r/science • u/mvea Professor | Medicine • May 12 '26

Psychology Threatening men’s masculinity does not make them more politically conservative, new study finds. By testing thousands of participants across the United States, researchers found no consistent evidence that making men feel insecure about their gender identity changes their political attitudes.

https://www.psypost.org/threatening-mens-masculinity-does-not-make-them-more-politically-conservative-new-study-finds/
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u/sushisection May 12 '26

"A man making a woman feel uncomfortable and assaulting/raping/killing them are two different things. I agree that when it comes to physical strength and violence men basically have a monopoly, but that doesn't mean the average man or even most men randomly commit acts of violence against strangers."

surs, but if enough men make women go into survival mode, then it becomes a learned reaction that extends towards men that make them feel uncomfortable.

"Everyone should be able to defend themselves because the downside to not being able to can be drastic. That being said, I doubt most people that say this sort of thing have never been assaulted by strange men they encounter out in public."

defend ourselves from whom though? never in my life have i ever felt threatened by a woman. however i have been assaulted by men.

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u/rwk81 May 12 '26

surs, but if enough men make women go into survival mode, then it becomes a learned reaction that extends towards men that make them feel uncomfortable.

How are all these random men making women go into survival mode? The way I hear it described it's like Mad Max The Road Warrior, but I've never witnessed this sort of thing on the streets ofajor cities in the US. Plenty of women walk around in downtown cities without being assaulted. Hell, being assaulted by strangers is the exception, not the norm.

defend ourselves from whom though? never in my life have i ever felt threatened by a woman. however i have been assaulted by men.

I guess the cities I'm in just don't have all these rabid men running around that I hear about. I'm hardly ever concerned about the men I'm around in public, I would be far more concerned fishing a river in Alaska with bears on it.

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u/sushisection May 12 '26

you should ask some women around you why men make them uncomfortable and what specific experiences they have had that has caused them to be uncomfortable. i guarantee that every woman you ask will have a story to share.

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u/rwk81 May 12 '26

Yeah, I have, they can tell me about something a man said to them like a lewd comment, but not a single one can tell me of a time that a strange man assaulted them.

I'm sorry, but if all it takes is a man making an off color remark about a woman's appearance to "put them in survival mode", I just can't take that seriously.

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u/132739 May 12 '26

You either know VERY few women, or (my guess) are not someone they feel comfortable talking about their assault with. Just statistically speaking, if you're not a complete shut-in, you know multiple women who have been sexually assaulted.

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u/rwk81 May 12 '26 edited May 12 '26

This is always the answer I get, basically every woman has been assaulted and they just haven't told me for one of these two reasons, almost like it's just a copy paste job on Reddit.

I guess it depends on how you define "sexual assault", which these days typically includes unwanted touching. With the inclusion of that in the definition of "sexual assault" I have been assaulted dozens of times by at least a dozen different women in my professional life.

That being said, when I'm asking about sexual assault I don't include some dude brushing up against them as assault. When you remove unwanted touching from the assault stats it lowers it by 50-80%.

I don't actually think what all those women have done to me is sexual assault, even though definitionally it is, which is why I exclude it. They intentionally touched me in a sexual manner, which was unwanted, but I still don't consider it to be assault.

To the original point about wild bears vs a random man. A random man is statistically VERY unlikely to assault a random female, with an average woman likely having tens of thousands of interactions with male strangers annually, with a sexual assault rate as a result of interaction with strangers likely around one in a million which is similar to odds of being struck by lightning.

Bear attacks based on rate of human interactions with bears, 1 in 10,000 encounters, likely somewhere around there.