7 Startling Reasons Men Feel Entitled to Women’s Bodies – Rachel’s Story

Male entitlement to women’s bodies is a driving force behind emotional & psychological abuse, sexual coercion, domestic abuse, sexual violence, and homicide. Here’s what you need to know.

Rachel Moran, a former trafficking victim, shares her story below. For women who are currently in a relationship, if you’re feeling used and unseen, consider taking our free emotional abuse quiz. To see if you’re experiencing any of these types of emotional abuse (including coercion).

Why Do Men Feel Entitled to Women’s Bodies?

Navigating the complex maze of societal expectations and gender dynamics, women often find themselves at the mercy of a perplexing phenomenon—male entitlement towards their bodies. It’s a pervasive issue that manifests itself in various ways, from thinking women “owe” them.

This list explores seven compelling factors that contribute to male entitlement to women’s bodies.

1. Patriarchy is a System of Male Entitlement

Patriarchy is an established framework where men have privilege and women don’t. Historically, male experience has been the default, and women have been objectified. Their roles reduced to caregiver or sexual object. Due to their societal status, men grow up with a sense of entitlement toward many aspects of life, including women’s bodies. The belief in their innate right to women’s attention, affection, and bodies can begin early.

2. Cultural Norms Perpetuate Male Entitlement to Women’s Bodies

The media plays a significant role in perpetrating gender stereotypes and norms, often depicting women’s bodies as objects for male consumption or that women are the supporting cast. From advertising that commodifies women to movies and songs that glorify persistent pursuit of women despite their lack of interest. The cultural narrative loads messages that reinforce the idea that “real men” take control.

3. Ignorance Isn’t Bliss (For Women)

An educational gap in teaching about healthy relationships and truly mutual intimacy further exacerbates the problem. Many education systems worldwide lack a comprehensive approach to relationship and sex education. Which includes the nuanced aspects of respecting one another’s autonomy. Without this knowledge, it is easy for men (and women) to believe men are entitled to women’s bodies in various ways.

4. Religious Beliefs Support Male Entitlement To Women’s Bodies

Religious and traditional values often “assign” women the task of being the moral compass for men, as if men aren’t capable of making ethical, healthy decisions. These beliefs can simultaneously place the onus of “morality”, domestic labor, childcare, and “meeting a man’s physical needs” the duty of a “righteous” woman.

While also stripping her of equal value and decision-making power. This can lead to a paradox where, on the one hand, women are seemingly “exalted.” And on the other hand, a convenient scapegoat when men’s desires or behaviors spiral out of control. People manipulate these beliefs to justify male entitlement to women’s bodies.

5. Male Entitlement Codified Through Legal and Political Structures

The failure of legal systems to adequately protect women from emotional and psychological abuse, including coercion and coercive control reinforces female entitlement to women’s bodies.

In some instances, laws meant to protect women end up tools of oppression. For example, when rape laws require evidence of physical resistance, it implies that without this resistance, the intercourse was mutual. Or that all that was required was a “yes”, without concern for how that yes was obtained.

6. Socio-Economic Factors That Support Male Entitlement

When men are the primary earners, there can be a belief that their financial contributions translate into ownership, not only of their wife, but also of her body. This is particularly evident in cases where women are financially dependent on men and fear the consequences of asserting their rights. The resulting power imbalance exploits and justifies men’s sense of ownership and control over women, including their physical autonomy.

7. Lack of Empathy is The Root Cause of Male Entitlement

Arguably, the most pernicious aspect of male entitlement is its normalization and acceptance within male social circles. Many men fail to recognize the privileges they hold and the ways in which their behavior contributes to a culture of male entitlement.

Instead, there’s often a reluctance to hold each other accountable for actions that violate women’s rights and boundaries. Without empathy, it’s challenging to change the societal narrative that enables and excuses male entitlement. Men must begin to stand up and actively work against these norms to create a culture of respect and equality.

Why Do Men Feel Entitled to Women & Girls?

Rachel and Anne work through the origins of male entitlement. It’s important to understand that male entitlement isn’t biological – there is hope. Just as boys learn to feel ownership over women’s bodies, they can learn to be respectful, caring, and observant of autonomy.

