What do mansplainers, husbands who slack on housework and Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh have in common? According to Kate Manne, it's a sense of male entitlement, an entrenched social system that shafts women. In the scholarly but nevertheless eminently readable Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, Manne sets out to expose how "misogyny, himpathy, and male entitlement work in tandem with other oppressive systems to produce unjust, perverse, and sometimes bizarre outcomes."
In essay-like chapters, each zeroing in on a specific aspect of entitlement, Manne (Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny) shows how male privilege can inform everything from how rapes are prosecuted to how medical care is administered and pain medication is prescribed: "Women are regarded as more than entitled (indeed obligated) to provide care, but far less entitled to ask for and receive it." Male entitlement flagrantly powers the grievances of incels (self-described involuntary celibates), and it can fuel the violence perpetrated against transgender people (the aggression can stem from the assailant's sense of entitlement to know the victim's biological sex). Manne pounces on news stories to point out entitlement at work and anatomizes some famous examples; beyond the Kavanaugh confirmation hearing, she looks at the falls of film mogul Harvey Weinstein and former senator Al Franken.
Entitled is a valuable addition to any social-justice library. Manne's thesis, shored up by copious research, will be hard to refute, although her book's abundance of buzzy neologisms ("himpathy," "herasure," and so on) may incline some readers to try. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer