Top Quotes: “Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women” — Kate Manne
“The case also highlighted the phenomenon of himpathy: the way powerful and privileged boys and men who commit acts of sexual violence or engage in other misogynistic behavior often receive sympathy and concern over their female victims.”
“Himpathy made Kavanaugh seem to Graham to be the real victim in all of this. And not confirming a man like Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court became tantamount to ruining his life, not just withholding an opportunity.’”
Incels
“The yoga teacher told him to stow his bag in the cubby outside the hot room. He told the teacher he had a question. Then he donned a set of hearing-protection earmuffs and pulled out a Glock. After pausing for a moment, gun in hand, he pointed it at the woman closest to him. He opened fire, seemingly indiscriminately: his objective being to kill women of the kind who had so enraged him since adolescence, when he had penned a revenge fantasy, “Rejected Youth.” He ended up shooting six and murdering two of them.
This was in November 2018. Prior to the shooting, Beierle had posted a video online, citing Elliot Rodger as inspiration. So did Chris Harper-Mercer, twenty-six, before he opened fire in a classroom at his Oregon community college murdering eight students and an assistant professor, while injuring eight others. So did Alek Minassian, twenty-five, before driving a van into pedestrians in Toronto, killing ten people and wounding sixteen. “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Staceys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” wrote Minassian beforehand, on Facebook.”
“Moreover, and more subtly, incels are but a vivid symptom of a much broader and deeper cultural phenomenon. They crystallize some men’s toxic sense of entitlement to have people look up to them steadfastly, with a loving gaze, admiringly and to target and even destroy those who fail, or refuse, to do so. And, as will emerge here eventually, these men’s sense of entitlement to such affection and admiration is a trait they often share with the far greater proportion of men who commit acts of domestic, dating, and intimate partner violence.”
“As I’ve already suggested, it’s a mistake to think that incels are primarily motivated by sex. Not only are some incels also interested in love (or some outward simulacrum thereof), but their interest in having sex with “Staceys” is at least partly a means to an end – the end being to beat the “Chads” at their own game. Sex thus promises to soothe these men’s inferiority complexes, at least as much as to satisfy their libidos.
It’s also a mistake to accede too readily to an incel’s self-reports about their lowly status in comparison with other men. With respect to male beauty standards, for example, a recent article on incels in New York magazine revealed photographs of perfectly ordinary-looking young men — some of them even handsome. They nonetheless hankered for different jaw lines, some going so far as to invest in exorbitantly expensive plastic surgeries, such as cheek implants and facial reshaping, to make them (in their own view) look more masculine.
Yet another mistake is to think that sex would provide a solution to an incel’s supposed problem. If an incel does start having sex, or gets into a relationship, who will he turn into? Contra several commentators, my guess is: not a nice guy. A once-single incel may well become a female partner’s tormentor. Anyone can feel lonely. But a wrongheaded sense of entitlement to a woman’s sexual, material, reproductive, and emotional labor may result in incel tendencies prior to the relationship and intimate partner violence afterward, if he feels thwarted, resentful, or jealous. In other words, an incel is an abuser waiting to happen.”
“Incels are often virulent racists. This is not to say that all incels are white; indeed, there are enough nonwhite incels to have given the racist terms “curry-cels” and “rice-cels” currency. But incels who are not white typically subscribe to white supremacist ideology. Elliot Rodger, for example, was half Chinese and full of racist self-hatred, as his writings made apparent. He bemoaned his lack of whiteness, longing to be blond and Caucasian:
I was different because I am of mixed race. I am half White, half Asian, and this made me different from the normal fully-white kids that I was trying to fit in with. I envied the cool kids, and I wanted to be one of them.
I was a bit frustrated at my parents for not shaping me into one of these kids in the past. They never made an effort to dress me in stylish clothing or get me a good-looking haircut. I had to make every effort to rectify this. I had to adapt.
My first act was to ask my parents to allow me to bleach my hair blonde. I always envied and admired blonde-haired people, they always seemed so much more beautiful.
Before driving to UCSB to attack the “hot, blonde sluts” whom he (falsely) perceived as having rejected him, Rodger fatally stabbed his two roommates and a guest of theirs. All three men were Asian — a factor that may well have played a role in this, his first three of six eventual murders.
Rodger was also brimming with anti-Black bigotry. In “My Twisted World,” he railed against interracial couples, especially those involving a Black man and a white woman.”
“This black boy named Chance said that he lost his virginity when he was only thirteen! In addition, he said that the girl he lost his virginity to was a blonde white girl! I was so enraged that I almost splashed him with my orange juice.
How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more. I tried not to believe his foul words, but they were already said, and it was hard to erase from my mind. If this is actually true, if this ugly black filth was able to have sex with a blonde white girl at the age of thirteen while I’ve had to suffer virginity all my life, then this just proves how ridiculous the female gender is. They would give themselves to this filthy scum, but they reject ME? The injustice!
Scott Beierle expressed similarly noxious sentiments in a series of YouTube videos. For instance:
When I see an interracial couple I think one of two things…either the guy couldn’t do any better, or the girl’s a whore… The army had plenty of this, I saw officers with Asian wives or black wives, and I thought, This is what you’re resigning yourself to: you couldn’t do any better than this to provide you with companionship. I mean, even mail order…you can get a mail-order bride from Russia or the Ukraine. You don’t have to resign yourself to some iguana, some lizard.”
“The notion of involuntariness in “involuntary celibate” is reveal-ing-and jarring, upon reflection. Ordinarily, we use the modifier when the relevant term would otherwise incorrectly imply that the act was deliberately, intentionally, or freely undertaken. For example, the term “involuntary manslaughter” refers to a killing that was unintentional, albeit reckless. The term “involuntary ser-vitude” similarly refers to work that is improperly coerced, not freely undertaken as the result of a negotiated contract.
The idea that a person’s celibacy is involuntary — as opposed to merely a disappointing state of affairs — is therefore illuminating. It is distinct from, and much less innocent than, the idea of a person who is “single but looking” or “dateless and desperate.” There is a strong implication that celibacy has somehow been imposed on the incel, even forced on him, against his will. And when it comes to sex, that implication is deeply wrongheaded. Inasmuch as an incel regards himself as entitled to sex with women, and women as therefore obligated to have sex with him, he evinces an indifference to what would go against her will. For these reasons, it is clearly sexual activity, not celibacy, that should be thought of as voluntary or involuntary.”
“Misoryny takes down women, and himpathy protects the agents of that takedown operation, partly by painting them as “good guys.”
Himpathy goes hand in hand with blaming or erasing the victims and targets of misogyny. When the sympathetic focus is on the perpetrator, she will often be subject to suspicion and aggression for drawing attention to his misdeeds. Her testimony may hence fail to gain the proper uptake. Instead, those who are himpathetic find endless excuses for the perpetrator.”
Rape
“In 2018, The Center for Investigative Reporting journalists, in conjunction with reporters from ProPublica and Newsy, conducted a year-long investigation into this practice. They filed Freedom of Information Act requests to obtain data from 110 major cities and counties, although they succeeded in securing records for only about 60. They found that in almost half of these, police officers had used the designation of exceptional clearance to close the majority of rape cases.
According to Lieutenant Tom McDevitt, commander of the sex crimes unit in Philadelphia, this classification applies, or is meant to apply, only to cases where “you know the crime, you’re able to prove a crime occurred. You have a victim, you know where the person is and who they are. And either the prosecutor doesn’t want to prosecute or the victim doesn’t want to go forward with the case.” A Department of Justice official confirmed that exceptional clearances are supposed to be just that — exceptional — and to apply only when, despite sufficient evidence for an arrest, the arrest is unfeasible for some reason: for example, the suspect is already incarcerated or deceased, or the victim refuses to cooperate. In cases of homicide, exceptional clearances tend to make up only around 10 percent of clearances; this means that around 90 percent of cleared cases are cleared by arrest (leaving, of course, a significant proportion of cases uncleared, “unsolved,” or open).
Yet when it comes to rape, many police departments appear to be flouting their own policies. In one of the cases the journalists followed from start to finish, a young woman had her rape case exceptionally cleared, despite her determination to move forward with it. A rape kit revealed that she had injuries and bruises consistent with the sexual assault she had reported. She cooperated fully with the police and said repeatedly she wanted justice.
The police identified the man she had accused (who claimed that the alleged attack was consensual). Two years after going to the police, this woman received a letter out of the blue saying her case had been cleared two weeks earlier, exceptionally. There was nothing more she could do: case closed, it was over.
Meanwhile, many cities and counties boast of high clearance rates, making no distinction between cases that actually resulted in an arrest and those cleared via exceptional means. Exceptional clearances thus threaten to skew public perception with regard to police efficacy.
While extremely high rates of exceptional clearances in rape cases may be news to many people, there is a growing awareness in liberal circles, at least, of the problem of untested rape kits. Recent testing of some 10,000 previously untested rape kits (discovered during a routine tour of a Detroit police storage warehouse) resulted in the identification of 817 serial rapists. According to Wayne County prosecutor Kym Worthy, there are an estimated 400,000 untested rape kits nationwide, and the existing evidence suggests that rapists commit between seven to eleven rapes, on average, before being apprehended.”
“Another sobering reality: of the rape kits that had previously gone untested, some 86 percent of the victims were people of color — primarily girls and women. As Worthy puts it, “You’re not going to find too many blond-haired, blue-eyed white women [with untested kits]…Their kits are treated differently, their cases are solved….Race is at the center of this in many ways as well, unfortunately; we know that across the criminal justice system.” What explains this apathy, this hostile, pointed indifference? Don’t we regard rape as a heinous, monstrous crime? Yes, in the abstract. Very well then, but in practice, why do we refuse to hold certain perpetrators accountable vis-à-vis certain victims?
One explanation that has the virtue of not only parsimony but sheer coherence is that we regard certain men as entitled to take sex from certain women. A white man who is in a relationship with an equally or less privileged woman, or who was once in such a relationship, is often deemed sexually entitled to “have” her. This is especially likely to be the case until she is otherwise spoken for — by another no less privileged man, not a woman or a man of color, at least typically. The most powerful of powerful men are deemed sexually entitled to “have” virtually anyone, with minimal repercussions.”
“Statistics from RAIN, the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, suggest that fewer than 0.6 percent of rapes will result in the rapist’s incarceration. This is a far lower rate than for comparable crime categories, including assault and battery, robbery, and so on.”
“She decides to go through with it anyway, and even manages to derive some sexual pleasure from the sense that Robert is taking great pleasure in her young, nubile body. To heighten the effect, she performs her role with ostensible enthusiasm, without feeling a shred of it.
None of this is politically or aesthetically comfortable; all of it is realistic. And it raises the specter of sex that is unwanted, and even coerced, but not by any particular person. Rather, the pressure derives from patriarchal social scripts and the prevalent sense of male sexual entitlement that would make it feel rude, even wrong, for Margot to walk out on Robert. We can imagine a variant of Robert who would have taken this exercise in sexual autonomy perfectly well, who would have handled the awkward aftermath with sensitivity and grace. Even so, we can still picture Margot — not knowing this, or not wanting to seem “spoiled and capricious” regardless — engaging in the same performance, out of deeply ingrained social programming.
The question thus becomes: Why and how, do we regard many men’s potentially hurt feelings as so important, so sacrosanct? And, relatedly, why do we regard women as so responsible for protecting and ministering to them?”
Pain
“In their groundbreaking and widely cited paper “The Girl Who Cried Pain,” medical researchers Diane E. Hoffmann and Anita Tarzian canvassed the existing literature on gender differences in the experience and treatment of pain. For several painful procedures — including abdominal surgery, coronary artery bypass grafts, and appendectomies — they found that men received more pain medication than women (controlling for weight, when appropriate). For the last of these procedures, women were more likely to be given sedatives instead of pain medication. In one study, women at a pain clinic were prescribed “more minor tranquilizers, antidepressants, and non-opioid analgesics than men. Men received more opioids than did women.” These trends were not restricted to adult patients, either. For boys and girls who had undergone surgeries and subsequently complained of pain, boys were significantly more likely to be given codeine; girls, acetaminophen (the mild over-the-counter analgesic marketed in the United States as Tylenol).
All of this is despite the fact that, as Hoffmann and Tarzian discuss in detail, there is some evidence that women may be prone to experiencing slightly more pain than men on the basis of the same noxious stimuli — submerging a person’s hand in very cold water being a standard test for this — and would therefore presumably require more aggressive pain management.”
“There is also a question about whether stereotypes, even about specific groups of women, provide the best explanation of the phenomenon of testimonial injustice (or, perhaps better, testimonial injustices). After all, for many women, their testimony is considerably less likely to be dismissed in closely related medical settings: when they are testifying as to the health of children in their care, for example. Women are indeed often regarded as supremely competent, trustworthy caregivers for their charges, until proven otherwise (in which case the punishment for failures of “good womanhood” may be harsh, swift, and disproportionate).
Why is the default to trust women in some contexts but not others (as closely related as these may be)? A plausible explanation in this instance is that women are regarded as more than entitled (indeed obligated) to provide care, but far less entitled to ask for and receive it. Suppose she is positioned as the nurse or the mother or the “mammy” (to invoke Patricia Hill Collins’s brilliant dissection of the “controlling image” of the “loving, nurturing, and caring” Black woman who tends to “her White children and ‘family’ better than her own”). Then, when it comes to the well-being of the children who are her charges, she will often be regarded as at least as trustworthy as her male counterpart. But when she is the patient who is in pain — and asking for nurture, rather than giving it — she will tend to be regarded with much more suspicion and, sometimes, consternation. She will hence be in for dismissive, skeptical, and even contemptuous reactions.
The problem then, at heart, may not be stereotypes about the trustworthiness of certain groups of women — for, as we’ve seen, these are deployed in an ad hoc manner to justify dismissing them in some, but only some, settings. The deeper problem here may be the sense that a woman is not entitled to ask for care for her own sake, or for its own sake simply because she is in pain, and because that pain matters.
By the lights of this analysis, an exception will tend to arise when a woman clearly needs care for the sake of others, and for sanctioned instrumental reasons — for example, to help her be a better caregiver to those who are regarded as mattering more deeply.”
Conclusion
“An important series of papers, legal scholars Linda Greenhouse and Reva B. Siegel have shown that the contemporary anti-abortion movement in the United States had its roots in the “AAA strategy,” spearheaded prior to the Roe v. Wade decision. The idea was to recruit Americans who had traditionally voted Democrat to the Republican Party by stressing the supposed moral threat of “acid” (LSD), amnesty (for so-called draft dodgers from the Vietnam War), and, finally, abortion — envisaged as a threat to the nuclear family. Greenhouse and Siegel write:
As [Nixon’s] campaign progressed, Republican strategists increasingly deployed abortion as a symbol of cultural trends of concern to social conservatives distressed about loss of respect for tradition. In an August 1972 essay for The New York Times entitled “How Nixon Will Win,” realignment strategist Kevin Phillips boasted of imminent Republican victory premised on the strategy of courting Southerners who supported [George] Wallace in 1968.”
“In. reality, the number of trans women or cis men merely purporting to be trans women who have preyed on any restroom user is vanishingly small. Since 2004, such a crime has been reported roughly once per year in the United States, according to recent research. Meanwhile, cis men not bothering to pretend to be trans women attack women in restrooms with much greater regularity: the same team of researchers found that this had occurred more than 150 times during the same time frame.”
“There is a prevalent sense of entitlement on the part of privileged men to regulate, control, and rule over the bodies of girls and women — cisgender and trans alike. And as the direct result of this, those subject to such misogynistic policing are often impugned as moral monsters, even though they’re the ones being made to suffer horribly.”
