“Large psychology study debunks stereotype of feminists as man-haters” - ”The Misandry Myth: An Inaccurate Stereotype About Feminists’ Attitudes Toward Men”

ProtectIntegrity · 2024-07-05T07:32:00+00:00

Pinned for visibility: https://www.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/1dvl5h7/comment/lbpfmns/

NegotiationBetter837 · 2024-07-05T00:21:55+00:00

The way they try to measure misandry is kinda weird. And if a person that is ideologically close to Andrew Tate says, that he likes women, according to the premise of this study, isn't a misogynist, because they say so.

ThoughtfulPoster · 2024-07-05T02:10:12+00:00

"We have investigated ourselves, and we concluded that we have done nothing wrong."

amjh · 2024-07-05T01:05:27+00:00

Several people have committed suicides or moved to a different country because they tried to help disadvantaged men, and feminists responded by constantly attacking and abusing them.

Erin Pizzey helped build shelters for women, but was abused by feminists because she came to the conclusion that men also need help, based on her experience.

doesitevermatter- · 2024-07-05T00:42:23+00:00

Because people are always straightforward about their hate during studies about hate.

It's like asking a racist if they're racist. Of course they're going to say no. But that doesn't change their actual behavior.

If you asked someone who had been labeled a misogynist, like Mel Gibson, if they hated women, they would absolutely say no. But that doesn't change what everything else about their behavior and mentality says.

Stephen_Morgan · 2024-07-05T05:17:54+00:00

I love a study that refers to men as "a perpetrator group".

Methodologically, the flaws in these studies are simple:

They find feminists don't have more misandry than certain other groups, but they don't compare feminists' attitudes to men with feminist attitudes to women.

Some of the studies are decades old, and don't reflect current mores.

They measure the prevalence of negative attitudes towards men, without measuring severity: believing in man-flu is regarded as being just as misandrist as believing that men are inherently violent and abusive.

Puzzleheaded_Pea_889 · 2024-07-06T03:16:51+00:00

Good god, this is an egregiously bad study. There's a lot wrong, but I'll just highlight some of the most obvious flaws in the methodology and analysis:

The study measures "misandry" by directly asking subjects if they hate men. If you asked a racist or misogynist if they "hated" black people or women, how many do you think would answer "yes"? Not many. Anyone can say they don't "hate" black people or women because that's the socially acceptable answer, but they may then assume a predominantly black neighborhood is high in crime or that most sexual harassment claims are false. Such people would still be considered racist or sexist, yet this study's questions are mostly items such as "How warm/favorable or cold/unfavorable do you feel towards men in general", and when feminists answer "yes" the authors conclude the feminists aren't misandrist.
They don't report most of the survey question wording: They provide a few example items, but for the most part they don't actually report what the questions in the survey even are, so we can't even evaluate the extent of the bias.
Of the example questions they do report, the questions are clearly biased to produce certain answers: The authors define "positive" feelings towards men as anything above the midpoint in a Likert scale, but of the example questions provided, one end of the scale will be very extreme. For example, one of the questions was “Men act like babies when they are sick.” This is worded quite harshly, and so the reason most participants voted above the midpoint was likely just because the low end of the scale signified an extreme attitude. Again, if you asked a highly sexist person a question such as "Women are all nothing but irrational gold diggers: Agree or disagree?" or a racist a question such as "Black people are all nothing but thugs: Agree or disagree?" then even most racist or sexist people would still answer above the midpoint on the scale simply because of how extreme one end of the scale is.
Little or no questions asking about widespread stereotypes: Certain stereotypes and presumptions about men (eg being entitled or obsessed with sex) are common in feminist discourse, yet none of the questions in the survey appear to measure them. By neglecting to report the exact questions the authors of course leave themselves some plausible deniability, but nothing in the methods suggests such stereotyped attitudes are measured.
Statistical cherry-picking and jerrymandering to conceal actual results: In spite of the blatantly rigged wording, the authors still attempt to obfuscate results by lumping several measures together into an aggregated index and base several of their main conclusions on the aggregate rather than the individual measures (several of which actually refute their conclusion, such as the measure of "benevolence to men"). The authors also conclude that feminists did indeed have higher perceptions than non-feminists of threats from men but also that feminists had higher perceptions of similarity to men, and therefore that the combined measures balance out into feminists having more positive attitudes towards men than non-feminists. If someone was afraid of black people, you wouldn't conclude they weren't actually racist simply because they also self-reported feeling more similar to black people, yet this is apparently the logic behind the authors' conclusion here.
Use of the implicit association test: The authors refute the possibility that participants weren't answering the survey honestly using the Implicit Association Test, however this test is known to have poor predictive validity, and susceptibility to voluntary control, and so this counterargument is really not valid.
Behold this magnificent quote: "feminists, to a greater degree than nonfeminists, showed strong positivity toward women (Study 6). It is worth pausing to reflect on this finding, which indicates that feminism is distinctive in its ingroup love for women, rather than its outgroup hate for men." Imagine if I said I don't hate black people, I just really love white people. I don't even have anything to add here, I just thought this quote was a treasure.