If you need live support, attend a Betrayal Trauma Recovery Group Session.

Transcript: 7 Startling Reasons Men Feel Entitled To Women’s Bodies

Anne: I have Rachel Moran on today’s episode. She is pioneering international progress in policy and collaborative advocacy to actualize robust solutions to exploitation. Jane Fonda endorsed her work, U.S. president, Jimmy Carter, Gloria Steinem, and many others.

Prior to joining the International Center on Exploitation, Rachel founded and led Space International, an international organization formed giving voice to women who have survived the abusive reality of prostitution. She’s also the author of the bestselling book, Paid For: My Journey Through Prostitution, we are so excited to have you on. Thank you so much for your time, Rachel.

Rachel Moran: Thanks so much for having me.

Anne: Rachel, we’re going to talk today about prostitution and how that intersects with trafficking. You have so much experience on this issue. And I appreciate everything that you’ve done to help women survivors all over the world.

So let’s start with the fundamental systemic problem of male entitlement to women’s bodies.

Rachel Moran: Male entitlement has existed across time, but it’s changed shape and intensity. In the last 20, 25 years, since we’ve had the internet, social media, all these different mechanisms. It’s why your husband is constantly on his phone. Men are bombarded through these mechanisms. With that message every day, especially when you’re talking about, you know, 20 something young guys today, they never lived in a world without the internet. They cannot conceive of it. I’ll be eternally grateful that I was born in the mid 1970s.

I’ll always be able to see the internet as something that came along at one particular point in time and wasn’t always there.

Online Explicit Content & Male Entitlement

Rachel Moran: And I actually feel sorry for anybody who can’t hold that memory. That has been an enormous contributor to male entitlement to female bodies.

Anne: Due, to their access to online explicit content? I mean, that would be my assumption, but is that what you’re thinking?

Rachel Moran: In very large part, but I think it’s more insidious than that. If you think about what life was like back in the 1980s when MTV burst onto the scene. All of a sudden, we viewed things considered very risqué back then. All of that now, it’s something that we look back on. And it appears almost charming, a relic of the past, things that would have been so scandalous that they were actually banned 35, 40 years ago.

Now they just wouldn’t turn a hair on your head. So we have this progression, is what I’m saying. Technology speeds everything up, including pushing it into the mainstream. Things considered explicit two generations ago, they’re not even on the radar anymore.

Anne: With more access to men being able to view women’s bodies via the internet. Can you talk about the correlation between the ability to view it whenever they want and their feelings of entitlement?

Rachel Moran: We covet what we see every day. If men see representations of highly sexualized women, and highly normalized. They put those two things together. I’ve had men look at me in absolute astonishment when I told them that I simply did not want their attention.

Normalization Of Harassment

Rachel Moran: I remember being in an American city a few years before the pandemic came along. It might’ve been New York, but I was there with a few women, and we were working towards abolishing all this. A man approached me in the street. I told him I didn’t appreciate his lewd and vulgar comments. He was genuinely astounded. And I can tell you one thing about that guy, is that the astonishment was real. It was genuine. My heart goes out to young women today.

Rachel Moran: Any woman under 27, 28 grew up in a culture that normalized harassment. I mean, harassment must get physical. It has to turn into assault. Before people have any idea of where the boundaries are, if they even do at that point. Women unwillingly turn a blind eye to their partners watching online explicit content. Or unwillingly participate in watching it with them.

Women reach out to me all the time, have done it for more than a decade, and often tell me their personal stories and experiences. I want to initiate conversations about that. So I’ve heard a lot of this stuff, and from everything I’ve seen, it is a toxic influence in human relationships and society more broadly.

Anne: Absolutely, yeah, many women who listen to this podcast have been abused in many, many ways by their husband’s use of online explicit content. Marital coercion, sometimes rape, which is coercion, and so my audience is familiar with the harms of it. This male entitlement has grown so much from women’s bodies, also to women’s labor.

It’s interesting to me that as we’ve had so much progress in some ways, like women in business or women in more leadership roles, male entitlement to women’s bodies has not reduced, but increased.

