Why do so many people mention Brock Turner’s promising swim career, or the many Oscars Harvey Weinstein won—instead of focusing on the stories of their survivors? Why do women often feel guilty telling a mansplainer to stop? For Kate Manne, the answer to both comes down to a single concept: entitlement.
Why do so many people mention Brock Turner’s promising swim career, or the many Oscars Harvey Weinstein won—instead of focusing on the stories of their survivors? Why do women often feel guilty telling a mansplainer to stop? For Kate Manne, the answer to both comes down to a single concept: entitlement.
Kate Manne is a professor, writer, and moral philosopher whose research aims to more closely define and combat various forms of misogyny. In her newest book, Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, Kate offers a bold new perspective on the ways in which men’s entitlement to sex, power, knowledge, leisure, and bodily autonomy are used to police and disenfranchise women and other marginalized populations.
It can really change the course of your life to say, "I do not have to feel bad for certain people, and I do not have to feel guilty for my refusal to prioritize the emotional needs of the most privileged people.” Rather, I can actually look toward people who are more marginalized, who are genuinely in need of my solidarity and support. So that's where it's both personally liberating not to feel those illicit sources of guilt and shame, and it can actually, I think, completely redirect where your moral energies go. Because so much of patriarchy, as well as white supremacy, is misdirecting moral emotions that are good things to have. It's good to be sympathetic, and compassionate, and empathetic in your life. But where those emotions get funneled, and in service of whom, that is something that often goes awry under white supremacist hetero-patriarchy.
—Kate Manne, author of Entitled
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Plus: in this week’s You’ve Got This, Sara offers advice on how to tell when you are obligated to speak up against misogyny in the workplace, and how to assess the risk of speaking up in those circumstances. If you’ve ever kept quiet about injustice and then wondered if that was the right choice, this bit is for you. For more on this topic, head on over to https://www.activevoicehq.com/podcast.
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Kate Manne 0:00 I do not have to feel guilty for my refusal to prioritize the emotional needs of the most privileged people. Rather, I can actually look toward people who are more marginalized, who are genuinely in need of my solidarity and support.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher 0:28 Hello, and welcome to Strong Feelings, the podcast all about the messy world of being a human at work. I'm your host, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and today I'm talking with an author I've wanted to have on the show for at least two years: Kate Manne. Kate is a feminist philosopher, and we're gonna talk about her latest book Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women. What I particularly love about Kate's work is how her framework helps us see and name issues so much more clearly, and specifically in this one, male entitlement. For example, I think we all know by now that there's been a huge problem with parenting burnout during the pandemic and that moms in heterosexual relationships have really borne the brunt of that. In fact, I was just reading a study about domestic labor that came out this summer, it's the American Time Use Survey from the US Department of Labor. And what they found was that both moms and dads reported spending more time on secondary childcare in 2020, which is defined as supervising at least one kid while doing a primary activity while working. But, they found that on average employed moms spend seven hours a day on secondary childcare, while employed dads spend an average of five hours.
1:38 So that difference, that is an example of one of the types of entitlement Kate mentioned in the interview: entitlement to domestic labor. Her argument is that the reason we see those disparities, or at least part of the reason, is that men are taught to feel entitled to more leisure time than women and also entitled to receive domestic care, domestic care that has to be done by someone like, you know, the women in their lives. And so that's why we see such uneven impacts of the pandemic on mothers versus fathers in two-parent cishet homes. So that is just one of the types of entitlement that Kate digs into in her book and in this interview. This interview is so great, there's so much here that I think is going to be really valuable in your own understanding of the world and in how you might cope with some of these issues in your life. Let's get to it.
SWB 2:28 Kate Manne is the author of two books: Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny and Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, which was first published in 2020 and just came out in paperback last month. She is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Cornell, a frequent essayist and op-ed writer, and one of the few people I believe is truly excellent at making philosophical concepts not just understandable, but actually compelling to a mainstream audience. So Kate, welcome to Strong Feelings.
KM 2:56 Thank you. Thanks so much for having me.
SWB 2:57 Well, first up, I'd love to ask a little bit about Entitled, since, like I said, just came out in paperback. I love the book. And I was wondering if you would just tell us a little bit about how you would describe the core premise behind it?
KM 3:08 Yeah, absolutely. So it kind of all started when I wrote my first book, which you mentioned. And that was a theory of what misogyny is. And it basically said misogyny is a way of policing and enforcing gendered norms and expectations for girls and women. And so that kind of left me with this question that I've been thinking about ever since: What are those gendered norms and expectations, particularly in superficially egalitarian milieu like America and my home country of Australia today? And so my answer to that is really contained in the second book; I hold that a lot of what gendered norms and expectations do these days is enforce a sense that men, particularly privileged men along racial dimensions, among others, are entitled to a whole host of goods and services from girls and women, so things like emotional, material, reproductive, and domestic labor. And in turn, women and girls are deemed obligated to give those goods to men, which they're in turn deemed entitled to. So that was the basic idea, and that forms the premise for the book that there are all of these spheres of male entitlement that we really need to interrogate and examine.