“In one representative study of the situation in the nation today, the sociologists Jill Yavorsky, Claire Kamp Dush, and Sarah Schoppe-Sullivan found that for male-female partners who both worked full-time (roughly forty-hour weeks), first-time parenthood increased a man’s workload at home by about ten hours per week. Meanwhile, the increased workload for women was about twenty hours. So motherhood took double the toll as fatherhood, workwise. Moreover, much of the new work that fathers did take on in these situations was the comparatively “fun” work of engagement with their children — for example, playing with the baby. Fathers did this for four hours per week, on average, while dropping their number of hours of housework by five hours per week during the same time period. Mothers decreased their hours of housework by only one hour per week while adding about twenty-one hours of child-rearing labor, including fifteen hours of physical child care for instance, changing diapers and bathing the baby. And mothers still did more by way of infant engagement: about six hours per week, on average.
A similar picture emerged via time-use diary statistics collected by Pew Research and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In 2000, they found that working women took on around two-thirds of at-home child-care responsibilities, while their male partners did the remaining one-third. Again, women did double the work. And disturbingly, over the past two decades, these figures have held steady.
A 2018 Oxfam report showed that women doing twice as much as men by way of unpaid care work and domestic labor is on the low end, globally speaking. Around the world, women average between two and ten times more of this work than their male counterparts.”
“Studies show there is but one circumstance in which men’s and women’s household work will tend to approach parity: when she works full-time and he is unemployed. And even then, the operative word is approach. She will still do a bit more. Equality is elusive, even in the supposedly egalitarian U.S. context.”
“One reason why men don’t do more may well be obliviousness — a willful, and comparatively blissful, state of ignorance. As Kamp Dush writes, commenting on her own studies:
Interestingly, new fathers don’t seem to realize that they aren’t keeping up with their partners’ growing workload. When we asked, both men and women perceived that they increased their total work by more than 30 hours a week each after they became parents.”
“The all too convenient, sexist hypothesis that men and women “naturally” have different child-care proclivities or preferences has been debunked in part by studies showing that when men are the primary caregivers, their brains being malleable come to resemble those of women who are primary caregivers.”
“It’s not just within the context of a household that men either fail or refuse to care. Even paid care work among men is strikingly unpopular. Economists have observed that men often prefer unemployment to taking on jobs in nursing (for example, as a nurse’s assistant), elder care, or working as a home healthcare aide. Yet these are increasingly the jobs that are available and need doing, as traditionally male blue-collar work disappears from the U.S. economy. A New York Times article from June 2017 put the matter bluntly: “It seems like an easy fix. Traditionally male factory work is drying up. The fastest-growing jobs in the American economy are those that are often held by women. Why not get men to do them?”
One barrier to male participation in paid care work is undoubtedly men’s sense of entitlement to more traditionally masculine jobs: factory or bust, in other words, particularly for white men. But another barrier may be their female partners’ preconceptions about the kind of work that befits a male partner’s dignity. The sociologist Ofer Sharone found that even when a middle-aged professional man who had lost his job was willing to take lower-paying work in a traditionally feminine industry, his wife would often encourage him to keep looking. Meanwhile, the percentage of men out of the labor force entirely (as opposed to being either employed, or unemployed but actively searching for work) has doubled — from just under 15 percent of men in 1950 to just over 30 percent of men in 2018.”
“Yet another reason why men often get away with this imbalance: many a woman unwittingly echoes and validates her male partner’s illegitimate sense of entitlement to her labor, and to his leisure time. Despite her frustrations, she subsequently gives him mixed messages, and she is reluctant to insist on a more equitable arrangement. She exhibits himpathy — the disproportionate or inappropriate sympathy for a man who behaves in misogynistic or, I would now add, entitled ways, over his female victims — even though she herself is his victim in this scenario.”
