, the

University of Indiana–Bloomington, RIT, the University of Alabama–

Birmingham, the Brooklyn Public Library, Wooster College, Nassau

Community College, Princeton University, CUNY, the University of

Buffalo, Amherst College, the University of Connecticut, Wellesley

College, the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University, Southern

Illinois University Edwardsville, the University of Puget Sound,

Grinnell College, and the University of Southern California, for their

generous and astute feedback on various portions of the material

contained herein. I’m also deeply indebted to my faculty and graduate

student colleagues at the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell for

providing such a wonderful intellectual atmosphere in which to do the

work I do.

On a more personal note, I owe so much to my parents, Anne and

Robert, as well as my sister, Lucy, for being the most wonderful family

imaginable, and for providing the kind of “secure base” from which to

spend a lifetime pursuing controversial, and sometimes divisive, ideas.

I am so grateful to each of them both for their support, and for being

who they are.

Finally, I couldn’t do any of this without my amazing husband,

Daniel. He is my rock. He is my safe place. He is the person who

supports me every day—intellectually, materially, and emotionally—

and who I can always count on. He is my first reader, my best friend,

and, now, my co-parent. I can only hope to someday go some way

toward deserving him.

NOTES

ONE Indelible—On the Entitlement of Privileged Men

1. Kavanaugh was also accused of sexual assault or misconduct by three other women:

Deborah Ramirez, Julie Swetnick, and an anonymous complainant. See Christine Hauser,

“The Women Who Have Accused Brett Kavanaugh,” The New York Times, September 26,

2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/us/politics/brett-kavanaugh-accusers-

women.html. However, I’ll focus on Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s allegations for the

purposes of this introductory chapter.

2. For example, “As much as I admired Dr. Ford’s courage and found her personally to be convincing and sympathetic, it does not change my conviction that uncorroborated and

un-investigable accusations from a pre-adult time in a man or woman’s life shouldn’t

derail a demonstrably exceptional career,” wrote Anneke E. Green in an article entitled

“We Can Believe Ford and Confirm Kavanaugh,” RealClearPolitics, October 3, 2018,

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2018/10/03/

we_can_believe_ford_and_confirm_kavanaugh_138240.html.

3. For an example of someone who insinuated she was lying, see Cheryl K. Chumley, who

wrote: “If Ford has anything, anything at all that could show her claims against Kavanaugh

are rooted in fact and truth, she needs to cough it up and cough it up quick. It’s not

incumbent on Kavanaugh to prove his innocence. It is, however, incumbent on Ford to

prove his guilt—to prove she’s not lying and using a shameful, despicable tactic to disrupt

the Supreme Court proceedings and kill Kavanaugh’s nomination.” “Christine Blasey Ford

Could Indeed be Lying,” Washington Times, September 22, 2018,

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2018/sep/22/christine-blasey-ford-could-

indeed-be-lying/.

Susan Collins, on the other hand, held that Ford’s testimony was unreliable due to a case

of mistaken identity. Following her casting of the deciding vote to confirm Kavanaugh, she

put it this way, during a TV interview: “[Christine Blasey Ford] was clearly terrified,

traumatized, and I believed that a sexual assault had happened to her. What I think she is

mistaken about is who the perpetrator was. I do not believe her assailant was Brett

Kavanaugh.” Jaclyn Reiss, “Susan Collins Says She Thinks Brett Kavanaugh’s Accuser Was

‘Mistaken,’ ” The Boston Globe, October 8, 2018, https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/

politics/2018/10/07/susan-collins-says-she-thinks-christine-blasey-ford-was-mistaken-

about-identity-perpetrator-being-brett-kavanaugh/JD3AyfW6tly9KfUZjJxNwJ/

story.html.

4. It’s worth noting that male privilege—like privilege of other forms, e.g., white privilege—

has many dimensions aside from entitlement. And while one can and should of course aim

as a privileged person (like me, for the record, in every respect bar gender) not to act in

objectionably entitled ways, there is often a limit to how much one can feasibly renounce

(as opposed to recognizing and mitigating) one’s privilege. For a classic treatment of

(white) privilege, see Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible

Knapsack,” Peace and Freedom Magazine (1989): 10–12. For a state-of-the-art treatment,

see Rachel McKinnon and Adam Sennet’s “Survey Article: On the Nature of the Political

Concept of Privilege,” Journal of Political Philosophy 25, no. 4 (2017): 487–507.

As will emerge throughout this book, white women’s privilege and sense of entitlement

is an important topic in its own right. However, my focus here for the most part is male

privilege, which constitutes a set of phenomena that cluster together in ways that are

salutary to study together, systematically and intersectionally.

5. Sam Brodey, “ ‘The Most Telling Moment’: Sen. Amy Klobuchar in National Spotlight After Brett Kavanaugh Hearings,” Minnesota Post, September 28, 2018,

https://www.minnpost.com/national/2018/09/the-most-telling-moment-sen-amy-

klobuchar-in-national-spotlight-after-brett-kavanaugh-hearings/.

6. Billy Perrigo, “Sen. Lindsey Graham Says Christine Blasey Ford ‘Has Got a Problem’ as He

Continues Attack on Democrats,” Time, September 28, 2018, https://time.com/5409636/

lindsey-graham-christine-blasey-ford-problem/.

7. Compare Donald Trump’s himpathetic remarks, as canvassed in my article “Brett

Kavanaugh and America’s ‘Himpathy’ Reckoning,” The New York Times, September 26,

2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/opinion/brett-kavanaugh-hearing-

himpathy.html.

8. See the (variously inflected) naysaying from notes 2 and 3 in this chapter, as well as the letter from sixty-five women who knew Kavanaugh in high school, defending him largely

on the basis of their never having known him to commit sexual assault toward them,

personally. But, as is often the case, absence of (direct, firsthand) evidence is not decisive

evidence of absence here. In other words, the fact that these women could testify to not

having been assaulted by Brett Kavanaugh themselves hardly casts doubt on Ford’s

testimony. See Tara Golshan, “65 Women Who Knew Brett Kavanaugh in High School

Defend His Character,” Vox, September 14, 2018, https://www.vox.com/2018/9/14/

17860488/brett-kavanaugh-sexual-assault-georgetown-prep-defense.

9. Obviously the law enforcement metaphor is meant to be exactly that: metaphorical. I’m certainly not arguing for a restriction of misogyny to formal policing and enforcement

mechanisms, as will become clear shortly.

10. According to recent statistics, girls comprise 82 percent of all juvenile rape victims, and women comprise 90 percent of all adult rape victims. Moreover, girls and women aged

sixteen to nineteen are four times more likely to be the victims of rape, attempted rape, or

sexual assault than are members of the general population. See RAINN, “Victims of Sexual

Violence: Statistics,” https://www.rainn.org/statistics/victims-sexual-violence.

11. A small sample of these messages: “No one believes you. Karma is a bitch and it will be visiting you very very soon”; “From what I’ve heard, you have six months to live, you

disgusting slime.” Erin Durkin, “Christine Blasey Ford’s Life ‘Turned Upside Down’ After

Accusing Kavanaugh,” The Guardian, September 19, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/

us-news/2018/sep/19/christine-blasey-ford-brett-kavanaugh-sexual-assault-accuser-

threats.

12. I originally used this metaphor in an interview for Guernica with Regan Penaluna. “Kate

Manne: The Shock Collar That Is Misogyny,” February 7, 2018,

https://www.guernicamag.com/kate-manne-why-misogyny-isnt-really-about-hating-

women/.

13. Kavanaugh said, in his opening remarks at the hearings: “A majority of my 48 law clerks over the last 12 years have been women. In a letter to this committee, my women law clerks

said I was one of the strongest advocates in the federal judiciary for women lawyers, and

they wrote that the legal profession is fairer and more equal because of me. In my time on

the bench, no federal judge, not a single one in the country has sent more women law

clerks to clerk on the Supreme Court than I have.” “Brett Kavanaugh’s Opening Statement:

Full Transcript,” The New York Times, September 26, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/

2018/09/26/us/politics/read-brett-kavanaughs-complete-opening-statement.html.

14. In chapter 6, for example, I argue that the anti-abortion movement in the United States is deeply misogynistic, without that necessarily impugning all of the individuals who

subscribe to its tenets as being so.

15. Note that this isn’t to deny, by any means, the possibility or concrete reality of feminist social progress in the United States and other contexts. It’s to say that historically

patriarchal social norms still linger and have an influence on our behavior, often

unwittingly, even when counteracted by egalitarian social mores.

16. As someone who practices cultural analysis, I generally focus on social contexts where I can count myself as an insider—leaving questions about how other cultural contexts may

be similar or different for other, more suitably positioned readers to consider. This is not to

say that this is the only way to avoid moral imperialism, however. See Serene Khader’s

Decolonizing Universalism: A Transnational Feminist Ethic (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2018) for a state-of-the-art discussion of these issues.

17. For two classic and groundbreaking pieces on intersectionality by Crenshaw, see her

“Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of

Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–99, and her “Beyond Race and

Misogyny: Black Feminism and 2 Live Crew,” in Words That Wound, edited by Mari J.

Matsuda, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw

(Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 111–132.

18. Hopefully, needless to say, these questions and the others I try to answer throughout these pages don’t constitute a comprehensive list of topics when it comes to male privilege and

entitlement, but merely some of the central ones, and the ones that I found myself in a

reasonably good position to comment on.

19. Ewan Palmer, “Christine Blasey Ford Can’t Return Home for ‘Quite Some Time’ Due to Continuous Death Threats: Lawyer,” Newsweek, October 8, 2018,

https://www.newsweek.com/christine-blasey-ford-cant-return-home-continuous-death-

threats-1157262.

20. Chris Riotta, “Trump Accused of 26 New Cases of ‘Unwanted Sexual Contact,’ ”

Independent, October 9, 2019, https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/

trump-sexual-assault-allegations-harassment-groping-women-karen-johnson-book-

a9149021.html.

TWO Involuntary—On the Entitlement to Admiration

1. “Timeline of Murder Spree in Isla Vista,” CBS News, May 26, 2014,

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/timeline-of-murder-spree-in-isla-vista/.

2. Fortunately, the video was quickly removed from YouTube. But a transcript of it can be found here: http://www.democraticunderground.com/10024994525 (last accessed October 5, 2019). Rodger had also previously uploaded other, similar videos to YouTube,

resulting in his mother alerting the police to his activities. Officers questioned Rodger

outside his apartment, but they did not take the matter further.

3. I discuss the case of Elliot Rodger at length in my book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), chapters 1–2. For some remarks on Rodger’s

mental health history—which is notable largely for his lack of any concrete diagnoses,

despite having received extensive therapy, thanks to his conscientious parents—see my

replies to critics, The APA Newsletter in Feminism and Philosophy 8, no. 2 (2019): 28–29.

4. I draw here on the following piece by Steve Hendrix, who also credits Julie Tate for her contributions to the story: “He Always Hated Women. Then He Decided to Kill Them,” The

Washington Post, June 7, 2019, https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/local/

yoga-shooting-incel-attack-fueled-by-male-supremacy/.

5. Nikolas Cruz, the nineteen-year-old who in 2018 killed seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, had also made comments lauding

Rodger on YouTube.

6. For an excellent history of incel culture, from these early and (by all reports) ostensibly benign beginnings to the present-day misogynistic horror show, see Zack Beauchamp’s

article “Our Incel Problem: How a Support Group for the Dateless Became One of the

Internet’s Most Dangerous Subcultures,” Vox, April 23, 2019, https://www.vox.com/the-

highlight/2019/4/16/18287446/incel-definition-reddit.

7. Alana (who prefers not to give her surname) has recently tried to come up with more productive alternatives, after having seen the incel community devolve and degenerate

over the past few decades. Her new project, Love Not Anger, attempts to revive her

website’s original spirit: supporting those who consider themselves unlucky in love,

without being resentful—much as she once did. Alana told Vox writer Zack Beauchamp:

“The aim is to help people be less lonely, by researching why some people—of all

genders and orientations—have difficulty with dating and creating effective

support services. The project doesn’t have ways to reduce violence directly. A

lonely person who is not too far gone into their own hatred might benefit from

whatever hope Love Not Anger can offer.”

Ibid.

This reminder that women as much as men, and queer people as well as straight, can be

lonely and feel loveless or be sexually dissatisfied will presumably do little to persuade the

committed incel. But it may be a helpful reality check for those who might otherwise

eventually be radicalized. There is a world of difference between simply wanting something

badly and wrongly feeling entitled to (and hence unfairly deprived of) it.

8. As Zack Beauchamp writes:

[Incels] are overwhelmingly young men and boys with a history of isolation and

rejection; they turn to the internet to make sense of their pain….

While there is no rigorous scientific study on incel demographics—the

community is deeply hostile to outsiders, particularly researchers and journalists—

their forums have conducted informal surveys on the demographics of their

users….

An informal poll of 1,267 Braincels [a once-popular incel forum on Reddit that

has subsequently been quarantined] users found that about 90 percent of forum

participants were under the age of 30. The users are almost all men—women are

banned on sight, but a handful do sneak in—and roughly 80 percent live in Europe

or North America.

Ibid.

9. Alice Hines, “How Many Bones Would You Break to Get Laid? ‘Incels’ Are Going Under the Knife to Reshape Their Faces, and Their Dating Prospects,” The Cut, May 28, 2019,

https://www.thecut.com/2019/05/incel-plastic-surgery.html.

10. See, e.g., Ross Douthat, who opined:

The sexual revolution created new winners and losers, new hierarchies to replace

the old ones, privileging the beautiful and rich and socially adept in new ways and

relegating others to new forms of loneliness and frustration. Our widespread

isolation and unhappiness and sterility might be dealt with by reviving or adapting

older ideas about the virtues of monogamy and chastity and permanence and the

special respect owed to the celibate.

From “The Redistribution of Sex,” The New York Times, May 2, 2018,

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/02/opinion/incels-sex-robots-redistribution.html.

Similarly, Jordan Peterson was quoted by reporter Nellie Bowles in The New York Times

opining that the solution to the problem of incels is “enforced monogamy.” Bowles writes:

Violent attacks are what happens when men do not have partners, Mr. Peterson

says, and society needs to work to make sure those men are married.

“He was angry at God because women were rejecting him,” Mr. Peterson says

of the Toronto killer [Alek Minassian]. “The cure for that is enforced monogamy.

That’s actually why monogamy emerges.”

Mr. Peterson does not pause when he says this. Enforced monogamy is, to

him, simply a rational solution. Otherwise women will all only go for the most

high-status men, he explains, and that couldn’t make either gender happy in the

end.

“Half the men fail. And no one cares about the men who fail,” Peterson added,

himpathetically.

Nellie Bowles, “Jordan Peterson, Custodian of the Patriarchy,” The New York Times,

May 18, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/18/style/jordan-peterson-12-rules-for-

life.html.

11. Other, similar incidents involving Beierle are detailed by Hendrix (in collaboration with Tate), in “He Always Hated Women,” The Washington Post.

There are also serious questions about the prevalence of sexual assault within the incel

community, as Zack Beauchamp has detailed in his investigative reporting. He writes:

The most chilling incel stories are about outright sexual assault….

One user claims to serially assault women on public transit. “I do it all the

time, rub my dick on their back/ass until I cum,” he writes. A second says that he

injected his semen into chocolate bars at his office to “punish” a woman who he

thought was flirting with him but actually had a boyfriend. A third claims to have

“groped so many women,” estimating his total at between 50 and 70—and claimed

he wanted to escalate to violent rape….

There’s no way to know how true any of this is. But even assuming a fraction of

it is, what you’ve got is a community where men who target women are celebrated

and incentivized to escalate.

From “Our Incel Problem,” Vox.

12. I owe the phrase “aggrieved entitlement” to the sociologist Michael Kimmel; see his Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (New York: National Books,

2013), pp. 18–25 and chapter 1.

13. As Zack Beauchamp notes:

Despite drawing users largely from majority-white countries, Braincels [a

subsequently quarantined forum for incels on Reddit] has an ethnically diverse set

of contributors; 55 percent of the site’s user base is white, with significant

percentages of posters who self-identify as East Asian, South Asian, Black, and

Latino. A poll that ran on incels.co, the largest incel site outside of Reddit, came

out with similar numbers on their user base’s age, race, and geographic

distribution.

From “Our Incel Problem,” Vox.

14. This quote comes from Rodger’s “My Twisted World,” his “manifesto” that was released

publicly following the incident. A copy of it is available here: http://s3.documentcloud.org/

documents/1173619/rodger-manifesto.pdf (last accessed October 5, 2019).

15. “Timeline of Murder Spree in Isla Vista,” CBS News, http://www.cbsnews.com/news/

timeline-of-murder-spree-in-isla-vista/.