There are various other criticisms I might have normally chewed the study out for (eg neglecting to validate the survey questions), but compared to what I've outlined above, these flaws are downright trivial.

Separate-Peace1769 · 2024-07-05T00:53:49+00:00

Yeah yeah...we know...you don't "hate men", you only go out of your way to disparage, dehumanize them, and lobby for policies that prioritize Women/Girls at the expense of everyone one else.

WeEatBabies · 2024-07-05T01:12:53+00:00

Random Redditor Collecting Screenshots Debunks Large Feminists Study About Feminism :

https://www.instagram.com/p/CgwxTGhr0zY/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CuxQr-VxK2r/

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cp7P2PdOJdx/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CiEPR3SNP6X/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CguXR6PLK5j/

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cz0tgybuZbH/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CzP_GDCt_tG/

https://www.instagram.com/reel/Cw56AW9LxSR/

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cpdx2jSNSWS/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CnHcdBsrB4I/

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ck83unSpBXA/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CgwcHyMrQ7D/

https://www.instagram.com/p/C718qAjxpQJ/

https://www.instagram.com/p/C1gEhv8tIIF/

https://www.instagram.com/p/C8PcphtxbxZ/

https://www.instagram.com/p/CgwcHyMrQ7D/

https://www.instagram.com/p/C8SiLwth1N-/

WokeUpIAmStillAlive · 2024-07-05T00:45:59+00:00

Don't women make the point, it isn't just what you, but how you say it. The point that actions are louder than words... like trying to apposed mens shelters.

PossumPalZoidberg · 2024-07-05T04:21:35+00:00

“Compared to nonfeminists, feminists did think that men represent more of a threat to women’s dignity and welfare,” Hopkins-Doyle told PsyPost. “This was associated with less positive attitudes to men.”

Did they even bother reading the manifest?

“However, counteracting this tendency, feminists also perceived that men and women were more similar, and this led in turn to more positive attitudes.” ….ah, here’s the massaging of the data to make it say what we want it to say.

ImConfusedSigh · 2024-07-05T05:21:32+00:00

If you ask a bunch of racists if they are racist, what answer would you get?

Edit: meaning this type of method cannot produce valid results, if the suspected response is socially undesirable.

ActualInteraction0 · 2024-07-05T00:51:02+00:00

Self reporting.

"We investigated ourselves and found nothing wrong."

Though I do find likely that many perceived big issues are actually over inflated by a relatively small number of loud voices. People are bad with really big numbers.

Blauwpetje · 2024-07-05T06:00:06+00:00

I stopped following PsyPost for quite a while. Too often they had sensational revelations like ‘Gays tend to be less homophobic than straight men’ and that as if that was a great achievement of those gays and it made the straight ones a bit suspect.

But I think the question if we should call feminists ‘misandrists’ is overrated on this sub. Most feminists are not like Valerie Solanas. They like men - as long as they support boundless affirmative action for women (and all other feminist issues), ridicule MRA’s and don’t even think of saying anything positive about them, aren’t dominant in any way, listen empathically to their female friends, don’t expect from them that they listen too, show their feelings (yes, the two last points are contradictory), don’t do anything to make women uncomfortable, find it a shame if other men do, and smile obediently when the women around them jump into bed with unfeeling machos, just to afterwards complain to them about those horrible machos.

Some will even admit that men who are less ‘perfect’ - as long as they don’t go astray too far - are not totally bad, but just affected by patriarchy and toxic masculinity, and need to be cured or re-educated one way or another. So how can ANYONE say they hate men?

Imho it is more fruitful to call feminism sexist. Just like a man can be sexist without hating women, or racist without hating blacks (they’re just ‘different’) feminism is clearly sexist against men. The word ‘misandrist’ just makes it easier to deny all that. Yes, some expressions of feminism clearly are misandrist, but we should reserve the word for those occasions.