Prostitution & Male Entitlement

Anne: They feel like women owe them, or that it is some type of need. That if they don’t have it met, a lot of these abusive men, there will be some consequences if their wife isn’t meeting her wifely duties. It’s alarming and harmful to women.

So for my audience, a difficult part of Rachel’s story. Men prostituted Ms. Moran for seven years in Dublin and across Ireland, beginning when she was 15 years old. I want to talk to you about this male entitlement and how it fuels prostitution and trafficking. I also want to help people understand that women in this situation who are abused like this are coerced and used.

Many women who listen to this podcast, their husbands, perhaps solicited a prostitute. And they have a hard time sometimes wrapping their heads around that he not only abused his wife. Because he gaslit, lied and psychologically abused her, but also abused the woman he exploited.

Rachel Moran: Prostitution couldn’t exist without male entitlement. It just simply couldn’t. I don’t think any man in the history of the world has ever paid to put his hands on a woman in any circumstances that I can imagine. Except by deciding himself entitled to do so. You know, I spent a decade writing my memoir, Paid For.

I don’t think I covered all the angles, because there’s far too many of them. But I gave it a good shot, and we published 110,000 words in the end. So, you know, that’s not a brief segment of writing. So I taught a lot and I, and I’ve talked a lot too. I’ve given public presentations for a long time now, well, more than a decade.

The Concept Of Consent

Rachel Moran: And it’s still hard to explain in a snapshot moment. You’re not going to get this across in a few minutes. I think the concept of consent is the biggest part of the problem when you’re trying to explain to people who know nothing about prostitution, what the heart and soul of prostitution truly is. Because people say to themselves, oh well she consented, oh well they consented, and as long as those women are consenting, well then no, no harm, no foul, you know.

People misplace the term consent itself, and the concept of consent not only in prostitution, but also in conversations about every kind of intimate exchange. Because it is supposed to be about mutuality, not consent. The term consent is far better suited to commercial exchanges or other kinds of exchanges that are not human, deeply human in their interactions. As soon as we start talking about consent, we remove the intimacy.

We remove what it is that actually passes between two people in a intimate exchange. The exchange shouldn’t involve money or any kind of coercion. And that’s another thing that people miss, is that the cash is the coercion in prostitution. Because if you removed the cash from the equation, simply nothing happens. Unless we were talking about forcible rape.

Anne: That is absolutely true. The cash is the coercion. The victims situation is so desperate. Male entitlements are forcing them with coercion to re-engage due to their circumstance.

Rachel Moran: Exactly, and this is why I don’t find the term trafficking useful. Our political opponents certainly find it useful. It allows them to distinguish between prostitutes and trafficked women.

Every Woman In Prostitution Is Coerced

Rachel Moran: So the idea of trafficking is that it refers to women in situations of force, fraud and coercion. But every woman in the history of prostitution was in a situation of coercion. If you consider the cash to coercion, as I have done from my first job, when I was 15 years of age, up till the present moment. And I’m a lot closer to 50 now than I am to 15.

You know, I’ve understood what this is for a long time, and the truth is that most men do too. You will never see a man move as quickly in your life as he will if you threaten to tell his wife. That he was there, and you’re having the conversation in the brothel.

Anne: Do you mean they know well that women are not doing it because they enjoy it? They know women receive money, and that they would not do this without money.

Rachel Moran: Yeah, most men are well aware of the circumstances and still feel that male entitlement. I have been saying for years that the veil would fall off everybody’s eyes, who condones it in whatever way they do. People tell themselves all sorts of stories, women as well as men. But I don’t believe any of these pro-legalization voices in academia, or whether they’re just ordinary housewives living their lives.

If any individual were to walk into a room and open the door and see their own daughter sitting there on a brothel’s bed for sale, that’s the great equalizer.

Male Entitlement: Men Are Buying The Right To Use A Woman’s Body

Rachel Moran: I think, when you imagine the body of someone you love used in that way. Because, you know, what men buy in prostitution. It’s not her time, they’re not buying an hour with a worker. They’re buying access, they’re buying the right to use that woman’s body.

They’re literally buying their way inside her. We think about people we love. Their bodies used in such ways are inconceivable to us. So that should tell us all we need to know about what the trade truly is.

