You’re Sexist If You Agree With These Statements

0:00 On the topic of sexism, Freya,

0:02 I'd like to put you on the spot a bit at the moment.

0:05 I would include you.

0:08 Well, we'll see.

0:09 I want to ask you a few questions where

0:10 you've been described as the voice of Gen Z women.

0:13 Uh, so this will be very interesting h to get your opinion on these questions.

0:17 So, I'm going to read them out to you.

0:18 So, Tanya, I already know what you

0:20 think because we're we're working on this together.

0:22 So, is it closer to sexist towards men or women to believe the following things?

0:28 One, women have a superior moral sensibility.

0:33 Uh, sexist toward men, I would say.

0:35 Okay.

0:36 Women have a quality of purity few men possess.

0:41 Sexist toward men.

0:42 Women have a more refined sense of culture and taste.

0:46 Sexist toward men.

0:47 Okay.

0:47 Full house.

0:47 Sexist towards men.

0:49 Next set of questions.

0:50 We're almost done.

0:51 Do you think it would be a good or bad thing

0:53 if men mostly agreed with the sentiment of the following statements?

0:57 A good woman should be set on a pedestal.

1:03 Uh, good.

1:04 Okay.

1:05 Women should be cherished and protected by men.

1:09 Good.

1:09 Men should sacrifice to provide for women.

1:13 Good.

1:12 In a disaster, women need to be rescued first.

1:16 Good.

1:16 Every man ought to have a woman he adores.

1:20 Good.

1:19 Men are complete without women.

1:22 Or men are incomplete without women.

1:24 Yeah.

1:24 Good.

1:25 Despite accomplishment, men are incomplete without women.

1:28 So, same thing.

1:29 Yeah.

1:29 Good.

1:30 And people are often happy without romance.

1:36 Bad.

1:35 Okay.

1:35 You are a massive benevolent sexist.

1:39 Those are the items on the benevolent sexism scale.

1:43 And I pled all my followers on this and they like you

1:47 believed that the statements were either sexist to men or a good thing.

1:52 Right.

1:52 So it it kind of begs this question of what is the scale measuring.

1:56 So this is an idea that Tanya and I and some other

1:58 colleagues are working on uh that we call the mismeasurement of men.

2:02 Now that title is strategic because there was

2:05 a famous book called the mismeasure of men

2:08 by uh Steven Jay Gould who was very critical

2:10 of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary approaches to human behavior.

2:14 And we think it's the precise opposite that's happening

2:17 in scale development in psychology now that a a lack

2:21 of insight into evolutionary psychology and just science

2:24 in general is uh creating these crazy problematic scales.

2:28 So you've got scales that are measuring toxic masculinity, benevolent sexism,

2:34 and uh male sexual entitlement that are actually problematic in so many ways.

2:40 One of the ways is they're measuring awareness of facts about the world.

2:45 So, one of the items is women are often attracted to muscularity and dominance.

2:51 And that's taken as evidence of toxic masculinity.

2:54 And there's no attitude added on to that inference.

2:58 It's just do you know that that's sometimes the case?

3:00 And it is sometimes the case.

3:02 Um, these scales, they're like the what I call the Kathy Newman of scales.

3:08 They require an extra inference about

3:11 the implication of agreeing with the statement.

3:14 So you believe that women deserve to be protected.

3:17 Oh, so what you're really saying is they should have

3:19 their autonomy limited to keep them safe for their own good.

3:23 And it's like that's not measured.

3:25 So it's a total mismeasurement of men.

3:27 And uh it also pathizes women's own preferences.

3:30 So women have strong preferences for protection and provisioning yet

3:34 and men care about being seen as attractive to women.

3:37 So they're going to prioritize that over being seen as sexist.

3:40 So it's a huge problem we see.

3:42 But yeah, sorry to tell you if you're a man.

3:44 So is that the same as internal internalized misogyny?

3:47 Same concept.

3:48 Not quite the same.