MonkeyCartridge · 2024-07-05T00:38:20+00:00

Assuming it's the same one from another post, it is basically saying "misandry doesn't exist because feminists don't hate men any more than men do."

Yeah....listen to some transphobic men talk about trans women for a while. It's a pretty low bar we are talking about, here.

SunJiggy · 2024-07-05T01:41:43+00:00

James Lindsay rewrote Mein Kampf with feminist lingo and it was accepted by mainstream universities

Eoasap · 2024-07-05T02:58:21+00:00

The old 'trust me bro' source

Raphe9000 · 2024-07-05T22:46:16+00:00

The article debunks its own claim:

“Compared to nonfeminists, feminists did think that men represent more of a threat to women’s dignity and welfare,” Hopkins-Doyle told PsyPost. “This was associated with less positive attitudes to men. However, counteracting this tendency, feminists also perceived that men and women were more similar, and this led in turn to more positive attitudes.

It uses a directly misandrist ideal, of men representing a threat to women's dignity and welfare, as an example of the negative attitudes towards men that feminists expressed, but then its example of a positive attitude towards men is... that feminists tend to see men and women as more similar than non-feminists?

That's a completely neutral attitude unless you give credence to the idea that being similar to women is in and of itself a positive thing, so their big point of proving that feminists aren't misandrists is that their negative attitudes towards men is counteracted by their association of men with their positive attitudes towards women.

Leinadro · 2024-07-05T02:12:22+00:00

Does this study basically amount to, "The police department that was accused of misconduct investigated itself and found no evidence of misconduct"?

FightHateWithLove · 2024-07-05T12:28:10+00:00

Let me guess, they defined misandry out of existence.

2ndharrybhole · 2024-07-05T12:38:32+00:00

Go on any feminist-oriented subreddit and you’ll see that it is not debunked, at least as far as online discourse goes.

PrettyText · 2024-07-05T09:04:55+00:00

Some parts of the rebuttal:

suppose some studies find that feminists don't hate men, and some studies find that they do. Then of course only the ones that find "feminists don't hate men" get published and the rest gets censored / not accepted by journals. Which creates an illusion that the science points in one direction, when it doesn't.
researchers want to get published, so even it the researchers aren't feminist themselves (and they might be), they understand that they need to find "no misandry" to get published. And "publish or perish." Also, it's much more easy than the average person is aware of to get the result you want, through choosing who you study / how you conduct the study / how you interpret the data.
this was just asking women variations of "do you hate men? do you hate masculinity? do you hate fathers?" and of course most women aren't going to say "actually I hate men." But just because women say that, doesn't mean that misandry doesn't exist. It would be like if I polled people, and most said they didn't hate black people, and then I conclude that anti-black bias / prejudice didn't exist.

SvitlanaLeo · 2024-07-05T17:15:29+00:00

There are two important moments in this article.

Firstly, in one sentence it admits that some feminists are misandrists, so if someone dismisses it as proof of the non-existence of misandry, it would be stupid of them.

Secondly, the authors, in fact, blurt out that they found quite a lot of misandry among feminists, they just found it in men, in non-feminists too, and they appeal to this. They don’t have a clear “feminists don’t have misandry”, they have “feminists don’t have more of it than men, are we going to call men man-haters?”

eli_ashe · 2024-07-05T17:47:32+00:00

let's give a few talking points here:

firstly, the study uses self-identified 'feminists', so the category they are speaking of is more or less social one rather than an ideological one.

this is important as it means that there isn't anything of worth or note to be said by way of this study in regards to any real ideological commits feminism may hold. Its like going up to a 'citizen scientist' a 'self-proclaimed physicist' and taking their opinion as being particularly relevant to the nature of physics.

so, at most whatever this 'study' might say is about some pop-cultural phenomenon in the current. Note that this is also crucial for understanding that those attitudinal dispositions may shift too. since they are not making any particular argument about feminism as such, what its says, etc.... at most what they would be providing is a current temp of misandry within those self-identified as feminists.

this is akin to asking the nazis how they feel about the jews post wwii. 'they alright'. the problem isn't their attitude after they've been taking a public whomping, the problem is to what degree are the underpinning ideological commitments causes for misandristic attitudes.

see for instance here:

“After some reading of the literature, we discovered there were very few empirical tests of the accuracy of the most widespread stereotype about feminists – that they are ‘man-haters.’ In particular, previous studies had been limited by the measures used, which focused more on ideological beliefs about men rather than warmth of feeling or liking, but also by the relatively few feminists in those samples (e.g., often < 30% in female student samples in the US).”

they express pretty straightforward motivated reasoning, a.k.a. bias here too:

"Beyond this, we were also interested in why people think that feminists hate men and set out to examine the faulty perceptions we hold about other people’s beliefs and how these can lead us to incorrect conclusions.”

they are holding, in other words, that there is in fact no misandry among feminists, and their inquiry is actually into why it is that men be so stupid. which i mean, misandrist much?

the parameter's they are using are broadly social, as previously alluded to, but also opaque.

"In these studies, feminism was operationalized using multiple measures, including identification with feminism, ideological beliefs, and engagement in collective feminist action."

identification with feminism is the only non-opaque criteria used. ideological beliefs (which one's, i bet its leftist shit and not reflective of the full spectrum of feminist ideological beliefs), and 'engagement with feminist action (which actions? again, i bet its leftist shit that doesn't bother to so much as recognize the full range of feminist ideological commitments). We'd call this P hacked data due to its likely political bias in addition to its motivated reasoning.

Attitudes toward men were assessed through several explicit measures, capturing various dimensions such as warmth, liking, trust, and emotional reactions.

cool. i like my slaves, they are so sweet and kind to me. except when they get uppity.

"In addition, the researchers also examined hostile attitudes towards men (e.g. “Men act like babies when they are sick”), benevolent attitudes towards men (“Men are more willing to take risks than women”) and collective anger (“I am furious with the sexual harassment of women”)."

i've not much to say in particular about these examples, save this which would be true no matter what examples they used; it is a strikingly limited mode of measure for either a general disposition or any specific misandristic takes.

in other words, its entirely plausible even very likely to answer 'correctly' to all of these so as to show no misandristic takes, and yet nonetheless have a misandrists attitude towards men. this is a general problem with 'studies' and 'statistics' tho, and not something peculiar here. but it is applicable.

whatever they show by such metrics are if not entirely meaningless to their stated aims, certainly not indicative of anything of widespread interest or note.

the rest of the article just gives results, which aren't really that interesting for the most part. it did say something about 'certain non-mainstream feminist ideological commitments' (radical feminism id assume) as actually showing hostile takes towards men. which is mostly just interesting because it shows that the real issue is the ideological commitments, not the attitudes given in a survey.

Archangel1313 · 2024-07-05T19:55:38+00:00

That seems like an awful lot of contradictory results just sort of swept out the way, in favor of the "positive" side.

Like how the respondents can simultaneously harbor negative feelings towards men due to the belief that they are inherently more dangerous, while pairing this reaction to the belief that men and women are more similar than we often give them credit for...so, somehow these two totally different ideas cancel each other out, or even count as a net positive result? Then there's the basic sense that all participants had, that they don't harbor negative feelings towards men specifically, just more in general...implying that their negative feelings towards men are more hypothetical than they are based on actual experience.

That's kind of where most people's misandry comes from...when you speak in terms of hyperbolic stereotypes, then most men are bad. But when you speak of 1st hand experiences, most men are not. Most women have encountered assholes in their life, but they will also readily tell you that they aren't the majority of men...it just feels that way, when every woman you talk to, has met at least one.

I would strongly suggest to these researchers to include a test of both conscious and unconscious bias regarding these beliefs.

The "myth" may be hidden in their unconscious biases. It's not that misandry doesn't exist...it's that it isn't based on objective reality.

GodlessPerson · 2024-07-05T00:40:08+00:00

It's been debunked before. You'll notice feminists aren't better when it comes to sexism against men. So really, all they showed is that the average woman is as much a man-hater as feminists are. Their questions are also very lackluster.

stefan00790 · 2024-07-05T14:58:25+00:00

With their type of methodology i can prove that incels are not misogynistic and misogynists are not misogynistic . Lol what a disgrace of a study was allowed to be published is beyond me .

hottake_toothache · 2024-07-05T13:56:50+00:00

This disagrees with my lived experience.

Johntoreno · 2024-07-05T09:12:56+00:00

MRAs never go around citing a study about how they're not racists&sexists, people with nothing to hide never go this far to prove their innocence. Male advocates are accused of being far right neo-nazis and yet we don't care.

Charming_Gift7698 · 2024-07-05T11:47:44+00:00

Maybe “hate” is a strong word but I don’t think that anyone who respects men as human beings would call themselves a feminist

maomaochair · 2024-07-05T17:08:10+00:00

Any similar studies show that KKK is not racist; incel is not sexist?

I only found some of the reports that e.g. KKK self reported as non-racists while the study said they were truely racists. Lol

Cearball · 2024-07-05T22:41:17+00:00

TBF I don't think feminist equals man hater.

