Average Joe ain’t lookin’ so bad now.
A new study of young men in the UK revealed that those who see themselves as either most or least handsome are more misogynistic than men who thought their features were garden variety.
Misogyny refers to the systemic devaluation and individual hatred of women by men throughout history, which shows up as sexism — the belief that one gender is superior over another — dismissiveness, manipulation, assault and rape among other abuses towards non-men.
Misogyny is at the core of radical, right-wing political ideaologies and “incel” (involuntary celibate) culture, researchers noted. However, study author Jiewen Zhang and her colleagues at the University of Bergen, Norway wanted to find out whether various lifestyle and psychological factors, such as loneliness, sensitivity to rejection, perceived attractiveness, and romantic relationships, also played a role.
Their new reserach, published in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, concluded that men who support right-wing authoritarianism as well as those with high or low self-perceived attractiveness “are associated with increased hostility towards womem.”
The survey of 473 single, heterosexual men, aged 18 to 35 in the UK included a battery of psychological assessments to detect patterns of hostile sexism, misogyny, self-perceived attractiveness, sensitivity to rejection, loneliness, gaming habits, gaming addiction symptoms and right-wing authoritarianism.
Perhaps counterintuitively, men with both the lowest and the highest numbers of sexual partners were less hostile towards women than those with an average number of partners.
Researchers suggested that how men rate their own looks is “possibly shaped by narcissistic traits rather than the number of sexual partners they have had.”
Indeed, many popular assumptions about the foundation of misogyny were called into question by the results.
“The lack of support for our hypotheses about loneliness, rejection, and romantic and sexual partners is surprising considering studies linking incels with such characteristics and hostility towards women,” researchers wrote.