by Kate Manne
Crown Publishing Group
8/11/2020, hardcover
SKU: 9781984826558
An urgent exploration of men's entitlement and how it serves to police and punish women, from the acclaimed author of Down Girl.
In this bold and stylish critique, Cornell philosopher Kate Manne offers a radical new framework for understanding misogyny. Ranging widely across the culture, from Harvey Weinstein and the Brett Kavanaugh hearings to "Cat Person" and the political misfortunes of Elizabeth Warren, Manne's book shows how privileged men's sense of entitlement--to sex, yes, but more insidiously to admiration, care, bodily autonomy, knowledge, and power--is a pervasive social problem with often devastating consequences.
In clear, lucid prose, Manne argues that male entitlement can explain a wide array of phenomena, from mansplaining and the undertreatment of women's pain to mass shootings by incels and the seemingly intractable notion that women are "unelectable." Moreover, Manne implicates each of us in toxic masculinity: It's not just a product of a few bad actors; it's something we all perpetuate, conditioned as we are by the social and cultural mores of our time. The only way to combat it, she says, is to expose the flaws in our default modes of thought while enabling women to take up space, say their piece, and muster resistance to the entitled attitudes of the men around them.
With wit and intellectual fierceness, Manne sheds new light on gender and power and offers a vision of a world in which women are just as entitled as men to our collective care and concern.
Reviews:
"Manne's concept of entitlement is versatile and useful; like the theory of gravity, it has equal power in explaining phenomena both big and small." --The New Yorker
"[A] clear-eyed analysis of misogyny [with] an element of timeliness that translates to something of a gut punch . . . Reading the book is in fact a bit like taking a sweeping tour, a la It's a Wonderful Life, of one's history experiencing misogyny, except Manne is a sharper, more astute Clarence. . . . Cathartic." --Mother Jones
"Kate Manne is among the greatest political philosophers of her generation. Her work is clear, compelling and intellectually devastating, and it matters to everyone who cares about thinking a way through to a better future." --Laurie Penny, author of Unspeakable Things
About the Author: