SIO412: Do Feminists Hate Men?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:16 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is Episode 412. I'm your host, Thomas Smith, and despite the fact that I had advertised that this would be the next part in the simulation series, you know, I decided that maybe it would be better to break that up a little, because it, uh, it's, you... intense, tough to grapple with philosophy and physics, which I love, but maybe give people's brains a little bit of a break on that end and have a very special expert on to talk about something else. And that expert is none other than Professor Lydia Smith, of How's it going?

0:00:51 Lydia: Pretty good. I was holding back laughs during your intro because I didn't want to give it away. I don't know if people will start recognizing my laugh.

0:00:59 Thomas: Yeah, it was crucial that we not give it away for that three seconds. That's going to make the whole show. No, I do appreciate it.

0:01:02 Lydia: It was. Well, to me, it was. Yeah, yeah. I know. Thanks for letting me invade your space for a bit. And we're going to talk about something very apt related to that. Yeah.

0:01:14 Thomas: But But as an expert, you know, I- we don't bring it up that much, but uh, you actually do have a master's in some book learnings, I think, is what it says on your certificate.

0:01:17 Lydia: No, I do. Do. Something like that. It's experimental psychology. I got my master's in that and my research.

0:01:29 Thomas: She's been experimenting on me ever since, but I'm Well,

0:01:33 Lydia: Okay, Rodney Dangerfield. Yeah, my but work was related to relationships and social psychology. But I've spent a lot of time learning all the psych stuff.

0:01:45 Thomas: And while you were at university, you learned how to hate men, right? Because you're you're a feminists. So even more expertise. I hate men myself. Actually, we're all experts here.

0:01:50 Lydia: Yes, yes. Exactly. This is perfect. Then do I have the study for you?

0:02:00 Thomas: Oh, great. This is too much expertise. We're going to need to bring on another lay person. No, it's okay. Where's Phoebe?

0:02:02 Lydia: Yeah. Oh, I know. Well, downstairs. Yeah.

0:02:12 Thomas: Maybe overwhelming expertise we have. And by we, I mainly mean you, um, to talk about a study that we saw. Um, you know, uh, family shenanigans aside, this is a legitimate, uh. SIO expertise episode because it was a study on, I don't know why you hate men or something. What was it?

0:02:16 Lydia: Well, It's titled "The Misandry Myth: An Inaccurate Stereotype About Feminist Attitudes Toward Men," and This is something misandery that's been you talked about very recently with fervor, but it's not something new. If you look back with the suffragettes who are fighting for women's voting, they were criticized by opponents because they supposedly disdained Men.

0:02:36 Thomas: Interesting.

0:02:54 Thomas: They killed thousands of men in the streets. And this has also always been, been, as long an incel or men's rights activist, you word, I guess. Like, oh, this is actually, yeah, yeah. They cry misandry at everything, thinking that, you

0:02:55 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, right. The opposite of misogyny is misandry. Yeah. And you know, back in the 90s, Rush Limbaugh created that term feminazi, right, and then was using that all the time to describe women that were advocating for equal rights. He claimed that it was, you know, related to abortion specifically, and because that was like the Holocaust. And so feminists were feminazis. But it evolved over time to just be applied to every feminist, regardless of their opinion. Opinion.

0:03:36 Thomas: Corpse uh feminists aren't the only women who get abortions just FYI, yeah.

0:03:40 Lydia: Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of conservative men would know that, too. And then Pat Robertson, another dead guy, wrote a letter, you saying that the feminist agenda included leaving your husbands, killing your children and becoming a lesbian.

0:03:58 Thomas: Hmm. You hear that, listeners?

0:03:58 Lydia: Yeah. So a feminist hating men has been been something that a lot of folks have been talking about for a long time. And I wanted to bring up one of those folks, which is a actually talking about how much feminists hate men. Hoff Summers, one of your favorites. I feel like I bring her up all the time lately.

0:03:58 Thomas: Oh.

0:04:14 Thomas: My god I know all I've tried to do for the last 10 years is get away from her and yeah you drag her into our marriage, am

0:04:20 Lydia: I won't let you. Yeah. Fellow with the American Enterprise Institute goes by Factual Feminist for her videos has written a lot of ridiculous books and here I'd like to you know just hear from her in her own words with her reaction to Emma Watson's speech to the United Nations back in 2014 yeah

0:04:42 Clip: Now serves as the UN Women Goodwill Ambassador, received thunderous applause for her speech before the General Assembly, and some are hailing her elation as a huge win for today's establishment feminism.

0:04:55 Clip: Well, I'm not so sure. I think her talk was successful precisely because she

0:05:00 Thomas: Want to pause, I'm looking at this video and it's the American Enterprise Institute channel and has 431,000 views, so cool, this isn't even like her channel per se, this is them like boosting her channel, right? Because she had her own YouTube channel that was a, I well, this is weird, I swear, back in the day she had her channel. I strongly do not remember her only being on the the American Enterprise Institute YouTube channel, but now as I search through YouTube, that's all I'm seeing for her. That's really weird. I don't know if that channel rebranded or... Huh, well, anyway, that's very interesting. Okay, sorry, continuing.

0:05:05 Lydia: Yes. Yep.

0:05:17 Lydia: Yeah, but I think it's affiliated with AEI.

0:05:33 Lydia: Hmm. Yeah. Like a marketing thing.

0:05:42 Clip: Showed the way to a badly needed alternative. I think she won hearts and minds because she focused on equality. For the record, feminism, by definition, is the belief that men and women should have equal rights and opportunities. It is the theory of the political, economic, and social equality of the sexes. Now, she correctly notes that today, many reject the feminist label, and in fact, according to a 2014 poll, only about 25% of Americans call themselves feminists. Now, Ms. Watson suggests that feminism has lost popularity because many associate it with an aggressive, isolating, male-hating philosophy. The more I've spoken about feminism, the more I have realized that fighting for women's rights has too often become synonymous with man-hateness. Now, she may have been suggesting that the stereotype about male-hating is baseless, But Ms. Watson just graduated from Brown University, and it cannot have escaped her that some of the excesses of today's campus feminism, with its penchant for trigger warnings and grievance collecting and demonizing men, even statues of men, she must have noticed all of this.

0:07:02 Thomas: With a lot of this stuff, I don't know what the fuck point this person is making that she thinks she's making, but like, she's setting up that Emma Watson is talking about, about fairness and feminism is fairness, and she's, I can't actually tell, was Emma Watson saying that, like, she thought feminism was being confused with man, man hating, or that the reaction to her being a feminist was that people thought she was man, I actually can't tell from the clip, which one of those things, look

0:07:27 Lydia: Yeah, I can' t really tell the difference there either. And what' s interesting is in the studies that we' re going going to go through, there's not going to really be like doesn't matter based on the studies, which is funny. But yeah, I mean, Christina Hoff Summers, her position, she made very clear in her book, Who Stole Feminism? She wrote, no group of women can wage war on men without at the same time denigrating the women who respect those men, that you can't be a feminist and respect women And because there are women who love men. And so then like if you hate men, then you also. Yeah, it's ridiculous.

0:08:00 Thomas: Adolf Hitler had a wife or fiance, what was it, I don't know, one of those, yeah you can't hate Adolf Hitler without also saying you hate women because he had a mom and a girl, shut up, I

0:08:08 Lydia: Yeah. Eva Braun. Yep. Yep, yeah. And, you years after this, she kind of digs a little bit deeper and is on Bill Maher in 2019. So this is post Me Too. And position has clearly been like, we're not oppressed. Women are doing fine. Everything's good. Good. Me Too comes on Bill Maher.

0:08:36 Thomas: Make a billion dollars on a YouTube channel for the American Enterprise Institute so I know yeah why don't you all just do this? Oh,

0:08:39 Lydia: Yeah, yeah, she's certainly not oppressed, right? If you want to pull that up, we'll, and give folks a little bit of a taste of this, this

0:08:48 Clip: Hoff Sommers! Hello, great to see you again. It's been so long. We go way back. We used to be a lot on Politically Incorrect, right? I remember you on when your first book came out, which was called Who Stole Feminism? Yes. And it's so funny, I was thinking, because my show was called Politically Incorrect, I thought I was going to defeat political correctness. Only has gotten worse. Yes, I failed miserably at that, and as far as Who Stole a Feminism, but over, stolen, that, that kind of got worse too, isn't it? It got worse. I thought it was

0:08:52 Thomas: God I hate her so much, yeah I bet I bet you do I guess you suck yeah, boy we're

0:09:26 Clip: Going to be easy to get it back. Yeah, it's proved impossible. And feminism is supposed to be about equality between the sexes, mutuality, friendship, civility, yet it's captive to a small group of very intense eccentrics who think men are the enemy and that the, look, the goal of feminism was to overcome male chauvinism. I became a feminist in the 70s because I didn't like male chouvinism, I still don't, but the answer is not female chaurinism. And now the movement is captive to female chauvinists who want to just

0:09:27 Thomas: Just a couple of failures friendship I feminism was about friendship, I'm leaving, well

0:09:44 Lydia: Yeah

0:10:04 Thomas: Yeah

0:10:05 Clip: Emphasize how bad men

0:10:05 Thomas: Now that we have a female president, a female Supreme Court, a female senate, and a female, you know, like I agree with her, we've gone too far with this, hmm

0:10:10 Lydia: Yeah exactly I don't

0:10:14 Clip: Are, toxic masculinity. And somehow, you know, people like you, well, maybe you don't agree with everything you say, but how did you get to be the right winger? I mean, you're a Democrat, right? I am a Democrat. You're Jewish. I'm a Democrat but I'm not a Democrat yet. You have a Ph.D. from Brandeis.

0:10:24 Thomas: Let's see you're Jewish what is that what

0:10:29 Clip: Yes. Okay, you've been published in the New England Journal of Medicine. You're not a crazy person. I read

0:10:35 Thomas: Is what is any of of that what

0:10:32 Lydia: Know it has nothing to do with anything, her piece was about animal rights

0:10:37 Clip: About what happened to you at, was it Oberlin College? Many colleges. I'm a frequent college lecturer, and I have been lecturing for years. And usually I go to debate and spar with some women's studies professors because I occupy a different position in sort of feminist theory. But now, these days, I go, and we don't, it's not the women's students, it's the students who come, the activists, to demonstrate. They set up safe rooms. I spoke at Oberlin. From you. From me. And I have to have bodyguards. At Oberlin, I had a detail of police. Didn't they also have a therapy dog? Yes. Here's the thing.

0:11:16 Clip: They had these safe rooms set up and 30 women and a therapy dog fled to the safe space. I triggered a dog.

0:11:15 Thomas: A therapy dog from you maybe

0:11:30 Clip: And I feel bad about the dog.

0:11:16 Lydia: Ha ha ha, yeah I know the dog ran away from her yeah

0:11:35 Clip: Yes, sir.

0:11:35 Thomas: That's a sign that it's bullshit, because I don't think the dog is in on like wokeism, oh great well

0:11:39 Lydia: Yeah yeah, so is all to set up my question to you, Han. All right. Do feminists hate men? What do you think? It's

0:11:50 Thomas: It's kind of one of those weird loaded questions where it's like, I mean, there's pretty good reasons to be like wary of the average dude, I don't really, really blame women for being tired of a lot of the ways that you operates in society and all that, I don't, I don't think I, I mean, I kind of doubt that really any woman would be like, yes, I hate all men in general, they should be like, that's whatever, that's not, not going to be, yeah hmm

0:12:17 Lydia: Kind of a silly position, right? Yeah. I will say that previous research in this area is a little mixed. And part of the reason is, you know, this idea of the stereotype accuracy hypothesis, right? The idea that there's always kernels of truth within a stereotype. And so feminism is, you know, there is thought that perhaps there's an element of that there for them as well. So this huge team of researchers decided they wanted to look at this. This study was published in the Psychology of Women Quarterly. It's ranked number one in terms of impact factor across 42 journals in the women's study space, and in the multidisciplinary psychology category of journals, it's 23rd of 135 journals. So this is, you know, a decent journal.

0:12:31 Thomas: Hmm oh yeah

0:13:06 Lydia: Authors are affiliated with universities in the UK, Norway, Thailand, China, Hong Kong, Japan, the Philippines, India, Taiwan, and South Korea.

0:13:14 Thomas: But either the woke ones, so

0:13:16 Lydia: I mean, I guess they could be. They did declare no conflicts of interest, though. So maybe they're not woke or.

0:13:22 Thomas: None of them are men, yeah, I don't know how they or any men, they had to find people, have never met a man, actually yeah

0:13:24 Lydia: Yeah. Right. Right, right. Right. And one of the the ways that they set this up was a statistic that was present in Emma Watson's position to the U.N. that feminism is seen as polarizing. You know, there are not many people will say that they identify as feminist.

0:13:43 Thomas: Well obviously, I mean, I'm really, I'm sick of that, very thing seen as polarizing is very passive language for what we study on, where there's woke, and on this show too, which is like, seen as polarizing, aka there's a fucking outrage industrial complex, who, these people we just listen to are a major part of like, up hatred constantly against a stereotype of the feminist, so I like, yeah, that is effective, that does work, so that is exists, I

0:13:50 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yep, definitely. And we're going to get into how effective that is. That 45 percent of women, 46 percent of men in the United States see feminism as polarizing. Qualitative research has also looked into this. And there's been evidence that feminists are seen as unfeminine, man -hating lesbians, right? Talking Those points, they're getting reiterated in qualitative studies as well. Well,

0:14:40 Thomas: Just think, if you pulled, if people on, do you see, um, change, is polarizing, it'd be like, yeah, but who fucking cares what does that mean, yeah

0:14:47 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. And then there's quantitative evidence as well in the research that feminists are stereotyped as disliking men, and that this in particular prevents women from identifying as feminists because they don't want to be seen as stereotyped in that way.

0:15:02 Thomas: I mean, I would believe all that, yeah, and

0:15:03 Lydia: Yeah, so there is a question of feminists versus non -feminists. Is there a significant difference in their are positive feelings towards men and in which way?

0:15:13 Thomas: These are people who will self-identify or not

0:15:15 Lydia: Self -identify. Yep. Yep, yep. I said previous research is mixed, they decided they were going to tackle this like, across all of these countries, and they did this in a number of studies, and we're going to go through each of them.

0:15:16 Thomas: Okay ah well, question one, are a hundred percent of you lesbians?

0:15:34 Lydia: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. So study number one, they had had a sample size of 1,664 participants. It was spread across five samples in what are referred to as weird countries, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. Those samples were in Italy, Poland, the United States, and the U.K. This was done because they were convenient for the researchers.

0:15:51 Thomas: That lot right, well

0:16:00 Lydia: You know, yeah,

0:16:00 Thomas: Not only I actually was gonna say, I think this is one of those issues where you kind of do need to do that, because I think if you, you, if you know, go elsewhere, if you're trying to go to, I don't know, the fucking Middle East or some, some other places, uh, gonna have a difference set of like social designations, and but, you know, there's gonna be a whole, I, is one of the times where I actually think the question you want to answer probably, probably does mean you should focus on those countries, but that's just kind of my first impression.

0:16:06 Lydia: Sure.

0:16:22 Lydia: Especially as a starting point, you you're going to be digging, let's dig in the most kind of obvious place first. It did also provide the opportunity for varied cultural contexts because, you know, you're not just looking at the United States and the United Kingdom, like you're pulling in Italy and Poland. Poland has a very active feminist movement.

0:16:36 Thomas: Right. Hmm.

0:16:40 Lydia: There's degrees of gender equality in labor force participation, political empowerment, reproductive rights across those countries or regions because the U.K. is not just one country. And they wanted to measure a variety of things related to feminism. So they looked at not just identification, but ideology, collective action, and attitudes towards men, which wasn't just do you like men? Yes or no. Right. Right? They looked at a number of different things.

0:16:58 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, here's a survey. Men, are you a fan? Well, there's another complicating factor in this, sort of in the way that, you know, Christina Hoff Summers, for example, was a, I don't know, third wave, second wave, one of the wave, negative five, fifth wave, wave. And now each wave pretty much hates the next wave often, it seems like.

0:17:25 Thomas: And so there is a sense in which some of these countries, you might get some of that within this very thing, like where if there's a country like, say, I'm not sure about this, but if it's like Poland or Italy or something where we'd consider them to be quite more conservative gender -wise maybe than than on average you would consider the U.S. to be, I've definitely heard from, like, for example, feminists in the Middle East, like they're trying to make sure that women can drive or whatever in Saudi Arabia.

0:17:08 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The waves. Yeah uh -huh. Yeah yeah

0:17:54 Thomas: So like, yeah.

0:17:54 Lydia: Those concerns are a little different.