Anne: It’s so heartbreaking to know that they are aware that this is not something an exploited woman would be doing if she weren’t desperate for the money. I like how you talked about how this isn’t about consent. Because the general feeling of consent from a male entitlement perspective would be, what can I do or say that will get her to have it with me? Rather than the perspective of is she interested in an intimate experience?

Is she actually wanting a physical experience, because she feels loved, cared about and seen? They’re thinking, well, I just have to get that yes. I feel like the world sort of sees “consent.” As just getting the yes, as long as she’ll sign right here on the dotted line, good, I’ve got her.

Mutuality vs. Consent

Anne: She gave her consent. I don’t know what the problem is. Rather than asking, what did she want or need in that moment? She wanted and needed money in that moment. In the case of prostitution, she needed to pay the bills. She needed to eat. is that kind of what you meant?

You didn’t like the word consent, because, hey, I can lie to her. As long as she signs on that dotted line, I’m good to go. Rather than a man with male entitlement actually having an interest in the person and caring about what their hopes and dreams are.

Rachel Moran: There is a daily tsunami of abuse and violation. The abuse is covered up, concealed, and condoned by the word consent. At this point, I think it’s a frankly dangerous word.

There was a time when I thought it was useless and a misplaced word. But I’ve evolved my thinking to believe it’s a dangerous word. Because anything regularly used to conceal harm has got to be dangerous, and that’s where I’m at with the word consent. I just don’t use it anymore unless I’m explaining why I don’t use it.

Anne: So how would you define consent in the sense that a woman is interested in an experience?

Rachel Moran: I talk about mutuality, because that’s what you’re talking about. There is a two-way street. In prostitution, it’s a one-way street. He’s getting the contact he wants. She’s getting the money she needs. And there is no mutuality whatsoever, which is exactly why the term consent is misapplied.

Trying To Get The Yes

Rachel Moran: You talked earlier about the way male entitlement justifies abusers only needing that yes, that’s only some of them, of course. But I believe we need to force a shift away from the use of the term consent, for all the reasons I’ve described. But of course, we have to replace that with something else, like you alluded to. And I think mutuality is that word.

Anne: So many organizations are trying to teach people about consent. And in part, they’re saying it’s an enthusiastic yes. Many abusers interpret that as, okay, how do I groom her to think I’m interested in her? How do I lie to her? Or what do I have to say to get the yes? And I think what you’re saying is they’re seeing a consent as some sort of transaction. I’m going to give you this. You’re going to give me that. And it’s this exchange of goods or services, essentially.

That is not what an experience should be about. If I hear you right, you’re saying that’s why you don’t like the word consent. Because the way it’s taught and talked about these days is so transactional and not at all relational.

Rachel Moran: Yeah, consent was never the right word, just from a linguistic point of view. And so for that reason, I think it’s little wonder that it’s been so misused. I’ve talked a lot about this elsewhere, about language around this whole issue. And the way that if you make one single misstep at the outset, every other step you take linguistically can only lead you in the wrong direction.

Male Entitlement: The Role of Self Published Exploitation

Rachel Moran: And you make a misstep with the language, and inevitably you make a misstep with the politics, etc. It’s a dangerous misstep to make. Because it starts with the language, moves into politics, then it ends up in legislation where male entitlement influences the result. So we have to be clear about the language, especially the language we’re using when we’re initially framing ideas and concepts.

Where we’ve been brought to today is something that’s just got to be unpicked. Looking at what all this has given rise to. One of the dangerous things is that it keeps getting more hidden. What happens is we end up with things now, like self published exploitation. That’s the best kind of example I can think of right now. Onlyfans is something that’s been so expertly concealed in its nature and intentions, and the way it operates. https://www.btr.org/how-to-prevent-exploitation/

Many women actually believe this is the breakthrough that women needed to be fully autonomous in this soft core version of the trade. This is not how to prevent exploitation. And we keep being served up these examples of women who make fantastical amounts of money, tens and tens of millions. The reality is, almost all women set up an OnlyFans account. They make a few hundred dollars a month, and their images will exist online forever.

