Claire Conger

Lately, we’ve been inundated with stories of men’s entitlement gone awry: the Me Too movement, of course, but also Rebecca Solnit’s being mansplained by someone so arrogant he barely paused when her friend got through to him that he was lecturing Ms. Solnit on her own work.

In Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, Kate Manne takes the issue of male privilege to a new level. I already knew, for example, that most medical studies have used males as a standard and considered females variants. I did not know that the concept of males being more stoic was a myth. We believe men are more tolerant of pain and we believe they’re more reluctant to visit the doctor. We attribute this to admirable masculine traits carried, perhaps, too far. When parsed for the same conditions, say back pain, we don’t know that women are less pain tolerant or visit the doctor more. We don’t know that women are not just as reluctant as men to visit the doctor. Women may expect their complaints to be dismissed; a visit to the doctor becomes a useless intrusion. I myself have experienced my complaints being dismissed outright as impossible because “the body doesn’t work that way.” (Oh, yes it does!) I have been given, by more than one (male) doctor, useless solutions to problems I know are common. (Really? You won’t be seeing me again.)

What was interesting to me, is Ms. Manne’s framing the doctor problem in terms of, basically, mansplaining. A male holds forth, given credence and credit for not over-using the medical system, while the female is doubted and her competence (about her own body!) is discounted. It’s two sides of the same coin: Without the notion of him as knowledgeable and stoic there is no reference for her to be considered irrational or needy.