Do feminists hate men? Science resolves the dispute

Neither michisms nor feminisms. The people who raise this phrase as a flag are usually the same ones who say that Feminists hate men. Although in fact this is a contradiction in terms. The feminist movement is defined as a movement that seeks equal rights between men and women. By definition, you don’t have to be a woman to be a feminist, so it makes no sense for the movement to hate men when in fact there are also male feminists. This is why there is absolutely no need to produce research showing that feminist hatred of men is a myth. But, unfortunately, the myth is so widespread that a team of psychologists from University of Surreyin the United Kingdom, was forced to do so.

The study consists of five experiments in which they took part. almost 10,000 people, belonging to nine countries with very different cultures and economic levels. Therefore, this is a very large sample with which they were able to demonstrate that, despite the fact that even women themselves tend to believe the myth, feminists do not hate men.

Yes, it has been noticed that anger In recent years, feminism has become increasingly sensitive to sexist violence or any other injustice against women. Feminists, men and women, are militant and persistent in their demands for equal rights. But they don’t hate anyone. At least not to those who don’t deserve it. Because it’s one thing to hate men who attack women, but another thing to be against an entire gender. This is where the difference lies.

Experiments that refute feminist hatred of men

The first experiment conducted in this study involved five groups of women. Great Britain (two groups), Italy, Poland and USA (one group for each country).

They all had to answer surveys that first asked them if they called themselves feminists. The majority answered in the affirmative, although there were those who did not consider themselves to be part of the movement.

In addition, they were asked other questions that can be divided into two groups. In the first block, they were asked about the type of feminism with which they most identified: radical, liberal, racial feminism, etc.. After this, they had to evaluate their perceptions in several areas. issues related to men: hostility or goodwill towards them, warmth, trust…

There were virtually no differences between feminists and non-feminists in individual attitudes toward men. Overall this era good in all cases. However, in the case of feminists, in most groups feminists scored higher on collective anger and slightly lower on agreeableness.

Changing country selection

The second experiment repeated the steps of the first, but this time with samples belonging to non-strange countries. For a country to be considered WEIRD, it must be Western, educated, industrialized, wealthy and democratic. If it doesn’t have any of these adjectives, it can’t be considered WEIRD. Great Britain, USA, Italy and Poland – they were chosen for the first experiment. On the other hand, secondly, they had women from China, India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

Apart from the fact that these countries do not have all the WEIRD characteristics, these countries were chosen because, with the exception of India, they have very Confucian cultures, with a clearly patriarchal ideology. It’s much more likely that the premise that feminists hate men is true here. But it wasn’t like that.

It should be noted that in this experiment Not only women took part.. There were also men and non-binary or transgender people. This produced some very interesting results because “there was no strong evidence that gender/gender moderates differences between feminists and non-feminists in men’s tastes and confidence.” The data, again, was very positive, so it would be incorrect to say that feminists hate men.

Other experiments

In the third experiment, participants were asked to classify a series of words into good or bad category. These included words with distinctly masculine connotations, such as “he,” “Mr,” or “Kevin.” On the other hand, these words had to be associated with good or bad adjectives, such as “wonderful” or “terrible.” The chosen words were respected and, in addition, response delay classify masculine words into good and bad.

Thus, there was more room for less deliberate and more unconscious responses. If it were true that feminists hated men, it would be logical for them to demonstrate a less positive association with the male category. It is also possible that the collective feminist action they were previously asked about was negatively associated with explicit and implicit attitudes.

But, again, everything was not like that. Feminists did not seem to show hostility to men, even unconsciously.

Next we wanted to check that perceptions of different feminist ideologies about other feminists. That is, we wanted to find out whether even within the movement they believed the myth of hating men. And, curiously, this was partly the case.

It turned out that in all types of feminist ideology, except liberal, feminism was negatively associated with obvious attitude towards men. That is, they believed in the myth. However, when answering the same questions as in other experiments, no negative individual perception of male gender was observed. However, it was common to perceive them as a greater threat compared to women.

Subsequently, in the fifth study, all previous results were confirmed UK sample onlybut larger and more representative of the population as a whole.

What is a resume?

From all these experiments several conclusions are drawn. To begin with, the attitude of feminists towards men was positive, but it is true that they were less positive than the opinions of non-feminists, who were somewhat more friendly. Moreover, feminist collective action and anger were negatively associated with attitudes toward men. It should be added that feminists, compared to non-feminists, reported greater perceived threat from menbut greater gender similarity.

On the other hand, feminists even themselves were perceived as having negative attitude towards men. This, according to the study’s authors, is partly the reason for this “meta-perceived connection between feminism and attitudes towards men.”

In short, feminists. they don’t hate men. Yes, they are less forgiving of their mistakes than non-feminists, and condemn them with the wrath of activism. But they don’t hate the male gender. It would be useless to do this because feminism requires men. You cannot achieve equality by suppressing the opposite, because that would be a contradiction in terms.

Although it may seem superficial, BarbieThis summer’s blockbuster defines this perfectly. Until Barbie and Kens sit down and talk to each other, society cannot fully move forward. So “neither machismo, nor feminism, nor equality” makes sense either. Because there will be no equality if the mechanisms of feminism are not involved. Next to men, neither against them, nor behind them.