I just think there are man haters within the feminists movement & they are really shit or perhaps unwilling to take the problem

Complete_Category_36 · 2024-08-01T18:24:23+00:00

I hope this will be debunked soon. Methodology look like a joke.

Fearless_Ad4244 · 2024-08-14T23:30:09+00:00

Doesn't the in the meta study itself say that feminists percieve men as more threatening when compared to how nonfeminists percieve men???

"Study 3 (n = 198) extended them to implicit attitudes. Investigating the mechanisms underlying feminists’ actual and perceived attitudes, Studies 4 (n = 2,092) and 5 (nationally representative UK sample, n = 1,953) showed that feminists (vs. nonfeminists) perceived men as more threatening, but also more similar, to women."

Whilst saying at the same time that negative perception can increase prejudice

"A third reason that feminists may hold negative attitudes toward men is that they may be inclined to perceive men as a threat to women. A common theme of feminist thinking is awareness that women collectively are oppressed and disrespected by men (Gamble, 2004). According to integrated threat theory (Stephan et al., 2016), prejudice toward an outgroup is heightened when it is seen as presenting realistic threats to the material welfare of the ingroup and symbolic threats to its values, standing, and dignity. Realistic and symbolic threat perceptions have been shown empirically to relate to negative intergroup attitudes to majority groups (Riek et al., 2006), including women's attitudes toward men (Alt et al., 2019; Stephan et al., 2000)."

There are also these 2 statements:

This suggests that though feminists are widely caricatured as “man-haters” (Ging, 2017), their attitudes are likely to be positive in absolute terms, even if they turn out to be less positive than nonfeminists.

Going further, feminists’ beliefs about gender similarity (vs. difference) also give reason to believe that their attitudes toward men may even be more positive than nonfeminist women's. In general, feminists have resisted, challenged, and rejected traditional notions of gender difference, seeing them as mythical justifications of gender inequality.

Aren't these 2 statements contradictory?

There's more:

Another study also returned mixed results. Anderson et al. (2009) administered the Ambivalence to Men Inventory (Glick & Fiske, 1999) to a sample of US undergraduates that included 41 feminists and 167 nonfeminists. The Ambivalence to Men Inventory includes a negatively valenced subscale, Hostility to Men (e.g., “Men act like babies when they are sick”), and a positively valenced subscale, Benevolence to Men (e.g., “Every woman needs a male partner who will cherish her”).

How can the statement: "Every woman needs a male partner who will cherish her" be treated as a positive statement towards men? That statement only speaks about wants of women and what a man can do for her not that women think positively of men.

Successful-Wheel4768 · 2024-07-05T05:25:31+00:00

My father is a massive antisemite. He always rants and raves about Jewish conspiracies. Everything is somehow their fault. Our corrupr politicians, Covid, the war in Ukraine, (they ordered Ukraine to opress Russians and forced Putin to step in), the border crisis, even the Holocaust (they borrowed Hitler a lot of money and forced him to start the war to purge the Jews out of their useless European brethren). But he still claims he isn't an antisemite. He doesn't hate Jews. He merely points out the many ways in which they are a threat to modern society.

stefan00790 · 2024-07-05T14:52:05+00:00

The feminist sexism arguments all fall apart when you generalize their stance and arguments to different unique opressed minority group that is not based on sexism .

ForwardCommercial670 · 2025-06-16T20:36:39+00:00

There is no myth. If there was a myth, feminists wouldn't have lobbied US Congress to exclude women from signing up with Selective Service...

So actions speak louder than claims.

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JarvisZhang · 2024-07-05T16:03:19+00:00

I don't actually know what is feminists. I won't link an Iranian woman who self-identified as a feminist to a man-hater at all. Even in the West, feminists in 2004 and in 2024 are very different. I don't think the formers are men-haters.

cosmofaustdixon · 2024-07-05T00:19:49+00:00

Either this is true and there is a small but vocal contingent of man-haters or this is another fake and gay study done to obfuscate the truth.

Title	“Large psychology study debunks stereotype of feminists as man-haters” - ”The Misandry Myth: An Inaccurate Stereotype About Feminists’ Attitudes Toward Men”
Author	ProtectIntegrity
Upvotes	144
Comments	103
Date	July 5, 2024 12:15 AM UTC (2 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/comments/1dvl5h7/large_psychology_study_debunks_stereotype_of/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates/large-psychology-study-debunks-stereotype-of.1523308 https://theredarchive.com/post/1523308

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