So many reasons why…
For so long, I’ve wanted to lead a book read on Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, by Kate Manne. I am so grateful to the Assisi Heights Spirituality Center in Rochester, Minnesota for sponsoring the program.
The impact of male privilege on women has come upon me in fits and starts throughout my life and continues to this day. I have experienced it directly and witnessed it around me – directed toward women of all ages, races, religions, socio-economic backgrounds and sexual orientations. I’ve had to work out for myself how I unconsciously internalized sexist attitudes and how this led to their perpetuation.
The more that I study and do pastoral work on situations of male harm against women, the more I find that they are often psychologized in a way that does double damage to women and to our society. Research shows, and this book highlights, that male entitlement comes from a mentality – a way of thinking – and not fundamentally from mental health situations. (See also, the work of Lundy Bancroft.) It’s time to look more closely at the current expansion and widespread impact of this mentality.
I could give a list a mile long about why reading this book is important now, even if I look only to our experience of femicide in Minnesota… the first political assassination of a woman in our country in the murder of Melissa Hortman, the recent murder of 20 year old Amber Czech, a welder, the murder of Amy Doverspike, just this week in Maplewood, MN, and the 2023 murder of Madeline Kingsbury by her boyfriend in my own small hometown of Winona, MN.
And then sometimes for us, the reason hits even more closely to our hearts. Just as they found Madeline’s body and the manhunt for her murderer was underway, I was sheltering a dear family friend – helping her to safely escape a volatile and violent marriage. I give thanks for her life and her courage daily.
While the reasons above show that this conversation is a matter of life and death, Entitled makes the case that this privileged mentality pervades our societies and daily lives as well. Manne looks closely at men’s entitlement in various forms.
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. (Entitled, 11)
This mentality rightly often angers and frustrates women and men. As a feminist scripture scholar, Jesus’ righteous anger, which led to his death, meant so much to me as I studied bible in my early 20s. I actually learned during this time how to deal in a healthy way with my own anger, whether it was righteous or not. It was and still is a part of me. While conversations like this can seem emotional, scary and intimidating, I think it’s mostly because they have the power and possibility to be transformational and healing.
What we can do is have the courage to shine the light in dark places. We can keep learning and growing and walking where we dare not go. We can shine the light inward on our own minds, hearts and souls.
I invite you to consider joining in this conversation online. It’s a chance to look inside ourselves and at people and structures in our world with a critical eye and hopefully to begin to create a corrective vision for the future.
Maybe here you can find a new growing edge…
https://rochesterfranciscan.org/events/entitled-how-male-privilege-hurts-women-series-via-zoom/