0:17:56 Thomas: And so I have witnessed a sense in which they can sometimes, in the same way that the first wave, second wave, whatever, are pissed at everybody way today, they can take an attitude of like, look, we have real problems over here. You whiny Western feminists with your, you know, you want representation in the blah, blah, blah. Like I haven't seen that. I don't know if that complicates anything in this study, but it is, I think maybe we're thinking about like, it's not universal. I don't think what the word feminist means per se in, in all these places.

0:18:13 Lydia: Yeah mm -hmm, yeah, no, 100 percent. Then they also looked at, um, regard to the attitudes toward men. They looked variety of factors related to warmth towards men, liking and trust of men, their emotional reaction towards men, ambivalence and collective anger. And let me give you a little bit more information about what all of these measures are specifically, maybe some examples I think would help. For feminist identity they measured this in two ways a dichotomous measure yes or no no. Are you a feminist? Yes or no. As well as a continuous measure, which I thought was really interesting.

0:18:51 Thomas: Yeah. Find out how much you hate men.

0:19:03 Thomas: Hmm. Hmm. Like how feminist are you?

0:19:06 Lydia: That is, yeah, how feminist do you consider yourself to be? And that was measured on a one through seven Likert scale from not at all to very much. Feminist ideology, they various statements. And then again, that was on a one to seven scale where you could strongly agree agree or disagree, sorry, some of those statements included things like girls and women have not been treated as well as boys and men in our society. Something kind of general like that to something a little more specific related to an issue at hand, like the availability of adequate quit child care is central to a woman's right to work outside the home.

0:19:06 Thomas: Yeah. Right. Mm hmm. Yeah, yeah.

0:19:43 Thomas: Would disagree with

0:19:43 Lydia: Yeah.

0:19:43 Thomas: That? Okay.

0:19:45 Lydia: And then for feminist collective action, that was another measure that they wanted to look at. There were a couple different ways that they looked at this. There was posting behavior as well as supporting behavior. And so this was related specifically to Me Too, the hashtag Me Too because they wanted wanted to, you know, really be specific about get everyone to respond to the same cause, essentially. And the posting behavior was, did you participate in the hashtag me too social media movement by using the hashtag? Or did you, you now, participate without using the hashtag? Yes.

0:20:02 Thomas: Hmm.

0:20:20 Thomas: Question. This wasn't how they identified feminists. This is kind of the battery of testing you're going through, Okay. Okay, gotcha. So so you may have responses from people who self-identify as feminists and people who don't, and maybe they would, both those groups could be supportive or not supportive. Okay, got you. I

0:20:26 Lydia: Correct. Yep. Yep, yep, yep. And on the supporting element of collective action was things like how much did you use likes, favorites, comments, shares to support others who were posting their Me Too story? To what extent do you support or oppose the movement of Me Too? And they use that one to seven scale as well to not at all or strongly disagree, depending on the question, to very much strongly agree. They looked at, I mentioned the the attitudes towards men. They looked at these in study one in an explicit way. So that warmth, liking and trust, emotional reactions. Let me pull up some of those examples so I warmth towards men, an example of that would be how warm or favorable or cold unfavorable do you feel towards men in general?

0:21:00 Thomas: Don't

0:21:22 Lydia: They would word it differently depending on, you know, what they were trying to accomplish there, uh, warm or favorable do you feel towards men in general. Yeah, and this was on a one through ten, or sorry, on a zero through ten scale, um, being extremely cool or unfavorable, 50, five was neutral, and then 10 was extremely warm or favorable, um, the liking and trust of men, these were just, you know, like men, men, dislike men, trust men, distrust men, and then they would rank that on a one through seven scale. And then for emotional reactions, that was words that were not, they were more emotionally charged. So disdain, fondness, acceptance, hostility, and you would rate those based off of your reaction for

0:21:22 Thomas: Know How I would answer that, that's literally what they ask them is how warm do you feel on a scale of

0:22:09 Lydia: Men.

0:22:09 Thomas: From From Mars. How do you rate men? Yeah.

0:22:11 Lydia: Dann there also was this ambivalence toward men, which is actually a specific inventory called the Ambivalence to Men Inventory that's used in other studies. And this includes elements that are hostility to men and benevolence to men. So hostility to men is measured through statements like men act like babies when they're sick. I have heard people say that.

0:22:35 Thomas: Yeah.

0:22:35 Lydia: And then for benevolence to men is are more willing to take risks than women.

0:22:42 Thomas: That's funny. Cause I don't think that's necessarily benevolent, you know, like, is that always good?

0:22:46 Lydia: It's a benevolent attitude towards men, I guess, where it's like, yeah.

0:22:49 Thomas: Yeah, I'm saying, I don't, I DON'T know that that's like, if I was like, man, men are all way more willing to take risks. Like I could imagine that being a negative, but that's interesting.

0:22:52 Lydia: Oh, yeah, yeah yeah that's true that's true. And then collective anger is something that was measured with things like I am furious with the sexual harassment of women. Yeah. On that scale, one through seven. So with those methods, they had several different hypotheses that they were looking to measure. The first one was that attitudes towards men would be positive, you know, without the breakout of feminist versus non -feminist. They didn't really have any indication that there would be a strong overall, yeah, negative reaction towards men, they would lean positive. Hypothesized, secondly, that feminists would be less positive than non -feminists and that feminist identity, ideology, and that feminist collective action would be negatively associated with attitudes towards men.

0:22:59 Thomas: Hmm. Okay.

0:23:26 Thomas: Like overall. Okay, yeah, yeah. I I doubt it.

0:23:44 Thomas: Okay. Okay.

0:23:45 Lydia: So as those things increase, right, the attitudes go down.

0:23:45 Thomas: So Were any of the things, it didn't sound like it, but were any of the things like, did they personalize it at all where it's like, you know, are they invoking like, oh, you've had a shitty boyfriend or husband or whatever? Or is it all very general? Like, hey, do you not like men or do you like men?