16. Rodger went on:

Females truly have something mentally wrong with them. Their minds are flawed,

and at this point in my life I was beginning to see it. The more I explored my

college town of Isla Vista, the more ridiculousness I witnessed. All of the hot,

beautiful girls walked around with obnoxious, tough jock-type men who partied all

the time and acted crazy. They should be going for intelligent gentlemen such as

myself. Women are sexually attracted to the wrong type of man. This is a major

flaw in the very foundation of humanity. It is completely and utterly wrong, in

every sense of the word. As these truths fully dawned on me, I became deeply

disturbed by them. Deeply disturbed, offended, and traumatized.

See my subsequent remarks in this chapter on Rodger’s frequent complaints of having

been traumatized, rather than merely disappointed, by women.

17. All of Beierle’s videos, including this one and another entitled The Plight of the Adolescent

Male—addressed to teenage incels—are available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=8Ca00hcOND8 (last accessed October 5, 2019). The quoted passage (my own

transcription) is taken from approximately one and a half to two minutes into this

compilation.

18. The aforementioned incel who committed his murders at an Oregon community college, Chris Harper-Mercer, also wrote a similar racist screed in which he bemoaned his lack of a

girlfriend and his status as a virgin.

19. Closely echoing Rodger’s rhetoric, Alek Minassian commented in a police interrogation after his attacks (footage of which was released on September 26, 2019): “Sometimes I am

a bit upset [with women] that they choose to date obnoxious men instead of a gentleman.”

He identified a pivotal episode of being rejected at a Halloween party in 2013:

I walked in and attempted to socialize with some girls, however they all laughed at

me and held the arms of the big guys instead….I felt very angry…because I

considered myself a supreme gentleman, I was angry that they would give their

love and affection to obnoxious brutes.

Minassian also spoke with great admiration of Elliot Rodger and claimed to have met

him online—calling him the “founding forefather” who started “the movement of angry

incels such as myself” to “overthrow the Chads which would force the Staceys to reproduce

with the incels.” As for the “involuntary” in “incel,” he said that incels like him were

“thrown into true forced loneliness, and unable to lose [our] virginity.” The video from

which I took these remarks is available here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?

v=S_zSdw1nShk.

20. According to a source who had known Beierle at the time, the characters in the

manuscript were Beierle’s real classmates, with their names slightly altered. “This is

basically his school journal,” said the man, who spoke to The Washington Post’s reporters

on condition of anonymity. See Hendrix (in collaboration with Tate), “He Always Hated

Women,” The Washington Post.

21. For a discussion of the complex relationship between objectification and misogyny, according to my definition of the latter, see my book Down Girl, “Misogyny and Sexual

Objectification,” in chapter 3.

22. For further discussion of this point, see ibid., chapter 5.

23. Compare these remarks by an incel forum user on why he began to stalk women:

I once approached a teenage girl (around 14 years old) by asking her for directions

at first. Then I proceeded to ask for her name. She became afraid and started

walking away. I followed her, and then she went from walking briskly to running.

Her gait was peculiar, because she ran like a newborn fawn, turning around every

so often, trying to see if I am still following. (Now, I want to make clear that I

absolutely abhor rape and did not have any intention in that direction, not

molestation not any of that.)

She had no reason to be frightened. I wasn’t going to do anything. But the

feeling when you follow a girl and she notices you, and she tries to lose you or

picks up the pace. That is kind of a good feeling. You become important to her.

You are no longer some random insignificant face in the crowd.

I know it is kind of low-level behavior. But I do enjoy doing that. I go to

another city, look for a girl walking by herself and start following her. After a while

they notice you….I recommend you lonely incels try it some time.

“Incel Creeper: It’s Fun to Follow 14-Year-Old Girls Down the Street and Scare Them to

Death,” We Hunted the Mammoth, April 20, 2018,

http://www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/2018/04/30/incel-creeper-its-fun-to-follow-14-

year-old-girls-down-the-street-and-scare-them-to-death/.

24. Pace Amia Srinivasan in her essay “Does Anyone Have the Right to Sex?” London Review

of Books, March 22, 2018, https://www.lrb.co.uk/v40/n06/amia-srinivasan/does-anyone-

have-the-right-to-sex.

25. As Zack Beauchamp remarks of two incels he interviewed, Abe and John:

It’s hard not to feel for people like Abe or John. All of us have, at one point,

experienced our share of rejection or loneliness. What makes the incel world scary

is that it takes these universal experiences and transmutes the pain they cause into

unbridled, misogynistic rage.

From “Our Incel Problem,” Vox.

26. It may also be worth noting that not only does the act of ministering to the pain do a potentially grave disservice to others—by effectively validating the incel’s sense that the

world, in general, and women, in particular, owe him certain favors—but it may not even

help the incel, at least in the long term. It may only increase his pain and feed a vicious

cycle, since his pain has its ultimate source in wrongheaded views about the degree to

which he deserves to be attended to, pacified, soothed, nurtured, babied.

27. Patrick Lohmann, “Bianca Devins: Lies, Scams, Misogyny Explode Online Before Facts;

Grieving Family Debunks Rumors,” Syracuse, July 15, 2019, https://www.syracuse.com/

crime/2019/07/bianca-devins-lies-scams-misogyny-explode-online-before-facts-emerge-

grieving-family-debunks-rumors.html.

28. Alia E. Dastagir, “Bianca Devins’ Murder Is ‘Not an Instagram Story,’ Domestic Violence

Expert Says,” USA Today, July 17, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/

2019/07/17/bianca-devins-death-posted-instagram-thats-not-story/1748601001/.

29. In New York, charges of first-degree murder are reserved for premeditated killings that meet certain special conditions—e.g., killing a law enforcement officer, firefighter, judge,

or crime witness; mass killings; killing someone while committing a felony; and killing

someone in a particularly heinous way, such as by torturing them.

30. Dastagir, “Bianca Devins’ Murder Is ‘Not An Instagram Story,’ ” USA Today.

31. Ibid.

32. Ibid.

33. See Mary Emily O’Hara, “Domestic Violence: Nearly Three U.S. Women Killed Every Day

by Intimate Partners,” NBC News, April 11, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-

news/domestic-violence-nearly-three-u-s-women-killed-every-day-n745166, for one

representative recent piece on this well-established statistic.

34. See Down Girl, Introduction and chapter 4—especially the section on the notion of entitled shame and the phenomenon of family annihilators. These are men who murder

not only their female intimate partner or ex-partner but also their children (before killing

themselves, typically). They strike once per week in the United States, on average. Yet

family annihilators have attracted far less attention than incels on the Internet.

35. Dastagir, “Bianca Devins’ Murder Is ‘Not An Instagram Story,’ ” USA Today.

THREE Unexceptional—On the Entitlement to Sex

1. The following account owes heavily to the collection of first-person testimony and subsequent investigative reporting by Bernice Yeung of ProPublica, Mark Greenblatt of

Newsy, and Mark Fahey of Newsy, in collaboration with the Reveal podcast about this

case: “Case Cleared: Part 2,” Reveal, November 17, 2018, https://www.revealnews.org/

episodes/case-cleared-part-2/.

2. However, it’s worth noting that in Minnesota, rape committed by someone with whom the victim is in “an ongoing voluntary relationship” was still prosecuted under a different code

at the time. This led to some successful deployments of the “voluntary relationship

defense,” which entailed a de facto marital rape exception—including in a case of a woman

raped by her ex-husband, while their divorce was still pending. He made a video of the

rape, filmed while their four-year-old child slept nearby. He was sentenced to just forty-

five days in jail, for “invasion of privacy.” Fortunately, this statute was repealed in May

2019, following a public outcry. See Amir Vera, “Marital Rape Is No Longer Legal in

Minnesota with New Law,” CNN, May 3, 2019, https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/03/us/

minnesota-marital-rape-repeal/index.html.

3. For another case that highlights the intersection of disability, sexual violence, and—in this case—racism, consider the Native woman who was raped and subsequently became

pregnant and gave birth, all while being in a comatose state in a nursing facility. Amanda

Sakuma, “A Woman in a Vegetative State Suddenly Gave Birth. Her Alleged Assault Is a

#MeToo Wake-Up Call,” Vox, January 7, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2019/1/7/18171012/

arizona-woman-birth-coma-sexual-assault-metoo.

4. There are general psychological mechanisms that help explain this tendency. Research has shown that when someone is made sympathetic to one party, A, by being told a hard-luck

story about A, that person will tend to become aggressive and hostile to A’s rival, B, during

a simple competitive game in which A and B are engaged. Psychologists established this by

showing that participants gave B more hot sauce to ingest (a standard clinical measure of

aggression) when A had been described in a sympathetic light, as compared with the

control condition, where no such backstory was given. Note that this aggression was shown

toward B despite the facts that B had done nothing objectionable to A, that B might have

had an equally or more sympathetic backstory, and that punishing B would not help A in

the slightest. See Paul Bloom, “The Dark Side of Empathy,” The Atlantic, September 25,

2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2015/09/the-violence-of-empathy/

407155/ for discussion; for the original study, see Anneke E. K. Buffone and Michael J.

Poulin, “Empathy, Target Distress, and Neurohormone Genes Interact to Predict

Aggression for Others—Even Without Provocation,” Personality and Social Psychology

Bulletin 40, no. 11 (2014): 1406–22.

5. The crime took place in January 2015, with the trial in March 2016. Miller was known for years only as Emily Doe, via her moving victim-impact statement. Shortly before this book

went into production, she released an extraordinary memoir, Know My Name, recounting

her experience of the assault and its aftermath. A chilling coincidence emerges in it: Miller

was a student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, when Elliot Rodger struck,

and she was deeply affected by his violence. She writes:

Six classmates had been stolen from us, Elliot the seventh. I do not include the

victims’ names here, for names are sacred, and I do not want them identified

solely by what he did to them.

From Know My Name (New York: Viking, 2019), p. 89. This crystallizes my own

inchoate thinking on these matters, and is why I’ve chosen to continue my practice in

this book of not listing their names in connection with Rodger’s rampage.

6. I draw here on my book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), from the section “Himpathy,” in chapter 6. Another crucial factor to

subsequently emerge, via Miller’s memoir: she is Chinese American, making Turner’s

whiteness (and, hence, comparative privilege) plausibly all the more relevant to the

outcome.

7. See Malcolm Gladwell’s analysis of this case, in his most recent book, where he writes: A young woman and a young man meet at a party, then proceed to tragically

misunderstand each other’s intentions—and they’re drunk….The entire case

turned on the degree of Emily Doe’s drunkenness….

The challenge in these kinds of cases is reconstructing the encounter. Did both

parties consent? Did one party object, and the other party ignore that objection?

Or misunderstand it?…

The outcome of People v. Brock Turner brought a measure of justice to Emily

Doe. But so long as we refuse to acknowledge what alcohol does to the interaction

between strangers, that evening at Kappa Alpha will be repeated again. And again.

From Talking to Strangers (New York: Little, Brown, 2019), chapter 8.

But as Chanel Miller aptly and succinctly put it in a 60 Minutes interview: “Rape is not a

punishment for getting drunk.” Bill Whitaker, “Know My Name: Author and Sexual

Assault Survivor Chanel Miller’s Full 60 Minutes Interview,” CBS News, September 22,

2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chanel-miller-full-60-minutes-interview-know-

my-name-author-brock-turner-sexual-assault-survivor-2019-09-22/.

8. Miller, Know My Name, p. 285.

9. Gabriella Paiella, “Report: Brock Turner Creeped Out Members of the Stanford Women’s

Swim Team,” The Cut, June 16, 2016, https://www.thecut.com/2016/06/report-brock-

turner-creeped-women-out.html.

10. Miller, Know My Name, p. 284.

11. Sam Levin, “Stanford Sexual Assault: Read the Full Text of the Judge’s Controversial

Decision,” The Guardian, June 14, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/

jun/14/stanford-sexual-assault-read-sentence-judge-aaron-persky.

12. ABC did eventually change the headline, however. See Donte Gibson, “Maryland Teen Demanded That ABC News Change Its Maryland School Shooter Headline,” A Plus, March

26, 2018, https://articles.aplus.com/a/great-mills-high-school-shooting-lovesick-teen-

headline.

13. Olly Hennessy-Fiske, Matt Pearce, and Jenny Jarvie, “Must Reads: Texas School Shooter Killed Girl Who Turned Down His Advances and Embarrassed Him in Class, Her Mother

Says,” The Los Angeles Times, May 19, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-

texas-shooter-20180519-story.html.

14. Ibid.

15. Ibid.

16. After outraged reactions on social media, the headline was subsequently amended to read:

“Wife Dies Hours After Her Children Were Killed in Car Inferno Lit by League Player

Father,” Fox Sports Australia, February 19, 2020, https://www.foxsports.com.au/nrl/nrl-

premiership/teams/warriors/exnrl-star-rowan-baxter-dies-alongside-three-kids-in-

brisbane-car-fire-tragedy/news-story/e1b715cb015ff853a4c8ccf115637e30.

17. Kelsey Wilkie, “From Trips to the Beach to Loving Bedtime Stories: How an Ex-Footy Star Portrayed Himself as a Loving Dad Who Would Do Anything for his Three Kids—Before

Killing Them All in Car Fire Horror,” Daily Mail, February 18, 2020,

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-8018989/Rowan-Baxter-died-three-children-

car-set-alight-Brisbane.html.

18. https://twitter.com/thebettinaarndt/status/1230623373232787456?lang=en (accessed February 29, 2020).

19. Arndt’s Twitter handle reads: “Once it was sex that was taboo, now it’s men’s issues. Help

Bettina achieve gender equity through advocacy for men. #MenToo,” https://twitter.com/

thebettinaarndt (accessed February 29, 2020). Well, some men; Arndt is on the record as

having defended a scoutmaster who allegedly abused boys as a “good bloke,” adding that

“such minor abuse rarely has lasting consequences.” See Samantha Maiden, “Independent

Board to Consider Rescinding Bettina Arndt’s Order of Australia Honour,” The New Daily,

February 24, 2020, https://thenewdaily.com.au/news/national/2020/02/24/bettina-

arndt-david-hurley/. This piece also details the subsequent efforts to have Arndt’s honor rescinded.

20. On the phenomenon of family annihilators, see the penultimate note from the previous chapter.

21. Note that the latter does not follow from the former: in Minnesota, people can be prosecuted without ever being arrested.

22. A standard definition of “probable cause” is “a reasonable amount of suspicion, supported by circumstances sufficiently strong to justify a prudent and cautious person’s belief that

certain facts are probably true”; whereas “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” means that

the proposition presented by the prosecution must be proven to the extent that there could

be no reasonable doubt in the mind of a reasonable person about its veracity. See

https://www.lawfirms.com/resources/criminal-defense/defendants-rights/defining-

probable-cause.htm.

23. Itasca County (where Rae Florek lived) has charged more than forty suspects with rape over the past five years. These cases nearly all involved child victims. In the very few

exceptions—i.e., rape cases involving adult victims—the suspect used force or explicit

coercion. And prosecutors rejected around 60 percent of the 170 sex crime cases brought

to them by law enforcement.

24. “Case Cleared: Part 1,” Reveal, November 10, 2018, https://www.revealnews.org/

episodes/case-cleared-part-1/. See also Mark Fahey, “How We Analyzed Rape Clearance

Rates,” ProPublica, November 15, 2018, https://www.propublica.org/article/how-we-

analyzed-rape-clearance-rates.

25. More precisely:

In the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program, law enforcement agencies

can clear, or “close,” offenses in one of two ways: by arrest or by exceptional

means….

CLEARED BY EXCEPTIONAL MEANS

In certain situations, elements beyond law enforcement’s control prevent the

agency from arresting and formally charging the offender. When this occurs, the

agency can clear the offense exceptionally. Law enforcement agencies must meet

the following four conditions in order to clear an offense by exceptional means.

The agency must have:

Identified the offender.

Gathered enough evidence to support an arrest, make a charge, and turn over

the offender to the court for prosecution.

Identified the offender’s exact location so that the suspect could be taken into

custody immediately.

Encountered a circumstance outside the control of law enforcement that

prohibits the agency from arresting, charging, and prosecuting the offender.

Examples of exceptional clearances include, but are not limited to, the death of

the offender (e.g., suicide or justifiably killed by police or citizen); the victim’s

refusal to cooperate with the prosecution after the offender has been identified; or

the denial of extradition because the offender committed a crime in another

jurisdiction and is being prosecuted for that offense. In the UCR Program, the

recovery of property alone does not clear an offense.

See: FBI, “2107: Crime in the United States,” https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/

2017/crime-in-the-u.s.-2017/topic-pages/clearances.

