Sexists fear women

As we recently discussed, I think fear, more than hate, drives sexism. Fear makes people more selfish, irrational, and short-sighted. These cognitive distortions also drive misogyny.

Today, allow me to present another reason I think sexists wanna date us more than they hate us: The people who are most sexist and the people who have the most to fear from women’s advancement are the same damn people.

Before I go any further, *Obama voice* let me be clear. This post is not dating advice. (You can pay me for that here.) It’s a political rant about the concept of gender (evergreen tweet). It’s the opposite of an argument for tolerating any man’s bullshit. “I’m afraid” is not an excuse.

Today, I want to show you what I’ve learned about who tends to be most sexist. Then we’ll talk about who’s most threatened by gender equality.

Spoiler that is also a restatement:

Who’s most sexist?

The biggest sexists tend to be male, young, and low-status, according to my data.

(Terminology-use, I often use terms like sexism, misogyny, patriarchy, and anti-feminism pretty interchangeably. For this post, “sexism” means what researchers call hostile sexism. I think sexism against men happens and is bad. However, the researchers only use it to describe how people feel about women.)

Feel free to skip this graf if you already know (or feel confident in your ability to dope out) how researchers use “hostile sexism” and “benevolent sexism” in academic papers. I just learned it myself. To put it simply, and likely butcher the concepts, if you say someone is demonstrating hostile sexism you mean they’re mad at women. They are likely to agree with statements such as “I think women’s advancement comes at men’s expense. Feminism has gone too far. Women have the advantage in society now.” Benevolent sexism, by contrast, looks like statements such as “I think women are weaker, dumber, less competent, etc. than men. They’re not bad people. But women need men to take care of them and make decisions for them.” In this post, I’m mostly ignoring benevolent sexism. When I say someone is more or less sexist, I mean they believe more of the ideas and share more of the feelings associated with hostile sexism and/or believe/feel them more strongly.

Men are, on average, more sexist than women.

While that didn’t shock me, I was surprised to learn that younger people tend to be more sexist than older people. To the extent that hostile sexism is on the rise, it’s mostly among young men.

Recent polls show that younger men are more likely to say they:

• Oppose feminism

• Believe that feminism has gone too far

• Resent women’s economic advancement

• Believe that women’s advancement comes at men’s expense

Source

In terms of class, bottom-half folks tend to be more sexist than top-halfers.

(In this and pretty much all contexts, when I say bottom-half I’m referring to status. I’m measuring status primarily through income/wealth and formal education. So, bottom-half people have less formal education, wealth, and income than the half with more and more advanced degrees, more wealth, and higher income.)

Bottom-half men are much more likely to vote Republican, which strongly predicts sexism (shockeroonie). Men who don’t have college degrees are also more sexist than men who do.

Note that these are not universal statements. Many old men and top-half men are sexist as hell. Many bottom-half young men love women. I’m describing averages.

Bottom-half women, for instance, are also more likely than top-half women to vote Republican.

Who’s most afraid?

So, I’ve inferred which portions of the population are likely to tend to be the most misogynistic based on the studies I found on the demographics of hostile sexism.

If my thesis that fear drives misogyny is correct, this is the same demographic that would stand to lose the most if women were able to keep advancing. Luckily, I was able to find some relevant data which showed that it is indeed young, bottom-half men who have not only already lost the most to feminism, but also stand to lose the most going forward.

In other words, feminism most severely threatens the well-being of the most sexist portions of the population.

Show you the data? Of course!