0:24:03 Lydia: Study one's very very general and, you kind of presenting it as, you us about your your attitudes. And I think that there is something to be said for that social desirability bias potentially that could be present here. I don't you know if I were taking the test, I could see personally like answering questions a little more like, oh, well, if I really really hate men.

0:24:04 Thomas: Okay.

0:24:24 Thomas: Was this like a phone survey or an online thing or a what? Is there like 10 men like staring at you while you.

0:24:27 Lydia: This was, no, was not 10 men just staring at you, though. Was the first one that they did within the university that the research was affiliated with. They did it, you know, know, within the lab kind of thing. Then largely they were students because, you know, that's convenient sample, you Know, yeah, yeah. They they that as a limitation.

0:24:45 Thomas: Oh yeah, that seems important though, huh? Okay.

0:24:51 Lydia: And so then they'll look at other things in future studies within this paper itself even. Other thing that they wanted to do was they wanted to look at if there was any of nonlinear relationship between feminist identity and attitudes towards men.

0:25:04 Thomas: It really takes off exponentially.

0:25:06 Lydia: Yeah. They didn't have any hypotheses related to that, so they did more exploratory tests for that. But those initial hypotheses that we talked about, that attitudes towards men overall would be positive, feminists would be less positive than non -feminists, they pre -registered those. And I know that's something that's been discussed on this show before, but essentially pre -registering it saying these are the hypotheses that we're testing. And then, you know, you kind of illustrate your impartiality to the results by doing something like that. What did they find?

0:25:34 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:25:38 Lydia: Hypothesis one was supported. Overall attitudes towards men were positive. OK, that seems reasonable. Hypothesist two, that feminists would be less positive than the non -feminists was not supported. There was no significant difference between feminists and non - feminists regarding their attitude towards men.

0:25:44 Thomas: Okay. Really? Stupid question. Are we just talking about women here?

0:26:00 Lydia: Was just women.

0:26:00 Thomas: Okay. Okay, I can't believe I didn't already ask that, but hmm.

0:26:01 Lydia: Yes. Yes." That feminist identity, ideology, and action would be negatively associated with attitudes towards men was also not supported with the exception of benevolence towards men, so feminist identity ideology, as that increased, then towards men was negatively associated. And those feelings went down. Things like men take greater risks there. Scored less high in those regards. If you were more of a feminist, I guess.

0:26:30 Thomas: Hmm. That risks one is throwing me off. Cause that to me, that sounds like if I were answering the question or, you know, I guess I wouldn't be in it cause I'm a dude, but as someone who's like more progressive, first off, I'd be like, I'm not allowed. Fuck you.

0:26:43 Lydia: Yeah. You're not allowed. Yeah, yeah.

0:26:50 Thomas: Feminazis. Um, I think like, well, that's a stereotype and the more like like progressive view is like, well, I don't really, we're you ask a student, what year was this? When

0:26:55 Lydia: Yeah. The study was just released, published last month.

0:27:04 Thomas: Oh yeah. So this is like fresh off the presses. I mean, I think if you're a student in, you somewhere around now and someone asks you any question that's like, do you think men are from Mars and women are from, you're going to be like, well, not really. You know, like I, even though that's probably true, I imagine those, some of those things are true. There are demonstrated effects, you know, differences between men and women, but I be surprised if that was part of it. I mean, were any, what were some of the other questions? Were there any that weren't that, you Know, what

0:27:07 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah.

0:27:33 Lydia: You Some other items under benevolence toward men include every woman needs a male partner who will cherish her.

0:27:40 Thomas: The, okay.

0:27:41 Lydia: That's horrible here.

0:27:42 Thomas: Come what? That's not benevolence toward men. This is how much are you a 1950s fucking housewife?

0:27:45 Lydia: Yeah. Let me go ahead and read all of these. So,

0:27:50 Thomas: Obviously. All right. I'm blowing a hole in this study.

0:27:51 Lydia: Yeah. So it's a stereotype. Right.

0:27:53 Thomas: Yeah. What the hell? I'm, I'm literally, let's do a reply to this study because these idiots are like wow it's weird that feminists are, you know, they're less benevolent toward men and every question is like, should women always have dinner ready when, when the man opens the door coming home from his hard job? You're like, that's not benevolence toward men. No.

0:28:10 Lydia: I mean, I guess it's not they're not saying like, oh, that's weird. I think that kind kind of tracks, right?

0:28:15 Thomas: Okay, but I'm just saying, like, if this, the category, maybe I'm misinterpreting something, but that category category description sounds incredibly wrong. Benevolence toward men or not, really doesn't sound what that is to me. That sounds like, do you agree with certain stereotypes about gender? I mean, what are some of these other ones? Give me some others.

0:28:34 Lydia: Yeah, sure. Men are more willing to put themselves in danger to protect others. Men are more willing to take risks than women.

0:28:41 Thomas: These are just stereotypes. You Could be the biggest fan of men. You could wear a Man T-Shirt, Make America Man Again hat. You could be the biggest fan of men ever. You've, you've bought all Man's albums and read all Man's books and you'd be like, well, no, I don't agree with this. That's what I'm saying, like, why is this a benevolence toward men? This is just benevolence toward old-timey stereotypes of what men do.

0:28:43 Lydia: Yep. Yeah So this is I mean, this is back from like the 90s. I think when this was put together And I think the intention is to contrast it to the hostile portion of the scale.

0:29:05 Thomas: Okay.

0:29:17 Thomas: Why?

0:29:17 Lydia: So hostile versus benevolent prejudices and stereotypes. I do agree that these are certainly, yeah, those 1950s stereotypes. The next one is, even if both members of a couple work, the women ought to be more attentive of to taking care of our man at home.