And do harm to them, their career prospects, reputations, sense of personal dignity and integrity. All for the price of what boils down to maybe a few cups of Starbucks coffee a day, if they’re lucky. And this is the reality of what’s going on.

The Dangers Of Misusing Consent

Rachel Moran: But back again to that term consent, people will simply look at it and say, Oh, but she consented. So what’s the harm? Or, oh, but she consented. So she has nobody to blame, but herself. And that’s another dangerous aspect of the term consent. The way it’s used to excuse. So it’s used in all sorts of harmful ways. And that’s one of them.

Anne: These are just more and more complex ways of blaming the victim. Women whose husband is abusive and convinced of his male entitlement could use the same argument. Well, she consented to be married to him.

Rachel Moran: Yeah, and also she didn’t leave.

Anne: Then she’s, what, by default, consenting to be emotionally and psychologically abused? No, she thought she was in a relationship with a man who cared about her. She did not realize she was in a transactionship with a man who was using and exploiting her. This consent word has really messed people up, because they think I did consent because I said yes. I’m not thinking, but I didn’t want to do it or I didn’t feel comfortable. So how would you use the term mutuality?

Rachel Moran: Ah well, that would depend much on the context. It’s not a word that you can switch out directly for consent in most instances, although you can sometimes of course. You can say well it was mutual, as readily as you can say well it was consensual, but they have those subtle but important distinctions between them. Give me a few of them now if you like, because it might be interesting for your listeners to think about how they can use this.

Consent vs. Mutuality

Anne: Maybe something like he was honest and trustworthy and actually cared about her. Both were interested in physical touch. She was safe, so the it was based on mutuality, not male entitlement. I mean, is that the kind of thing you would say, rather than saying the husband and wife went on a date, and then of course she consented to intimacy?

It would take a little longer when we talk about it to actually describe mutuality. Because it’s more than just someone saying, yes, it involves so much more. There’s no way to say, and so then she, mutualitied, right? Where you can say, and then she consented.

Rachel Moran: What you can say, just as briefly, is that it was mutual. It doesn’t have to be a big, long winded thing. We don’t have to make it more complicated than it needs to be. But I think we’ll have to push for this. Like we’ll have to actively put this into conversations and explain why.

Anne: Yeah.

Rachel Moran: Because people will continue to circle back to the whole consent thing. I mean, it’s not the boulder up a hill scenario that it might seem like. 50 years ago, nobody was talking about consent. Some idiot came along and thought that was a good idea, and it took off. Same thing happened with the term sex work, which is just appalling. But I think we can and should deliberately introduce mutuality into our conversations, and it doesn’t have to be that hard.

The Impact Of Male Entitlement

Anne: So when we’re talking about the sense that men are entitled to use women’s bodies. This male entitlement fuels trafficking and prostitution. Because so many victims are filmed, and then that documented filming of their abuse is called pornography. But we know it’s just documentation of abuse.

Rachel Moran: In a very real way, we’re all harmed. Because society itself is harmed. Clearly, the individual who’s on the receiving end of that I harm is the person who’s harmed first and foremost. But, we’re all harmed by this. Any mother who’s ever brought a little boy into this world has seen the progression of that child and the difference in his innocence, pre and post puberty. The difference between a little boy who’s eight or nine and the same child at 13 or 14.

When the social phenomenon of masculinization kicks in, and he’s at the receiving end of strange bullying from his peers that forces his personality into into hiding. That’s all part of this. Back to the conversation about male entitlement. First of all, that’s bred into men when they’re boys. It doesn’t just appear. And there’s something strange that I’ve noticed about it too. It’s not enough for these young men, I mean, you have a whole movement of them now.

I’m sure. They call themselves incels, involuntary celibates for anybody who hasn’t heard. Any one of those young men could pay to assault a woman. And it is assault in a brothel. But it’s not enough for them that women’s physical selves are available to them, because they are to every man in America and everywhere else.

The Incel Movement

Rachel Moran: That’s not enough for them. I’ve noticed this. It’s strange. They also want to be wanted, demand to be wanted. They feel very hard done by, to the point where some of them are even willing to murder. Because they’re not wanted. I think that that takes male entitlement to a strange place, and we seem to witness something larger than anything that I think we’ve ever seen throughout history.

