This advice holds true for men and women, according to a newly published study that aims to debunk stereotypes of feminists as romantically challenged.
The two-part study asked 242 undergraduates and 289 older adults about feminism and their relationships. The results, published in this week's issue of the journal Sex Roles, showed that women who identify themselves as feminists are more likely than non-feminists to be dating or married, and that men and women with feminist partners tend to be happier with their relationships and more satisfied with their sex lives.
"They're not man-hating lesbians and all that sort of stuff," says Laurie Rudman, an associate professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey who co-authored the study with PhD student Julie Phelan.
But is anyone except Rush Limbaugh still railing against those fearsome "feminazis" any more?
Apparently, yes. We may have come a long way, baby, but stereotypes about feminism just won't die.
"People avoid the 'F-word,' " Dr. Rudman says. "The idea you cannot be a feminist and feminine at the same time is huge in the popular imagination."
Dr. Rudman documented the persistence of the F-word stigma in a study published this summer in Psychology of Women Quarterly. She surveyed hundreds of university students and found they believe feminist women are uglier and less likely to find romantic happiness than non-feminists.
"These are ideas I thought went out with my grandma's gartered stockings, but it turns out they are still a concern," Dr. Rudman says. She's also heard similar attitudes in conversations with university-aged women who don't want to identify themselves as feminists.
Dr. Rudman suspected that feminism's reputation as a romantic buzzkill may be scaring young women away from adopting the label, so she decided to investigate whether those stereotypes held any truth.
The first study found that among university students who were in heterosexual relationships, it didn't matter to a man's relationship satisfaction whether his partner was feminist, but that women dating feminist men reported better relationship health.
The second study, which surveyed adults aged 18-64 in heterosexual relationships, found that both men and women reported healthier pairings when their partner was a feminist.
In both studies, relationship health was measured with a series of questions about how often people confided in their partners, quarrelled with them, or felt relaxed and happy with them, for example.
Dr. Rudman says the question of why feminism seems to boost relationship health is a subject for future study. Her hypothesis, supported by marriage research, is that mates who feel like equal partners tend to be happier and to stay together longer.
"Who wants to have all the power in a relationship, or to be on the other end, where you have no say in anything?" Dr. Rudman asks.
For now, she hopes her research will, in some small way, help young women embrace feminism without fear of losing their romantic mojo.
"There's a lot of work to be done," she says.
The religious and right-wingers have already started denouncing this. Because obviously women are happier in a relationship where they are treated as property and not a person.
I wish my Uni had access to the journal so I could see the actual publication.
CaptainChewbacca wrote:So, if I understand the article correctly, the man doesn't see any difference, but the woman feels better about herself.
There are two students. The one among college undergrads says that men don't care either way if their woman is feminist, but women do like it better when their man is feminist. However the second study, which polled adults 18-64, states that both sexes like it better when their partner is a feminist.
From the tone of the article you could have replaced 'feminism' with 'open minded'. Which would make sense. Any real relationship needs work and communication instead of just blind faith and archaic rules.
They say, "the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots." I suppose it never occurred to them that they are the tyrants, not the patriots. Those weapons are not being used to fight some kind of tyranny; they are bringing them to an event where people are getting together to talk. -Mike Wong
But as far as board culture in general, I do think that young male overaggression is a contributing factor to the general atmosphere of hostility. It's not SOS and the Mess throwing hand grenades all over the forum- Red
The feminist movement was hijacked in the 1970s by two execrable fads:
1) The notion that gender identity was a purely social construct, with no biological basis whatsoever. In short, feminists argued that there is no difference whatsoever in the way mens' and womens' brains are wired. They continued to insist this for many years, until the mountain of scientific evidence to the contrary became overwhelming. By the time they capitulated, the damage was already done to the credibility of the feminist movement; it was deemed a movement of ideologically-driven nutjobs.
2) The notion that women are better off without husbands or children, and the accompanying notion that any woman who thinks she does want or need a husband and children is therefore inferior to women who do not. This movement was not crushed nearly as decisively as movement #1, and still heavily influences gender-related social debates today.
I'm guessing that this survey defined "feminist" in such a way that women could self-identify as "feminist" without feeling that they were attaching themselves to one of those two movements.