SWB 4:28 Yeah, so one of the things I actually found really helpful was that framework of thinking about entitlement along these different themes or different kinds of concepts. And I'm curious if you could talk a little bit about some of the different ways that entitlement looks at its basic level.
KM 4:42 So I think one of the most obvious forms of entitlement that we're getting more culturally accustomed to thinking about, thanks to Tarana Burke's Me Too Movement and its popularization in 2017, is the entitlement to sex and the sense that in particular, as I mentioned, racially-privileged men are entitled to sex from less-privileged women and in particular, female sexual partners within the context of heterosexual relationships. That makes things like sexual assault quite difficult to prosecute in the context of intimate relationships, along with domestic violence, which it's, of course, adjacent to. But I also have tried to think hard about ways in which men are also deemed entitled not just to sex, but sexual admiration and consent in a thoroughly patriarchal as well as white supremacist context. It's not sufficient to have sexual consent in order for sex to be ethical because often, there is a lot of social pressure on particular people: girls, women, nonbinary folks as well, I believe, to give the consent which privileged men are deemed entitled to. So that's one kind of sphere in which I've tried to explore the complexities of both sexual entitlement and also a sense of entitlement to having sex consented to, which means that consent is of course necessary but not sufficient for sex to be permissible.
6:17 But there's also all these other spheres like domestic labor, where men are deemed entitled to much more leisure time and have to do much less work within the average heterosexual household, areas like medical care where women, especially Black and indigenous women are often denied the genuine entitlement to care, because they're deemed obligated to provide care and not deemed entitled to have it for themselves, even when there's a genuine and crucial entitlement there. Then I think about other areas like the entitlement to knowledge, the entitlement to power, also the entitlement to bodily control, that comes up both in the context of reproductive rights that we're seeing under attack at the moment, and also the rights of trans people to control their bodily autonomy and to be who they are. Those are just some of the spheres in which we can, approaching this intersectionally, see that white, otherwise privileged men are often deemed entitled to more than their due, and other people are deemed obligated to provide those goods and get less than their due.
SWB 7:28 Yeah, I think it was really telling you started the book with Brett Kavanaugh, and I mean, talk about an example of entitlement. And I think that that was such a perfect example to begin with because it showed a number of those different entitlements. I'm curious about, you know, how did you decide to begin with that example, and some of the major examples in the book are really coming back to these kind of like high profile cases. And how did you end up picking those out, and what was so important about including something like Brett Kavanaugh?
KM 7:55 Great question, I mean, part of the answer to this is autobiographical, that it was during that week, the Kavanaugh hearings, that the genesis for this book really came to be, in part because there was such a gendered asymmetry in terms of Brett Kavanaugh's angry, indeed, rage-filled, stroppy sense of entitlement to not so much as be questioned when he was about to assume the position of some of the highest moral authority in the US as Supreme Court Justice.
SWB 8:25 Lifetime appointment.
KM 8:27 Sigh. Indeed. And that contrasted so markedly with Christine Blasey Ford's incredibly tempered and conciliatory demeanor where she had such poignant attempts to be helpful to the senators who were questioning her. And despite the horrific trauma of what she had been through—and for the record, I absolutely believe her in her testimony that Brett Kavanaugh assaulted her when the two were both teenagers—but that trauma compounded by the trauma having to recall those events in such a public setting, and yet she was so solicitous, as I said, helpful, and modest in her demeanor compared to Brett Kavanaugh's fulminating in the most entitled manner imaginable about, in effect, his entitlement to assume that position of moral authority without so much as being questioned.
SWB 9:26 Right, that tone of just like, "I can't believe I even have to be here today."
KM 9:30 Absolutely. That nails it.
SWB 9:32 Yeah, like, that he should have just had the job. Why are we even asking questions?
KM 9:35 That it was his, that he was entitled to it.
SWB 9:38 Yeah. And I think, you know, one of the things that I find really powerful about your book that I kind of alluded to before is just, like I said, a framework in sort of outlining these different areas. And like you said, some of them are becoming maybe a little bit more aware, so entitlement to sex is something that I think a lot of folks have been thinking about. But there are some others that I thought might be maybe a little bit more of a sleeper sense of entitlement that I thought were really interesting. One of them that you picked up on was the entitlement to knowledge, which I think you mentioned before, and you kind of talk about mansplaining as being part of that. I'd love to home in on that because a lot of people who listen to this show work in, like, tech workplaces. And I think that that entitlement to knowledge piece, the idea of being "the knower," that comes up a lot in their workplaces. And so I'm curious if you can talk a little bit about that, like, what does it mean that men feel often entitled to be the knowers of society? And how does that play out?
KM 10:31 Yeah, well, I'm so glad you asked that, because that was something in the book that I hoped would resonate with people and provide a kind of unifying explanation of a bunch of phenomena, including mansplaining, but also gaslighting. So the way I tried to parse it is that some privileged people, men in particular, again, who are privileged along other dimensions like race and class, and being non-disabled, being cis rather than trans, being straight up and queer, tend to have, in some cases, a sense of entitlement to be the default authority figure in a conversation, the one who issues authoritative explanations. The one who is presumed by all parties to know what they're talking about, and to have the entitlement to hold forth on that topic.
11:18 And of course, that's often just simply false, that women and nonbinary folks who he's in a conversation with will know more than he does. And so that leads to, in some ways, amusing, but also horrifying exchanges where you have, for example, the founder of the concept of mansplaining, Rebecca Solnit, who was at a dinner party where a man hosting mansplained to her her own book on Eadweard Muybridge, the founder of motion pictures. He said, "Did you ever hear about this very important book on Muybridge that was written just this year?" Which he hadn't read, he'd just read about it in the New York Times Book Review. And what was interesting there is that his sense of entitlement was so complete that Solnit actually found herself questioning for a moment, was there another book on Muybridge that she'd somehow missed? Because the people in the exchange are assigned these roles; it's not just that the man explains things that the woman already knows. He's assigning to her, as she points out, the role of ingenue, the kind of vessel for the information that he is about to disseminate as we might put it, somewhat provocatively, non-consensually.
12:34 And it took Solnit's friend at that dinner party three or four tries to say, "No, that's her book. She wrote that book." Which is, of course, comical in the way that the social script is so dissonant with what's actually going on in terms of who's expert and who's the authority. She wrote the darn book. But as well as that, she recounts a moment where he finally registers his error, and he's deterred only for a moment. She says his face pales, he turns ashen, but then he begins to hold forth again, undeterred. So this is how rigid these social roles sometimes are, that even when someone is embarrassed in that way, humiliated really, by his own mansplaining behavior, even then he can't quite get out of this role of default authority figure and the one who is the explainer rather than the person who listens to authoritative explanations coming from women or nonbinary folks.
SWB 13:34 Yeah, I feel like I've seen that so much. And where that's like, even in that moment of recognition, like "Oh, no," right? "Oh, no, I'm talking to the person that actually wrote the book," it's like, "I can't deal with being in a different role, so I'll just get through my own discomfort by pushing that onto them."
KM 13:50 Yeah, doubling down.
SWB 13:51 Somehow their fault. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, I think about this a lot, about, you know, kind of, workplace dynamics, and I think about the number of meetings I've had, where I feel like, "Oh, that was what was happening," right? Like, "Oh, that person was defaulting to the knower role." I was just thinking about a conversation I had with somebody who also, I run a business, they run a business, both small businesses. I thought it was like a friendly, kind of collaborative session, and I left the meeting feeling like, "Why do I feel so bad about myself?" And I realized that in the session, it was that he was talking to me as if he knew about running businesses, and I had asked him how to run mine.
KM 14:25 Wow.
SWB 14:25 In the moment, I think I kind of fell into that, like you're saying, it's easy to fall into that role of like, "Oh, right. That's the default behavior that's expected of me, is that he's going to tell me about things, and I'm going to learn about things." And it wasn't until I left that I realized how small I had felt and how much I was like, "Wait. I've successfully run my own business for like 10 years. What am I doing? I think it really speaks to how much it is easy to sort of normalize the things that we maybe don't have any distance from or don't have a name for. I've been thinking a lot about this, the power of having a name for it, like mansplaining or the The Knower entitlement. I'm wondering what was important to you about being able to name some of these things, and what do you think that allows us to do in our everyday lives?
KM 15:09 I mean, the anecdote that you just gave is so resonant with me. And I think it highlights something, which is that often when we're assigned these social roles, there is a huge amount of subtle social pressure, both internalized and external, to be polite, and to go along with the existing social script that's been imposed. And so one of the things that happens when there is a default sense of entitlement, be it to knowledge or something else, is you have to do something kind of socially jarring to get out of it. And it's often not worth it, or it's difficult to locate in the moment what that social move would be, to try to challenge someone's elicit wrongheaded sense of entitlement, because it can feel almost rude to disrupt someone's sense that they, for example, are the knower and the one who gets to issue the explanation.
16:03 And so one of the things that having a name for phenomena like mansplaining does is it allows you to see that actually, no, you're not the one who's on the brink of being rude by interrupting this. You're the one who he's being rude to.
SWB 16:17 Yeah.
KM 16:18 So you're the one who's being wronged in this scenario when it's occurring, and that you have yourself the moral entitlement to say, "Wait, why are you explaining to me how to run a business when I've been doing this for 10 years?" Or in my case, why is someone telling me that as well as thinking about racial privilege, I should think about male entitlement? On Twitter, this happened just yesterday.
SWB 16:42 I've done some thinking about it.
KM 16:43 Indeed, I happen to host a thread about white privilege. But of course, these forms of privilege intersect. This is what I've been thinking about for, you know, now nearly a decade. And yet, it would feel disruptive, without the label of mansplaining, to say, "Hey, pipe down," or even to think to yourself how amusing/ridiculous this is that I am having this explained to me when, you know, I wrote the book on white male privilege.