“When a woman internalizes her putative obligations to care for others at the expense of herself, there is affective as well as behavioral fallout. She is likely to feel guilt and shame for holding a male partner accountable and, as Lockman points out, to feel an excessive sense of gratitude toward him, even for falling far short of fairness.”
“Part of the problem here, then, may be women’s sense of entitlement — or lack thereof. Some women may not feel entitled to equitable domestic arrangements and leisure time for themselves, on par with that of their husbands. Or they may feel entitled to this in theory but be unable to insist in reality, given the social forces around them that tell them not to insist and to “take one for the team” in perpetuity. Jancee Dunn even writes, in How Not to Hate Your Husband After Kids, of not feeling entitled to eat whole, undamaged crackers from the box. Instead, she eats the broken ones, saving the good ones for her husband and daughter.”
“I believe that mansplaining typically stems from an unwarranted sense of entitlement on the part of the mansplainer to occupy the conversational position of the knower by default: to be the one who dispenses information, offers corrections, and authoritatively issues explanations.”
“Plying someone into submission by appealing to her sense of loyalty or sympathy — such that she won’t question his story about himself, however implausible, out of a misplaced sense of guilt — can have much the same effect as making her doubt her rational capacities. The intended implication being that, if she questions him, there’s something fundamentally wrong with her — either epistemically (she’s “crazy,” delusional, paranoid) or morally (she’s a heartless bitch, incapable of trust, cruelly unforgiving, or similar). And the result will be much the same as well: someone who will not, cannot, challenge him.
Gaslighting thus results in a victim who feels a false sense of obligation to believe his story over her own. She has been epistemically dominated — colonized, even. It’s not hard to see how evil this is. It goes beyond harming someone. When successful, gaslighting robs the victim of the ability to name the harm done to her.”
“There is a certain kind of man who is unable or unwilling to cope with others expressing views that threaten his own sense of what has happened, or ought to happen. Such men cannot abide girls and women, in particular, evincing their own, legitimate sense of epistemic entitlement to state what is happening in the world, or what has to change, going forward. They do not react merely by strenuously disagreeing with a girl or woman in this position. Indeed, they often seem to lack the wherewithal — or, again, the willingness — to disagree with her whatsoever. They instead want to shut her up, or to head off the very possibility of disagreement, by denying that her word has any meaning or merit whatsoever (she’s crazy, or she’s evil — so, either way, anything she says is beneath consideration). Or such a man instead imaginatively conjures up a world in which he and his ilk have the power to make her eat her words — in this case, by shoving something down her throat, thus silencing her forever. Strikingly, he is liable throughout this to feel like the justified, or even aggrieved, party.”
“The researchers were able to ensure that there was no substantive difference in the information participants received, on average, about the two people to be evaluated. Yet participants showed a marked, consistent bias toward the male leader. Specifically, when information about their competence was equivocal, participants judged “James” to be more competent than “Andrea” in some 86 percent of cases — though there was no significant difference between how the participants judged the candidates in terms of their likability. When the file contained information that made their high degree of competence unambiguous (by stating that each was in the top 5 percent of all employees at that level), the results shifted. This time, “James” was judged to be more likable than “Andrea” 83 percent of the time (though there were no significant differences in rankings of their relative competence). Interestingly, breaking the results down by participant gender made no difference to these findings: men and women exhibited the same biased tendencies.
The upshot: regardless of their own gender, people tend to assume that men in historically male-dominated positions of power are more competent than women, unless this assumption is explicitly contradicted by further information. And when it is so contradicted, women are liable to be disliked and regarded, in particular, as “interpersonally hostile,” a measure that, in this study, encompassed being perceived as conniving, pushy, selfish, abrasive, manipulative, and untrustworthy.”