3:48 So benevolent sexism uh is one end

3:51 of the scale of what's called ambivalent sexism.

3:54 On one end of the scale they have hostile sexism,

3:56 which is like direct antipathy towards uh women to be like,

4:00 oh women are trash, basically like really direct and obvious.

4:03 Whereas benevolent sexism is this more subtle putting kind of infantilizing

4:08 of women and um which I believe could be a real concept.

4:12 But when I looked under the hood at these items that were used to measure it,

4:16 I couldn't believe it.

4:17 I just thought that they're absurd.

4:20 Well, that reminds me of the New Statesman piece because

4:23 the New Statesman piece basically concluded that liberal women are

4:26 unhappy and then everybody was basically we spoke about this.

4:30 They were saying that this is no one's

4:32 spoken about what's going on with liberal women.

4:34 This is new.

4:35 Like the new statesmen are the first to have the balls to say it.

4:40 Frey.

4:41 No, but the interesting thing is is that I sort

4:45 of get viewed with the internal misogyny thing because I will say

4:49 the same thing which is liberal women are unhappy.

4:52 But I'll also say it's because they have these unmet needs.

4:55 It's because they want to belong.

4:56 And it's it's like a compassionate worldview

4:58 that I think women want to be protected.

5:01 They want to feel like they're safe and stable and all of these things.

5:05 But then I get the that's a sexist point of view.

5:07 But the new statesmen can present it and say young women

5:11 are unhappy and draw different conclusions and then it's not a

5:14 sexually your female privilege has been revoked.

5:17 Yeah.

5:17 You don't have the female privilege that you once thought you did

5:19 because I'm white or

5:21 Because you're white.

5:22 Because you're right of center.

5:23 Yeah.

5:24 Yeah.

5:24 Yeah.

5:24 I'm I then don't get treated as a woman at all.

5:28 No, you're an honorary man.

5:30 Congratulations.

5:31 It's three on one.

5:32 So So in the literature, there's this kind of confusion about, oh,

5:36 women are perplexingly attracted to benevolent sexism,

5:40 and this is like a problem.

5:41 It's a inconvenient finding.

5:43 But when you look at the way the items are written,

5:45 it's needless because I think women are attracted

5:47 to men who believe women should be protected.

5:51 But I don't think they're attracted to men who

5:53 would add on the extra inference and would say,

5:55 "Oh, because women need to be protected,

5:57 they need to have their rights good." So if you had the item

6:01 written in a proper way in the scale designed in a proper way,

6:04 you would actually have no problematic attraction to benevolent sexism.

6:07 Do you remember that video of the two travelers

6:11 in Thailand and a guy pulls out a knife?

6:13 It's CCTV footage.

6:16 Yeah, it went super super viral and all of the replies

6:19 and all of the uh quote tweets of it were girl he's trash.

6:22 So this guy pulls out a knife and he's trying to steal the woman's

6:24 bag and she fights him off and the guy hides behind a[ __] pillar.

6:27 The dude hids behind a pillar.

6:29 So there's two things that are sort of Yeah.

6:31 icky, right?

6:32 And we all have this sense that you should protect.

6:35 Dude, what was that[ __] thing that I said?

6:37 I put this in the group chat 6 months ago and I[ __] called it and I

6:40 was right about the fact that women would be

6:45 less there would be more Oh, here it is.

6:47 Look at this.

6:48 Oh no.

6:50 So that guy's got a knife.

6:53 Oh my god.

6:54 Homeboy hides.

6:54 Homeboy hides behind the pillar while she is fighting him.

6:58 And there's another dude that just comes over and maybe he's with the guy.

7:02 And then this guy with the[ __] benevolently sexist man over

7:07 and thinks the woman cannot defend herself.

7:08 And what a sexist son of a pig.

7:10 I know.

7:10 What a pig.

7:12 Yeah.

7:11 What an absolute pig.

7:12 Is it the dude on the bike?

7:14 I think it's a He comes in with a helmet.

7:16 Yeah.

7:17 Good, dude.

7:17 A helmet to the head.

7:19 Commute to help.

7:20 Yeah.

7:21 Um, so almost everybody was Universal in this.

7:25 That guy that's hiding behind the pillar is What are you doing, dude?

7:29 Come on.

7:29 Like, yeah, it's a knife and[ __] scary or whatever, but like do something.

7:33 Women's preference for protection is seriously strong.

7:36 So, I ran a poll asking which would have a stronger effect.

7:39 This was my idea.

7:40 Don't[ __] say I I would run a poll.

7:42 This is my idea, dude.

7:44 Okay.

7:45 I was even surprised by the results.

7:47 Uh, women said it would have a stronger effect

7:49 on their attractiveness to a man if he if they found

7:52 out he was unwilling to protect them than it would

7:55 be if he cheated on her in a one night stand.

7:58 Yeah, that really strong.

8:00 I kind of wonder if like maybe that's

8:01 one factor in like why women aren't interested

8:04 in men nowadays is like men don't get

8:06 to display those abilities coming back from war.

8:09 Yeah.

8:09 If we're not seeing men defending our groups or hunting like you don't

8:13 get to see the value of male formidability or the display of it.

8:17 I what I'm starting to wonder is like

8:19 if women even realize how much stronger men are.

8:22 When I ask my students like I I present the sex

8:25 difference in upper body strength and they're surprised and I'm like what?

8:31 Yeah.

8:30 There's this viral trend on TikTok apparently now where uh

8:34 it's like asking couples to ask the guy to go

8:37 into the challenge of putting her in handcuffs in 30

8:40 seconds and they're like it's the greatest foreplay ever.

8:42 It's like women get so turned on by it.

8:45 It's like wow realizing the strength difference is crazy.

8:48 Yeah.

8:48 Well, I mean that's the the thing that Andrew Thomas was talking about.

8:51 Andrew do crav Maggar or some[ __] He

8:54 does some kind of some martial artsy thing, right?

8:58 And he's saying that uh the ability to turn

9:02 on and turn off aggression is really rare.

9:05 Like most guys, the aggression sort of bleeds out

9:08 in the same way as your level of obsession

9:11 and how much you pay attention to patterns

9:13 is great when you're trying to write new piece, but is not so great when you're

9:16 dealing with your intimate relationship or whatever.

9:19 guys that are aggressive.

9:20 Uh, good.

9:21 If if homeboy comes along with the knife, forget running away.

9:25 He's licking his lips.

9:26 The guy's like, "Oh, wait my entire life for just pulls out

9:28 an armory of things to kill him with." Like,

9:30 okay, it's like everyone's like Tim Kennedy.

9:32 But very few people have learned, very few men have learned to turn that off.

9:36 And I think what

9:37 women what's got crossed over a little bit here is that women love

9:42 the idea of a man who is able to be aggressive, but never to them.

9:47 Mhm.

9:47 And unfortunately the guys I mean how many you

9:51 MMA fighters have had like awful abuse domestic abuse situations

9:57 that you've you've selected for a guy who is

10:00 he is going to really really stand up for me.

10:03 Well yeah but maybe that's also that's not to say that all[ __] MMA fighters

10:06 are going to be you know home abusers but this has happened a bunch of times.

10:09 you go.

10:10 It's hard to turn that aggression off.

10:11 And the protector thing is great, but the just raw aggression thing carries on.

10:17 It's a trade-off women have to make.

10:18 And it's you predictable the ecologies in which

10:22 they'll actually select a really formidable mate.

10:24 And it's a predictable based on the individual differences in that woman's size.

10:28 Smaller women in those dangerous ecologies tend to have

10:31 a stronger preference for a really strong aggressive.

10:34 What would a dangerous ecology in the modern world be like?

10:36 So, I mean, there's rough areas of I used to live in Birmingham.

10:40 There's rough areas of it.

10:41 This is as rough as it gets.

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