About the author
Australian moral philosopher (b. 1983), associate professor at Cornell. Manne came to wide attention with Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017), which offered an influential analytic account of misogyny; Entitled extended it for a general audience and made her one of the most read feminist philosophers writing today.
Synopsis
Building on her earlier book Down Girl, Manne devotes each chapter to a domain — sex, consent, bodily autonomy, domestic labour, knowledge, power — and shows how an unspoken sense of male entitlement operates within it. She introduces concepts like 'himpathy' (the excess sympathy extended to male perpetrators) and dissects how women who withhold what men feel entitled to are punished.
Core passage idea
Paraphrase · Modern copyrighted workManne argues that misogyny is less about individual hatred than about a system that enforces and polices women's subordination — and that a sense of male entitlement is its engine.
Reframing misogyny as enforcement rather than emotion shifts the question from 'do men hate women?' to 'how is women's compliance secured?' It lets Manne explain why even people who like individual women can uphold a structure that punishes women who step out of line.
To avoid a bubble
Pair with critics who argue that 'entitlement' frameworks over-generalise from hard cases, and with evolutionary or biological accounts of sex differences that Manne's structural reading sets itself against.
Reading note
Accessible and example-driven — a good first contemporary feminist read. The conceptual tools (himpathy, the giver/taker dynamic) travel well; carry them into the news and you'll see them everywhere.
Best paired with
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex; bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman.