From Donald Trump’s treatment of Kristen Welker and Jon Stewart’s critique, to Charles Barkley’s comments about Cardi B, a familiar pattern emerges: Women are expected to absorb disrespect and manage it perfectly.
Originally published on Dr. Reeves’ Medium and in the Nextions Impact e-newsletter.
Over the last few days, I watched a series of exchanges unfold across journalism, sports entertainment and comedy that left me thinking about the permissions our culture grants men and the expectations it places on women.
The examples are different. The people involved are different. The intentions behind their actions may even be different. Yet each reveals a set of permissions embedded in our culture regarding how women can be treated—particularly when men feel challenged, irritated, inconvenienced or embarrassed. These permissions are not exercised by all men. Many men reject them outright. But they remain culturally available to men who choose to use them.
Cultural permissions create the conditions for entitlement. Entitlement reflects the belief that one has the right to act on those permissions and that the resulting costs, if they exist at all, will be borne by someone else. The examples that follow illustrate how these permissions can become entitlement in moments when men feel challenged, irritated, inconvenienced or embarrassed by women.
Entitlement depends … on the expectation that the costs of exercising those permissions will be minimal, if they exist at all, for those who exercise them. … [The costs] are borne by women who learn to anticipate disrespect before it occurs, to monitor their own reactions as they navigate it and to absorb its consequences without disrupting others’ comfort.
That entitlement can take many forms: diminishing women who question, contradict or challenge men; transforming women from professionals into objects of sexual entertainment; redrawing professional boundaries on men’s terms; prioritizing men’s emotional states over women’s dignity; and prescribing how women should respond when they experience disrespect.
From “Crooked” to “Darling”: How Professional Accountability Became Personal Disrespect From the President
On Sunday, June 7, NBC aired an interview between Kristen Welker and President Donald Trump in which Trump grew increasingly frustrated as Welker pressed him to provide evidence supporting claims he had made. He told her, “Just like you’re crooked.” Later, he added, “You’re either crooked or you’re stupid.” As he ended the interview, he said, “Let’s call it quits because I’ve had enough. Thank you, darling,” before patting Welker on the shoulder as he walked away.
Trump later explained that “because it was raining,” he had become “a little bit angry.” Perhaps he had. Irritation is human. But irritation does not grant permission to insult another person’s intelligence, attack her credibility, replace her professional identity with gendered condescension, or narrow the boundaries of a professional interaction through unsolicited touch.
Women’s dignity should not depend on another person’s irritation, discomfort or need for control.
Trump’s behavior sequence reveals the rhythm of entitlement. The insults challenged Welker’s competence. The “darling” challenged her professional standing. The shoulder pat narrowed the boundary between journalist and interview subject. Welker entered the interaction as a journalist doing her job. By its conclusion, Trump had repositioned her as a woman he felt entitled to insult, patronize and touch according to his own terms.
Public reaction to Trump’s treatment of Welker was largely divided along familiar lines. Some viewed his comments and physical familiarity as disrespectful and demeaning. Others dismissed them as evidence of authenticity, frustration with the media, or simply how Trump communicates.
The disagreement itself is revealing. We rarely argue about whether these interactions occurred. We argue about whether they deserve the label “disrespect.”
Cardi B Goes From Halftime Performer to Sexual Object in a Matter of Seconds
The following evening, on Monday, June 8, during coverage of Game 3 of the NBA Finals between the San Antonio Spurs and the New York Knicks, Cardi B’s halftime performance began as ESPN commentators attempted to finish their analysis.
Ernie Johnson acknowledged the transition by saying, “We’ve been competing with Cardi B here.” Charles Barkley responded, “We lost.”
He then added, “I don’t know if those are Bs. They might be Cardi Ds.”
Moments later, he continued, “I’m pretty sure those aren’t Bs. She has the wrong initials.”
Irritation itself is not the issue. Barkley was under no obligation to enjoy Cardi B’s performance. He may have found the sound distracting. He may have been frustrated that the halftime show interrupted the broadcast’s rhythm.