26. Note that even in rape cases where the victim initially comes forward, but later ceases to cooperate with the investigation, this is not—or ought not to be—a decisive barrier to the

police pursuing the case further, and eventual prosecution. As Tom McDevitt told

reporters, they can, for example, search the suspect’s computer and phone, as well as

interview the suspect (since confessions under these circumstances are not uncommon).

They can also, of course, try harder to win the trust and cooperation of the victim—whose

participation in the prosecution is, in any case, not essential. Compare the practice of

building so-called evidence-based cases (which do not rely on the victim’s testimony in

court) against the perpetrators of crimes where victims are reliably reluctant to press

charges—e.g., nonfatal manual strangulation, which I discuss in the Introduction of Down

Girl.

27. For two representative studies that bear out this estimate, see: Marc Riedel and John G.

Boulahanis, “Homicides Exceptionally Cleared and Cleared by Arrest: An Exploratory

Study of Police/Prosecutor Outcomes,” Homicide Studies 11, no. 2 (2007): 151–64, and

John P. Jarvis and Wendy C. Regoeczi, “Homicides Clearances: An Analysis of Arrest

Versus Exceptional Outcomes,” Homicide Studies 13, no. 2 (2009): 174–88.

After this, data collected by The Washington Post also showed around a 10 percent

exceptional clearance rate, on average, for homicide cases in fifty-five major cities between

2007 and 2017. See Dan Bier, “Why Are Unsolved Murders on the Rise?” Freethink,

October 18, 2018, https://www.freethink.com/articles/why-don-t-we-solve-murder-

anymore for a summary.

28. It’s worth noting that the police said that in this case they failed to obtain DNA evidence from the victim’s rape kit. However, given that the man accused by the victim had been

identified by them and had admitted to having sex with her that night (which he said was

consensual), this is far from a decisive barrier to eventual prosecution—especially given

that the initial exam provided evidence that the encounter had been violent. See “Case

Cleared: Part 1,” Reveal.

29. Nancy Kaffer, “Kaffer: 8 Years into Tests of Abandoned Rape Kits, Worthy Works for

Justice,” Detroit Free Press, December 17, 2017, https://www.freep.com/story/opinion/

columnists/nancy-kaffer/2017/12/17/rape-kit-detroit/953083001/.

30. Ibid.

31. Consider, too, the phenomenon of police officers perpetrating sexual assault—and, often, getting away with it. See Jonathan Blanks, “The Police Who Prey on Victims,” Democracy

Journal, November 1, 2017, https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/the-police-who-

prey-on-victims/; and see, in chapter 6 of Down Girl, “Misogynoir in Action: The Daniel Holtzclaw Case,” for further relevant discussion.

32. Eliza Relman, “The 24 Women Who Have Accused Trump of Sexual Misconduct,”

Business Insider, June 21, 2019, https://www.businessinsider.com/women-accused-

trump-sexual-misconduct-list-2017-12.

33. Up until this point, Epstein had served just thirteen months in a private wing of a Palm Beach county jail for these crimes. He was granted work release to go to an office described

as comfortable for some twelve hours a day, six days a week. This despite the fact that work

release is not permitted for sex offenders in this jurisdiction. These exceptions were made

for Epstein due to a plea deal he made in 2008 with Alexander Acosta, then Miami U.S.

Attorney and now Trump’s labor secretary. The non-prosecution agreement also granted

immunity to “any potential co-conspirators” and even concealed the plea deal from thirty

of the victims—many of whom did not know, until recently, about Epstein’s shockingly

lenient sentence. Thanks to the particular victims selected in the plea deal arranged by

Acosta—the youngest of whom was sixteen at the time of the alleged sexual abuse, whereas

many victims were significantly younger—Epstein was even able to avoid having to register

as a sex offender in any of the states in which he had a residence, Florida included.

Were it not for the trenchant efforts of one journalist, Julie K. Brown, Epstein would

likely have continued to get away with his crimes having faced only these minimal

consequences. As it was, he was arrested on sex trafficking charges in July 2019, before

committing suicide in jail in August. See Tiffany Hsu, “The Jeffrey Epstein Case Was Cold,

Until a Miami Herald Reporter Got Accusers to Talk,” The New York Times, July 9, 2019,

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/09/business/media/miami-herald-epstein.html.

34. Jennifer Peltz, “Over 1,000 Arrests Nationwide After Authorities Test Backlogged Rape

Kits,” HuffPost, March 13, 2019, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/new-york-feds-join-to-

get-100k-rape-kits-tested-around-us_n_5c88f54fe4b0fbd7661f8840?

ncid=engmodushpmg00000006.

35. I am in fact sympathetic, without being committed, to prison abolitionism. But this is another issue, and one I won’t weigh in on here.

36. Andrew Van Dam, “Less Than 1% of Rapes Lead to Felony Convictions. At Least 89% of Victims Face Emotional and Physical Consequences,” The Washington Post, October 6,

2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2018/10/06/less-than-percent-rapes-

lead-felony-convictions-least-percent-victims-face-emotional-physical-consequences/. For a compelling first-hand account of rape and its aftermath, see the philosopher Susan J.

Brison’s book, Aftermath: Violence and the Remaking of a Self (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2002).

37. See RAINN, “The Criminal Justice System: Statistics,” https://www.rainn.org/statistics/

criminal-justice-system.

38. In this section, I draw on a group blog post for The Daily Nous I contributed to, which was convened by Justin Weinberg: “Philosophers on the Art of Morally Troubling Artists,”

November 21, 2017, http://dailynous.com/2017/11/21/philosophers-art-morally-

troubling-artists/.

39. Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body (New York: HarperCollins, 2017), p. 44.

40. Tara Culp-Ressler, “Five Important Takeaways from a New National Study on U.S. Teens

and Sexual Violence,” Think Progress, 2013, https://thinkprogress.org/five-important-

takeaways-from-a-new-national-study-on-u-s-teens-and-sexual-violence-9d454f54cea1/.

41. See, e.g., David Finkelhor, Richard Ormrod, and Mark Chaffin, “Juveniles Who Commit

Sex Offenses Against Minors,” OJJDP Bulletin, December 2009, https://www.ncjrs.gov/

pdffiles1/ojjdp/227763.pdf.

42. See the discussions of testimonial injustice, quieting, and smothering in chapters 5 and 8.

43. T. Christian Miller and Ken Armstrong, “An Unbelievable Story of Rape,” ProPublica,

December 16, 2015, https://www.propublica.org/article/false-rape-accusations-an-

unbelievable-story; the case has subsequently been dramatized in the TV series

Unbelievable.

44. Ibrahim’s mother, Sandra Allen, commented:

We found out that within days of her reporting the attack the police started

investigating [her]….The police trot out these words that victims will be believed

but I don’t think they ever bothered investigating what Layla was saying from the

beginning. I will fight for her innocence to my dying day. What happened to her

was beyond horrific, she suffered that night, she suffered in prison and she is still

suffering.

Ibrahim’s lawyer, Nigel Richardson, added:

These cases seem to be pursued with a particular vehemence by the police and CPS

[Crown Prosecution Service]. It’s as though lying to the police, as they would see it,

demands a really heavy reaction. There comes a moment when the woman goes

from being a victim in the eyes of the police to a suspect. She may not even know

that has happened.

From Sandra Laville, “109 Women Prosecuted for False Rape Claims in Five Years, Say

Campaigners,” The Guardian, December 1, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/law/

2014/dec/01/109-women-prosecuted-false-rape-allegations.

45. As Richard Ackland wrote in The Guardian:

In every instance, the judge preferred the applicant’s evidence. [Rush’s witness]

Armfield didn’t see any of the inappropriate behaviour, nor did Buday; some of the

allegations were not put to Winter; things Norvill said in evidence were not in her

original prepared statement; and she sent Rush friendly greetings and text

messages even after he had allegedly behaved “inappropriately” towards her.

The judgment does not adequately explore why this may have been so. There

was no explicit judicial recognition of the close friendship between Rush’s main

theatre witnesses, an aspect that should have been considered and carefully

weighed.

It is also entirely possible that…even though Norvill had an unhappy time

during the King Lear production she still wanted to keep a good relationship with

a significant star like Rush. None of that was sufficiently explored in the

judgment….

Norvill gave evidence that…she had a conversation with Nevin in which she

said Rush had harassed her. She told the court that Nevin’s response was, “I didn’t

think Geoffrey was doing that anymore.”

[The judge] did not accept that Norvill had taken her concerns to Nevin.

He rejected the accusation that Rush consciously stroked her right breast:

“How could Mr. Rush maintain the focus and state of mind which he considered

necessary to properly perform this difficult scene, and yet engage in such a base

and crude action as intentionally stroking Ms. Norvill’s breast?”

As for the “socially inappropriate thoughts” with the panting emoji this too

went nowhere. While many might regard this as suggestive of an older man

salivating at the thought of a younger woman, Justice Wigney arrived at an

entirely different conclusion—it was a throwaway line, a joke, and it simply meant

the actor was sorry for missing the opening night of a play in which Norvill was

performing.

It was not believable that Rush was “putting it out there.”

From Richard Ackland, “The Geoffrey Rush Trial Shows Defamation Can Make

Victims Become Victims All Over Again,” The Guardian, April 17, 2019,

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/18/the-geoffrey-rush-trial-

shows-defamation-can-make-victims-become-victims-all-over-again.

46. Rush was initially awarded AUD$850,000 in damages from The Daily Telegraph, which

published stories detailing Norvill’s accusations. For details about the eventual, much

larger defamation payout, see Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore, “Geoffrey Rush Awarded $2

Million in Defamation Case, a Record for Australia,” The New York Times, May 23, 2019,

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/world/australia/geoffrey-rush-defamation.html.

47. Nicole Pasulka, “How 4 Gay Black Women Fought Back Against Sexual Harassment—and

Landed in Jail,” Code Switch, NPR, June 30, 2015, https://www.npr.org/sections/

codeswitch/2015/06/30/418634390/how-4-gay-black-women-fought-back-against-a-

sexual-harasser-and-landed-in-jail.

48. As with many of the themes of this book, I strongly suspect the same holds, and worse, for non-binary people.

49. A far more accurate term is “nonconsensual pornography,” since many of the perpetrators are not motivated by revenge—and, in any case, their motivations are not what primarily

matters here. For a compelling treatment of this phenomenon, together with its gendered

nature and legal ramifications, see Danielle Keats Citron, Hate Crimes in Cyberspace

(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014).

FOUR Unwanted—On the Entitlement to Consent

1. Kristen Roupenian, “Cat Person,” The New Yorker, December 4, 2017,

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/12/11/cat-person.

2. Bari Weiss, “Aziz Ansari Is Guilty. Of Not Being a Mind Reader,” The New York Times,

January 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/opinion/aziz-ansari-babe-

sexual-harassment.html.

3. Katie Way, “I Went on a Date with Aziz Ansari. It Turned into the Worst Night of My Life,”

Babe, January 13, 2018, https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355.

4. Compare the notorious scene from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia (Episode: “The Guys Buy a Boat”) where a man opines to his friend that persuading a woman to have sex would

be easier on a boat, because of the implication that if she refuses, harm may come to her—

and her body could then be conveniently disposed of at sea. This man doesn’t intend to

harm women, personally—merely to benefit from “the implication.”

5. Jennifer Van Evra, “Sarah Silverman’s Response to a Twitter Troll Is a Master Class in

Compassion,” CBC, January 3, 2018, https://www.cbc.ca/radio/q/blog/sarah-silverman-s-

response-to-a-twitter-troll-is-a-master-class-in-compassion-1.4471337.

6. Caitlin Flanagan, “The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari,” The Atlantic, January 14, 2018,

https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/the-humiliation-of-aziz-

ansari/550541/.

7. Not to mention hypocritical, given Ansari’s having built much of his career on a reputation for wokeness vis-à-vis “modern romance”: the phrase serves as the title of his 2015 book

and is one of the main themes of Master of None, his popular TV show on Netflix.

8. Daniel Holloway, “Netflix Wants Aziz Ansari’s Master of None to Return for Season 3,

Originals Chief Says,” Variety, July 29, 2018, https://variety.com/2018/tv/news/netflix-

aziz-ansari-master-of-none-1202889434/.

9. Stanley Milgram, Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).

10. Ibid., p. 6.

11. Matthew Hollander, “The Repertoire of Resistance: Non-Compliance with Directives in Milgram’s ‘Obedience’ Experiments,” British Journal of Social Psychology 54, no. 3

(2015): 425–44.

12. Milgram, Obedience to Authority, p. 9.

13. Ibid., p. 6.

14. Somewhat reduced (but still significant) rates of obedience were obtained by varying the

original condition on this score—e.g., by having the experimenter operate out of a shady

basement in Connecticut, with no ostensible affiliation with the famous university.

Milgram implemented many other conditions, some of which significantly affected the

results of the experiment—e.g., having an experimenter deliver his instructions by phone

(which markedly reduced rates of obedience) and having two experimenters, who argued

with one another (which massively reduced rates of obedience). Ibid., chapters 6 and 8.

Another interesting condition would have been varying the experimenter’s gender, by

running the experiment with a female authority figure. But as far as I have been able to tell,

this was never attempted.

15. Ibid., p. 21.

16. It’s also possible that all the participants who were given the fourth prompt were on their way out of there already. However, the interpretation in the text also fits with other

findings in social psychology—e.g., a study that showed that when asked for bus fare by a

stranger at a bus stop, people gave twice the amount of money on average if they were

explicitly told “But you are free to agree or refuse” by the person asking. See Christopher

Carpenter, “A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of the ‘But You Are Free’ Compliance-

Gaining Technique,” Communication Studies 64, no. 1 (2013): 6–17.

17. In a more general discussion of results in social psychology that include, but are not exhausted by, the Milgram experiments, John Sabini and Maury Silver write:

We suggest, then, that there is a single thread that runs through social

psychology’s discoveries of people acting in surprising and demoralizing ways:

people’s understandings of the world—…the moral world in the case of the

obedience experiments…—are strongly influenced by what they take to be other

people’s perceptions of those worlds. We smugly assume that we stick to our guns

when no one challenges us, but it turns out that it is harder than we think to do

this when we must face (without allies) a confrontation with other people’s

apparent views.

And, the theme continues, the emotional price people pay when they face a

situation in which they must act by their own lights contrary to what they think are

others’ lights is embarrassment. People who must act in such circumstances are

confused and inhibited by the anticipation of embarrassment, and that we argue is

the lesson to be drawn from social psychological research. People are also, we

suggest, unaware of how potent fear of embarrassment is as a motivation for

behavior.

From John Sabini and Maury Silver, “Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued,”

Ethics 115, no. 3 (2005): 559.

18. See “Harvey Weinstein: Full Transcript of the ‘Horrifying’ Exchange with Ambra

Gutierrez,” ABC News, October 10, 2017, https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-10-11/

harvey-weinstein-full-transcript-of-audio-with-ambra-gutierrez/9037268.

19. Ronan Farrow, “From Aggressive Overtures to Sexual Assault: Harvey Weinstein’s

Accusers Tell Their Stories,” The New Yorker, October 10, 2017,

https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/from-aggressive-overtures-to-sexual-

assault-harvey-weinsteins-accusers-tell-their-stories. Of course, my discussion of

Weinstein in the context of this chapter, which focuses on the “soft” side of sexual

coercion, in connection with a male sense of entitlement not only to sex but also to

consent, should not distract readers from the highly credible evidence of Weinstein’s

outright sexual assaults against multiple victims—in view of which he was convicted of

rape and a criminal sex act in February 2020.

20. Anonymous, “We Need to Talk About Sexual Assault in Marriage,” Vox, March 8, 2018,

https://www.vox.com/first-person/2018/3/8/17087628/sexual-assault-marriage-metoo.

21. The author of the Vox piece cited in note 20, just above, mentions not only how difficult it was to speak about her experiences with her husband but how “nearly every woman with

whom I have broached this subject has shared stories—her own, a friend’s, or both—about

suffering unwanted sex in marriage.” And yet, as she rightly points out, such accounts are

hard to come by (and even hers is understandably anonymous).

22. Salma Hayek, “Harvey Weinstein Is My Monster Too,” The New York Times, December

12, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/12/13/opinion/contributors/salma-

hayek-harvey-weinstein.html.

23. I draw here on my piece “Salma Hayek Was Destroyed by the Same Shame That Protected

Harvey Weinstein,” Newsweek, December 14, 2017, https://www.newsweek.com/salma-

hayek-shame-harvey-weinstein-748377.

