William Costello

So women have strong preferences for protection and provisioning, and men care about being seen as attractive to women.

So they're going to prioritize that over being seen as sexist.

So it's a huge problem we see.

But yeah, sorry to tell you if you're a man.

Not quite the same.

So benevolent sexism is one end of the scale of what's called ambivalent sexism.

On one end of the scale, they have hostile sexism, which is like direct antipathy towards women to be like, oh, women are trash, basically, like really direct and obvious.

Whereas benevolent sexism is this more subtle putting, kind of infantilizing of women, which I believe could be a real concept.

But when I looked under the hood at these items that were used to measure it,

I couldn't believe it.

I just thought that they're absurd.

No, you're an honorary man.

Congratulations, it's three on one.

So in the literature, there's this kind of confusion about, oh, women are perplexingly attracted to benevolent sexism.

And this is like a problem.

It's an inconvenient finding.

But when you look at the way the items are written,

It's needless, because I think women are attracted to men who believe women should be protected.

But I don't think they're attracted to men who would add on the extra inference and would say, oh, because women need to be protected, they need to have their rights limited to their own good.

So if you had the item written in a proper way, and the scale designed in a proper way, you would actually have no problematic attraction to benevolent sexism.