SWB 17:13 Yeah.
KM 17:14 But yeah, that label is a way to address what Miranda Fricker calls “the hermeneutical injustice” that would otherwise exist, where there can be a gap in your collective conceptual resources for kind of labeling what's going on and being able to thus, either flip the script, or at least see that the script is what it is, and that something is going on, that is silly or unjust, wrongheaded in some way that explains that sense of discomfort that you have or that sense of feeling small in that moment, that would otherwise be difficult to kind of locate why it was going on, or what moral basis it had. So that clarity, I think, is a huge form of collective power that we have as feminists to name things and thus potentially flip the script, disrupt the script, or just say, internally, "I know what's happening.” And even if it's not worth addressing at the time, because it would be too risky or too dangerous, or just take too much of your energy, there's still a clarity that is, to me at least, a deep form of consolation.
SWB 18:24 Yeah, I'm really glad you mentioned that, that there's two parts to it, right? There's like, what are you internalizing from it? And then also, what are you choosing to push back against? And that you might be doing both, but that at least even if you've decided, "I'm not going to touch this. Not worth my time," or "I'm going to be perceived as a bitch if I do," which is a real problem, that at least having that internal clarity for yourself, I found that really freeing in terms of not carrying as much of this, kind of, internalized sense of responsibility to care about somebody else's feelings who does not hear about mine or sense of shame that I'm, you know, acting and appropriately just because they're treating you that way. I think it's really helpful to think like, even if you don't say something, gaining that emotional distance from it yourself and being able to say, "That's happening out there. I didn't do something wrong. I see what's going on here. And I'm not going to let that control me," I think is more powerful maybe than people sometimes realize.
KM 19:19 For me, it's kind of life-changing. Like, that's one of the things that feminism has given me that has been so liberating in work that, you know, runs the gamut from feminist interventions to critical race theoretic interventions, everyone from Catharine MacKinnon to Derrick Bell. I feel like there is a way of saying you don't have to feel guilty or ashamed, or like you're broken. And even if you can't, or are unwilling to challenge a particular dynamic in the moment because there are real consequences sometimes for calling out others' bad behavior, even if it's not possible to change the dynamic immediately, getting that emotional distance, just as you said, can really be a powerful bulwark against both the negative immoral emotions that eat away at us otherwise, a sense that there's something wrong with us. And also being gaslit because for me a big part of being gaslit is feeling guilty for adhering to your version, your knowledge, in fact, of what's true and real and important. So people are sometimes made to feel "crazy," which is obviously an ableist term, but that's kind of within the framework of gaslighting what people are made to feel. They're also made to feel morally defective, like bad people for not buying a particular dominant narrative about what is going on in their worlds. And being able to push back against that, internally, I think is intrinsically valuable, as well as helping us to affect external change.
SWB 20:18 Yeah, I think about that a lot because I work with so many people who, you know, we're in this moment of extreme burnout for everybody everywhere, and some of that we don't have a lot of power over. But some of that, I think it's like if you can let go of some of those unrealistic expectations of you, if you can let go of the idea that somehow you're failing, because you're not performing this sense of duty as a woman, whatever, right? If you can let go of some of that stuff, I think that you actually-
KM 20:55 Right.
SWB 20:55 It does. That stuff takes so much energy, and to be able to say, like, "Yeah, no, I'm not wasting my energy there. I see what's happening there," I think that that is one way to kind of regain a little bit of sense of power and agency in a moment where so much feels powerless.
KM 21:38 And it can change our behavior. I mean, it can change what we're able to do in the world. So you know, here's an example: I have this concept of, you know, of "himpathy," this idea that we're sometimes overly sympathetic with men who commit acts of sexual violence and sexual assault, and even domestic homicide for that matter, especially when those men are privileged. That is partly me pushing back against an internalized sense that I should feel guilty for calling men out for bad behavior, that there's something inappropriate, or mean-spirited, or uncompassionate about my holding men accountable for their very bad behavior. You know, I often like to joke, and it's not really a joke. I'm a recovering himpath. And part of having those concepts and being able to wield them to say, "No, I'm not actually obligated to feel deep compassion for Louis C.K., or Harvey Weinstein or Kevin Spacey.”
SWB 22:38 But they lost so much.
KM 22:40 They lost so much. Yeah, I mean, it can really change the course of your life to say, "I do not have to feel bad for certain people, and I do not have to feel guilty for my refusal to prioritize the emotional needs of the most privileged people.” Rather, I can actually look toward people who are more marginalized, who are genuinely in need of my solidarity and support. So that's where it's both personally liberating not to feel those illicit sources of guilt and shame, and it can actually, I think, completely redirect where your moral energies go because so much of patriarchy as well as white supremacy is misdirecting moral emotions that are good things to have. It's good to be sympathetic, and compassionate, and empathetic in your life. But where those emotions get funneled, and in service of whom, that is something that often goes awry under white supremacist, hetero-patriarchy.
