soulvomit:

funereal-disease:

funereal-disease:

Those last two posts are why I have a pretty different perspective on the concept of male entitlement than a lot of other women seem to.

[Epistemic status: tentative, but approaching something quantifiable.]

Most entitlements are invisible. They only really stand out as entitlements when we think the person in question is acting *unduly* entitled. For example, we don’t think of a person who wants to walk their dog without being hit by a drunk driver as “acting entitled”, because our social contract considers that something we *are* entitled to. When we decry someone as exhibiting entitlement, there’s an unspoken “unjustified” hovering there. This makes sense: calling someone “entitled” for, say, wanting to be able to vote is technically not inaccurate, but since the law and the broader culture consider it a *legitimate* entitlement, it becomes an example of Scott’s “worst argument in the world”.

When we say men are acting entitled, we’re saying they’re demanding access to things they aren’t *actually* entitled to. We lack a similar concept for women. I think this is because the things many women act entitled to are things most of society *actually does believe* they deserve. It’s not obvious to the world at large. To most people, these women are merely acting within conventional female scripts. To the people on the receiving end of that entitlement, though, it reads very differently.

Many women believe, or behave as though they believe, that they are entitled to a certain degree of intimacy from other women. Unlike entitlement to specifically *sexual* intimacy, this is mostly not coded as threatening. It is considered part of normal womanhood, to the point where we don’t actually recognize it as an entitlement. It’s just part and parcel of Sisterhood.

This phenomenon includes but is not limited to:

• The normalization of trauma as a casual conversation topic
• Physically fixing another person’s clothes or hair without asking (tucking in tags, etc.)
• Commiserating over body issues, periods, etc.
• Casual discussion of weight and calories
• The near-ubiquity of hugs as greetings

All of these are things to which many women are socialized to feel entitled. Remember that I’m not calling entitlement an inherently bad thing. Food and shelter are entitlements! I do not want to belittle the importance of these particular feminine norms for those who find them enriching. What I am saying is that this constant white noise of emotional (and sometimes physical) intimacy that women are expected to share is more damaging to some women than the expectation of male sexual intimacy. This is very, very rarely acknowledged in a feminist context.

Predictably, the women for whom this is especially difficult tend to be neurodivergent. Autistic women who can’t be touched, eating disordered women who can’t handle calorie talk, women with PTSD who don’t feel safe in a space where assault is constantly discussed. Even women who are “just” private, or gender-nonconforming, or, hell, even just kind of weird can find these norms burdensome. But they are so integral not only to large groups of women but to the structure of feminist activism that it’s no wonder so many of us feel alienated.

And the thing about entitlement is that it’s invisible. Many men who act entitled to women’s sexual attention do not realize there is any other way. It’s simply the nature of things. If you call them entitled, they honestly won’t understand what you’re talking about. It’s the same for many of the women mentioned above. They don’t see how their expectations of entitlement might be burdensome or unfair, because that’s just what being a woman is all about. It’s a blind spot they don’t even seem to realize they have.

Reblogging this to elaborate on that last part: defensive responses to this sort of behavior (i.e. “come on, it’s all in fun” “it’s just us girls”) sound an awful lot like the male sexual harasser’s “what, a guy can’t flirt anymore?” Some of it is bad faith, sure, but some of it is legitimate confusion at realizing something you’ve been trained to think of as yours actually isn’t. Don’t tell me you wouldn’t be rattled if you started getting hostile responses to something you’d grown up assuming was okay. 

It’s not lost on me that it’s a very broad group of women who probably have an uncomfortable relationship with the intimacy and emotional labor expectations of other women. Autistic, PTSD, traumatized, gender non conforming? Add those all up.

We’re all expected to play this same game, some of us are better at it than others.

pythius:

quiet–dominance:

Stop teaching children that there is only one person out there meant for them. Let it be easier for people to let their toxic relationships go without fear of losing “The One”.

Its so fucked up and weird that we don’t tell people that there will be multiple important people in their lives