No! No! No!
Are feminists butch lesbians?
Some are, some aren't.
Do feminists shave their legs?
Who cares?!
Do feminists "just need some good sex"?
(If you answered yes, please go far, far, far, far away and stay there.)
There are a lot of stigmas surrounding feminism and feminists. Today, we're going to debunk one of these myths with:
For starters, google defines feminism as "the advocacy of women's rights on the grounds of political, social, and economic equality to men." As a feminist, that sounds about right to me. I don't hate men. I'm a big fan of men. I love my dad, I have a boyfriend, and I'm of the opinion that most men are good people. What I'm not a big fan of is being treated as lesser than men and that's what feminism is all about.
Now that we've established that let's delve into the real science. Dr. Kristin Anderson, Dr. Melinda Kanner, and Dr. Nisreen Elsayegh conducted a self-response study that measured 488 diverse college students' "Ambivalence Toward Men Inventory" or AMI. (Read more about the AMI here.) The basic idea is that there are two attitudes being measured: hostility towards men and benevolence towards men. Hostility is just what it sounds like, meaning attitudes such as "All men are idiots and all women do is gossip." Benevolence however, doesn't mean something positive. It means attitudes that can also be hurtful, such as "Men need women to care for them and women need men to protect them."
The study was simple. Ask each student to define feminism, record whether they identified as feminist or not, and complete the AMI. The students who defined feminism correctly (at least some mention of equal rights or social inequality, etc.) then had their AMIs analyzed. Guess what. The results were consistent with the hypothesis that feminists were more ambivalent to men than non-feminists. I'll say it again. Feminists had a more positive attitude towards men than non-feminists. Hold, on one more time. Feminists, commonly referred to as "man haters," responded positively whereas non-feminists responded negatively.
Comments are accepted, I'd love to hear if this changed your perspective or if you're sticking to your "crazy feminist" stereotypes.
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