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Aubren Endres

Professor Angela Pedrotti

English Comp II

1 November 2020

The Dangers of Male Entitlement

Almost every woman knows how it feels to be catcalled while trying to do something as

simple as taking a walk, getting groceries, or just filling up her gas tank. Oftentimes, her heart

stops, she feels her throat close up, and she hopes that if she just ignores the man who called out

to her, he will eventually leave her alone. This is the best-case scenario. Oftentimes, when men

do not get the desired response from a woman they wish to pursue, she is made to face the

consequences. Be it name-calling, unwanted touching, or something even more sinister, male

entitlement can lead to hostility, aggression, and domestic/ sexual abuse.

So, what exactly does “male entitlement” mean? In an interview by Isacc Chotiner from

The New Yorker, philosopher Kate Manne describes it as “a feature of misogyny that prioritizes

what men purportedly deserve and dictates what women are obligated to give them”(Manne). For

example, analyze what it really means for a man to catcall a woman. A man will see a woman

that he finds visually appealing and call out to her, often saying something sexually suggestive.

This implies entitlement to her body. When she ignores him and he proceeds to walk next to her,

this implies entitlement to her personal space. And when he still expects a response from the

woman he has been harassing, this as well as calling her names when he gets angry implies

entitlement to her time.

The dangers of entitlement start out relatively small. Entitlement can first lead to things

like hurtful words and controlling behavior. This is level one. Take, for instance, this online
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social experiment. Men and women are paired with fake dating accounts and are faced with

rejection. The study found that men became hostile and aggressive while women did not; the

findings were consistent. According to the researchers, “romantic rejection is a relevant

precursor of male hostility and aggressive responses against women” (Andrighetto et. al) When

analyzing these results, it is clear that entitlement plays a key role. Many women who frequent

dating sites will share very similar experiences. They “match” with a male counterpart and begin

chatting. First, the conversation starts off relatively normal with some small talk, after a while

she becomes disinterested or maybe she just gets busy and stops responding. Because of this, the

man becomes irritated. He, feeling entitled to a response, messages her again and again, and

when he finally learns that she will not reply, he will say something rude such as “you were fat

anyways.”

I have had many experiences such as this, even on a non-dating platform such as

Facebook where there is no mutual understanding that romantic interaction is welcome or

expected. I have gotten random message requests from men I have never met who start out

saying something completely inappropriate such as unwarranted comments about my appearance

and other comments that are explicitly sexual. When I do not respond, I am called names like

“bitch”, “whore”, and “bimbo.” On a more dangerous level, I have received back to back calls on

Facebook messenger with messages in between saying things like “answer me bitch” and

unsolicited pictures with rape threats attached. This enters the realm of genuine harassment. It is

incredibly important to note that this is dangerous. This has long term effects on the women that

have been targeted; the experience mentioned above happened years ago and I still feel anxious

talking about it.

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Entitlement also leads to things like rape myths, groping, and stalking, This is level two.

Refer back to the aforementioned study. The group mentioned that earlier studies have shown

that men who have “higher levels of social dominance orientation and masculine honor beliefs”

are likely to endorse rape myths. The team concluded that male entitlement likely played a key

role. Rape myths are harmful misconceptions about the concept of nonconsensual sex. These

myths often diminish the importance of consent, question the credibility of the victim/ survivor,

and removes accountability from the rapist often by placing that burden onto the victim/

survivor.

Some common examples of rape myths are beliefs such as; people can consent to sex

while drunk, wearing revealing clothes means that the survivor was “asking for it”, most women

lie about rape if they get angry/ simply regret having consensual sex, or the victim should keep

quiet so she does not ruin the career/ reputation of the man over “a small mistake.” Take, for

instance, Brock Turner. Myths like these are the direct result of his pitiful six-month jail

sentence. Myths like these are why he is now walking about freely. Brock’s father perpetuated a

popular rape myth by saying that his son shouldn’t have his life ruined over “twenty minutes of

action.” A slap in the face to the woman whose life was changed forever over the same amount

of time.

Groping occurs when a man feels entitled to a woman’s body. He feels entitled to touch

her. Any woman who has been groped knows the lasting effects of a single touch. She will often

feel dirty and ashamed as if she could have done something to prevent this. When I was sixteen,

a trusted male friend gave me a ride home. I was confused when he took a different, longer route

than usual and I began to panic. He grabbed my hand and placed it on his groin. When I pulled

away, he grabbed my wrist so hard to the point that it bruised. He continued to move my hand
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against my will. I began to cry as I was scared; I had never done anything like that before. That

did not seem to matter to him as he did not stop. I sank into a deep depression and did not tell

anyone about this incident until years later. I did not even recognize what happened as sexual

assault until about a year ago. It still angers me today to think about the emotional trauma that I

went through. He assumed that because he was giving me a ride home that he was entitled to

some type of service from me. The emotional toll from that experience will last a lifetime.

Stalking is the result of feeling entitled to a specific person, their time, their body, and

their space. It is also the result of feeling entitled to intimate knowledge about a specific person.

Doctor J. Reid Meloy mentions a particular pattern followed by stalkers. They first start out with

a “narcissistic linking fantasy” which makes the stalker believe that they are special to, loved by,

or destined to be with their victim. He says that “These linking fantasies may eventually provide

the conscious preoccupations and derivative rationalizations, usually marked by grandiosity and

entitlement, that may excuse the stalking once it begins, particularly if competing superego

constraints, such as guilt, remorse, or ambivalence, are present” (Meloy, 88). Rejection from

their victim then leads to feelings of humiliation which leads to the desire to hurt, control,

damage, or destroy that person. This leads us to level three.

The final level of dangers that entitlement brings consists of beating, raping, and murder.

Many agree that entitlement is in fact a key component to violence. For example, a 2002 research

study on sexual violence titled “Male Customers of Prostituted Women,” stated that “entitlement

to power and control” were large contributors to violence towards women according to domestic

violence researchers. Studies had also shown that males with patriarchal views on gender roles

are more likely to be physically aggressive and that “one of the characteristics of men who

perpetuate violence against women is the expectation of service by women” (Busch et al.).
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Additionally, In a 2019 news article exploring the meaning of toxic masculinity, Maya

Salam with The New York Times states that toxic masculinity occurs through acts such as

bullying and catcalling and that many ideas surrounding toxic masculinity are “linked through

violence and aggression” (Salam). Many men feel that violence is an indicator of power. While

entitlement is not mentioned here, it is implied through the nature of toxic masculinity itself. It is

then clear that when men feel as though they do not get what they are “entitled to” many will act

out with physical violence as they view this as a way of regaining or maintaining the power they

feel that was lost.

Rape occurs when men feel that they are entitled to a woman’s body. When a man

decides that a woman saying “no” is insignificant compared to his sexual desire, it is the most

obvious and perverse form of entitlement. He has decided that the woman he wants no longer has

any say or control over her own body because she is not entitled to those decisions, he is. Many

men and women alike are not aware that they have raped someone/ were raped. If someone had

sex with a person who was drunk that is rape, if someone pressures or blackmails a person into

sex to the point where the person feels that they have no other choice that is rape. Rape is not

always aggressive and forceful, but rape always involves some wrongful sense of entitlement

from the acting party.

Murder is the final and most severe consequence that women are subjected to at the

hands of entitled men. Murder can be the result of men feeling entitled to a woman’s body, but

when it comes to crimes of passion, it is likely that the murder was a result of a male being

denied and becoming angry; therefore seeking revenge as a way of regaining the power he feels

that the rejection lost him. In “The Dynamics and Dangers of Entitlement,” doctors, John Bishop

and Robert Lane attribute entitlement to murder cases. For example, in regards to a fourteen-
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year-old boy who shot his English teacher, the doctors state that “journalistic depictions of the

boy’s family life and events leading up to the murder suggest the development of an attitude of

entitlement in the perpetrator which may have played a part in these events” (Bishop and Lane

745). They go on to say that “anger and vindictiveness provoked by this coercion and deprivation

can reach dangerous, murderous proportions, with defensive entitlement demanding redress and

revenge.”

While working at my first strip club, I was told by some of my friends about the murder

of another dancer at a separate club. They were friends with this girl and they teared up when

they talked about her. She was very young, just twenty years old when she was kidnapped, raped,

and murdered. Her body was found somewhere in the woods and her neck was cut. Sex workers

are especially vulnerable to the dangers that men present when they do not get their way. Most

dancers, including myself, have stories about feeling scared for their lives while on the job. This

is why bouncers have to walk us to our cars. Men think that just because a woman displays her

sexuality, he is entitled to her body and all that it possesses. Some men even feel that we deserve

to be hurt or treated badly because of our jobs, ignoring the simple concept of demand and

supply. If men did not create this specific market my wanting sexual content, sex workers would

not be working where they are.

Refer back to the study on sexual violence, “Male Customers of Prostituted Women.”