As for the relationship of feminism to relationship health, it seems obvious to me. Both partners in any given relationship have needs that their partners must fulfill if both people are to be happy. If a woman is convinced that she is not the equal of her husband, then she will not expect him to fulfill her needs the way she tries to fulfill his. She may not even mention those needs to him at all. But unfulfilled needs can't simply be ignored forever; eventually they must manifest themselves in some way, and it won't be pleasant.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
ray245 wrote:Wait...why do people have to dislike feminist again?
In case you failed to notice, Mike's basic point was that a relationship is about balancec. If one or the other members of that relationship have unfufilled needs or wants it will unbalance the relationship (or cause friction, take your pick) until the problems/needs are resolved/met.
It's not a really difficult concept to grasp, nor does it require any sort of exceptional categorization (which I believe is another point of Mike's.)
ray245 wrote:Wait...why do people have to dislike feminist again?
There is the whole 'feminazi' stereotype, for the most part gleefully created by conservatives on the basis of the sprinkling of nutjobs DW mentioned above, then generally applied to any woman who called herself a feminist. Plenty of fundamentalists are still doing that today.
Wait...why do people have to dislike feminist again?
Because it brakes away some of the old ideas that dates back to the medieval ages, where women were viewed more of a property and "fancy things" then actual people, and the feminist movement opposes these ideas?
Credo!
Chat with me on Skype if you want to talk about writing, ideas or if you want a test-reader! PM for address.
ray245 wrote:Wait...why do people have to dislike feminist again?
There is the whole 'feminazi' stereotype, for the most part gleefully created by conservatives on the basis of the sprinkling of nutjobs DW mentioned above, then generally applied to any woman who called herself a feminist. Plenty of fundamentalists are still doing that today.
Such as individuals like this? I'm constantly reminded of the mass stupidity that takes place on Youtube...
Megabot wrote:Such as individuals like this? I'm constantly reminded of the mass stupidity that takes place on Youtube...
That guy's points would be (mostly) reasonable if applied solely to the extremists. There are of course ultra-feminist man-hating nutjobs out there and they do tend to shout quite loudly. But they're only a tiny fraction of the movement. Conservatives do all this all the time when criticising 'liberals' (i.e. anyone who doesn't agree with them); they pick out the worst nutjobs they can find and then act as if everyone else who cares about the issue is just as bad. To be fair, no political group is immune to this behaviour, conservatives are just far quicker to resort to it and more practiced at doing so.
P.S. What is the point of these idiotic videos where the author just reads out an essay they're written? I'm not wasting time with that, I just skimmed the transcript. The very first comment sums up the mindset of this group;
Starglider wrote:That guy's points would be (mostly) reasonable if applied solely to the extremists. There are of course ultra-feminist man-hating nutjobs out there and they do tend to shout quite loudly. But they're only a tiny fraction of the movement. Conservatives do all this all the time when criticising 'liberals' (i.e. anyone who doesn't agree with them); they pick out the worst nutjobs they can find and then act as if everyone else who cares about the issue is just as bad. To be fair, no political group is immune to this behaviour, conservatives are just far quicker to resort to it and more practiced at doing so.
The problem with conservatives is that their extremists are much closer to their mainstream. Ann Coulter, for example, is a raving extremist nutjob, but her positions are really only slightly exaggerated compared to mainstream conservatism. So they have a jolly old time blasting liberals by associating them with extremists, and liberals have much more cause to do the same but they end up getting painted with the same brush as a result.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
Here's a rather more sickening / blackly humourous antifeminist screed. It has a series of 'shocking facts' that come up; one of them is 'Some women love their children more than their husbands'. I should hope so! The next one is 'Before women had the vote the tax rate was 1% and the divorce rate was 7%'. Yes, you read that correctly, female emancipation is directly responsible for taxes and divorce. It degenerates from there into trying to 'prove feminists suck at maths and are trying to create more lesbians'. The author tops it up by stating that 'teenage pregnancy, alcohol and drug abuse, and 85% of criminals come from single-mother families...' (which all feminists apparently hold up as the ideal). There's some random anti-European sentiment tossed in there for good measure as well, presumably because Europe was the original cradle of all evil liberalism.
Darth Wong wrote:I love the way conservative assholes blame feminism for single mothers, as if feminism caused the phenomenon of deadbeat dads.
But I suppose that when you don't know how to keep a woman happy, you cannot conceive of any way to hold onto one except through oppressive force.