24. Although these are fictional cases, they establish what I need for present purposes—the intelligibility of the social-sexual dynamics in question, regardless of how often they are

instantiated in reality. (As a matter of fact, I do suspect that many people will recognize

their own experiences in these portraits; but, admittedly, this is speculative.)

25. I draw here on my piece “Good Girls: How Powerful Men Get Away with Sexual

Predation,” HuffPost, March 24, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/good-girls-or-

why-powerful-men-get-to-keep-on-behaving_b_58d5b420e4b0f633072b37c3.

26. J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (New York: Penguin, 1999), p. 23.

27. Ibid.

28. Ibid., p. 28.

29. Ibid., p. 53.

FIVE Incompetent—On the Entitlement to Medical Care

1. Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (New York: New Press, 2019), p. 82.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid., p. 83.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., pp. 83–84.

6. Ibid., pp. 84–85.

7. Ibid., p. 85.

8. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Pregnancy Mortality Surveillance System,

https://www.cdc.gov/reproductivehealth/maternalinfanthealth/pregnancy-mortality-

surveillance-system.htm.

9. A recent analysis of births in New York City found that “Black college-educated mothers who gave birth in local hospitals were more likely to suffer severe complications of

pregnancy or childbirth than white women who never graduated from high school”—

noting that highest educational level attained is a fairly reliable proxy for income. See New

York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, Severe Maternal Morbidity in New

York City, 2008–2012 (New York, 2016), https://www1.nyc.gov/assets/doh/downloads/

pdf/data/maternal-morbidity-report-08-12.pdf.

10. See Linda Villarosa, “Why America’s Black Mothers and Babies Are in a Life-or-Death

Crisis,” The New York Times, April 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/

magazine/black-mothers-babies-death-maternal-mortality.html.

11. Maya Salam, “For Serena Williams, Childbirth Was a Harrowing Ordeal. She’s Not Alone,”

The New York Times, January 11, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/11/sports/

tennis/serena-williams-baby-vogue.html.

12. Cottom, Thick, pp. 85–86.

13. By the time women were referred to this specialty pain clinic, they had experienced pain for longer, and were older, than their male counterparts. In another study of a pain clinic,

women were more likely to have been referred to the clinic by a specialist; men, by a

general practitioner. As Hoffmann and Tarzian point out, “the results suggest that women

experience disbelief or other obstacles at their initial encounters with health-care

providers.” Diane E. Hoffmann and Anita J. Tarzian, “The Girl Who Cried Pain: A Bias

Against Women in the Treatment of Pain,” Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics 29

(2001), p. 17.

14. Of course, receiving opiates for pain relief is, in some cases, at best a mixed blessing, given the opioid crisis in this country. However, the point here is just that the prescription of

opiates to boys and men, rather than non-narcotic pain medication that’s widely available

over the counter, indicates that male pain is being taken more seriously than female pain—

regardless of what constitutes best clinical practices, bearing in mind the risk of

dependency.

15. Hoffmann and Tarzian, “The Girl Who Cried Pain,” p. 19.

16. Ibid., p. 20.

17. Anke Samulowitz, Ida Gremyr, Erik Eriksson, and Gunnel Hensing, “ ‘Brave Men’ and

‘Emotional Women’: A Theory-Guided Literature Review on Gender Bias in Health Care

and Gendered Norms Towards Patients with Chronic Pain,” Pain Research and

Management 2018 (2018), p. 10.

Similarly, when it came to emergency room treatment, Caroline Criado Perez writes: “A

US Institute of Medicine publication on chronic pain released in 2011 suggested that not

much has changed [since the 1990s and 2000s], reporting that women in pain face ‘delays

in correct diagnosis, improper and unproven treatments,’ and ‘neglect, dismissal and

discrimination’ from the healthcare system.” Caroline Criado Perez, Invisible Women:

Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (New York: Abrams, 2019), p. 228.

18. Samulowitz et al., p. 8.

19. In one study, many providers interviewed about patients with fibromyalgia held them to be time-consuming and frustrating malingerers. Some patients were even held accountable

for their own pain by clinicians. Ibid., p. 5.

20. Ibid., p. 7.

21. Ibid., p. 5.

22. Kate Hunt, Joy Adamson, Catherine Hewitt, and Irwin Nazareth, “Do Women Consult

More Than Men? A Review of Gender and Consultation for Back Pain and Headache,”

Journal of Health Services Research and Policy 16, no. 2 (2011): 108–13.

23. Ibid., p. 109.

24. Ibid., p. 116.

25. Ibid., p. 109.

26. Ibid., p. 116.

27. See Lindsey L. Cohen, Jean Cobb, and Sarah R. Martin, “Gender Biases in Adult Ratings of Pediatric Pain,” Children’s Health Care 43, no. 2 (2014): 87–95, and Brian D. Earp, Joshua

T. Monrad, Marianne LaFrance, John A. Bargh, Lindsey L. Cohen, and Jennifer A.

Richeson, “Gender Bias in Pediatric Pain Assessment,” Journal of Pediatric Psychology

44, no. 4 (2019): 403–14.

28. Interestingly, the most recent replication of this study, by Earp et al. (ibid.), produced a significant effect for female but not male participants viewing the footage. The explanation

for this is unclear, but it jibes with the fact that many gender biases hold just as much for

women as for men—or perhaps, in this case, more so. See chapter 9 in this book for a

discussion of some such biases.

29. This is as opposed to a trait (supposedly) being hardwired due to differences that emerge later—e.g., hormonal factors that kick in in adolescence.

30. Samulowitz et. al., “ ‘Brave Men’ and ‘Emotional Women,’ ” p. 10.

31. I say “privileged” partly because racism as well as misogyny—together with their toxic intersection, misogynoir, of which more shortly—undoubtedly plays a crucial role in

inadequate pain treatment. In 2016, a landmark study shed light on the reason why, as the

researchers note, “Black Americans are systematically undertreated for pain relative to

white Americans.” They investigated the prevalence of false beliefs about biological

differences between Black and white people (e.g., “Black people’s skin is thicker than white

people’s skin”), and found that a full half of their sample of white medical students and

residents harbored such false beliefs. These participants were also significantly more likely

to believe that a Black patient was experiencing less pain than a white counterpart, and

made less accurate recommendations when it came to their pain management. See Kelly

M. Hoffman, Sophie Trawalter, Jordan R. Axt, and M. Norman Oliver, “Racial Bias in Pain

Assessment,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 113, no. 16 (2016): 4296–

4301.

32. Kristie Dotson, “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia 26, no. 2 (2011): 242. A discussion of Dotson’s concept of testimonial smothering, a kind of

coerced self-silencing, will follow in chapter 8, “Unassuming.”

33. Miranda Fricker, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), chapters 1–2.

34. For a history of the term, coined by Bailey in 2008 and written about online since 2010 by Bailey and Trudy (a.k.a. @thetrudz), see their coauthored article: Moya Bailey and Trudy,

“On Misogynoir: Citation, Erasure, and Plagiarism,” Feminist Media Studies 18, no. 4

(2018): 762–68.

35. Jazmine Joyner, “Nobody Believes That Black Women Are in Pain, and It’s Killing Us,”

Wear Your Voice Magazine, May 25, 2018, https://wearyourvoicemag.com/race/black-

women-are-in-pain.

36. Compare the experiences of Rachel, who also suffered from a twisted fallopian tube, as written about by her husband. See Joe Fassler, “How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less

Seriously,” The Atlantic, October 15, 2015, https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/

2015/10/emergency-room-wait-times-sexism/410515/. But without wishing to detract one iota from the terrible suffering and injustice Rachel experienced, it is striking that her story

received far more uptake (and appeared in a premier venue), in contrast to Joyner’s. For,

often, misogynoir partly consists in the hostile indifference toward Black women’s

suffering and the injustices they face—in contrast to Rachel, a presumptively white woman.

There is also the fact that Rachel’s story was told by her husband, and thus plausibly

benefited from the weight of his (male) testimony.

37. Jazmine Joyner, “Nobody Believes That Black Women Are in Pain,” Wear Your Voice Magazine.

38. Valuable conversations with Tammy Nyden helped me recognize the extent to which

mothers of mentally ill children are disproportionately punished within the U.S. medical

system—stigmatized as “bad” women and blamed for their children’s struggles.

39. Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2000), p. 72.

40. Similarly, when women testify against powerful men, e.g., about their sexual and other abuses, there is a marked tendency to discount their word—as opposed to when they testify

in these men’s favor, whereupon testimonial injustice becomes much less of an issue. So,

again, such dismissals are neither random nor universal for speakers who belong to a

particular social category. Instead, they often work to uphold and sustain existing social

hierarchies. See my book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2018), Introduction and chapter 6, for discussion. And more on these

issues follows here, in chapter 8, “Unassuming.”

41. Angela Garbes, Like a Mother: A Feminist Journey Through the Science and Culture of Pregnancy (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), p. 28.

42. I say “actually” because, as recent Pew statistics show, white women have among the lowest rates of interracial marriage of any other group. See “Intermarriage in the U.S.,

50 Years After Loving v. Virginia, ” May 18, 2017, https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2017/

05/18/1-trends-and-patterns-in-intermarriage/.

43. Criado Perez, Invisible Women, p. 234.

44. Ibid.

45. Ibid., p. 196.

46. Even nonhuman animal studies exhibit this prevalent bias: a 2014 survey found that some 80 percent of the studies that specified sex used only male animals, despite the somewhat

greater variability of, e.g., male rats than female rats. Ibid., p. 205.

47. Ibid., p. 209.

48. Ibid., p. 228.

49. Ibid., pp. 212–18.

50. Ibid., pp. 204–05.

51. Ibid., p. 222.

52. Cory Doctorow, “Women Are Much More Likely to Be Injured in Car Crashes, Probably Because Crash-Test Dummies Are Mostly Male-Shaped,” Boing Boing, July 23, 2019,

https://boingboing.net/2019/07/23/in-every-dreamhome-a-heartache.html.

53. Criado Perez, Invisible Women, p. 233.

54. Ibid., p. 233

55. Ibid., p. 234.

SIX Unruly—On the Entitlement to Bodily Control

1. Six Democrats, including two female Democrats, voted no on the bill; three state senators (one female Democrat and two male Republicans) did not vote for the bill; and one female

Democrat abstained from voting.

2. The bill, dubbed the “Human Life Protection Act,” also reclassified abortion as a class A felony, punishable by up to ninety-nine years in prison for doctors who perform abortions.

For details on how the law was subsequently frozen, see Alice Miranda, “Federal Judge

Blocks Alabama’s Near-Total Abortion Ban,” Politico, October 29, 2019,

https://www.politico.com/news/2019/10/29/federal-judge-blocks-alabamas-near-total-

abortion-ban-061069.

3. Constitutionally protected at the time of writing—although, given Brett Kavanaugh’s well-known anti-abortion stance and his position on the Supreme Court, this may not be true

for much longer.

4. Jessica Glenza, “The Anti-Gay Extremist Behind America’s Fiercely Strict Abortion Bans,”

The Guardian, April 25, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/25/the-

anti-abortion-crusader-hopes-her-heartbeat-law-will-test-roe-v-wade.

Such bills have been signed into law (if only to be subsequently struck down) in seven

states at the time of writing: Iowa, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Dakota, Ohio, Georgia,

and Missouri. The Alabama law with which I opened is even stricter.

5. Anti-abortion activism has also, for many years, whittled away access to clinics, many of which have shut down as a result of this. See my book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), chapter 3, for discussion.

6. Katie Heaney, “Embryos Don’t Have Hearts,” The Cut, May 24, 2019,

https://www.thecut.com/2019/05/embryos-dont-have-hearts.html.

7. Lydia O’Connor, “The Lawmakers Behind ‘Fetal Heartbeat’ Abortion Bans Are Lying to

You,” HuffPost, May 22, 2019, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/six-week-fetal-heartbeat-

abortion-ban-lies_n_5ce42ccae4b075a35a2e6fb0.

8. Kate Smith, “A Pregnant 11-Year-Old Rape Victim in Ohio Would No Longer Be Allowed to Have an Abortion Under New State Law,” CBS News, May 14, 2019,

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ohio-abortion-heartbeat-bill-pregnant-11-year-old-rape-

victim-barred-abortion-after-new-ohio-abortion-bill-2019-05-13/.

9. Jonathan Stempel, “U.S. Judge Blocks Ohio ‘Heartbeat’ Law to End Most Abortions,”

Reuters, July 3, 2019, https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-abortion-ohio/u-s-judge-

blocks-ohio-heartbeat-law-to-end-most-abortions-idUSKCN1TY2PK.

10. Laurie Penny, “The Criminalization of Women’s Bodies Is All About Conservative Male

Power,” The New Republic, May 17, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/153942/

criminalization-womens-bodies-conservative-male-power.

11. Daniel Politi, “Trump: After Birth, Baby Is ‘Wrapped’ in a Blanket and Mother, Doctor

Decide Whether to ‘Execute the Baby,’ ” Slate, April 28, 2019, https://slate.com/news-and-

politics/2019/04/trump-abortion-baby-wrapped-blanket-execute-baby.html.

And compare Vice President Mike Pence’s tweet, in reference to an anti-abortion protest

in Times Square in May 2019, which featured a live ultrasound of a fetus in the third

trimester projected onto a giant screen: “As Democrat Governors in NY & VA advocate for

late term abortion & even infanticide—& Democrats in Congress refuse to allow a vote on

the Born-Alive bill—TODAY in Times Square an ultrasound will be shown for all to see,

demonstrating the miracle of life” (https://twitter.com/vp/status/1124742840184201216?

lang=en).

12. Anti-abortion activists have hijacked the expression “late-term,” which is a medical expression used to describe pregnancies that extend past forty weeks. See Pam Belluck,

“What Is Late-Term Abortion? Trump Got It Wrong,” The New York Times, February 6,

2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/06/health/late-term-abortion-trump.html.

13. Jia Tolentino, “Interview with a Woman Who Recently Had an Abortion at 32 Weeks,”

Jezebel, June 15, 2016, https://jezebel.com/interview-with-a-woman-who-recently-had-

an-abortion-at-1781972395.

14. The procedure then involved giving Elizabeth a shot to prevent labor until she could fly back to New York, where she delivered the baby—vaginally, but without pushing, with the

doctor using forceps and sheer muscle to extract the fetus manually (a tremendously

painful procedure, and not one they could have ethically performed had the fetus still been

alive).

Full abortion procedures at that Colorado clinic cost $25,000. And the clinic is barely

keeping its head above water, partly due to the danger pay needed to retain staff. At the

time Tolentino’s interview was published, the roof was in fact leaking.

15. Lori Mooreaug, “Rep. Todd Akin: The Statement and the Reaction,” The New York Times,

August 20, 2012, https://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/21/us/politics/rep-todd-akin-

legitimate-rape-statement-and-reaction.html.

16. Susan Milligan, “Go Back to Health Class,” U.S. News & World Report, February 24, 2015,

https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/susan-milligan/2015/02/24/idaho-lawmaker-

asks-about-swallowing-cameras-to-get-pregnancy-pictures.

17. The lawmaker in question was advocating insurance coverage for a nonexistent procedure.

See Kayla Epstein, “A Sponsor of an Ohio Abortion Bill Thinks You Can Reimplant

Ectopic Pregnancies. You Can’t,” The Washington Post, May 10, 2019,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/2019/05/10/sponsor-an-ohio-abortion-bill-

thinks-you-can-reimplant-ectopic-pregnancies-you-cant/.

18. Occasionally an ectopic pregnancy that has implanted somewhere other than the fallopian tube (e.g., in the abdomen) has been viable. But this is an extremely rare occurrence.

19. According to recent data, bleeding from an ectopic pregnancy is responsible for 4–10

percent of all pregnancy-related deaths and is the leading cause of death in the first

trimester in the United States. See Krissi Danielsson, “Ectopic Pregnancy Statistics,”

Verywell Family, published August 1, 2019, updated October 29, 2019,

https://www.verywellfamily.com/what-do-statistics-look-like-for-ectopic-pregnancy-

2371730.

20. Georgi Boorman, “Is Abortion Really Necessary for Treating Ectopic Pregnancies?” The

Federalist, September 9, 2019, https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/09/is-abortion-really-

necessary-for-treating-ectopic-pregnancies/.

21. https://twitter.com/DrJenGunter/status/1171167907834806272 (accessed September 18, 2019).

22. In response to widespread condemnation from the medical community, Boorman

eventually apologized for her article, saying it no longer expresses her opinion. See “I Was

Wrong: Sometimes It’s Necessary to Remove Ectopic Babies to Save Their Mother’s Life,”

The Federalist, September 19, 2019, https://thefederalist.com/2019/09/19/i-was-wrong-

sometimes-its-necessary-to-remove-ectopic-babies-to-save-their-mothers-life/. But the

original article is still available on The Federalist at the time of writing (September 23,

2019), albeit with a link to Boorman’s subsequent apology and recanting.

Notably, the mortality rate for ectopic pregnancies is vastly (nearly seven times) higher

for Black women as compared with white ones—part of a pattern of dismal healthcare for

Black women that was a major focus in the previous chapter.

23. Jess Morales Rocketto, “Seven Children Have Died in Immigration Custody. Remember

Their Names,” BuzzFeed News, September 30, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/

article/jessmoralesrocketto/remember-their-names.

24. Jay Parini, “Alabama’s ‘Pro-Life’ Governor Is a Hypocrite,” CNN, May 17, 2019,

https://www.cnn.com/2019/05/16/opinions/alabama-kay-ivey-hypocrisy-parini/

index.html.

25. Roni Caryn Rabin, “Huge Racial Disparities Found in Deaths Linked to Pregnancy,” The

New York Times, May 7, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/07/health/pregnancy-

deaths-.html.

26. Nor are they prone to raise much of a fuss about a vast swathe of vulnerable beings with heartbeats who are brutally slaughtered by the billions every year in the U.S. alone: the

non-human animals subject to factory farming. Consider also the non-human animals

subject to unnecessary and cruel forms of experimentation and testing.

27. Maggie Fox, “Abortion Rates Go Down When Countries Make It Legal: Report,” NBC

News, May 20, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-care/abortion-rates-go-

down-when-countries-make-it-legal-report-n858476.

28. Reva B. Siegel and Linda Greenhouse, “Before (and After) Roe v. Wade: New Questions About Backlash,” Faculty Scholarship Series 4135 (2011): 2056–2057.

https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?

article=5151&context=fss_papers.

29. Ibid., p. 2057.

30. Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel, Before Roe v. Wade: Voices that Shaped the Abortion Debate Before the Supreme Court’s Ruling (New York: Kaplan, 2010), p. 257.

As Greenhouse and Siegel go on to show in their article, though, Nixon’s anti-abortion

stance had limited efficacy in the end:

The Nixon campaign saw the strategic benefit in invoking abortion for its power in

signaling social conservatism; staking out a position on abortion itself appeared to

offer little benefit. On August 28, 1972, campaign strategists sent John Ehrlichman

“data showing ‘a sizeable majority of Americans, including Roman Catholics, now

favoring liberal abortion laws,’ ” and “the president decided to leave [the] matter

to the states,…privately affirm[ing] that ‘abortion reform’ was ‘not proper ground

for Federal action’ ” and that he “ ‘would never take action as President.’ ” Only

three days before, the mid-1972 Gallup poll published in newspapers around the

country showed that “a record high of 64 percent support full liberalization of

abortion laws,” a sharp increase from the preceding January. In contrast to the

doctrinal message being preached with increasing vigor by the Church hierarchy,

the new poll showed that substantial numbers of Catholics in fact supported

liberalizing access to abortion: “Fifty-six per cent of Catholics believe that abortion

should be decided by a woman and her doctor.”…In November 1972, two months

before the Supreme Court handed down Roe v. Wade, Nixon won reelection with

the support of a majority of the Catholic voters, although abortion was not a

significant determinant in attracting votes. Soon after, when the Court handed

down Roe, Nixon “directed his aides to ‘keep out’ of the case.”

From Greenhouse and Siegel, “Before (and After) Roe v. Wade, p. 2058.

31. Greenhouse and Siegel, Before Roe v. Wade, p. 257.

32. Michelle Oberman and W. David Ball, “When We Talk About Abortion, Let’s Talk About

Men,” The New York Times, June 2, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/02/

opinion/abortion-laws-men.html.

33. Jill Filipovic, “Alabama’s Abortion Bill Is Immoral, Inhumane, and Wildly Inconsistent,”

Vanity Fair, May 15, 2019, https://www.vanityfair.com/style/2019/05/alabamas-

abortion-bill-is-immoral-inhumane-and-wildly-inconsistent.

34. Although many trans boys and men, as well as non-binary people who can become

pregnant, are just as much affected by the resulting policies.

35. Pace Laurie Penny, when she writes that the anti-abortion laws canvassed in this chapter

“are about women as things.” “The Criminalization of Women’s Bodies,”

https://newrepublic.com/article/153942/criminalization-womens-bodies-conservative-

male-power.

36. Some of the many anti-choice Republican men who are known to have enabled or actively

pressured their female sexual partners to have abortions include Scott Lloyd, Elliott

Broidy, Tim Murphy, and Scott DesJarlais. The former two even paid (in full or in part) for

the procedure. See Arwa Mahdawi, “A Republican Theme on Abortions: ‘It’s OK for Me,

Evil for Thee,’ ” The Guardian, August 25, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/world/

2018/aug/25/a-republican-theme-on-abortions-its-ok-for-me-evil-for-thee.

37. Emily Oster, Expecting Better: Why the Conventional Pregnancy Wisdom Is Wrong—

and What You Really Need to Know (New York: Penguin, 2018), pp. 40–52.

38. This isn’t to deny that these benefits exist, of course—just that they must be rationally

weighed against the risks, difficulty, or impossibility of a vaginal birth for many patients.

And see the obstetrician-gynecologist Amy Tuteur’s book, Push Back: Guilt in the Age of

Natural Parenting (New York: Dey Street, 2016), for a fascinating account of how

anything other than so-called natural childbirth came to be a source of intense, needless

guilt for birth parents. And for a compelling, more general, account of the policing of

gestation, see Quill R Kukla, writing as Rebecca Kukla, Mass Hysteria: Medicine, Culture,

and Mothers’ Bodies (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2005).

39. Emily Oster, Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from

Birth to Preschool (New York: Penguin, 2019), chapter 4.

40. The same lack of consideration of the costs and benefits will often apply to chestfeeding,

for trans male birth parents—although transphobic and exclusionary views may conspire

to make this an even more fraught site of bodily control, guilting, shaming, and so on.

41. Kirsten Powers, “Kevin Williamson Is Wrong. Hanging Women Who Have an Abortion Is

Not Pro-Life,” USA Today, April 6, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2018/

04/06/kevin-williamson-atlantic-fired-hanging-women-who-have-abortion-column/

491590002/. And see Down Girl, pp. 96–98, for further discussion of such views.

42. Ronald Brownstein, “White Women Are Helping States Pass Abortion Restrictions,” The

Atlantic, May 23, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/05/white-

women-and-support-restrictive-abortion-laws/590101/.

43. Moreover,

In most cases pregnancy provided a “but for” factor, meaning that but for the

pregnancy, the action taken against the woman would not have occurred. In seven

cases, efforts to deny women their liberty also included allegations related to

actions a woman took after she had delivered a baby and was no longer pregnant.

From Lynne M. Paltrow and Jeanne Flavin. “Arrests of and Forced Interventions on

Pregnant Women in the United States, 1973–2005: Implications for Women’s Legal Status

and Public Health,” Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law 38, no. 2 (2013): 301.

Another brutal and common practice is forcing pregnant people who are incarcerated to

give birth while in shackles. See “Shackling Pregnant Inmates Is Still a Practice in Many

States,” CBS News, March 13, 2019, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/shackling-pregnant-

inmates-is-still-a-practice-in-many-states/.

There are many other travesties of reproductive justice, including forced sterilization,

forced abortion, and the “removal” (or, more accurately, stealing) of children from their

parents. These crimes—to which poor, nonwhite, Indigenous, and disabled girls and

women have been massively disproportionately vulnerable—are a topic of deep

importance, but further discussion would take me beyond the scope of this chapter. For a

useful primer and set of resources on this subject, see Amanda Manes, “Reproductive

Justice and Violence Against Women: Understanding the Intersections,” VAWnet,

February 28, 2017, https://vawnet.org/sc/reproductive-justice-violence-against-women-

understanding-intersections.

44. Paltrow and Flavin, “Arrests of and Forced Interventions on Pregnant Women in the United States,” p. 311.

45. Paltrow and Flavin explain:

In 2008, as a result of post-conviction relief proceedings, the South Carolina

Supreme Court unanimously overturned her conviction, concluding that she had

received ineffective assistance of counsel at her trial. The court described the

research that the state had relied on as “outdated” and found that McKnight’s trial

counsel had failed to call experts who would have testified about “recent studies

showing that cocaine is no more harmful to a fetus than nicotine use, poor

nutrition, lack of prenatal care, or other conditions commonly associated with the

urban poor.” To avoid being retried and possibly sentenced to an even longer term,

McKnight pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was released from prison.

From Paltrow and Flavin, p. 306.

Note, then, that McKnight will still be classified as a felon.

46. See “ ‘Bathroom Bill’ Legislative Tracking,” http://www.ncsl.org/research/education/-

bathroom-bill-legislative-tracking635951130.aspx.

47. Brian Barnett, “Anti-Trans ‘Bathroom Bills’ Are Based on Lies. Here’s the Research to

Show It,” HuffPost, September 11, 2019, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-

transgender-bathroom-crime_n_5b96c5b0e4b0511db3e52825.

48. Another parallel with the anti-abortion movement is the role white cis women have often

played in such moral policing, sometimes under the aegis of so-called radical feminism.

See Katelyn Burns, “The Rise of Anti-Trans ‘Radical’ Feminists, Explained,” Vox,

September 5, 2019, https://www.vox.com/identities/2019/9/5/20840101/terfs-radical-

feminists-gender-critical, for a primer on this subject.

49. Barnett, “Anti-Trans ‘Bathroom Bills’ Are Based on Lies,” Huffpost,

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-transgender-bathroom-

crime_n_5b96c5b0e4b0511db3e52825.

50. As well as the work by Bettcher to be discussed shortly, see the following works by Robin

Dembroff, Emi Koyama, Rachel V. McKinnon, and Julia Serano for illuminating feminist

discussions of transgender identity and transphobia:

Robin Dembroff, “Real Talk on the Metaphysics of Gender,” in Gendered

Oppression and its Intersections, a special issue of Philosophical Topics, edited by

Bianka Takaoka and Kate Manne, forthcoming.

Robin Dembroff, “Trans Women Are Victims of Misogyny, Too—and All Feminists

Must Recognize This,” The Guardian, May 19, 2019,

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/may/19/valerie-jackson-

trans-women-misogyny-feminism.

Emi Koyama, “The Transfeminist Manifesto,” in Catching a Wave: Reclaiming

Feminism for the 21st Century, edited by Rory Dicker and Alison Piepmeier

(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2003), pp. 244–59.

Rachel V. McKinnon, “Stereotype Threat and Attributional Ambiguity for Trans

Women,” Hypatia 29, no. 4 (2014): 857–72.

Rachel V. McKinnon, “Trans*formative Experiences,” Res Philosophica 92, no. 2

(2015): 419–40.

Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the

Scapegoating of Femininity, 2nd ed. (2007; repr., Berkeley, Calif.: Seal Press,

2016).

51. Talia Mae Bettcher, “Full-Frontal Morality: The Naked Truth About Gender,” Hypatia 27,

no. 2 (2012): 320. Here she draws on the work of Harold Garfinkel.

52. Talia Mae Bettcher, “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers: On Transphobic Violence and the

Politics of Illusion,” Hypatia 22, no. 3 (2007): 43–65.

53. Bettcher, “Full-Frontal Morality,” p. 332.

54. Another appallingly false pseudo-obligation in the vicinity that the law has nevertheless

enshrined in many states: recognizing the parental rights of rapists. See Analyn Megison,

“My Rapist Fought for Custody of My Daughter. States Can’t Keep Survivors Tied to

Rapists,” USA Today, June 19, 2019, https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/

2019/06/19/abortion-laws-bans-rape-parental-rights-column/1432450001/.

55. Julie Euber, “American Medical Association: Transgender Deaths Are an Epidemic,” Non-

Profit Quarterly, October 2, 2019, https://nonprofitquarterly.org/american-medical-

association-transgender-deaths-are-an-epidemic/. For a useful recent estimation of the

rates of homicide in the United States for trans women versus cis men, see the data

scientist Emily Gorcenski’s “Transgender Murders: By the Numbers,” January 13, 2019,

https://emilygorcenski.com/post/transgender-murders-by-the-numbers/. And note that the risks here are particularly high for trans girls and women of color. See Rick Rojas and

Vanessa Swales, “18 Transgender Killings This Year Raise Fears of an ‘Epidemic,’ ” The

New York Times, September 27, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/27/us/

transgender-women-deaths.html.

56. Bettcher, “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers,” pp. 43–45.

57. Following a mistrial, Magidson and Merel were eventually convicted of second-degree murder, without hate-crime enhancement. Nabors pleaded guilty during the first trial to

voluntary manslaughter. Cazares ultimately pleaded no-contest to voluntary manslaughter.

58. For a nuanced discussion of the connection here between transphobia and homophobia, see Bettcher, “Evil Deceivers and Make-Believers,” p. 47.

59. This is hence a paradigm case of himpathy, a concept explained and explored in earlier chapters.

SEVEN Insupportable—On the Entitlement to Domestic Labor

1. Darcy Lockman, All the Rage: Mothers, Fathers, and the Myth of Equal Partnership (New York: HarperCollins, 2019), p. 205.

2. Jill E. Yavorsky, Claire M. Kamp Dush, and Sarah J. Schoppe-Sullivan, “The Production of Inequality: The Gender Division of Labor Across the Transition to Parenthood,” Journal of

Marriage and Family 77, no. 3 (2015): 662–79.

3. “Time Spent in Primary Activities by Married Mothers and Fathers by Employment Status

of Self and Spouse…2011–15,” Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/tus/tables/

a7_1115.pdf.

4. “Why the Majority of the World’s Poor Are Women,” Oxfam International, accessed July 15, 2019, https://www.oxfam.org/en/even-it/why-majority-worlds-poor-are-women.

5. See “Men Taking on 50 Percent of the World’s Childcare and Domestic Work Requires Global Goal and Immediate Action, Reveals State of the World’s Fathers Report,”

https://men-care.org/2017/06/09/men-taking-on-50-percent-of-the-worlds-childcare-

and-domestic-work-requires-global-goal-and-immediate-action-reveals-state-of-the-

worlds-fathers-report/, and International Labour Organization, A Quantum Leap for

Gender Equality: For a Better Future of Work for All (Geneva, Switzerland: International

Labour Office, 2019), https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---

dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_674831.pdf.

6. Sara Raley, Suzanne M. Bianchi, and Wendy Wang, “When Do Fathers Care? Mothers’

Economic Contribution and Fathers’ Involvement in Childcare,” American Journal of

Sociology 117, no. 5 (2005): 1422–59.

7. Lockman, All the Rage, p. 16.

8. “Sharing Chores at Home: Houses Divided,” Economist, October 5, 2017,

https://www.economist.com/international/2017/10/05/houses-divided.

9. Scott Coltrane, “Research on Household Labor: Modeling and Measuring the Social

Embeddedness of Routine Family Work,” Journal of Marriage and Family 62, no. 4

(2000): 1210.

10. Claire Kamp Dush, “Men Share Housework Equally—Until the First Baby,” Newsweek,

May 10, 2015, https://www.newsweek.com/men-share-housework-equally-until-first-

baby-330347.

11. Lockman, All the Rage, p. 3.

12. Tracy Moore, “The Stupid-Easy Guide to Emotional Labor,” Mel Magazine, 2018,

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/the-stupid-easy-guide-to-emotional-labor.

13. In a recent interview, Hochschild said:

Emotional labor, as I introduced the term in The Managed Heart, is the work, for

which you’re paid, which centrally involves trying to feel the right feeling for the

job. This involves evoking and suppressing feelings. Some jobs require a lot of it,

some a little of it. From the flight attendant whose job it is to be nicer than natural

to the bill collector whose job it is to be, if necessary, harsher than natural, there

are a variety of jobs that call for this. Teachers, nursing-home attendants, and

child-care workers are examples. The point is that while you may also be doing

physical labor and mental labor, you are crucially being hired and monitored for

your capacity to manage and produce a feeling.

From Julie Beck, “The Concept Creep of ‘Emotional Labor,’ ” The Atlantic,

November 26, 2018, https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/arlie-

hochschild-housework-isnt-emotional-labor/576637/.

14. Gemma Hartley, Fed Up: Emotional Labor, Women, and the Way Forward (New York: HarperCollins, 2018), pp. 3–4.

15. Ibid., p. 4.

16. Ibid., p. 1.

17. Ibid., p. 5.

18. See, for example, Eyal Abraham, Talma Hendler, Irit Shapira-Lichter, Yaniv Kanat-Maymon, Orna Zagoory-Sharon, and Ruth Feldman, “Father’s Brain Is Sensitive to

Childcare Experiences,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 27

(2014): 9792–97. For a more general discussion of such sexist hypotheses, which play a

role in rationalizing and naturalizing a patriarchal social order, see my book Down Girl:

The Logic of Misogyny (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), chapter 3.