0:29:32 Thomas: Okay. What What was the name of this section of the poll, of the, whatever the study?

0:29:37 Lydia: Well, this is ambivalence toward men inventory. This is an existing inventory that's existed since the 90s.

0:29:39 Thomas: Ambivalence toward men inventory? I wrong, or could you another word for this measure? Like, if you, if you just were looking at a study and you hadn't seen any of this and you don't know what the name of this session of questions is, would you be surprised it if was named, how anti -feminist are you? Would you? Oh, I think a man, even if they both work, the, the woman dessert. There, what the fuck, like all that, that's So maybe I misunderstood what that title was, but this, this strikes me as, oh, the people who identify as feminists are more feminist is what that looks like to me. I don't don't see how this is at all linked with, like, disliking men in any way. Got

0:30:03 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, that's fair. I think that's a fair interpretation. Right, right. Is fair. Like, they didn't really dig deeper into that because I think what they were trying to demonstrate is is that hostility toward men. There was no relationship there that that was not impacted by how feminist you were. You didn't hate men.

0:30:34 Thomas: Yep. Yep, and that makes sense that goes, goes against what they predicted.

0:30:34 Lydia: Yeah. Right. Hostility right. And benevolence, hostility, no relationship. Benevolence, there was a relationship in the way you would expect based off of the tenets of feminism. Okay.

0:30:46 Thomas: And And so I guess I'm asking like if there was any discussion or whatever, how this study itself like presented this part is

0:30:53 Lydia: Did not really speak to it at all. It says, inconsistent with expectation, hypothesis three correlational analyses of feminist ideology showed that it was not significantly related to explicit attitudes toward men, nor hostility to men. Feminist ideology was negatively associated with benevolence to men. No.

0:31:10 Thomas: Okay. But they're not, they're making like a big deal of it. Suppose I don't know entirely if the people who did this study, what their view on those those questions are, so but it sounds like, correct me if I'm wrong, the goal with that section of the study was to measure, oh, do people, is there an extra special affection toward men or not? You know, there's like the, do you hate men or Not? That was the first thing. Then there's the like, oh are you a bigger fan of men than the average man?

0:31:12 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:31:37 Thomas: And so I, it just strikes me as those are weird fucking questions to ask for that. Is, am I crazy? I just feel like maybe, maybe if I tried to think of better ones, maybe I couldn't. Maybe that's why you have to think of like, well, men deserve this kind of like special extra treatment kind of thing.

0:31:50 Lydia: And I think those are questions related to the creation of that inventory to begin with, you, the 90s, where, like, they were testing. And I haven't looked at the study related to the development of that inventory, of that scale, and those questions. But often you have to, you know, retest. You have to make sure that's a valid scale. And I'm guessing that there is validity to it because it continues to be used in studies thereafter, after.

0:32:15 Thomas: So, okay. That's worth maybe looking into for later. Cause that's very, I find that very curious.

0:32:19 Lydia: Yeah, okay. That wraps up study one. Of the glaring issues that they felt that was missing from study one is that it focused on those weird countries. I know you said that it makes sense that you'd be looking there, but they were saying feminism isn't just tied to if you're a Western nation. Feminism is a global phenomenon. So maybe maybe in other countries, this does look different.

0:32:46 Thomas: Hmm.

0:32:46 Lydia: We want to know, like, is this where the stereotype is coming from? So in study two, they -weird countries. This feels so silly.

0:32:54 Thomas: Can someone just send them a link of this Christina Hoff Summers in Bill Maher video and be like, hey, hey, assholes, this is where it's coming from. The call is coming from within the house. Yeah, you don't need, I know that's the question question they're, you know, they're trying to cover their bases in terms of like, is this valid? I get it. But it is kind of funny. It's like, man, where does all the hatred for feminists come from? We can't figure it out.

0:33:02 Lydia: Yeah. These people, we found them. Yeah. Right. So these countries included India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, as well as three separate regions of China, Hong Kong, Macau, and mainland like China, just because that there are, you different societal expectations depending on the region of China. And with the exception of India, the remaining countries are Confucian cultures. And under Confuciism, that's explicitly patriarchal from my understanding of it and from their understanding of it as well from the researchers, so they said, "OK, well, maybe we're going to find something here." Maintain those same hypotheses, positive attitudes in absolute terms. But feminists are going to be less positive about men than non-feminists. What they did here, in addition to what they didn't, study one, besides looking at non-weird countries, they also recruited male participants, and they

0:33:25 Thomas: Hmm. Interesting.

0:33:42 Thomas: Oh, okay. Here

0:34:06 Lydia: Expected to see the same pattern. If you identify as a feminist as a male, you are going to have you attitudes, attitudes towards men than your non-feminist male counterparts, and yeah

0:34:06 Thomas: We go.

0:34:18 Thomas: Would predict, by the way, I would predicted that, oh man, that's a hard prediction, but would But I would for allow the possibility that feminist men would hate men more than feminist women would hate them.

0:34:28 Lydia: And they were basing this off of some previous research that showed attitudes that tend to be similar, uh, not here, yeah.

0:34:33 Thomas: I don't think they asked that question, did they? OK, yeah, but I was just that was just my own observation. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if that were true.

0:34:37 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. With the methods, with this, you know, they're looking at a lot of the same information, but they wanted to make sure that, you know, I mentioned these are, these countries are Confucian cultures for the most part. So they wanted to make sure that the participants that were engaging in the study had lived in the country since birth. Because they wanted make sure, like, this is part of their identity too. And they had a lot of folks do this. There's 24 universities, 28 researchers across 24 universities across those various various countries were pulling the sample size. Came up with a sample size of 3,892 people in here. Yeah, huge numbers. And they ended up I don't know, dialing down the identity measure. They had to drop the continuous measure because when they were looking at how how the studies were carried out across 28 researchers, 24 universities, there were inconsistencies in how the continuous measure was

0:35:00 Thomas: Mm hmm. Mm hmm, yeah. Sure. Gotcha.

