Neither michismi nor fiminismi. The people who raise this phrase as a flag are generally the same ones who say that Feminists hate men. When, in reality, this is a contradiction in terms. The feminist movement is defined as that which seeks equal rights between men and women. By definition, you don’t have to be a woman to be a feminist, so it doesn’t make sense for the movement to hate men when, in reality, there are also feminist men. This is why it should be totally unnecessary to carry out a study showing that feminists’ hatred of men is a myth. But, unfortunately, the myth is so widespread that a team of psychologists from the University of Surreyin the United Kingdom, has been forced to do so.
The study consists of five experimentsin which they have participated almost 10,000 people, belonging to nine countries with very different cultures and economic levels. Therefore, it is a very large sample, with which they have managed to demonstrate that, despite the fact that even women themselves tend to believe the myth, feminists do not hate men.
Yes, it is observed that the wrath towards sexist violence or any other injustice against women has increased in recent years within feminism. Feminists, men and women, are combative and forcefully demand equal rights. But they don’t hate anyone. At least, not to anyone who doesn’t deserve it. Because it is one thing to hate men who attack women, and another to go against an entire gender. Therein lies the difference.
Experiments to disprove that feminists hate men
In the first experiment carried out for this study, five groups of women participated. United Kingdom (two groups), Italy, Poland and the United States (one group for each country).
All of them had to answer surveys, in which they were first asked if they defined themselves as feminists. The majority answered yes, although there were some who did not classify themselves within the movement.
In addition, they were asked other questions that can be classified into two groups. In the first block, they were surveyed about the type of feminism with which they most identified: radical, liberal, racialized feminism, etc.. Afterwards, they had to evaluate their perception towards several issues related to men: hostility or benevolence towards them, warmth, trust…
There were hardly any differences between feminists and non-feminists in terms of their individual attitude towards men. In general, this era good in all cases. However, in the case of feminists, in most groups, there was a higher score for collective anger among feminists and somewhat less for benevolence.
Change in country selection
In the second experiment, the steps of the first were replicated, but this time with samples belonging to non-WEIRD countries. For a country to be considered WEIRD it must be Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic. If it does not have any of these adjectives it cannot be considered WEIRD. The United Kingdom, the United States, Italy and Poland are, which is why they were chosen for the first experiment. On the other hand, for the second, they had women from China, India, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.
In addition to not having all the WEIRD characteristics, these countries were chosen because, except for India, they have very confucian cultures, with clearly patriarchal ideologies. It would be much more likely that the premise that feminists hate men is true here. But it was not like that.
It should be noted that in this experiment Not only women participated.. There were also some men and non-binary or trans people. This allowed for very interesting results, since “there was no strong evidence to suggest that gender/sex moderates the differences between feminists and non-feminists in men’s taste and confidence.” The data, again, was very positive, so it would be false that feminists hate men.
Other experiments
In the third experiment, participants were asked to classify a series of words into a good or bad category. Among them were words with clearly masculine connotations, such as “he”, “mister” 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 observed and, in addition, the response latencies to categorize masculine words as good or bad.
In this way, there was more room for less considered and more unconscious responses. If it were true that feminists hate men, it would have been logical for them to demonstrate a less positive association with the masculine category. It could also be the case that feminist collective action, which they were previously surveyed about, was negatively related to the explicit and implicit attitudes.
But, again, it wasn’t like that. Feminists did not seem to show a rejection of men, not even unconsciously.
Next, we wanted to check what was the perception of different feminist ideologies about other feminists. That is, we wanted to know if even within the movement the myth of hatred of men is believed. And, curiously, it was partly like that.
It was found that in all types of feminist ideology, except liberal, feminism was negatively associated with explicit attitudes towards men. That is, they believed in the myth. However, when answering the same questions as in the rest of the experiments, there was no negative individual perception towards the male gender. However, it was common to perceive them as more of a threat compared to women.
Subsequently, in a fifth study all previous results were confirmed with a UK only samplebut larger and more representative of the general population.
What is the summary?
Several conclusions are drawn from all these experiments. To begin with, feminists’ attitudes toward men were positive, but it is true that they were less positive than those of the non-feminists, who were somewhat more benevolent. Furthermore, feminist collective action and anger were negatively related to attitudes toward men. Added to this is that feminists, compared to non-feminists, reported a greater perceived threat from menbut greater gender similarity.
On the other hand, feminists were perceived even by themselves as having negative attitudes towards men. This, according to the authors of the study, is what causes, in part, this “meta-perceived relationship between feminism and attitudes towards men.”
In short, feminists they don’t hate men. Yes, they are less permissive with their errors than non-feminists and they condemn them with anger from activism. But they don’t hate the male gender. It would be useless to do so, since men are necessary for feminism. You cannot seek equality by crushing the opposite, because this would be a contradiction in terms.
Although it may seem superficial, Barbie, the blockbuster movie released this summer, defines this perfectly. Until Barbies and Kens sit down and talk to each other, society doesn’t fully move forward. So that “neither machismo nor feminism, equality” doesn’t make sense either. Because equality will not exist without putting the gears of feminism to work. Next to men, neither against them, nor behind them.