19. See Arlie Russell Hochschild (with Anne Machung), The Second Shift: Working Families and the Revolution at Home (London: Penguin, 1989), pp. 5–6, and Lockman, All the

Rage, p. 17.

20. And it’s worth noting that even when privileged women do obtain paid help with housework and child-rearing responsibilities, they often have the added emotional burden

of having to single-handedly manage the relationships with those they hire to help them.

21. Susan Chira, “Men Don’t Want to Be Nurses. Their Wives Agree,” The New York Times,

June 24, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/24/opinion/sunday/men-dont-want-

to-be-nurses-their-wives-agree.html.

22. Ibid. Admittedly, this study didn’t speak to the question of whether these men’s wives disapprove of this work inherently and deem it beneath the dignity of their husbands or,

alternatively, anticipate intolerable emotional fallout if their husbands do take low-status

and lower-paying work than that to which they’ve been accustomed.

23. N. Gregory Mankiw, “Why Aren’t More Men Working?” The New York Times, June 15, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/15/business/men-unemployment-jobs.html.

Note that the percentage of women out of the labor force has decreased dramatically

during the same time period: from nearly two-thirds in 1950 to 43 percent today.

24. The quote is taken from Lockman’s Atlantic piece “Don’t Be Grateful That Dad Does His

Share,” May 7, 2019, https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/05/mothers-

shouldnt-be-grateful-their-husbands-help/588787/.

For the research Lockman is drawing on here, see, for example, Suzanne M. Bianchi,

John P. Robinson, and Melissa A. Milkie, Changing Rhythms of American Life (New York:

Russell Sage Foundation, 2006), pp. 121–22; Andrea Doucet, “Can Parenting Be Equal?

Rethinking Equality and Gender Differences in Parenting,” in What Is Parenthood?, edited

by Linda C. McClain and Daniel Cere (New York: NYU Press, 2013), pp. 251–75; and Claire

M. Kamp Dush, Jill E. Yavorsky, and Sarah J. Schoppe-Sullivan, “What Are Men Doing

While Women Perform Extra Unpaid Labor? Leisure and Specialization at the Transitions

to Parenthood,” Sex Roles 78, no. 11–12 (2018): 715–30.

25. Hartley, Fed Up, pp. 27–28.

26. Jancee Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids (New York: Little, Brown, 2017), p. 8.

27. Ibid., p. 58.

28. Ibid., p. 60.

29. Claire Cain Miller, “Why Women, but Not Men, Are Judged for a Messy House,” The New

York Times, June 11, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/upshot/why-women-

but-not-men-are-judged-for-a-messy-house.html. Notwithstanding the article’s headline, the research findings are somewhat more equivocal:

When participants were told that a woman occupied the clean room, it was judged

as less clean than when a man occupied it, and she was thought to be less likely to

be viewed positively by visitors and less comfortable with visitors.

Both men and women were penalized for having a messy room. When

respondents were told it was occupied by a man, they said that it was in more

urgent need of cleaning and that the men were less responsible and hardworking

than messy women. The mess seemed to play into a stereotype of men as lazy

slobs, the researchers said.

But there was a key difference: Unlike for women, participants said messy

men were not likely to be judged by visitors or feel uncomfortable having visitors

over.

30. Note, though, that the hypothesis that women are better than men at noticing household disorder or at multitasking or task switching has been thoroughly debunked. See Leah

Ruppanner, “Women Are Not Better at Multitasking. They Just Do More Work, Studies

Show,” Science Alert, August 15, 2019, https://www.sciencealert.com/women-aren-t-

better-multitaskers-than-men-they-re-just-doing-more-work.

31. Lockman, All the Rage, p. 25.

32. According to recent reports, in the U.S., over 40 percent of mothers were the sole or

primary breadwinners for their families, with just under a quarter of mothers being “co-

breadwinners”—defined as married people “whose wages comprise at least 25 percent of

their total household earnings.” Moreover, in U.S. families with children at home, over

two-thirds of married mothers do paid work outside the home. Sarah Jane Glynn,

“Breadwinning Mothers Continue to Be the U.S. Norm,” Centre for American Progress,

May 10, 2019, https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/women/reports/2019/05/10/

469739/breadwinning-mothers-continue-u-s-norm/.

33. Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband, p. 64.

34. Ibid., p. 58.

35. Lockman, “Don’t Be Grateful,” The Atlantic.

36. Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband, p. 250.

37. At the same time, as noted above, it is in general vital to be aware—particularly as a comparatively wealthy white woman—of the dangers of “leaning down” on more

vulnerable women: the women of color and poor women who wealthy white women often

end up exploiting for care labor, rather than insisting upon the involvement of a male

partner.

38. Dunn, How Not to Hate Your Husband, p. 257.

39. Ibid., p. 256.

40. Ibid., p. 247.

41. Ibid., p. 272.

EIGHT Unassuming—On the Entitlement to Knowledge

1. Laura Dodsworth, interviewed by Liv Little, “Me and My Vulva: 100 Women Reveal All,”

The Guardian, February 9, 2019, https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/

09/me-and-my-vulva-100-women-reveal-all-photographs.

2. See, e.g., Dr. Jen Gunter’s apt intervention: https://twitter.com/DrJenGunter/status/

1094831250945191936 (accessed July 5, 2019).

3. Julie Scagell, “Guy Mansplains ‘Vulva’ vs. ‘Vagina’ to Women and It Goes About as Well as

Expected,” Scary Mommy, February 12, 2019, https://www.scarymommy.com/vulva-

versus-vagina-twitter/.

4. Some of his subsequent comments veered into incoherence: “You are begging the question in as much is [ sic] if I thought it were a dumbing down and I wouldn’t be supporting it. I’m

taking issue with that sort of position.” This was in response to the (at that point, one

might have thought welcome) suggestion that his mistake was due to a more widespread

“dumbing down” of the correct anatomical terminology, substituting “vagina” for “vulva,”

incorrectly.

5. For an argument in favor of such “ameliorative” approaches to definitional questions, pioneered by Sally Haslanger, see my book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (New York:

Oxford University Press, 2018), chapters 1–2. For Haslanger’s original, groundbreaking

analysis, see her article “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to

Be?” Noûs 34, no. 1 (2000): 31–55, reprinted in her book Resisting Reality: Social

Construction and Social Critique (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).

6. As usual, by “attitude,” I don’t mean something deeply psychological—the kind of thing that is between an individual agent and their psychologist to figure out. I’m interested in

attitudes as gestured toward by the common question “What’s with the attitude?” As in,

here, what’s up with a common kind of bad behavior, in terms of the general social

expectations or assumptions it reflects and perpetuates?

7. This was not the first time that a man tried to correct a woman about a body part that she possessed, and he did not, on Twitter. In October 2016, after the release of hot-mike

footage of Donald Trump boasting about grabbing women “by the pussy,” a male user

named @DaveBussone mistook the fact that the vagina is indeed an internal organ for the

impossibility of being sexually assaulted by being forcibly touched, or “grabbed,” in that

area. He tweeted to political commentator Kirsten Powers, who had reported on the story:

“Normally I give you a pass. Not this time. The vagina is internal. Check an anatomy book.

It cannot be grabbed. #MAGA.” Kirsten Powers tweeted back: “I know where my vagina

is.” See https://www.facebook.com/kirstenpowers10/posts/1070957156354394/.

8. I’m here implicitly construing “epistemic entitlement” as a pejorative term—to refer to an unwarranted and overly entitled attitude along these lines. Later, I’ll have occasion to

distinguish such an attitude from a warranted or justified sense of epistemic entitlement

to, e.g., assert one’s views, claim knowledge, or authoritatively impart information.

9. Another important distinction to be made here is moral in nature: whereas testimonial injustice is about an agent not meeting their epistemic obligations to listen to others,

epistemic entitlement is about an agent’s undue and overly entitled attitudes and behavior

—in other words, their assuming too much about another’s obligations to listen to them.

See note 20 in this chapter.

10. Dotson’s full definition of testimonial smothering is as follows:

Testimonial smothering, ultimately, is the truncating of one’s own testimony in

order to insure that the testimony contains only content for which one’s audience

demonstrates testimonial competence….Three circumstances…routinely exist in

instances of testimonial smothering…: 1) the content of the testimony must be

unsafe and risky; 2) the audience must demonstrate testimonial incompetence

with respect to the content of the testimony to the speaker; and 3) testimonial

incompetence must follow from, or appear to follow from, pernicious ignorance.

From “Tracking Epistemic Violence, Tracking Practices of Silencing,” Hypatia 26,

no. 2 (2011): 244.

11. Rebecca Solnit, “Men Explain Things to Me,” reprinted in Guernica magazine, August 20, 2012, https://www.guernicamag.com/rebecca-solnit-men-explain-things-to-me/.

12. Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (New York: New Press, 2019), p. 219.

13. Patrick Hamilton, Angel Street: A Victorian Thriller in Three Acts (copyrighted under the title Gas Light) (New York: Samuel French, 1939).

14. Ibid., p. 5.

15. This gets at part of the ableism of gaslighting: the idea that mental illness is something to be shamed and stigmatized, rather than treated in a humane, effective, and nonjudgmental

manner. Thanks in particular to Bobbi Cohn and Nicholas Tilmes, as well as other

members of my spring 2019 “(Un)following” seminar at the Society for the Humanities at

Cornell, for discussion on this point.

16. As the philosopher Kate Abramson has argued, isolation is a key tactic employed by

gaslighters, so that the victim or target won’t have people she can easily consult to

vindicate or at least support her own perceptions. See Abramson’s “Turning Up the Lights

on Gaslighting,” Philosophical Perspectives 28 (2014): 2.

17. Hamilton, Gas Light, pp. 34–35.

18. Ibid., pp. 10–11.

19. It’s worth noting here that although gaslighting is not necessarily gendered, it frequently exploits and perpetuates gendered dynamics, in ways illuminated by Kate Abramson. As

she points out:

To begin with (1) women are more frequently the targets of gaslighting than men,

and (2) men more often engage in gaslighting. More importantly, gaslighting is

frequently, though again, not necessarily, sexist in the following ways: (3) it

frequently takes place in the context of, and in response to, a woman’s protestation

against sexist (or otherwise discriminatory) conduct; (4) some of the forms of

emotional manipulation that are employed in gaslighting frequently rely on the

target’s internalization of sexist norms, (5) when gaslighting is successful—when it

actually undermines the target in the ways it is designed to do—it can reinforce the

very sexist norms which the target was trying to resist and/or those on which the

gaslighter relies in his/her manipulation of the target, and (6) sometimes it is

some subset of those very sexist norms which the gaslighter seeks to preserve

through his/her gaslighting conduct.

From her “Turning Up the Lights,” p. 3.

20. Earlier, I highlighted some differences between testimonial injustice and (an undue assumption of) epistemic entitlement. Another distinction worth highlighting can now be

drawn between testimonial injustice and gaslighting (which, as I’ve argued, often stems

from an extreme form of epistemic entitlement). Testimonial injustice involves the

perpetrator not meeting their genuine moral obligation to treat their interlocutor as a

knower or a potential knower. Gaslighting involves the perpetrator—the gaslighter—

imposing a spurious moral obligation on their interlocutor to treat the gaslighter as the

knower in the exchange, regardless of the potential superiority of the interlocutor’s own

epistemic position. So although gaslighting may be a form of testimonial injustice—as

Rachel V. McKinnon has persuasively argued—it also goes beyond this and is particularly

creepy. See Rachel V. McKinnon, “Allies Behaving Badly: Gaslighting as Epistemic

Injustice,” in The Routledge Handbook of Epistemic Injustice, edited by Gaile Polhaus, Jr.,

Ian James Kidd, and José Medina (New York: Routledge, 2017), pp. 167–75.

21. Abramson, “Turning up the Lights,” p. 9.

22. Kyle Swenson, “Abuse Survivor Confronts Gymnastics Doctor: ‘I Have Been Coming for You for a Long Time,’ ” The Washington Post, January 17, 2018,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/01/17/ive-been-coming-

for-you-for-a-long-time-abuse-survivor-confronts-gymnastics-doctor/.

23. John Meehan also sought to isolate Debra Newell from her children and other relatives.

Again, this is a common tactic employed by gaslighters, as Kate Abramson has argued (see

note 16 in this chapter).

24. For this quote and the following excerpts from the podcast Dirty John see

https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-dirty-john/.

25. Here my conception of gaslighting is somewhat more expansive than Kate Abramson’s, who writes that

the phenomenon that’s come to be picked out with [the term “gaslighting”] is a

form of emotional manipulation in which the gaslighter tries (consciously or not)

to induce in someone the sense that her reactions, perceptions, memories and/or

beliefs are not just mistaken, but utterly without grounds—paradigmatically, so

unfounded as to qualify as crazy….Gaslighting is aimed at getting another not to

take herself seriously as an interlocutor.

She writes later:

Gaslighters charge their targets with being crazy, oversensitive, paranoid. What

these terms have in common in the context of gaslighting is that they are ways of

charging someone not simply with being wrong or mistaken, but being in no

condition to judge whether she is wrong or mistaken. The accusations are about

the target’s basic rational competence—her ability to get facts right, to deliberate,

her basic evaluative competencies and ability to react appropriately: her

independent standing as deliberator and moral agent. When gaslighting succeeds,

it drives its targets crazy in the sense of deeply undermining just these aspects of a

person’s independent standing.

From “Turning Up the Lights,” p. 2 and p. 8 (respectively).

26. There was a dark reason lurking in Debra Newell’s past as to why she may have been prepared to forgive her husband and relinquish her own perceptions. Her older sister,

Cindi, had been murdered by her husband, Billy Vickers, several decades prior. He shot her

in the back of the head, at point-blank range, after she filed for a divorce from him. Yet

Cindi and Debra’s mother, Arlane Hart, forgave Billy everything. She even came forward,

at her own behest, to testify on his behalf at the murder trial. She practiced an extreme

form of forgiveness—to the detriment of her daughter’s memory, according to at least some

of the people who witnessed her behavior. Christopher Goffard writes:

Her testimony stunned the prosecutor, Thomas Avdeef, who regarded it as a cold-

blooded execution. As he interpreted it, the mother’s testimony…portrayed Cindi

as having mistreated her husband.

“They threw her under the bus,” Avdeef says. “I don’t know the dynamics of

the family. I could never understand that. Why say bad things about the victim?”

From https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-me-dirty-john/.

I hope that this book has helped answer that good question, by exploring a prevalent

tendency to sympathize with a male perpetrator over his female victim—even, as here,

when she is your own daughter. In a word, himpathy; it’s responsible for a multitude.

27. Some may insist that gaslighting involves the motive on the part of the gaslighter of driving the victim crazy. But this, to my mind, makes gaslighting too dependent on

psychological factors—both yielding too psychologistic a definition and requiring too much

intentionality on the part of the perpetrator. I prefer a conception which would move to

define gaslighting in terms of what the act tries to achieve (i.e., its purpose or “telos”), whether or not the gaslighter is consciously aiming at this end, and whether or not he is

employing a crazy-making or, alternatively, moralizing tactic (or some combination of the

two—or, perhaps, another tactic entirely, such as threatening behavior). But, of course, I

don’t pretend that these brief remarks here are more than suggestive. The best way to

understand and define gaslighting is a much larger philosophical topic; interested readers

would do well to read the illuminating pieces referenced in the notes above by Kate

Abramson and Rachel V. McKinnon, among others.

28. Christopher Goffard commented that John Meehan “approved of the mob’s way of doing business, particularly when it came to dealing with enemies. Over and over, he spoke

approvingly of a cold-blooded ethos: A dead enemy couldn’t suffer, so you went after their

loved ones. You went after their families.” And that is plausibly why he went to Terra

Newell’s apartment one evening, armed with what police called a “kidnap kit”—including

duct tape, cable ties, a set of kitchen knives, a vial of injectable testosterone, and his

passport. John proceeded to stab Terra with a knife before she managed to fight back.

Ultimately, she succeeded in disarming him, then stabbed him several times in self-

defense. He died four days later, in the hospital. Goffard writes, “Detectives told the

prosecutor, Matt Murphy, that it looked like a clear-cut case of self-defense. In such

scenarios, the killer usually wound up on the run, the victim dead, dumped off a freeway or

in the desert.”

Terra was neither arrested nor prosecuted. From https://www.latimes.com/projects/la-

me-dirty-john-terra/.

29. Abramson, “Turning Up the Lights,” pp. 8–12.

30. Solnit, “Men Explain Things to Me,” Guernica.

31. Of course, anyone can be the target of wrath on the Internet. But the point—and what makes it misogyny, by the lights of my analysis—is both that this targeting of women is

demonstrably disproportionate (as compared with their male counterparts) and that it

often involves distinctively gendered threats and insults. On the first score, see “The Dark

Side of Internet Comments,” The Guardian, April 12, 2016,

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/12/the-dark-side-of-guardian-

comments.

32. For example, in 2012, Jones said that Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard, should be “shoved in a chaff bag” and drowned at sea. Later that year, when Gillard’s father

died, Jones opined that his shame toward his daughter must have been what killed him.

33. Ardern has subsequently made good on this commitment, with New Zealand enshrining this target into law. “New Zealand ‘On the Right Side of History’ with 2050 Carbon

Emissions Target, Jacinda Ardern Says,” ABC News, November 7, 2019,

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-11-07/new-zealand-passes-leading-carbon-emissions-

law/11683910.

34. Aaron M. McCright and Riley E. Dunlap, “Cool Dudes: The Denial of Climate Change Among Conservative White Males in the United States,” Global Environmental Change 21,

no. 4 (2011): 1163–72.

35. Compare some of the many put-downs of environmental activist Greta Thunberg, who—as a person on the Autism spectrum—is also the subject of ableist stereotypes and the

associated rhetoric. See, for example, Australian columnist Andrew Bolt’s appalling attack

on her: “I have never seen a girl so young and with so many mental disorders treated by so

many adults as a guru,” he wrote in an article entitled “The Disturbing Secret to the Cult of

Greta Thunberg,” The Herald Sun, August 1, 2019, https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/

andrew-bolt/the-disturbing-secret-to-the-cult-of-greta-thunberg/news-story/

55822063e3589e02707fbb5a9a75d4cc.

36. Kate Lyons, Naaman Zhou, and Adam Morton, “Scott Morrison Condemns Alan Jones’s

Call to ‘Shove Sock Down Throat’ of Jacinda Ardern,” The Guardian, August 15, 2019,

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/aug/15/alan-jones-scott-morrison-shove-

sock-throat-jacinda-ardern.

37. Under considerable pressure (from companies pulling ads, as well as the displeased broadcasting network itself), Jones subsequently did issue a halfhearted apology—on the

same day he called Jacinda Ardern “gormless” and a “hypocrite.” “Alan Jones Writes to

Jacinda Ardern to Apologise After Companies Pull Ads,” The Guardian, August 16, 2019,

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2019/aug/16/alan-jones-writes-to-jacinda-ardern-

to-apologise-after-companies-pull-ads.

38. Lyons, Zhou, and Morton, “Scott Morrison Condemns Alan Jones’s Call to ‘Shove Sock Down Throat’ of Jacinda Ardern,” The Guardian.

NINE Unelectable—On the Entitlement to Power

1. Not fewer than seventeen thousand news stories mentioning electability and the most popular female presidential hopeful, Elizabeth Warren, had been published at the time of

writing (September 1, 2019, well over a year before the election). Of course, some of these

stories could in theory have focused more on the electability of a male candidate or on

electability in general. But scanning the relevant headlines suggests otherwise, in most

cases. See, e.g., from a single week in August 2019:

Aaron Blake, “Elizabeth Warren Is Surging, but This One Big Question

[Electability] Looms Over Her,” The Washington Post, August 8, 2019,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/08/08/elizabeth-warren-all-

important-electability-question/;

Jonathan Martin, “Many Democrats Love Elizabeth Warren. They Also Worry

About Her [Electability],” The New York Times, August 15, 2019,

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/15/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-2020-

campaign.html; and

Nicole Goodkind, “Democrats Worry That a Female Candidate Can’t Beat Trump,”

Newsweek, August 15, 2019, https://www.newsweek.com/2020-candidates-

women-vote-trump-electability-1454622.

2. Madeline E. Heilman, Aaron S. Wallen, Daniella Fuchs, and Melinda M. Tamkins,

“Penalties for Success: Reactions to Women Who Succeed at Male Gender-Typed Tasks,”

Journal of Applied Psychology 89, no. 3 (2004): 416–27.

3. Note that one participant did not identify their gender, perhaps due to a simple omission, or perhaps due to being non-binary.

Note too that while Heilman et al.’s study was published in 2004, it has been widely

replicated, as will emerge through the course of this chapter. Moreover, the participants

were then college students, with a mean age of 20.5 years, thus making them millennials.

This obviates facile dismissals of these results as merely a historical relic.

4. David Paul and Jessi L. Smith, “Subtle Sexism? Examining Vote Preferences When

Women Run Against Men for the Presidency,” Journal of Women, Politics, and Policy 29,

no. 4 (2008): 451–76.

Again, disaggregating the results by gender made no difference to the results here. I

discuss this study at greater length, along with the one referenced in note 2 for this

chapter, in my piece “It’s the Sexism, Stupid,” Politico, April 11, 2019,

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/04/11/its-the-sexism-stupid-226620.

5. Emily Peck, “Half the Men in the U.S. Are Uncomfortable with Female Political Leaders,”

HuffPost, November 21, 2019, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/half-us-men-

uncomfortable-with-female-political-leaders_n_5dd30b73e4b0263fbc993674.

6. As a result of that election, 117 women were sent to the 116th Congress, compared to 89

women elected in the 2016 cycle. Li Zhou, “A Historic New Congress Will Be Sworn in

Today,” Vox, January 3, 2019, https://www.vox.com/2018/12/6/18119733/congress-

diversity-women-election-good-news.

7. Tyler G. Okimoto and Victoria L. Brescoll, “The Price of Power: Power Seeking and Backlash Against Female Politicians,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 36, no. 7

(2010): 933.

8. Madeline Heilman and Tyler Okimoto, “Why Are Women Penalized for Success at Male

Tasks?” Journal of Applied Psychology 92, no. 1 (2007): 81.

9. Ibid.

10. Ibid., p. 82.

11. If Andrea was described in the above way, James would be similarly described as “an involved manager who is caring and sensitive to the needs” of his subordinates, someone

who “emphasizes the importance of having a supportive work environment,” and as having

been “commended for his efforts to promote a positive community.” Ibid., p. 83. As usual,

these two communal descriptions were switched for every second participant.

Note that the researchers also added a condition where positive, noncommunal

information about both targets of evaluation was added, to check that it was not merely the

insertion of praise that made the difference for women but not men (it wasn’t).

12. Yet again, participant gender made no difference to these findings—suggesting that one’s own gender does not make a difference either to these biases, or to the way they can be

ameliorated. Ibid., p. 84.

13. It’s worth reminding the reader here that Clinton did win the popular vote. However, the force of this point is limited in the context of the dialectic. I believe reasonable minds can

disagree widely about how good a president Clinton would have made. But that she would

have made a better president than Trump seems to me to be scarcely questionable. Hence,

as the vastly more qualified candidate, her 2016 election defeat remains a troubling—

though not, as we’ll see, remotely decisive—data point regarding women’s electability in

general.

14. Tina Nguyen, “Salad Fiend Amy Klobuchar Once Berated an Aide for Forgetting a Fork,”

Vanity Fair, February 22, 2019, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2019/02/amy-

klobuchar-comb-fork-salad. To be fair, the tone of the article itself was more circumspect, and authors don’t generally get to choose their headlines.

15. Matt Flegenheimer and Sydney Ember, “How Amy Klobuchar Treats Her Staff,” The New

York Times, February 22, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/22/us/politics/amy-

klobuchar-staff.html.

16. Joseph Simonson, “Biden Aide: ‘Everyone Who Has Worked for Him Has Been Screamed

At,’ ” Washington Examiner, July 1, 2019, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/

biden-aide-everyone-who-has-worked-for-him-has-been-screamed-at.

17. Paul Heintz, “Anger Management: Sanders Fights for Employees, Except His Own,” Seven

Days, August 26, 2015, https://www.sevendaysvt.com/vermont/anger-management-

sanders-fights-for-employees-except-his-own/.

See also:

Harry Jaffe, “Bernie Sanders Is Cold as Ice,” Boston Magazine, September 29,

2015, https://www.bostonmagazine.com/news/2015/09/29/bernie-sanders/;

Mickey Hirten, “The Trouble with Bernie,” Lansing City Pulse, October 7, 2015,

https://www.lansingcitypulse.com/stories/the-trouble-with-bernie,4622; and Graham Vyse, “10 Things Biographer Harry Jaffe Learned About Bernie Sanders,”

InsideSources, December 23, 2015, https://www.insidesources.com/10-things-

biographer-harry-jaffe-learned-about-bernie-sanders/.

Admittedly, some of these sources are much smaller and less prestigious than those that

broke the Klobuchar story. But in a way, that’s part of my point: such rumors about the

female senator were deemed far more newsworthy from the outset.

18. Alex Seitz-Wald, “Beto O’Rourke Drops F-Bombs, Snaps at Staff, Stresses Out in

Revealing New Documentary,” NBC News, March 9, 2019, https://www.nbcnews.com/

politics/2020-election/beto-o-rourke-drops-f-bombs-snaps-staff-stresses-out-n981421.

19. Politico began recording polling numbers on February 3, 2019. Klobuchar polled at 3–4

percent initially, in the weeks between February 10 and March 10, and then between 1 and

2 percent for most of the remainder of 2019, once falling out of the top ten candidates

recorded: https://www.politico.com/2020-election/democratic-presidential-candidates/

polls/ (site accessed December 20, 2019). And despite a surprisingly strong third-place

finish in the New Hampshire primary, Klobuchar dropped out of the race prior to Super

Tuesday.

20. For a candidate who was widely expected to be a genuine contender for the presidency, Gillibrand’s polling numbers were even more dismal than Klobuchar’s. She initially polled

at 1 percent consistently, and she broke 2 percent just once (in the week ending April 7). In

July and August, she never made the top ten in Politico’s rankings, before dropping out of

the race on Wednesday, August 28, having not qualified for the third Democratic debate:

https://www.politico.com/2020-election/democratic-presidential-candidates/polls/.

21. A few representative tweets, in response to Gillibrand’s announcement that she was dropping out of the presidential race:

“I am happy with the 10 chosen candidates, but still bitter…@alfranken would

have been a formidable person to eliminate [Trump] which we will never see…but

you knew that…right?” https://twitter.com/criteria681/status/

1166879516951797762;

“The party thanks you. Also we will never forget the NRA and Al Franken,”

https://twitter.com/rmayemsinger/status/1166845231448256518; and

“Bye girl…Signed, AL Franken,” https://twitter.com/DCRobMan/status/

1166827567040598018.

22. It is worth reminding the reader that, morally speaking, the responsibility for Franken’s resignation lay solely with Franken—who is responsible, moreover, for his original bad

behavior (about which I believe the complainants).

For more on this, see my piece “Gillibrand’s Al Franken Problem Won’t Die,” The Cut,

January 17, 2019, https://www.thecut.com/2019/01/kirsten-gillibrands-al-franken-

problem-wont-die.html.

23. Elena Schneider, “Why Gillibrand Crashed and Burned,” Politico, August 29, 2019,

https://www.politico.com/story/2019/08/29/kirsten-gillibrand-drops-out-2020-race-

1477845.

24. Heilman and Okimoto, “Why Are Women Penalized for Success at Male Tasks?” p. 86.

25. The researchers showed one further way in which this gender bias could be overcome: including information that the target of the evaluation was a parent. Women were seen in

a more favorable light when they were mothers; for men, again, this appeared to make no

difference—that is, there was no appreciable “boost” in likability or boss desirability for

fathers, as opposed to men without children. But, as Heilman and Okimoto note, this

result is of somewhat limited applicability, since numerous studies have shown that

women are subject to a potent motherhood bias, whereby mothers are often perceived as

less competent and committed to the job than their child-free counterparts. The prospect

of another unjust double bind hence glints grimly on the horizon.

26. Suspecting that this might be a distinctively gendered dynamic, I found evidence from aggregated ratemyprofessor.com student evaluations that female professors were also far

more likely to be described in these terms—lending some modest evidence to the

hypothesis that there’s something about female authority that tends to read as inauthentic,

at least in male-dominated positions. See my book Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), chapter 8 (and the section “Faking It,” in

particular).

27. See Down Girl, chapter 8.

28. “Transcript: Greta Thunberg’s Speech at the U.N. Climate Action Summit,” NPR,

September 23, 2019, https://www.npr.org/2019/09/23/763452863/transcript-greta-

thunbergs-speech-at-the-u-n-climate-action-summit.

29. Compare the response to Jacinda Ardern, the female prime minister of New Zealand, who was widely lauded for her deeply empathetic response to the mosque shootings in

Christchurch in March 2019. But see the end of chapter 8, “Unassuming,” of this book for a

discussion of the consternation Ardern has attracted from some quarters for addressing

environmental causes.

For an excellent analysis of the connection between misogyny and climate change

denialism more broadly, see Martin Gelin’s piece “The Misogyny of Climate Deniers,” The

New Republic, August 28, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/154879/misogyny-

climate-deniers.

30. Being perceived as communal may be easier on the right than the left, given that one can thereby portray oneself as upholding traditional, family values. This jibes with my

prediction in Down Girl that conservative women in politics will be subject to less

misogyny, all else equal, than left-wing and centrist women. See Chapter 4, pp. 114–15.

31. See Myisha Cherry, “Love, Anger, and Racial Injustice,” in The Routledge Handbook of Love in Philosophy, edited by Adrienne Martin (New York: Routledge, 2019), chapter 13;

Amia Srinivasan, “The Aptness of Anger,” Journal of Political Philosophy 26, no. 2 (2018):

123–44; Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

(New York: St. Martin’s, 2018); Soraya Chemaly, Rage Becomes Her: The Power of

Women’s Anger (New York: Atria, 2018); and Rebecca Traister, Good and Mad: The

Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2018).

32. Shannon Carlin, “Elizabeth Warren Doesn’t Care If Joe Biden Thinks She’s Angry,”

Refinery 29, November 10, 2019, https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/11/8752565/

elizabeth-warren-angry-joe-biden-email-response.

33. Benjamin Fearnow, “Elizabeth Warren Celebrates Taking 100,000 ‘Selfies’ with

Supporters During 2020 Campaign,” Newsweek, January 5, 2020,

https://www.newsweek.com/elizabeth-warren-celebrates-taking-100000-selfies-

supporters-during-2020-campaign-1480473.

34. Lauren Strapagiel, “Elizabeth Warren Followed Through on Giving This Woman Advice

on Her Love Life,” BuzzFeed News, May 19, 2019, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/

laurenstrapagiel/elizabeth-warren-followed-through-on-giving-this-woman-love.

35. Aris Folley, “Warren’s Campaign Team Sends Dinner, Cookies to Sanders Staffers After

Heart Procedure,” The Hill, October 3, 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/

464253-warrens-campaign-team-sends-dinner-cookies-to-sanders-staffers-after-heart.

36. This tweet received 1.8K retweets and 22.8K likes (accessed August 11, 2019),

https://twitter.com/AlishaGrauso/status/1144073941922832385.

37. This tweet received 3.1K retweets and 32.5K likes (accessed August 11, 2019),

https://twitter.com/MerrillBarr/status/1144074388993499136.

38. This tweet received 3.8K retweets and 41.6K likes (accessed August 11, 2019),

https://twitter.com/ashleyn1cole/status/1144125555438018560.

39. See Steve Peoples, “Analysis: Elizabeth Warren Growing into Front-Runner Status,” AP

News, October 16, 2019, https://apnews.com/43a868c4b91746f5a5a74df751a08df3.

40. Following Super Tuesday, as of March 4, 2020 at 1pm, Warren had accrued just 47

delegates, compared to Biden, at 513, Sanders, at 461 (with Buttigieg accruing 26,

Bloomberg, 24, and Klobuchar, 7, before each of them suspended their campaigns. Tulsi

Gabbard also earned one delegate). https://twitter.com/NBCNews/status/

1235264711136071680.

41. I say this given Warren’s pledge not only to do better, but to make the needs of Native community members a priority moving forward. See, e.g., Thomas Kaplan, “Elizabeth

Warren Apologizes at Native American Forum: ‘I Have Listened, and I Have Learned,’ ”

The New York Times, August 19, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/19/us/

politics/elizabeth-warren-native-american.html.

42. https://twitter.com/sandylocks/status/1234924330040954880 (accessed March 4, 2020).

43. Nominally speaking—as an Australian citizen, and a permanent resident of the U.S., I can’t vote, as I write this.

44. See, e.g., Roxane Gay, who wrote on Twitter: “I am mystified by this election cycle. I expect[ed] Sanders to do well but I also expect[ed] Warren to do well. Her results are just

baffling. Biden cruising on through is so disappointing. If he is the nominee ugh. He better

make Beyoncé his VP.” https://twitter.com/rgay/status/1235081083038752768 (accessed March 4, 2020).