SWB 23:39 One example you talk about in the book that I thought was such a perfect encapsulation was the endless amount of headlines about Brock Turner. And "Oh, and his poor swimming career is going to be over." Right? And it's like, there's no conversation whatsoever about what did this sexual assault that he committed, what did that do to the life of this woman who was unnamed? We know it's Chanel Miller now. What happened to her? What did she lose? And what are all the ways that she was this, like, bright and shiny young person about to do great things that she didn't get to do because of this.
KM 24:12 Exactly.
SWB 24:12 That story doesn't get nearly the press time, and I don't know, you've probably read her memoir, if anybody else hasn't read it, it's, Know My Name.
KM 24:22 It's so brilliant. And what was so brilliant about it, I really recommend it to anyone who can afford the emotional bandwidth because it is a harrowing read. But it's so brilliant because it pushes back against the centering of the shiny, golden boy at the center of the narrative, and it centers on her and her experience of being sexually assaulted and recovering from that sexual assault as well as going through the at least equally traumatic experience of having her sexual assault dredged up and questioned in a court of law. And yeah, that was exactly what was so striking to me. As you said at the time, the headlines were all about Brock Turner, this sexual assailant who was caught in the act by two Swedish graduate students at Stanford who performed in effect a citizen's arrest when they saw him doing this. So there was no doubt at all about his guilt. He was nonetheless subject to huge amounts of sympathy from everyone from the judge in the case, to his family and friends, to many people in the media who bemoaned the loss of his swimming scholarship and his bright future as a Stanford student. You know, his father said he could no longer enjoy a fresh ribeye steak off the grill because his appetite had been ruined—as if it shouldn't be, him having sexually assaulted Chanel Miller behind a dumpster after a Stanford party.
25:53 So that kind of misdirection of emotional energy toward the perpetrator rather than the victim, and the sense that that's actually a good thing that we should be behind the perpetrator and feeling lots of compassion towards him rather than prioritizing first and foremost, the victim in our hearts and minds. It's not just that we have to change our reaction, we also have to change the reaction to our reaction; we have to learn to feel okay with holding men like Brock Turner accountable for what they do without guilt or shame for perceived harshness.
SWB 26:31 Yeah, you know, that's where I think, again, having a name for something is so valuable. When I read the word "himpathy," it helped me like you, right, to start to see where had I had those feelings before. And I think because part of being human, for most of us, is some degree of empathy and, you know, sure, losing a swimming scholarship, yes, I'm sure that that was painful for him. And then to go, "Yep, that was painful for him, and I don't have to put my concern there-"
KM 26:57 Right.
SWB 26:57 It allows me to kind of stop, pause, and give myself that space to process it instead of going with a knee jerk reaction and say, "Wait a second, where should I really be placing my empathy?" And so for me, himpathy was a really valuable term to start thinking about that.
KM 27:11 Yeah, I mean, I have a big belief in the power of moral philosophy and feminist thinking in general, to really crystallize inchoate worries or anxieties that we had, that we couldn't quite put our finger on. So I might have had an incipient sense of awkwardness and anxiety about cases like Brock Turner's, and of course, I would have had various feminist reactions, but it wasn't until I could see the kind of, the unity of a certain way of prioritizing a male perspective, and prioritizing men's emotions, that I was able to bring together various cases where I could see in myself a reaction to them that I no longer felt I ought to have. So that crystallizing function is important, I think, and a lot of feminist theory as well as critical race theory has really done that for me. It's not necessarily convincing me as something I didn't already believe. So we often focus on the power of a good argument to persuade the other side. That can be important. It can also be impractical. But as well as that function of arguments, I like to think about the crystallizing role of a lot of discourse, that it can show people who were on the same side how to think about some phenomenon in a much clearer away, and it can help us communicate with each other as well as locate in ourselves patterns that we were previously unable to fully envisage.
SWB 28:44 Yeah, I think that really dovetails with something I wanted to ask about, which is that you've said that you want to reach a broad audience, and obviously men do read your work, that a lot of what you're doing is writing for women. And I'm curious, you know, when you think about the impact that you hope that your work has, how are you hoping that your readers can use this work to better cope with their lives or change their circumstances?
KM 29:07 Well, I would say that it is important to me that I am writing first and foremost for girls and women as well as nonbinary folks. Although I don't consider myself the authority on the particular issues raised by being nonbinary, I nonetheless want my work to be inclusive of different ways of being in the world in a gendered way. But that idea that yeah, look, my work is there for the reading by men, of course, and I welcome them as readers, and that's great. But I really want to be speaking primarily to people who are marginalized along the dimension of gender and who might need the help that I have received from feminist theorists. You know, I see myself as one small contributor to a very large collective feminist effort by philosophers, theorists, writers, activists, podcasters, etc, etc, to try to be a community where certain things become sayable, even if they're highly impolitic. And yeah, to open up space for women and girls to claim a sense of entitlement that is genuine rather than wrongheaded. So for me, entitlement is not a dirty word. Yes, some people feel overly entitled.
SWB 29:17 Yeah.
KM 29:28 But often girls and women, especially more marginalized girls and women in virtue of race, aren't deemed entitled to what they genuinely deserve and have a right to. And so opening up space for people to say, "No, I am entitled to adequate medical care," for example. "I am entitled to equal pay. I am entitled to occupy a position of authority on this matter." That's something that I hope my work does.
SWB 30:50 Well, I will say that for me, I found the book really helpful for just doing exactly what you're describing, right, having a better way to talk about some of the things I was seeing and feeling like I could say more of the things that were unsayable. Entitled is out now on paperback. And I just want to say, Kate, thank you so much for talking about the book. I am such a big fan.
KM 31:08 Thank you so much.
SWB 31:17 All right. So, Kate, we've talked a lot about the book. But now I want to ask just a couple more questions about you and your experience, and maybe even some advice you might have for our listeners. Are you ready?
KM 31:29 Yeah. Great.
SWB 31:30 So in Entitled, you mentioned that you had written Down Girl while you were pregnant with your first child. And one of the things that came up was this feeling of pessimism in that first book, pessimism about how we might change things. And that as you wrote Entitled, you had actually moved to maybe like a cautious optimism, and that your daughter was a big part of that. And I'm curious if you can say more about what helped you shift to that place, and what's important about that to you?
KM 31:54 It's partly just a personal shift that, you know, wasn't driven by intellectual changes so much as embodied changes. I suppose to reframe things slightly, not so much moving from pessimism to optimism, I think I'll always be a pessimist. But I think I felt as I was pregnant for more or less the whole course of writing the second book, I think I felt more obligated to be in the fight. I think I had become so depressed, just that, you know, this is a purely personal matter. It's, again, not to say this is a justified intellectual stance, but I'd become so depressed at the end of writing Down Girl, that I said, "I give up." That I wish I could offer a more hopeful message, but as it was, I just ended the book by giving a postmortem, because I felt like something in me, by way of hope had died in writing that book.
32:48 But it was sort of reignited by, in a way, having a community of readers, and thinkers, and activists who were in community with me after I wrote this book, and was able to more fully enter back into a social world with other feminists as well as critical race theoretic writers. And so part of what changed was I felt more in community and feminist solidarity. After finishing the book, which was such a lonely and isolating pursuit, again, not because that is the way I meant it to be, but really just that was kind of the process that I went through. And then, becoming pregnant and learning that we were having a child who, they said, would be a girl, I really felt, yeah, this renewed sense of being in the fight for her. And so that very much changed my perspective between the first and second books. Again, not really by intellectual design, but just by life happenstance.
SWB 33:49 Yeah. I think something that you really speak to there though is that power of community and sort of getting outside of yourself sometimes. Like, getting stuck in your head is not necessarily the best place to hold on to hope.
KM 34:02 Right?
SWB 34:02 Yeah, I'm curious, then, you know, it's been a difficult year-and-a-half.
KM 34:07 Yeah.
SWB 34:08 And for a lot of people, connection's been something that's been pretty hard to come by. That sense of community has felt pretty fractured or lost. And I'm wondering, you know, how do you, or have you sustained hope over the pandemic? And as, I don't know, I could make a list of things. But like, what's the point of listing them all?
KM 34:25 I mean, it's tricky for me, hope is always such a difficult thing to sustain. I suppose I've been influenced by Tressie McMillan Cottom's characterization of a kind of do-si-do dance that isn't even progress and then backlash, but is simultaneous forward momentum and backwards momentum in lockstep. So very much a simultaneous, you know, we have these amazing moments of protest of George Floyd's murder, but he was murdered.
SWB 34:59 Yeah.
KM 35:00 You have the protests to George Floyd's matter. But then you have the backlash that sees whites retrenching in hostility towards critical race theory and having a moral panic over school curricula, which you know, it has tangential connections at best to critical race theory, although it does share certain DNA in terms of thinking of racism as systemic. So, you know, it's hard for me to think in monolithic terms. You know, it's a bit hackneyed, but I say, not glass half full or half empty, but just, I'm thirsty. I want that cup to be fuller, and am in the fight to make it so.
SWB 35:38 Yeah. I'm curious, then what advice would you give to a listener who's kind of on the brink right now, like, really struggling to hold on to a sense of hope or a sense of power for themselves?
KM 35:50 Well, I guess I would say I really sympathize and have absolutely been there. I think community is crucial, and that that is a really hard thing to make happen during the pandemic. But I hope that there are ways that we're finding to find those solidaristic opportunities to kind of be in connection with other people. I would also say that a big part of my perspective shift in the first to second book for me was feeling more entitled to care for myself and rest. So there's a wonderful Instagram account that I follow called The Nap Ministry. You know, I'm a huge fan of their work. These are Black activists who are trying to show that, particularly for people who are marginalized in virtue of race and/or gender, the ability to rest and to take a nap is something that really does matter. And that there is, again, an entitlement to that is often hidden from view from us under late-stage capitalism that constantly demands and extracts productivity from us. So I guess that's one concrete piece of advice: take a nap and feel good about it.