“Hellman and Okimoto decided to investigate this question using a research paradigm similar to the setup in the opening study, with one crucial difference: in the experimental condition, they included information that implied that both “James” and “Andrea” had a communal mindset. (In the control condition, their mindsets were not mentioned, and both were portrayed as highly competent.) The results? Bias against Andrea, and toward James, remained in full force in the control condition (thus replicating the results of the previous study). But when participants were explicitly told that Andrea had been described by her subordinates as someone who is “understanding and concerned about others,” that she “encourages cooperation and helpful behavior,” and that she “has worked to increase her employees’ sense of belonging,” this pattern was reversed: participants were significantly more likely to choose Andrea as the more desirable boss, the more likable of the pair, and judged her as no more interpersonally hostile than James. And remember, this held even though James was similarly described in this condition as having communal attributes. Perceived communality made an enormous difference for female but not male applicants. When it comes to demonstrable niceness, it’s an imperative for powerful women — and seemingly inconsequential for their male rivals.
So it would be a mistake to assume that male presidential candidates will inevitably have an easier time garnering support over similarly or even more qualified women. The above research reveals that, under specific conditions, women can be perceived as entitled to wield power in such male-dominated domains as much as, or even more than, the men they’re up against. That is the good news. The bad news? These specific conditions will often go unmet. Being perceived as communal in presidential races turns out to be an uphill battle for many female candidates.”
“Even for those who think that all of these stories about Klobuchar were of direct public concern and appropriately framed, there are comparable reports about male politicians that received relatively little uptake. According to one story, for instance:
Joe Biden’s outward appearance of geniality and good humor belie a fierce temper behind the scenes, with the former vice president routinely lashing out at staff, a new report says...”Everyone who works for him has been screamed at,” a former adviser told the magazine.”
“Bernie Sanders has also been described as “unbelievably abusive” by a former subordinate. In an article entitled “Anger Management: Sanders Fights for Employees, Except His Own,” published during his 2016 presidential bid, Paul Heinz disputed the grandfatherly image of Sanders:
According to some who have worked closely with Sanders over the years, “grumpy grandpa” doesn’t even begin to describe it. They characterize the senator as rude, short-tempered and, occasionally, downright hostile. Though Sanders has spent much of his life fighting for working Vermonters, they say he mistreats the people working for him.
“As a supervisor, he was unbelievably abusive, says one former campaign staffer, who claims to have endured frequent verbal assaults. The double standard was clear: “He did things that, if he found out that another supervisor was doing in a workplace, he would go after them. You can’t treat employees that way.”…Others echoed the former employee’s story, saying the senator is prone to fits of anger. “Bernie was an asshole,” says a Democratic insider who worked with Sanders on the campaign trail. “Just unnecessarily an asshole.”
Yet another male presidential hopeful, Beto O’Rourke, behaved like an “asshole” to staffers too, by his own admission. In a documentary called Running for Beto, which followed his unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in Texas, O’Rourke was shown “dropping f-bombs…complaining about having to ‘dance’ for the press, and snapping at his staff…. ‘I know I was a giant asshole to be around sometimes,’ O’Rourke acknowledges at one point in the documentary to his top aides, who do not dispute him on the point,” read one news story, released prior to O’Rourke’s announcement that he had decided to run for president.
Compared with the reports about Klobuchar’s treatment of her staff, such stories about Biden, Sanders, and O’Rourke have attracted little interest, and even less consternation. This jibes well with the finding that a perceived lack of communality in a powerful woman will tend to be harshly punished, while the same trait in her male counterparts will remain a matter of relative indifference.”
“”Elizabeth Warren always knows exactly what she wants when she gets to the front of the Starbucks line and never holds everyone else up.” “Elizabeth Warren has never asked a bartender ‘What whiskeys do you have?’ She’s already checked the shelf.” “Elizabeth Warren never takes up too much space on the sidewalk or the subway. She checks her own privilege and shares public space.”
Tweets of this sort, which briefly became a popular meme on Twitter, reflected a widespread perception that Elizabeth Warren is exceptionally communal: kind, caring, compassionate, attentive to others’ needs, and so on. And in light of the empirical evidence canvassed in this chapter, this perception helps to explain Warren’s moment of great popularity during her bid for the presidency, with her becoming the frontrunner in the race by October 2019. It also helps to explain her rapid, dramatic downfall — with her coming in no better than third in any of the early primaries, including in Warren’s home state of Massachusetts. This was despite the fact that, in addition to her communal virtues, Warren was arguably the most experienced, prepared, poised, and smartest of any of the Democratic candidates. She was famous for her comprehensive plans, from tackling climate change to the coronavirus pandemic. And when she made mistakes, such as undergoing DNA testing to confirm her (negligible) Native ancestry, she not only apologized, but learned from her missteps.”