0:35:43 Lydia: Measured.

0:35:43 Thomas: So they kind of like, OK, if this one was done inconsistently, we kind of got to drop that one.

0:35:44 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah, they axed it. So they only looked at dichotomous. Are you a feminist? Yes or no. And then they really focused in on that liking and trust of men measure. You this to all of these different languages and, you know, it's significant work. So what they found here, female versus male, there were no gender -moderated differences. And I say female versus female. Those were their largest subgroups. They did have a non -binary option for folks to select if they felt that way, but they're really focusing on the biggest subgroup, which was female and male. So hypothesis one, supported, which is overall positive attitudes towards men. And again, hypothesis two, not supported. There was no significant difference in how feminists and non -feminists felt towards men in terms of positive attitudes.

0:35:49 Thomas: Yeah. Oh, mm hmm. Wow. Interesting.

0:36:36 Lydia: Attitudes, yeah. So they said, okay, well, you mentioned social desirability bias and they said, you know, that could be going on here. So what do we do when there's a social desirable bias concern? Let's do the implicit attitudes test.

0:36:51 Thomas: And are you saying that means they may be presenting a good kind of, I don't know.

0:36:51 Lydia: Yeah. Exactly. A participant, you might think the researchers are going to, you know, maybe somehow, somehow associate you with your answers. And if there is, like, mores that you're worried about, you off, you don't want to, like it's, you know.

0:37:07 Thomas: Okay. Yeah, like there's a bunch of moray eels looking at you and you're like, I'm worried about those morays.

0:37:16 Lydia: They're going to get me. Yeah. They did an implicit attitudes test, is significantly more involved. So we're not going to see those thousands of participants like we have in the previous ones, which are, you know, survey -based. But we still had 198 participants for this. Previous studies had thousands of participants. When you're doing a survey, it's a little, you know, easier to do. The implicit attitudes test is a little more involved. So, still a decent sample size, all things considered, but it was 198 people. Much smaller than our previous Numbers. Just want to be clear that, the hypotheses that they had here was that similar to what we saw in study one and study two, there would be a positive association with words that were category male in absolute terms. So overall, folks are going to positively associate terms that are male, and that they're going to respond faster when good is matched with things that are mail categories. And so an example of that would be he, Mr. Kevin, you know, things that are like male.

0:37:17 Thomas: Yeah. Mm -hmm.

0:38:19 Thomas: And this is just testing like implicit bias?

0:38:21 Lydia: Yeah. So, well, like implicit attitudes. Do How you, feel you when you're not sitting there and thinking and staring at a question? How quickly does your brain respond when things are paired with, you wonderful, celebrating versus terrible, horrible. And so there were seven target words associated with the category male. And then they had target words related to good, like I said, wonderful, celebrating and bad. And they thought, you know overall people would respond faster. There'd be a positive association with the Category of Male overall. And again, that feminists would have less positive attitudes towards non -feminists at an implicit level.

0:38:24 Thomas: Sure. Oh, I wouldn't guess that at all. I would guess this would all be the same, because we're all swimming in the same cultural soup, right?

0:39:05 Lydia: I think that's a fair hypothesis. But, you know, they're really kind of tracking that of standardized, you that we think explicitly this is what's going on, so implicitly this is also going on. Also looked specifically at feminist collective action so that, that, you know, Me Too were all, you supporting or posting about Me Too. And they thought that that would be negatively related to explicit and implicit attitudes.

0:39:14 Thomas: Yeah. Oh yeah, you set that up in the first study, and then I don't think we...

0:39:33 Lydia: Yeah, they didn't really get into it in the first study.

0:39:34 Thomas: Oh, okay, so it was just data they collected but didn't really talk about, maybe?

0:39:37 Lydia: Yeah, yeah. These methods, they focused on women. And so they were looking at undergraduate women from a UK university. Again, 198 folks. They had had to split this up because of the timing of when they were offering this opportunity for IAT. So they had 97 implicit attitudes test IATs.

0:39:38 Thomas: Okay.

0:39:57 Thomas: I -A -T... Okay. Yeah.

0:40:01 Lydia: Had 97 folks do this in person and 101 that did it online. It ended up being like over the course of like a Thanksgiving break or something like that. So they struggled to get the numbers they wanted to see in the lab. So, they opened it up and offered it online as well. They tested the results between those two groups, the in -person versus the online, and there were no significant differences. So they were able to combine it and move forward with their hypothesis testing.

0:40:25 Thomas: So This is now, it's like, well, we're trying to do a harder thing, so now forget all the convenience stuff, this is, we got to just go with who's most easily available

0:40:30 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And they're not having to translate things. There's not as much of a language barrier there. They measured, again, that feminist identity. Here, they did dichotomous and continuous because there was was consistency and how they could ask it. And they looked at that feminist collective action intentions. Their results here, positive implicit attitudes towards men. And again, no differences between feminists and non -feminists. Everyone feels positively towards men and it doesn't matter about feminism.