Anne: Wait, wait, I just sit around playing video games all day. And all I eat is like a monster energy drink, and you are not interested in talking to me. Like not only should you want to have it with me, which I’m entitled to, but you should also want to be with me and clean up my mess, and why in the world would you not think I’m awesome?

Rachel Moran: Yeah, this is what we’re up against. We’ve somehow created this kind of distortion in the minds of young men, well before they ever were young men. Because this starts, like I said, in boyhood.

And it’s like that. They think they can sit in their mother’s spare room and eat Doritos all day, and maybe call a pizza. And play video games, and when they’re not chatting about what women are for, they are for not wanting to sleep with them on the regular. It’s just wall to wall male entitlement.

It’s a hardcore male entitlement. Some men take that to the level of a psychosis of entitlement. We just saw the first mortar here in Ireland since the passage of the Nordic model. which was implemented six years ago. There was a woman murdered here only a few weeks back, a Muslim woman from Romania.

Taking Male Entitlement To Extremes

Rachel Moran: She’d only lived in Ireland for three weeks at the time she was killed. She was killed by a Middle Eastern man who’d only been here a couple of months. You’d have to be a flat fool or live under a rock or something, not to realize that this was one of those ugly, male on female examples of violence. From Islamic extremists that are sometimes to as “honor killings.”

He killed her because she was a Muslim woman in a brothel in the Western world. Sleeping with the infidels. This is what his whole thinking was. He was arrested the next day in Belfast. He’d skipped across the border. He was arguing he would have to be granted bail. Because he couldn’t possibly have his religious convictions pandered to if he was detained in prison.

So, here’s this guy talking about his faith in Allah needs to be respected. After he’s just butchered this poor woman. He didn’t turn up there for an encounter. He killed her in 1 minute 57 seconds. That’s how long it took him to arrive at her apartment, walk in, murder her and leave, under 2 minutes. It exemplifies the level and nature of the brutality that we’re dealing with with male entitlement.

Anne: It reminds me of a book I recently read, and it’s on our website, Betrayal Trauma Recovery. If you go to our website, btr.org, you can find a curated list of books that we recommend. This one is called Men Who Hate Women, From Incels to Pick Up Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All. It’s by Laura Bates.

Extreme Misogyny & Its Effects

Anne: It is excellent. It’s talking about this type of extreme misogyny that leads to physical violence. She’s talking about murders like the one you just described. But also domestic abuse, not just physical, although it definitely includes that, but also all the emotional and psychological abuse that women endure from men who believe in male entitlement to women’s bodies, but also their labor.

They feel like you owe me this, because you’re just a woman, and I’m a man. As victims of this type of abuse, the only thing we can do is get to safety. Start making our way to emotional and psychological safety. Make sure that the people around us are safe. We’ve heard a lot about the abuse of women.

And I think it’s important to acknowledge that we’re actually caring people, rather than people who want to exploit us and see us as a good or service that they can exchange with. What are your thoughts about how to change this mentality, knowing that women who listen to this podcast have no ability to change the mentality of the abusers out there?

Rachel Moran: First of all, every woman should join the women’s movement. It’s absolutely untrue that we don’t have it within our gift to affect change. Every woman has their voice to raise and their presence to bring. Every last one of us is valid and relevant, because if every woman ever was hurt and harmed, would bring her own voice in her own way. Whatever that is, to the women’s movement. We would have a big movement. Most of the women on earth would be involved in that.

Prostitution & Violence Against Women

Rachel Moran: Another thing, this is obscure for most women and for understandable reasons, but I truly believe that as long as we have prostitution on this earth, we will always have violence against women.

Anne: I absolutely agree with you, yes.

Rachel Moran: Some people think you can contain violence against women by directing it towards one group of women. And that those women can or should for the greater good of most women be served up as human shields. I have heard women make remarks along those lines that would so, so clearly believe that some segment of us should be used to absorb male entitlement and men’s violence.

Anne: Really? You’ve heard that?

Rachel Moran: Oh, absolutely.

Anne: That’s crazy.