But Cardi B did not control the arena’s sound system. She did not determine the timing of the performance. She was doing precisely what she had been hired to do.
Yet Barkley’s frustration found expression through commentary about Cardi B’s breasts. A professional doing her job became a sexual object for male entertainment.
The entitlement at work here was not simply the entitlement to make a joke. It was the entitlement to prioritize one’s own irritation over another person’s dignity.
Barkley’s comments were not delivered to a silent audience. The other commentators on the broadcast, Ernie Johnson, Shaquille O’Neal and Kenny Smith—all men—laughed. The laughter did not create the remark, but it helped normalize it. It signaled that the moment belonged in the category of entertainment rather than objectification.
The Conversation Shifts From Trump’s Behavior to Welker’s Response
… The cultural permissions surrounding what can be said *to* women, *about* women and expected *from* women cannot be understood without taking gender into consideration.
Later that same evening, Jon Stewart discussed Trump’s interview with Welker on The Daily Show. Stewart sharply criticized Trump’s conduct, describing it as the reaction of “an incredibly fragile man-baby” confronted by “a woman … who won’t stop asking pertinent questions.”
But Stewart then turned his attention toward Welker’s response. He described her plea for Trump to continue the interview as “one of the worst pleas in the history of journalism.” He mocked her explanation that she had “traveled all the way to Wisconsin,” joking, “You can’t leave, sir. I was in business class. Business.” Later, rejecting Welker’s explanation that the rain had complicated the interview, he exclaimed, “What? You were inside!” before adding, “F–k that!”
Stewart’s comments should not be equated with Trump’s treatment of Welker or Barkley’s remarks about Cardi B. His critique appears directed toward journalistic norms that prioritize access to powerful figures over accountability. In fact, Stewart expressed hope that the exchange would “give journalists permission to not back down” and “to finally be honest about Trump’s inability to be challenged in the moment.” That critique is legitimate.
The issue is not that Stewart criticized Welker. The issue is what the criticism reveals: Within moments of explaining how disrespectfully Trump had treated her, he shifted to evaluating whether Welker had responded appropriately while she was still processing that very disrespect in real time. The focus moved from the conduct itself to the woman’s management of it.
Women often learn that observing disrespect is not enough. We must also prove that we have responded to it correctly.
Should she have challenged him more forcefully? Should she have disengaged sooner? Should she have been warmer? Tougher? More direct? Less accommodating? Women are often expected not only to navigate disrespect in the moment but also to accept external judgments about whether they handled it correctly. The original behavior becomes the opening act. The woman’s response becomes the main event.
How Entitlement Is Reinforced Through Humor, Excuses and Expectations Placed on Women
These incidents show how the cultural permissions surrounding women’s treatment by men are communicated and maintained in predictably consistent ways.
They are communicated through insults directed at women’s intelligence and credibility; through terms of endearment that replace professional identities with gendered ones; through unsolicited touch that narrows interpersonal boundaries; through commentary that transforms women from professionals into sexual bodies for male entertainment; and through arrogant suppositions about how women should have handled the disrespect directed toward them.
Cultural permissions for this entitled behavior are sustained through a series of familiar moves: Irritation becomes explanation and explanation quietly becomes justification. Objectification is reframed as humor. Criticism shifts away from the original behavior toward the woman who experienced it. And women are expected to absorb disrespect gracefully while others retain permission to express frustration however they choose.
Not every instance of disrespect directed toward a woman is sexist, and the people who engage in these behaviors do not direct them exclusively toward women. Yet the cultural permissions surrounding what can be said to women, about women and expected from women cannot be understood without taking gender into consideration.
Social patterns rarely emerge through perfectly controlled comparisons. Instead, they become apparent when similar dynamics recur often enough that they can no longer be dismissed as coincidence.
Women Pay the Price Not Just for the Disrespect—but for Responding to It
These dynamics do not end when the public conversation does. They often continue in the quieter conversations women have with themselves.