“The problem with perceptions of communality is that they are likely to be volatile. They hence constitute a dangerous if, as we have seen, necessary facet of a female politician’s appeal. A potent double bind presents itself to women in this position: embrace the hope that you’re exceptionally communal and risk flaming out, when people are inevitably disappointed by some aspect of your history, views, or platform. Don’t present yourself as exceptionally communal, and run a greater risk that your campaign will never go anywhere, like Klobuchar and Gillibrand.”
“We expect too much from women. And when a woman we like or respect disappoints us, even in minor and forgivable ways, she is liable to be punished often by people who think they have the moral high ground, and are merely reacting to her as she deserves, rather than helping to enact misogyny via moralism. Meanwhile, no such perfection is demanded of her male rivals.
Sanders paid essentially no penalty for flipping his 2016 position on whether the candidate with a plurality of delegates should automatically become the Democratic nominee, when that outcome stood to his potential advantage in 2020. Nor did Biden face much criticism for his hazy public-option health plan, or for the embellished stories he told on the campaign trail- not to mention, his history of plagiarism.
But perhaps the most important occasion of lost support during Warren’s campaign was a rare moment of conflict between her and Sanders. This was following leaked details of their meeting during December 2018, when Warren told Sanders she was planning to run for president. According to Warren insiders, and later confirmed by Warren, Sanders said he didn’t think a woman could win against Trump. Sanders, meanwhile, vehemently denies having said this. Rather, he maintains, he said that sexism would be weaponized by Trump against a female candidate.
Whatever transpired and it’s not clear that the two candidates’ versions of events are ultimately incompatible Warren’s role in the conflict likely did her far more damage than Sanders’ did. When a woman challenges the epistemic and moral authority of a trusted male figure, she is likely to be the one who comes off as incorrect or immoral, all else being equal. And in this instance, to make matters worse, she was also perceived as whiney: as accusing Sanders of sexism, despite her never having made this accusation. This, together with perceptions of Warren as betraying the progressive cause by failing to “play nice” with Sanders, likely cost her dearly. And that’s despite the fact that, by and large, this was a symmetrical disagreement: each held that the other was failing to tell, or perhaps simply to remember, the full story. But when he says she’s lying, people tend to believe him. When she says that he is, she’s perceived as attacking him cruelly.
Following this incident, a meme depicting Warren as a snake proliferated on Twitter. The symbolism is obvious: When a man and a woman clash, she is the one who is venomous and sneaky.”
“Perhaps most perniciously of all, the electability narrative framed voting for a woman in the 2020 Democratic primary as a selfish choice — as a political liability, given the existential threat of Trump being returned to the White House. As such, it preyed on the conscience of some of the people most likely to be attracted to Warren’s politics: those who value communality, and who therefore might have been willing to sacrifice their voting preference for the sake of the supposedly bigger picture.
But the bigger picture is surely partly this: we are entitled in such contexts to vote for the person we think would be the best person for the job. For my money, that was not a man who recently defended working with segregationists and who lecherously sniffed the hair of a young Latina politician, nor a man who had a heart attack during his campaign and who subsequently refused to release his health records. It was a woman who is whip-smart, truly compassionate, and who seemed to have a plan for everything.”
“Studies show that the school-aged daughters of fathers tend to be more ambitious when he does his fair share of housework — saying they want to be a lawyer or a doctor, for example, rather than that they want to follow a specifically feminine-coded path, as a teacher, a nurse, or staying at home with children. And this pattern holds even if both parents in a household where the mother does more of the housework explicitly espouse gender egalitarian beliefs: actions speak louder than words here, seemingly.”