SWB 35:57 Yeah. I mean, one of the things about The Nap Ministry message that I found really resonant, it is absolutely centering Black voices and Black needs, but I think it has lessons for all of us. And one of them is that, you know, rest is not something you earn by being productive. Rest is not something that you do only so that you can become more productive. Rest in and of itself is deserved. It doesn't have to be in relation to work.
KM 37:29 Exactly.
SWB 37:30 And I really love that message. And that was something that, you know, I found really powerful. A friend of mine, actually was at a retreat, the GirlTrek retreat for Black women.
KM 37:38 Oh, yeah, I love that organization.
SWB 37:40 She got to go to a Nap Ministry workshop where they did like a collective nap. And I was like, this is the best thing I've ever heard of.
KM 37:47 I love it. I can't think of a better way to combine community and a sense of rightful entitlement to respite and rest.
SWB 37:58 Yeah, I love it. Everybody should listen to The Nap Ministry. Follow them. I think their Instagram is where they're the most active. Super powerful message. Kate, I have one more kind of category of question for you, which is that you're a woman, you're a public intellectual, so that's already grounds just by that alone to be kind of on the receiving end of a lot of misogyny. And then of course, you write about misogyny. So I imagine that that kind of visibility can also present some vulnerability for you. And I'm wondering, how do you manage that kind of public profile and the vulnerability or like maybe negative attention that comes with it?
KM 38:35 Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, I remember when I published my first op-ed in the New York Times. Within maybe 15 minutes, so that having been posted online, someone tweeted, "Dumb c-word writing dumb things." Needless to say the c-word was not filled out with an ellipsis.
SWB 38:56 Yeah.
KM 38:57 But yeah, learning to see that as misogyny and not a reflection on me. Or if anything, a reflection on the fact that I'm doing the work that I think does need to be done, that I'm, you know, making a contribution, a small one, to a kind of important collective effort to push back against vast social forces that try to silence outspoken women. You know, I think that that clarity has helped me resist some of those messages and prevent me from internalizing them or feeling like I was out of line. I would say too, again, being able to disengage from it is really important. You know, I usually, for example, don't have Twitter installed on my phone. And, you know, will only check it a couple of times a day. I recently took a month off Twitter just because I was too mired in pandemic stress to keep thinking about mean tweets. I guess I don't have any particularly good sort of magic bullets, but I think I've gradually learned to tune it out and not so much have a thick skin as better layers of protection that I surround myself with.
SWB 40:05 Yeah, I think a lot about how it's like, it's not fair that you have to do that. It's not fair that you have to take that kind of precaution or to have that kind of protective kind of shield around you. And then at the same time, it sounds like that's the thing that allows you to keep that work up. And I'm curious, you know, if you were talking with somebody who wanted to be more visible, speak up more, whether it was something like writing op-eds, very public, or even just in their workplace, but they're kind of in that place of like, "Can I really deal with the backlash? Can I deal with the feedback I'll get?" How might you suggest that they think through those choices for themselves?
KM 40:44 Yeah, I mean, I would say, one very simple thing that I find it helpful to think about is, I'm entitled, but not obligated, to speak up under most circumstances where I'm defending my own rights. Now, that is complicated very much when you're thinking about standing up for others, which is often the case, in which case, you will sometimes be obligated because of your own privilege, including institutional or workplace privilege. If you're in a better position than other people to speak up on some matter, then you may well have an obligation to do so. But I would think of it in terms of something analogous to Spoons, that is a nice metaphor for people who are dealing with chronic illness or certain disabilities and have limited energy. I think in a way, we all have limited energy to protest and resist. And so where is my energy best spent? Where is my energy obligated to go to, for example, defending more marginalized women in the workplace. And where can I merely note that something ought to change, but there are areas where it would be too risky, or dangerous, or too energy-sapping to stand up to some, say, minor injustice, that would be tremendously difficult to change.
SWB 42:04 Yeah.
KM 42:05 So navigating all that is really tricky. But I think it is the kind of, if you like, cost-benefit analysis that we have to make all the time. Can I speak? Am I obligated to speak? Am I entitled to speak? Am I the best person to do so? How much energy will it take? What will it cost me? What will it cost others if I don't? That, I think, is the kind of considerations that we should be bearing in mind when we enter into any kind of activist space or, indeed, ordinary institutional space where change needs to be made. As it inevitably does.
SWB 42:41 I find that so valuable. I'm going to be thinking about this for a while, this,
where am I entitled to speak up and not obligated? And also, where am I obligated?” Because I think that's an easy one that people maybe sometimes opt out of when they have enough institutional power, they really ought to be doing something. Thank you so much for that. And Kate, thank you so much, again, for being here today. I hope everybody picks up Entitled and down girl as well, which I also loved. And you can follow Kate on twitter at Kate_Manne. Kate, thank you again. What a good conversation.