Even as I observed and analyzed these cultural moments as a social scientist, I found it very difficult to write this. Not because I questioned whether these incidents had occurred. The quotes are public. The footage exists. What I struggled with was my own reaction to these moments as a woman.
Even as someone who has studied these dynamics for decades, I found myself questioning whether I had the right to name them. Was I making too much of it? Was I reading gender into situations better explained by personality, humor or frustration? And perhaps most revealingly, was I writing about these moments in a way that demonstrated enough composure, enough objectivity, enough grace to be taken seriously?
Even while writing about the expectation that women absorb disrespect gracefully, I found myself wondering whether I had absorbed it gracefully enough to write about it at all. As I revised draft after draft, I realized my internal thoughts about the point were the point—they were evidence of the very dynamics I was trying to describe.
Women often learn that observing disrespect is not enough. We must also prove that we have responded to it correctly. We must narrate our experiences or analysis about our observations without appearing too emotional, too angry, too sensitive, or too certain.
If women are asking ourselves these questions before anyone else has the chance to ask them, then our participation in the cultural work of enforcing these expectations is already underway. We begin monitoring ourselves according to standards we never consciously agreed to uphold and, in doing so, become participants in the very thing we are trying to understand and challenge. In the end, the very reason I almost didn’t write this essay became the reason I knew I needed to.
Women and men need to talk about these moments more directly in our homes, our workplaces and our communities. Instead of shaking our heads at yet another “that’s just Barkley being Barkley” moment, we should ask why commentary about a woman’s breasts felt available to him in the first place.
Instead of dismissing Trump’s treatment of Welker as simply another example of Trump’s personality, we should ask why irritation so often appears to grant permission to men to insult, patronize and redraw professional boundaries with women. Instead of focusing first on whether women responded correctly, we should ask why women continue to bear responsibility for managing the discomfort created by men’s behavior.
The conversations we need to have are not primarily about identifying and villainizing bad actors. Criticizing Trump or Barkley is easier than examining the cultural conditions that make similar behaviors understandable, repeatable and, too often, acceptable. The work before us is to identify the patterns, to ask why certain permissions remain so readily available and to consider the role each of us plays in maintaining them.
Of course, the conversations beyond calling out the bad behavior are not easy. The cultural permissions that give rise to men’s entitlement to disrespect women and the expectations placed on women to absorb and respond to that disrespect appropriately, are deeply embedded in our institutions, relationships and everyday interactions.
They are reinforced through humor, rationalized through frustration, softened through familiarity and sustained through silence. Because they often appear in ordinary moments and involve people we otherwise admire, respect, or identify with, they can be difficult to recognize and even more difficult to challenge.
The long road ahead of us (because it doesn’t always feel like we’ve come very far) begins with honesty. It requires asking not only whether we have exercised these permissions ourselves, but whether we have laughed along with them, excused them, minimized them, remained silent in the face of them, or redirected attention away from the behavior and toward the women who experienced it.
Entitlement depends not only on cultural permissions but also on the expectation that the costs of exercising those permissions will be minimal, if they exist at all, for those who exercise them.
Those costs are not abstract. They are borne by women who learn to anticipate disrespect before it occurs, to monitor their own reactions as they navigate it and to absorb its consequences without disrupting others’ comfort. The harm lies not only in the insult, the objectification, the patronizing touch, or the demand for composure.
It lies in the cumulative message that women’s dignity is conditional, can be negotiated in response to another person’s frustration, and that women themselves are responsible for managing the aftermath. Respect cannot be the reward women receive for navigating disrespect correctly.
Rejecting entitlement when it appears in its most obvious forms is necessary, but insufficient. We must also confront the quieter ways we help sustain the permissions that allow it to flourish. The more willing we are to question those permissions in ourselves, in our relationships and in our institutions, the more difficult we make it for entitlement to thrive without cost or consequence.
Women’s dignity should not depend on another person’s irritation, discomfort or need for control. Respect is not something women should have to earn through resilience and perfect composure. It is the minimum standard from which we should begin.