Rachel Moran: You see, here’s where those women are silly in their thinking. Is that as long as we have a segment of women who are seen as the human shields of violence, what you’re doing is condoning the violence, accepting that since it needs a direction to go in. It has a right to exist in the first place. When we talk about eradicating violence against women, we’re starting from the wrong perspective.

We’re thinking about a well heeled middle class housewife, for example. And don’t misunderstand me, please. I’m not suggesting anyone deserves violence more or less than anybody else. What I’m saying is that when we think about violence against women, we think about young women in nightclubs. We think about victims of domestic violence, we think about women who are abused, harassed, stalked, etc. But we put all of our focus on what you might call civilian women.

Male Entitlement: The Propaganda Of Male Desire

Rachel Moran: And we don’t think about the women who are at the absolute outer rim of society. And I truly believe that that’s where we need to start. We need to start at that outer rim. Because if we start our work on this issue with the mentality that no woman anywhere, no matter how disadvantaged, no matter how marginalized, deserves that kind of abuse, no woman.

Anne: um hmm

Rachel Moran: Well then that will sweep across society as an understanding I believe far, far quicker.

Anne: Sorry, I’ve never heard of that before. This idea that some women should be sacrificed or something for the greater good of women. So I’m like …

Rachel Moran: Oh, that’s a very old idea.

Anne: I’m shocked anyone thinks that. It also gives the idea that it must be because of male entitlement. Rather than thinking men do not have to exploit women. That’s not a male characteristic. They could, not exploit women. They could treat women with respect.

They’re not viewing men as capable, caring human beings, that somehow their nature is to exploit. And so we have to sacrifice some women so that men don’t, I don’t know, what, turn into cannibals or something? That just sounds crazy.

Rachel Moran: The crux of the problem is that many people, including women, have come to buy the propaganda that male entitlement, and desire are an unstoppable force. What men do constantly around their own desires is that they mistake them for needs. That to me speaks to a state of toddlerhood.

Anne: Yeah.

The Role of Mothers In Perpetuating Male Entitlement

Rachel Moran: In toddlerhood, when a child gets to around three and a half, you need to clarify the difference between a want and a need. You want the ice cream, you don’t need it. There is a difference. It’s a sorry state, when we have so many grown men who ought to know better. They don’t understand the basic distinction between a want and a need.

And that’s something that we’ll have to clarify before we get any sense out of such people. But there are women, and it’s important to say this, who play that game of male entitlement and play along with it, and cause great harm in doing so. That’s been clearly exemplified to me by the women who take their sons to brothels and convince themselves that there’s a real and genuine need to take a young man or teenage boy to a brothel. Those women make me exceptionally angry.

Anne: In our community, I would say that, not a majority, but I’ve heard many, many women who their mother-in-laws would fit this category. Where their mother-in-law is like, “My son has these intense needs, and it is your job to give it to him. If you don’t give it to him, he has to get it somewhere. So of course he’s going to view online exploitation.

So it’s your fault that he views it. Or it’s your fault that he abuses and exploits prostitutes. It’s your fault, because you’re just not meeting his needs. Mother-in-laws who feel this way traumatize so many women.

Rachel Moran: It sounds like the mother-in-law from hell, I mean.

Anne: Yeah, I know.

Rachel Moran: Not every woman thinks she can speak up for herself in these circumstances. That kind of nonsense from somebody will destroy every relationship.

The Importance Of Self-Respect

Rachel Moran: In your life, most importantly, your relationship with your own self, there comes a point in our lives where we have to put the relationship with ourselves front and center. And if that means the collapse of a marriage, so be it. Because if a marriage is under that kind of pressure, it’s a pretty good indication that it’s best off collapsed.

Anne: And going back to that discussion we had about consent. In my opinion, it’s not a marriage. It’s a transactionship where male entitlement exploits you. That’s a totally different thing than what marriage should be, which is a partnership. It is not that. And so you’re not collapsing a marriage. You are getting to safety from a very unsafe situation.

Rachel Moran: Um hmm, yeah.

Anne: Rachel, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us today. Your insights are invaluable and I really, really appreciate your thoughts.

Rachel Moran: You’re very welcome.