https://www.vox.com/identities/2016...-president-sexual-assault-sexism-misogyny-won
Why misogyny won
America’s president-elect is an alleged sexual predator. This theory of sexism explains how it came to this — and why even many women voted for Trump.
By Emily
Crockett@emilycrockettemily@vox.com Nov 15, 2016,
...Meanwhile, a hostile sexist would claim the benevolent sexist is overreacting — that the tape doesn’t actually describe sexual assault, just normal male sexual aggression.
These attitudes might seem diametrically opposed to one another. But they’re actually two sides of the same coin, Peter Glick, professor of psychology and social sciences at Lawrence University, told Vox. People can hold both of these sexist views at the same time, and they very often do.
“It’s how men can wear ‘Trump That Bitch’ T-shirts at a Trump rally,
and then go home and say, ‘I love my wife and daughter,’” Glick said.
Trump expresses both hostile and benevolent attitudes toward women all the time. When he likes a woman, he praises her in a patronizing way (usually focusing on her physical beauty). When he doesn’t, he viciously insults her.
Benevolent sexism is the carrot, Glick explained, and hostile sexism is the stick.....
https://faculty.lawrence.edu/glickp/
...Dr. Glick co-developed the warmth-competence model (with Susan T. Fiske, Princeton, and Amy Cuddy, Harvard), which Harvard Business Review recognized as a “breakthrough idea.” His foundational work on benevolent sexism (with Susan Fiske) received
the Allport Prize for best paper on intergroup relations. Tested worldwide, both models represent revolutionary advances in understanding stereotypes and are among the most highly cited theories in social psychology. ...
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.....