0:40:32 Thomas: Yeah sure yeah It's almost like we live in a patriarchal society that would imbue us all with kind of the implicit attitude toward men

0:41:07 Lydia: Yeah. Continuous also measure not not related to implicit attitudes towards men. So even that, you know, more gradient approach with feminism, you Know, it wasn't that yes or no, but like, let's look at it more on a scale didn't matter. The And attitudes explicit that they measured here similar to study one. So they're seeing that consistency within their studies. With to the feminist collective action, that was unrelated to all implicit and explicit attitudes towards men, with the exception of there was a negative relationship with the emotional reactions towards men. And if you recall, I'm emotional reactions towards was words like disdain, fondness, acceptance, hostility. So this idea that if there is, you know, like you're moving towards a cause as one, like, you might have more of an emotional reaction to men as opposed to just that general likeness or fondness warmth. Um, feminist collective action, they had predicted was going to be related to attitudes towards men, but

0:41:24 Thomas: Yeah Hmm.

0:41:49 Thomas: I'm Hmm.

0:42:20 Lydia: They was unrelated to all measures of implicit. And they call out one relationship in which there was a negative relationship that was significant, and that's the emotional reactions towards men. So words like disdain. They did find a relationship there. But overall, they didn't really dive into that within this study because they overwhelmingly, there was not really any sort of, you know, significant relationship to attitudes towards men. And so their opinion is, within this is that in concert, these findings indicate that even when operationalized as action, something that often, you, and fortifies your identity and what they thought as feminism as well, doesn't actually relate to how you feel about men.

0:43:12 Thomas: Do you feel about men? Okay. But is there a relationship between, you know, who I would expect there's at least a relationship between who identifies as a feminist and who supported Me Too or something. There's got to be some relationship there, right? But it's just not that, not one that means you hate men.

0:43:14 Lydia: Yes. Right, right. Exactly. And that's what they're looking at that like these various ways of feminism. And it's either, you know, your identification of it or, you your specific ideology, how you feel about certain feminist statements and women versus men. And

0:43:27 Thomas: Okay.

0:43:39 Thomas: All done three studies on this. We're trying really hard to find why feminists hate men. We're just like, there's got to be somehow. Yeah. Find me a woman who hates men somewhere.

0:43:45 Lydia: Somewhere. Yeah.

0:43:51 Thomas: Like every outhouse, henhouse, and feminist house. And we're now three for three of, nah, not really.

0:43:57 Lydia: There's nothing there.

0:43:58 Thomas: Nothing there. And then, but at this point, did they just say like, well, guess feminants don't hit men or are we Still going here.

0:44:04 Lydia: We're still going.

0:44:05 Thomas: Okay. Well, I'm sure those man hating feminists are somewhere. We've done an awful lot of work on this. I and by the way, at least two of them, a shitload of participants, you know, like that's a pretty high number we've now traveled across the world. We nowhere to be found is the fact that feminists hate men. We don't seem to be finding that anywhere. We've found, you feminants disagree more with statements that I find to be just stereotypes about men. So roughly that's my characterization of it, but we haven't found anything else. So naturally we probably were like, all right, well, let's study something, anything else or, we moving on? Like, are we, do we, we can't move on.

0:44:10 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, We can't move on. We can't.

0:44:47 Thomas: Okay. So we've done on three studies, you're telling me there's more studies, okay. That's a good point to leave it for part one here, and in part two we'll search for the man-hating feminist part, maybe.

0:44:47 Lydia: No, more. There's we'll find them.

0:45:00 Thomas: Yeah, maybe we'll fight, we will meet that man-hating feminist in part two. Well, I think that's a good idea. You can only throw so many studies at a listening population at once before it's considered a violation of the Geneva Accords. So why don't we settle here for part one? Thanks so much to our amazing, and might I say, lovely and beautiful expert, Lydia Smith. Master Lydia Smith.

0:45:15 Lydia: Yeah Yeah. Oh, why thank you. Master.

0:45:25 Thomas: What are you called when you have a master's? I don't know.

0:45:25 Lydia: Yes. Think some people do that and I just don't care. So

0:45:29 Thomas: Do you get the green jacket, okay darn different, that's a different masters darn, uh No, thanks so much, Lydia, for coming on. Hey, do you have any, like, I don't know, anything you want to plug, you know, any, do you do anything else at all, uh, called

0:45:31 Lydia: No. Sorry. Yeah. Different masters. Yeah oh yeah yeah yeah um I do something that I love very very much uh there's woke yeah

0:45:48 Thomas: Being a mom and a wife. No, I'm just kidding, yeah.

0:45:49 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. We had a lot of fun this month. You know, it's the war on Christmas, folks, deep in the trenches, and we kind of of tackled some of those, you ways in which we were taking down Christmas and finding out, you now, are we successful or not, uh

0:46:09 Thomas: Amidst the body the corpses of dead reindeer, we found the humor in it and

0:46:10 Lydia: Yeah. Yep. Yep, um, so that was a ton of fun. Um, want to go check that out on the main feed, and then we also had a fun bonus that we did with Tom, Mr. Curry, um, that folks may know from Dear Old Dads, one of your other projects, as as well as, you all of his shows that he's doing. And that was a ton of fun.

0:46:29 Thomas: One Was, yeah, that was really good. You need to check that out for sure. Everybody.

0:46:30 Lydia: Yeah. Yeah. And I'm having a blast over on that show. So I really recommend folks to go over there, you Know, do a lot of research debunking.

0:46:39 Thomas: Jeez. What are you? Some kind of podcaster now or something? I can weird. Yeah. Don't you have a day job?

0:46:44 Lydia: Apparently, yeah. Thanks for having me, everybody.

0:46:46 Thomas: Yeah. All right. No. That's awesome. I will go subscribe to that show immediately. Immediately, uh, All right, well, uh, well, that's it for this one, thanks so much everyone, and uh, next time on Serious Inquiries Only, we'll, we'll find them, the man hating feminist, the, the chupacabra, I don't know who, what you would call it, but uh, we'll see, see if we can do a hundred more studies and find that person. We'll see you then, okay.

0:46:52 Lydia: Good. You better. Better.

0:47:05 Lydia: Yep.