In this unflinching intervention, philosopher Kate Manne offers a radical new framework for understanding misogyny. Ranging widely across the culture, from the Kavanaugh hearings and 'Cat Person' to Harvey Weinstein and Elizabeth Warren, Manne shows how privileged men's sense of entitlement - to sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, medical care, bodily autonomy, knowledge and power - is a pervasive social problem with often devastating consequences.
In lucid prose, she argues that male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women's pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are 'unelectable'. As Manne shows, we are all implicated in toxic masculinity. It's not just a product of a few bad actors; it's something we all perpetuate, conditioned as we are by the social and cultural currents of our time.
With wit and intellectual fierceness, Manne sheds new light on gender and power and offers a vision of a world in which women are just as entitled as men to our collective care and concern.