KM 43:14 Thank you so much. I really enjoyed the conversation.
SWB 43:20 All right. So before we go, it's time for our last segment: You've Got This. That is where we look at a concept that came up in the interview and apply it to our lives. So today, I want to talk about something Kate mentioned there at the end: being entitled to speak up versus being obligated to speak up. This is such a useful framing, y'all. As Kate said, when we're defending our own rights, we're entitled to speak up, meaning we deserve to do it. But she says we're not obligated. So for example, you are entitled to tell someone to stop explaining your own book to you. You're entitled to tell someone that their sexist joke wasn't acceptable. You're entitled to demand equal pay, but you're not necessarily obligated to do those things. Because, let's be real, there are absolutely risks to advocating for yourself and saying no. I think this goes back to something Kate mentioned earlier in the interview, that even if you choose not to speak up in the moment not to push back, it's still incredibly valuable to understand what's going on, just for your own sense of self and your sanity. So just by recognizing what's happening is unfair or misogynistic, that can make a huge difference in your experience and how much weight you carry around from it.
44:30 So that's when you're entitled to speak up, but you're not obligated. I think it's really, really great though that Kate also mentioned that there are times when we are obligated to speak up. And she frames those times as being when we're speaking for the rights of others who are more marginalized than us or who have less institutional power than us in a specific context. I'm glad she mentioned this because I think about this a lot regarding white women working in tech, which is of course where I come from, right? So I've talked about this before in a lot of different places. Have I talked about it here? I don't remember, and either way I don't care because it's so incredibly important. I am happy to say it again. So my experience is that white women in tech have often been on the receiving end of a lot of biased behavior. They've been on the receiving end of misogyny; they're often paid less than their male counterparts. They've often been treated dismissively, treated like they don't know anything, or they couldn't possibly be technical. They have to do the office, birthday party, whatever. They've often experienced harassment. Those are all super real things.
45:28 But at the same time, white women in tech are also an increasingly powerful group. There are studies showing that DEI efforts at tech companies predominantly end up benefiting white women. There's a lot of white women in tech, kind of, affinity groups or meet-up groups that have been shown to really be in support of white women in tech and don't necessarily meet the needs of others. White women tend to mentor and sponsor other white women to kind of give them a helping hand to make their way up the ladder. And we are seeing more and more white women entering leadership in tech. And we're not necessarily seeing that across all groups. And so what I see is an issue is often that white women will focus in on the very real misogyny they've experienced. And again, that's valid, those are real experiences. But as a result, they'll see themselves as unable to take risks or to speak up. They'll start seeing themselves as powerless. And I think that stops us from looking at where we actually do have power, where we've been gaining more institutional power, or where we have strong networks. Where we can actually afford to take risks.
46:28 This really matters because as Kate says, we all should consider where we're obligated to speak up for those who are more marginalized than we are. And so for white women, I think that really means speaking up for women of color, and for nonbinary people of color, who experience much worse outcomes in the industry, who experience more harassment, greater pay disparity, less support, fewer opportunities, etc. So something I try to ask myself, and I encourage any of my fellow white women listening out there to think about themselves, is not do I have power, but rather, where do I have power? Because when we ask ourselves, if we have power, it's a binary: yes or no? And if you've experienced misogyny at work, which let's face it, most of us have, it can feel like the answer is "No, I don't have power." But when we ask ourselves instead, "Where do I have power," that creates options. That makes us think. That really makes us assess things.
47:22 In addition to that, I would encourage you to ask yourself, not if it's risky for you to speak up for those who are more marginalized than you, but how risky is it? And what risks can you honestly afford to take right now? Because the thing is, is that speaking up is always going to carry some risk. Always, right? But the more senior you are in your organization, or the stronger your network, the more other job opportunities you have, the more money you have, the more stability you have, etc, etc, etc, all of those things, all those things are going to impact how big the risk actually is for you, and then also what level of risk you can afford to take, what level of risk isn't gonna threaten your safety or your stability. So the next time you see something unjust happening, and you're nervous to speak up about it, try asking those questions. Not "Do I have power," but "Where do I have power?" And not "Is it risky," but "What risks can I afford to take right now?" Get more resources on this at activevoicehq.com/podcast and let me know how it goes.
48:26 And that is it for this week's episode of Strong Feelings. I'm your host, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, and Strong Feelings is a production of Active Voice. Check us out at activevoicehq.com, and get all the past episodes, show notes, and full transcripts for Strong Feelings at Strongfeelings.co. This episode was recorded in South Philadelphia and produced by Emily Duncan. Our theme music is "Deprogrammed" by Philly's own Blowdryer. You can check them out at blowdryer.bandcamp.com. Huge thanks to Kate man for being our guest today. And thank you so much for listening. If you liked our show, please give us a rating wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. It really helps us reach new audiences. See you next time. Bye.