Glick worked with Princeton University’s Susan Fiske to develop a groundbreaking assessment of hostile and benevolent sexism. (And of how those two attitudes combine, Voltron-like, to form the cognitively dissonant state of “ambivalent sexism.”)
Glick’s and Fiske’s work, along with two decades of social science research that has used and expanded on it, tells us a lot about why sexist bias against women is still so pervasive.
And it tells us why women themselves often buy into these ideas, too.
Male dominance actually requires a pretty delicate balance, Glick said. If men want to maintain the control over women they’ve enjoyed for thousands of years, and continue their species, and satisfy their desires for heterosexual love and companionship, they can’t just use brute force. They need women to actually like them and not resent their dominance.
And so a compromise emerged — or at least a “protection racket,” as Glick calls it, like when the Mafioso tells the businessman he’d hate to see his nice shop burn down, so why don’t they make a deal.
The basic agreement is that as long as women cater to men’s needs, men will protect and cherish women in return. If women have few good options for independent success, this is a pretty good deal — which explains why in more overtly sexist societies where women have fewer opportunities, cross-national studies show that women endorse benevolent sexism at even higher rates than men do.
This may also help explain why Trump maintained high levels of support among white women voters who don’t have a college degree — a group Trump won 62 percent to 34, and a group whose career opportunities are probably more limited. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton totally reversed 2012’s partisan gender gap among college-educated white women. (A demographic Clinton won by 51 to 45 percent, and Romney won 52 to 46 against Obama.)
But the most powerful gendered element of Trump’s campaign may actually lie in his fear-mongering.
“Trump's strategy was to ramp up anxiety about a dark, dangerous world,” Glick said. “When women are under threat, their benevolent sexism scores go up.”
Specifically, he said, showing women survey data about men’s hostile sexism makes women more likely to endorse benevolent sexism out of psychological self-defense.
It may be ironic to turn to men for protection from male hostility, but it’s how the cycle works.
This also helps explain why so many women hold sexist biases against women, Glick said. If women themselves enforce gender norms and punish deviants, it reinforces the social order that guarantees them protection. And it separates them from the “bad” women who are deemed unworthy of that protection.
But that protection can still come with a cost, Glick said — which is also where sexist stereotypes about men factor in. The idea that men have to be providers and protectors, Glick said, goes hand in hand with the “boys will be boys” attitude that’s often used to excuse men’s bad behavior.
“Men are bad but bold. That’s the stereotype,” Glick said. “He’s not a very good protector if he can't beat up on other men.”
Glick said that Trump’s more positive masculine traits — boldness, change, willingness to defy tradition — may be seen as inextricably linked with his more negative ones, like his boorishness and cruelty. Trump may not be a nice guy, the thinking goes, and we may not like some of the things he says. But that just comes with the territory if you want a strong male leader.
You hear this rationale a lot from women who still supported Trump after the “pussy” tape leaked and more sexual assault allegations came out. They don’t like it, but they find ways to excuse it. “I do find the words offensive, but that’s locker room talk. That’s the boys club,” Michelle Werntz, a Trump supporter, told CNN.
Some of these excuses minimize sexual assault, or even endorse it. “Groping is a healthy thing to do,” Trump supporter Jane Biddick told the Cut. “When you’re heterosexual, you grope, okay? It’s a good thing.”
Comments like these are reminders of another dark truth research has revealed about benevolent sexism: its strong role in our culture’s tendency to blame victims of sexual assault. The higher a person scores on measures of benevolent sexism, the more likely that person is to blame women who are victims of acquaintance rape (as opposed to rape by a stranger), or victims who behaved in less than “ideal” ways before a rape (like cheating on their husband, or passively rather than actively resisting their attacker).
Sexual assault is the ultimate expression of hostile sexism. But the protection racket of benevolent sexism gives women a lot of incentive to either forgive men for it, or blame women.
The alternative — acknowledging that the system is broken, and that virtue can’t protect you from violence — can be too terrible to contemplate.
http://www.vox.com/identities/2016/11/15/13571478/trump-president-sexual-assault-sexism-misogyny-won
will only hurt outreach for democrats