The team looked to previous studies to access the amount of violence that sex workers face,

stating “ Silbert and Pines found that 70% of the 200 prostituted women that they interviewed

had been raped by customers, 65% had been physically assaulted by customers, 66% had been

physically assaulted by pimps, and 73% had been raped in situations unrelated to their work as

prostituted women. Farley and Barkan (1998) reported that of the 130 working prostituted
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women they interviewed, 82% reported physical assaults and 68% reported sexual assaults since

entering prostitution” (Busch et al.).

Two men, Daniel Boduszek and Philip Hyland write about serial killer Fred West for the

International Journal of Criminology and Sociological Theory. They discuss his home life and

talk about his father who would have sexual relations with his daughters. They stated, “Fred

West grew up in a family where his father was his primary role model (Sounes, 1995), and this

man, according to Fred’s own personal accounts, had frequent sexual relationships with his

daughters motivated by an attitude of extreme self-entitlement, encapsulated in his belief that, ‘I

made you, so I am entitled to have you’” (Boduszek and Hyland 866). It is very possible that

seeing his father’s feelings of entitlement towards women was a key factor towards Fred feeling

the same way. His father felt that he was entitled to women’s bodies, so why shouldn’t he?

Marissa Gainsburg writes about serial killer Ted Bundy’s mental health issues for

Women’s Health. She states that “about 95 percent of the psychologists in the University of

Kentucky study believed that Ted Bundy also showed signs of narcissistic personality disorder

(NPD)” (Gainsburg). She lists all of the traits relating to narcissistic personality disorder that are

included in the DSM-5, one of them being “feelings of entitlement and superiority.” It is likely

that Ted Bundy’s feelings of entitlement towards women was a key factor in his decision to rape

and kill them. He even felt entitled to their bodies after death, sometimes engaging in sexual

relations with the deceased bodies of his victims, all of which resembled his ex-girlfriend who

wore her brown hair parted in the middle. He would typically play on his female victim’s instinct

to be kind and helpful, often pretending to struggle to put things in his car while wearing a cast

on his arm. Not only did he feel entitled to these women’s bodies, he felt entitled to their

kindness and helpful nature as well.

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While looking at these three levels, it is easy to see how these actions are connected as

oftentimes, one action leads to another. In an interview by Lois M. Collins from Desert News,

Stephanie Nilva describes how difficult it can be to recognize abuse early, saying “people forget

that it didn’t start bad: a date, a dinner, let me get your coat and hit you in the face...It is good in

the beginning and people love each other. Things that can become abusive can be mistaken for

intense attraction and obsession.” Refer to a component of level two, rape myths. Rape myths

can lead to actual rape simply through misconceptions about consent.

Many men, however, would not agree with this and reject the idea of rape myths

altogether. For example, Luke Gittos claims that there is no such thing as rape culture. He does

not believe that unwanted sexual advances are sexual harassment; he states, “ (Women) say

things like ‘any unwanted sexual activity that you experience from another person is a sexual

assault, sexual abuse, or a rape.’ Of course, this is not true” (Gittos). The author even believes

that you can have consensual sex while drunk. He also disagrees with consent classes stating that

“teaching children how to ‘consent’ with one another is a disturbing development.”

This is an incredibly problematic way of thinking and stems from a privileged

background and a lack of proper education on the topic of consent and rape. One could make the

claim that he has no place to comment on the subjects because he is male and has likely never

been raped and has never been a victim of the rape culture in our society, however, that would

also invalidate the work of all of the men who so diligently studied and worked to defend these

women by proving the existence of such structures in society with sexual assault statistics and it

is also wrong to assume anyone’s experience with sexual assault as you can never be sure.

However, there are valid arguments against his faulty and harmful statements.
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Professor Johanna Stiebert wrote a response to Gittos for Women’s Studies Journal. She

makes many valid points, but one that stood out the most was her comment on policing the

meaning of sexual assault. She mentions a crime survey referenced by Gittos that helps survivors

who are confused about whether or not they had actually been assaulted, a concept that Gittos

finds ridiculous as he assumes one should know when they are sexually assaulted and shouldn’t

need a survey to determine such a straightforward thing. She then describes how the survey

provides statistics about sexual assault and the manner in which Gittos responds to this.

Stiebert states, “ Scrutinising the Crime Survey which produced these statistics, he

argues that some of the behaviours and scenarios included in the survey questions do not

necessarily constitute an act of rape (as it is defined under the law), and thus ‘the figure of

85,000 potentially includes as victims people who shouldn’t be’. He then gives a number of

examples of these non-rape scenarios, including various forms of ‘perfectly ordinary relationship

behaviour’ where things might get ‘a bit frisky.” (Stiebert 5).