45. Kamala Harris is a trickier case here, for a number of reasons. For one thing, before she dropped out, she enjoyed significantly more support than either Klobuchar or Gillibrand,

although significantly less than Warren. For another, there were genuine concerns about

her record as a prosecutor—about which, I confess, I remain quite ambivalent. Did this

role, and some of the decisions of her office regarding incarcerated trans women—for

example, to deny them gender-affirmation surgery—show her to be genuinely lacking in

communality and compassion? It seems to me that reasonable minds differ even more

widely on this score than when it comes to what to think about Klobuchar with respect to

the latter’s treatment of her staffers. Harris contributed to institutional racism,

transphobia, and other such structural problems. This, to my mind, is a more important

issue. Finally, and on a different note, the comparison between the aforementioned white

women has some epistemic advantages for the limited purposes of the discussion here,

since Harris was doubtless subject to unique forms of bias as a Black woman aspiring to

the presidency.

Thanks to Reginald Dwayne Betts for helping me think through these issues and

prompting me to rethink some (though not all) of my original worries about Harris’s

prosecutorial record.

46. https://twitter.com/JRubinBlogger/status/1230317991180546049 (accessed March 4, 2020).

47. For a good summary of such criticisms, see Susan J. Demas, “Nobody Likes a Smarty Pants: Why Warren and Obama Irk Pundits So Much,” Wisconsin Examiner, February 20,

2020, https://wisconsinexaminer.com/2020/02/20/nobody-likes-a-smarty-pants-why-

warren-and-obama-irk-pundits-so-much/.

48. Shortly before the primaries, Warren was in fact the top second choice among Democratic voters. See Philip Bump, “A New National Poll Answers a Critical Question: Who Is the

Second Choice of Democratic Voters?” The Washington Post, January 28, 2020,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/01/28/new-national-poll-answers-

critical-question-who-is-second-choice-democratic-voters/.

49. The T-shirts are available at: https://nextlevely.com/product/shes-electable-if-you-

fucking-vote-for-her-elizabeth-warren-shirt/ (accessed March 4, 2020).

50. See note 3 in this chapter.

51. I draw here on my piece, “Warren Succeeded Because Voters Saw Her as Caring. That’s Also Why She Failed,” The Washington Post, March 6, 2020,

https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/warren-succeeded-because-voters-saw-her-as-

caring-thats-also-why-she-failed/2020/03/06/8064b7c2-5f0f-11ea-b014-

4fafa866bb81_story.html.

52. See Alex Thompson and Alice Miranda Ollstein, “Warren Details How She’d Transition

Country to ‘Medicare for All,’ ” Politico, November 15, 2019, https://www.politico.com/

news/2019/11/15/warren-medicare-for-all-071152.

53. For some evidence of Sanders’ failures of compassion vis-à-vis a disabled Vermont constituent’s health, see my “Unfeeling the Bern: Or, He Is the One Who Protests,”

https://www.academia.edu/30041350/

Unfeeling_the_Bern_or_He_is_the_One_Who_Protests_--_Draft_of_June_2. For a more general discussion of my reservations about Sanders’ politics, see my “The Art of

Losing: Bernie Sanders’ White Male Problem,” https://www.academia.edu/30040727/

The_Art_of_Losing_Bernie_Sanders_White_Male_Problem_Draft_of_May_24_2016_.

54. “It can’t be stated enough that Elizabeth Warren, a rightwing corporate lawyer who once faked her race to become Harvard’s 1st “female professor of color,” now has the largest

super PAC in the field despite her website saying she will “disavow any super PAC formed

to support her,” read one representative tweet, by Aren R. LeBrun @proustmalone

(https://twitter.com/proustmalone/status/1235215120160219139, accessed March 4, 2020).

55. For an extensive discussion of the (I believe, largely false) perception that Hillary Clinton and Julia Gillard were particularly untrustworthy politicians, see my Down Girl, Chapter

8.

56. Hope Yen, “AP Fact Check: Sanders’ Shift on Delegates Needed to Win,” AP News, March 1, 2020, https://apnews.com/a5f8f2335cf1b617dbb6626845b1c4a8.

57. On the first score, see Libby Watson, “Joe Biden’s Individual Mandate Madness,” The New

Republic, October 23, 2019, https://newrepublic.com/article/155477/joe-bidens-

individual-mandate-madness; on the second, see Matt Flegenheimer, “Biden’s First Run for President Was a Calamity. Some Missteps Still Resonate,” The New York Times, June

4, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/03/us/politics/biden-1988-presidential-

campaign.html.

58. MJ Lee, “Bernie Sanders Told Elizabeth Warren in Private 2018 Meeting That a Woman

Can’t Win, Sources Say,” CNN, January 13, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/01/13/

politics/bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-meeting/index.html.

59. Note that saying that sexism would be weaponized against a female candidate by Trump in the general election carries a strong implication, in the context of such a conversation,

that a woman would indeed be hard-pressed to win against him. (Otherwise, why mention

it? Especially since this would hardly have been news to Warren.) However, there is

reasonable disagreement about whether Sanders having implied this would have itself

been sexist, or merely an undiplomatic way of recording a plausible—though not, as we’ve

seen, ultimately justified—hypothesis about the insuperable barriers women face in being

elected president.

60. I draw here on my interview with Ezra Klein, “Kate Manne on Why Female Candidates

Get Ruled ‘Unelectable’ So Quickly,” Vox, April 23, 2019, https://www.vox.com/policy-

and-politics/2019/4/23/18512016/elizabeth-warren-electability-amy-klobuchar-2020-

primary-female-candidates.

61. Biden secured 29 percent of people’s votes in the “horse race” question, followed by Sanders at 17 percent, and Warren at 16 percent. But when asked the “magic wand”

question, 21 percent of people favored Warren, compared to 19 percent who favored either

Biden or Sanders. Max Greenwood, “Poll: Democrats Prefer Warren When Not

Considering ‘Electability,’ ” The Hill, June 19, 2019, https://thehill.com/homenews/

campaign/449315-poll-dems-prefer-warren-when-not-considering-electability.

62. Silver was quoted by Michelle Cottle in a piece in which she also canvassed the poll results discussed in the previous note: “Elizabeth Warren Had a Good Run. Maybe Next Time,

Ladies,” The New York Times, March 5, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/

opinion/democrats-super-tuesday-warren.html.

63. It is telling that, by Super Tuesday (when many states hold their primaries), the most diverse Democratic party field in history had been winnowed down to three white men in

their late seventies, plus Elizabeth Warren hanging on, albeit barely.

64. For an excellent discussion of the concept of “sexism by proxy,” see Moira Donegan’s

“Elizabeth Warren’s Radical Idea,” The Atlantic, August 26, 2019,

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/08/sexism-proxy-still-sexism/596752/.

65. See Amanda Arnold, “All the Women Who Have Spoken Out Against Joe Biden,” The Cut,

April 5, 2019, https://www.thecut.com/2019/04/joe-biden-accuser-accusations-

allegations.html; and Emma Tucker, “Sanders Backtracks on Promise to Release Medical Records: ‘I’m in Good Health,’ ” The Daily Beast, February 9, 2020,

https://www.thedailybeast.com/bernie-sanders-backtracks-promise-to-release-medical-

records-says-im-in-good-health.

TEN Undespairing—On the Entitlement of Girls

1. See, for example, the research showing that, in the wake of the Me Too movement,

attitudes about gender in the workplace have shifted in a less than salutary direction for

many people. In early 2019, researchers found that “19% of men said they were reluctant to

hire attractive women, 21% said they were reluctant to hire women for jobs involving close

interpersonal interactions with men (jobs involving travel, say), and 27% said they avoided

one-on-one meetings with female colleagues.” This was a bigger backlash than was

anticipated by survey participants in 2017, in the immediate aftermath of the initial Me

Too revelations—and these numbers have actually increased in that time frame, in all but

one instance. Tim Bower, “The #MeToo Backlash,” Harvard Business Review,

September–October 2019, https://hbr.org/2019/09/the-metoo-backlash.

2. One way of getting at the distinction here: beliefs aim to reflect the world accurately, whereas desires, commitments, and actions aim to actively change the world (or, again,

prevent it from backsliding). I’m channeling a distinction first formulated by the famous

twentieth-century English philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe in her classic book Intention

(Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957). And for a compelling argument that the intelligibility of

perpetual political struggle does not depend on hopefulness or optimism about the future,

see Kathryn J. Norlock, “Perpetual Struggle,” Hypatia 34, no. 1 (2019): 6–19.

3. That is, we are alive to and actively embrace the possibility that our child may turn out to be a trans boy or non-binary.

4. However, it may be worth recording that one common idea in liberal circles about raising boys—that they need much more help to become in touch with and expressive of their

emotions, as compared with girls—appears to lack robust empirical foundations. In a large

meta-analysis, researchers found that the differences between boys’ versus girls’ emotional

expressions were generally small, subtle, and highly context-dependent. Tara M. Chaplin

and Amelia Aldao, “Gender Differences in Emotion Expression in Children: A Meta-

Analytic Review,” Psychological Bulletin 139, no. 4 (2013): 735–65.

5. Obviously we should celebrate these feminine-coded paths, when freely chosen by people of any gender; but the point here is just that it is a shame to have children’s horizons

winnowed early on, and that the father’s choices appear to make an important difference

for girls when it comes to this winnowing. It’s also worth noting that, sadly, boys’ choices

appear to be winnowed more consistently: identifying a gender-typical path was the norm

for boys, regardless of parental division of labor. For an overview of this research, see

Emily Chung, “Dads Who Do Housework Have More Ambitious Daughters,” CBS News,

May 28, 2014, https://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/dads-who-do-housework-have-

more-ambitious-daughters-1.2655928.

6. Of course, boys and men also face sexual abuse, assault, and harassment, though generally at lower rates than girls and women (and, I suspect, non-binary people, who are likely to

be at least as vulnerable as their female counterparts). But whatever the gender of the

victim, a large majority of those who perpetrate sexual violence are male. See, e.g., Liz

Plank, “Most Perpetrators of Sexual Violence Are Men, So Why Do We Call It a Women’s

Issue?” Divided States of Women, November 2, 2017,

https://www.dividedstatesofwomen.com/2017/11/2/16597768/sexual-assault-men-

himthough, for relevant discussion.

7. See David Sadker and Karen R. Zittleman, Still Failing at Fairness: How Gender Bias Cheats Girls and Boys in School and What We Can Do About It (New York: Scribner,

2009).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kate Manne is an associate professor of philosophy at Cornell

University, where she has taught since 2013. 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, 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 (U.K.).

READING GROUP GUIDE

Entitled

1. In the opening of Entitled, author Kate Manne describes

misogyny as “the shock collar worn by a dog to keep them

behind [an invisible fence],” while she describes sexism as

“the beliefs, ideas, and assumptions that rationalize and

naturalize patriarchal norms and expectations.” What do you

make of this distinction? What do you see to be the main

differentiating factors between misogyny and sexism?

2. Manne repeatedly returns to her definition of misogyny,

described plainly as: “the hostility girls and women face, due

to patriarchal forces, rather than the hostility men feel, deep

down in their hearts.” Why do you think women feel this

hostility so acutely despite the fact that many men don’t

intentionally or consciously harbor it? Given that misogyny is

so often exerted via amorphous patriarchal forces, rather

than by individual actors, how can individuals make a

difference?

3. In chapter 5, the author explains how women—most

significantly, women of color—often receive substandard

healthcare because they aren’t believed when describing their

pain to their doctors. Do you know anyone who has

experienced this? Has this ever happened to you? Do you

agree with the author’s argument that this injustice occurs

because society views women as “entitled to provide care, but

far less entitled to ask for and receive it”?

4. Consider Tressie McMillan Cottom’s harrowing ordeal,

outlined in chapter 5, when she went into premature labor

with her daughter. What did you find most striking about the

discrimination that women of color or non-cis women face

when seeking medical care? Do you see any solutions?

5. When discussing the inequitable division of child-rearing

and housekeeping labor in typical heterosexual relationships,

the author argues that while a large portion of this inequity is

due to men’s negligence and entitlement to female labor, it is

partly due to women’s socialization, too: “Some women may

not feel entitled to equitable domestic arrangements and

leisure time for themselves, on par with that of their

husbands. Or they may feel entitled to this in theory, but

unable to insist in reality, given the social forces around them

that tell them not to insist, and to ‘take one for the team’ in

perpetuity.” Do you agree? Why or why not? How have the

women in your life been socialized to act?

6. In chapter 4, Manne raises several questions: “Why, and

how, do we regard many men’s potentially hurt feelings as so

important, so sacrosanct? And, relatedly, why do we regard

women as so responsible for protecting and ministering to

them?” Discuss how you might answer these questions. Do

you feel there is an answer?

7. The author discusses many high-profile instances of sexual

coercion and sexual violence in chapters 3 and 4. A few key

examples include the viral “Cat Person” short story published

in The New Yorker in 2017, the accusation against comedian

Aziz Ansari, and the many rape allegations against former

Hollywood film producer Harvey Weinstein. What are the

similarities and differences between these examples?

Consider the public reaction to each. Why do you think

public sentiment was so disparate?

8. How do juvenile offenders—who, the author argues, often

do not understand the implications of their actions—

complicate the issue of sexual violence and coercion?

9. Manne writes that when women are seeking positions of

power, they are liable to be considered “conniving, pushy,

selfish, abrasive, manipulative, and untrustworthy.” Why do

you think power-seeking women are described in this coded

way but not men? Do you think these words have a different

implication when used for women? What words would you

use to describe a man acting in the same way? Which words

are similar and which are different?

10. “Mansplainers,” according to the author, are men who

feel entitled to be “the one who dispenses information, offers

corrections, and authoritatively issues explanations.” In other

words, they expound their views over another’s (often a

woman’s) cogent and sometimes expert. The author, as a

philosopher, and her female colleagues must experience this

frequently in academic settings. Where outside of academia

do you see mansplaining occur? Have you or someone you

know ever encountered this? How did you react?

11. The author describes how anti-abortion regulation and

anti-trans bathroom bills are wielded in similar ways, both

with the end goal of controlling cis- and transgender

women’s bodies. “There is a prevalent sense of entitlement on

the part of privileged men to regulate, control, and rule over

the bodies of girls and women—cisgender and trans alike.

And, as the direct result of this, those subject to such

misogynistic policing are often impugned as moral monsters,

even though they’re the ones being made to suffer horribly.”

How do you see these two seemingly disparate political issues

as similar? What do you consider to be the source of this

entitlement to the regulation of female bodies?

12. While many anti-abortion advocates are white men, some

of the most vehement supporters are white women. Why do

you think that is? How are women of color impacted by these

regulations compared to white women? What is at stake with

the many “heartbeat bills” that have been passed by state

legislatures in the United States in recent years?

13. The author wrote much of Entitled while pregnant with

her first child. When she and her husband learned they were

having a girl, she wrote that it was “difficult to reconcile the

desires we naturally have for our child with a sober

acknowledgment of the realities of misogyny and the male

entitlement that often gives rise to it.” Alongside this fear of

raising a girl, she expresses relief that she isn’t having a boy:

“The prospect of raising a boy to be confident and joyful, yet

appropriately mindful of his own privilege, seemed like a

particularly daunting moral challenge.” What do you make of

the author’s raw reactions? Discuss the challenges related to

both scenarios. How would you navigate these difficulties?

14. Of the eight entitlements Manne outlines in the book,

which was the most compelling to you? The most surprising?

Were there any you disagreed with? Why?

15. Despite the frustrating nature of the topics discussed in

Entitled, the author ends on a brighter note. She says that

while she is “still far from hopeful,” she is “not so despairing

anymore.” Do you share this hope (or at least this

diminishing despair)? Why or why not?

Document Outline

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Chapter One: Indelible—On the Entitlement of Privileged Men

Chapter Two: Involuntary—On the Entitlement to Admiration

Chapter Three: Unexceptional—On the Entitlement to Sex

Chapter Four: Unwanted—On the Entitlement to Consent

Chapter Five: Incompetent—On the Entitlement to Medical Care

Chapter Six: Unruly—On the Entitlement to Bodily Control

Chapter Seven: Insupportable—On the Entitlement to Domestic Labor

Chapter Eight: Unassuming—On the Entitlement to Knowledge

Chapter Nine: Unelectable—On the Entitlement to Power

Chapter Ten: Undespairing—On the Entitlement of Girls

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Notes

About the Author

Reading Group Guide