Backlash against the #MeToo movement: How women's voice causes men to feel victimized

Abstract

Three studies examined whether perceived increases in women's "voice" (i.e., being heard and taken seriously about sexual assault) contributes to perceptions of bias against men. In Study 1, both men and women who perceived women to have greater voice related to sexual assault perceived greater victimization of men. This relationship was stronger for relatively conservative participants. In Study 2, relatively conservative (but not relatively liberal) participants who read about #MeToo perceived greater men’s victimization than those in the control condition. Study 3 examined responses to perceiving that men are victimized by #MeToo. For relatively conservative (but not liberal) men, perceptions of men’s victimhood lead to less willingness to work alone with a woman and less willingness to combat sexual assault (relative to a control condition). Thus, while the #MeToo movement brings awareness to issues of sexual assault, it also generates backlash among the more conservative and may accentuate gender disparities.

Supporting men or male privilege? Women's progressive and reactionary collective action for men

“…(Note that we did not detect any univariate outliers that could have ‘inflated’ the observed scores). This finding suggests that women's support for reactionary action for men might not be a fringe phenomenon and that a certain proportion of women might feel that the social progress in the realm of gender has gone ‘too far’, coming at the expense of men rather than benefitting women and men alike (see Lisnek et al., 2022 for a similar argument in relation to the conservative women's backlash against the #MeToo movement).…”

“…Despite men being the structurally advantaged group across a broad range of political and economic indicators, postulates of women active in the men's rights movement imply that women engage in action for men because they see men as disadvantaged. These subjective perceptions of injustice in relation to reactionary action for men are often attributed to seeing gender equality as a zero‐sum game in which any gains made by women are framed as losses for men (e.g., Lisnek et al., 2022). In line with this reasoning, the men's rights movement depicts gender policies as a form of reverse sexism giving women an unfair advantage, portrays feminism as a man‐hating ideology, and ascribes hidden power motives to women who accuse men of sexual harassment (e.g., Coston & Kimmel, 2012).…”

Privilege lost: How dominant groups react to shifts in cultural primacy and power

“…In their work, Lisnek, Wilkins, Wilson and Ekstrom (2022) shone light on a specific domain: sexual assault. In particular, they explored how men can claim victimhood for their group, even in contexts in which the topic is men’s assault of women.…”

“…Other teams in the Special Issue found shift effects to be stronger among those higher in zero-sum beliefs (e.g., Stefaniak & Wohl, 2022) or when such beliefs are manipulated (e.g., Jones et al, 2022); others observed that dynamics framed in terms of dominant group advantage (vs. less dominant group disadvantage) were particularly threatening to the dominant group (see Dover, 2022). With regard to political partisanship and political ideology, researchers also found stronger pushback against privilege being lost among White Republicans and conservatives (vs. White Democrats and liberals; see Knowles, Tropp and Mogami 2022), or found stronger beliefs that men (vs. women) are victims of the #MeToo movement (e.g., Lisnek, Wilkins, Wilson and Ekstrom 2022). Relatedly, Brown, Rucker and Richeson(2022) found that conservatives were consistently threatened and committed to pushing back, regardless of the presentation of racial shift information; instead, the experimental “action” was observed primarily among liberals, who became less psychologically rattled in the shift (vs. control) conditions, seemingly embracing the change in demographics and/or power.…”

“…We are particularly encouraged to witness the wide range of domains and outcome measures explored in the Special Issue, ranging from basic attitudes (e.g., Earle & Hodson, 2022; Stefaniak & Wohl, 2022) to policy support (e.g., Craig & Lee, 2022; Jones et al, 2022; Okuyan & Vollhardt, 2022) to supporting social movements (e.g., Rivera-Rodriguez, Larsen and Dasgupta 2022; Stefaniak & Wohl, 2022) or political candidates (Stewart & Willer, 2022). We also witness a new interest in predicting the dominant group feeling victimized (e.g., Lisnek, Wilkins, Wilson and Ekstrom 2022). Several of the research groups (e.g., Domen, Scheepers, Derks and van Veelen 2022; Dover, 2022) introduced physiological measures to the exploration of privilege lost, offering new insights and corroborating much of the self-report evidence in the field.…”