She goes on to say “this raises the question: who gets to determine what constitutes

‘frisky’ behaviour versus sexual assault? If women and men identify one or more of their own

sexual experiences as non-consensual, if they feel that they have been assaulted, who is Gittos to

redefine these experiences as ‘perfectly ordinary’? And what does it say about the culture in

which Gittos lives if non-consensual sexual encounters are identified as ‘ordinary’ or acceptable

forms of sexual behaviour? Surely such a culture is definitive of a rape culture; Gittos’s

definition of acceptable sexual relationships therefore does nothing to deny the validity of rape

culture, but rather affirms it.” She also makes the point that Gittos blatantly ignores the

experiences of both survivors as well as professionals such as health care workers and social

workers as well as law enforcement.

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So, what is to be done? Perhaps growing up in a patriarchal society where “boys will be

boys” gave many an excuse for awful behavior and this mindset was carried into adulthood. In

order to see positive change, we as a society must hold boys and men alike accountable for their

actions. It is incredibly important to educate all genders about things such as consent and rape

culture. It is imperative to teach them young so as to break the problematic system within our

society.

As well as this, it is important to know the early signs of abusive behavior. Lois Collins

mentioned earlier from Desert News, says “people experiencing domestic abuse feel like they’re

all alone, although that’s far from true. The National Coalition Against Domestic Violence says

on average 20 people are abused by an intimate partner in America every minute — about 10

million women and men a year. One-third of women and one-fourth of men experience some

form of physical violence by a partner within their lifetime. On a typical day, there are more than

20,000 phone calls placed to domestic violence hotlines nationwide” (Collins).

Angela McIlveen, another one of Collin’s interviewees and family law attorney says that

“a partner who lies, is jealous of your family and friends, acts possessive, blames others for his

or her own behavior, wants to know where you are or who you’re with, tries to move the

relationship forward too quickly, doesn’t want to introduce you to his family and friends,

criticizes or blows up gives off red flags that shouldn’t be ignored.”

Every day, women walk in fear of men. They are faced with constant harassment and

aggression from perfect strangers. In order for things to get better, it is important to attack the

issue from its source. Women are not hurt because of what they wear or how they act, saying

such things is victim-blaming. Women are put in danger because of male entitlement which leads

to things like hostility, aggression, domestic/ sexual abuse, and murder.

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Works Cited

Gainsburg, Marrissa. “So, Exactly Which Mental Health Disorders Did Ted

Bundy Have, Anyway?” Women's Health, Women's Health, 22 Oct. 2019,

www.womenshealthmag.com/life/a27346043/ted-bundy-mental-health-disorders-

antisocial-behavior-personality/.

Andrighetto, Luca, et al. “Lonely Hearts and Angry Minds: Online Dating

Rejection Increases Male (but Not Female) Hostility.” Wiley Online Library, John Wiley &

Sons, Ltd, 11 June 2019, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/ab.21852.

Bishop, John, and Robert C. Lane. “The Dynamics and Dangers of Entitlement .”

American Psychological Association, American Psychological Association,

psycnet.apa.org/record/2002-18614-007.

Chotiner, Isaac, and Paul Bloom. The Costs of Male Entitlement. 4 Sept. 2020,

www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/kate-manne-on-the-costs-of-male-entitlement.

Collins, Lois M. “Why It Is so Hard to Spot Domestic Abuse Early on and What

to Do Once You See It.” Deseret News, Deseret News, 3 Aug. 2017,

www.deseret.com/2017/8/3/20617072/why-it-is-so-hard-to-spot-domestic-abuse-

early-on-and-what-to-do-once-you-see-it.

Gittos, Luke. Why Rape Culture Is a Dangerous Myth. Andrews UK Ltd, 2015.
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Meloy, J. Reid. STALKING: An Old Behavior, A New Crime. 29 June 2005,

www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0193953X05700617.

NoËl Bridget Busch, Holly Bell. “Male Customers of Prostituted Women:

Exploring Perceptions of Entitlement to Power and Control and Implications for

Violent Behavior Toward Women - NoËl Bridget Busch, Holly Bell, Norma

Hotaling, Martin A. Monto, 2002.” SAGE Journals, Sage Journals, 25 July 1970,

journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/107780102401101755.

Salam, Maya. “What Is Toxic Masculinity?” The New York Times, The New York

Times, 22 Jan. 2019, www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/us/toxic-masculinity.html.

Stiebert, Johanna. “Denying Rape Culture: A Response to Luke Gittos.” Women's

Studies Journal, The New Zealand Women's Studies Association, 1 Dec. 2018,

www.questia.com/library/journal/1P4-2168838069/denying-rape-culture-a-

response-to-luke-gittos.