There is also the fact that many of the ¨fathers¨ are young guys usualy out of High School and not all that experienced with the world. They don't think about the consequences of their actions. For the rest of them as in the older folks there is a large number of factors from economic to social things. I doubt all that makes any sense though. Whatever the problem is, there will always be people blaming everything else. So they blame a large group for their ineptitude.
Long live the Great Tokyo Empire!
Long live Akira!
Santiago wrote:There is also the fact that many of the ¨fathers¨ are young guys usualy out of High School and not all that experienced with the world. They don't think about the consequences of their actions.
They don't think about the consequences of their actions because we do not expect them to. This is the result of the self-indulgence and infantilization of our youth.
Why do we look at a guy who's 19 years old and assume that he cannot understand the concept of responsibility? When I was that age, I was paying my own way through university.
Why aren't NBA stars publicly scorned for their infamous deadbeat-dad behaviour? Why isn't someone's personal reputation ruined if he doesn't support his offspring properly? Why don't people shun him, spit at him in the street, avoid making eye contact, etc., the way they treated disgraced people in the past?
As I said, we don't expect responsibility, so people find it easier to avoid it.
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
Why aren't NBA stars publicly scorned for their infamous deadbeat-dad behaviour? Why isn't someone's personal reputation ruined if he doesn't support his offspring properly? Why don't people shun him, spit at him in the street, avoid making eye contact, etc., the way they treated disgraced people in the past?
As I said, we don't expect responsibility, so people find it easier to avoid it.
Of course it doesn't help that you have such a high percentage of idiot parents in the US deliberately trying to STOP many useful preventatives like, oh let's say information on birth control? Comprehensive sex education and condom distribution would be an excellent start everywhere, but of course THAT would be immoral.
You have to realize that most Christian "moral values" behaviour is not really about "protecting" anyone; it's about their desire to send a continual stream of messages of condemnation towards people whose existence offends them. - Darth Wong alias Mike Wong
"There is nothing wrong with being ignorant. However, there is something very wrong with not choosing to exchange ignorance for knowledge when the opportunity presents itself."
Why aren't NBA stars publicly scorned for their infamous deadbeat-dad behaviour? Why isn't someone's personal reputation ruined if he doesn't support his offspring properly? Why don't people shun him, spit at him in the street, avoid making eye contact, etc., the way they treated disgraced people in the past?
As I said, we don't expect responsibility, so people find it easier to avoid it.
Of course it doesn't help that you have such a high percentage of idiot parents in the US deliberately trying to STOP many useful preventatives like, oh let's say information on birth control? Comprehensive sex education and condom distribution would be an excellent start everywhere, but of course THAT would be immoral.
Even leaving aside sexual puritanism, deadbeat fatherhood is simply not treated with the kind of scorn it deserves. Beat or molest a kid and you're a scumbag who needs to be sodomized with a hot curling iron, but neglect a kid and fuck up his whole life? You're O-TAY!
"It's not evil for God to do it. Or for someone to do it at God's command."- Jonathan Boyd on baby-killing
"you guys are fascinated with the use of those "rules of logic" to the extent that you don't really want to discussus anything."- GC
"I do not believe Russian Roulette is a stupid act" - Embracer of Darkness
"Viagra commercials appear to save lives" - tharkûn on US health care.
Even leaving aside sexual puritanism, deadbeat fatherhood is simply not treated with the kind of scorn it deserves. Beat or molest a kid and you're a scumbag who needs to be sodomized with a hot curling iron, but neglect a kid and fuck up his whole life? You're O-TAY!
I also seem to find an attitude that hints toward blaming the female more because she didn't use birth control. There seems to be almost this suggestion that if she wasn't stupid enough to get pregnant, then she "trapped" the boy into this unwanted situation.
Of course it's ridiculous and both are equally responsible, but I swear people tend to hold to the "blame the female" attitude. This probably plays a part in their leniency towards the fathers.
You have to realize that most Christian "moral values" behaviour is not really about "protecting" anyone; it's about their desire to send a continual stream of messages of condemnation towards people whose existence offends them. - Darth Wong alias Mike Wong
"There is nothing wrong with being ignorant. However, there is something very wrong with not choosing to exchange ignorance for knowledge when the opportunity presents itself."
Even leaving aside sexual puritanism, deadbeat fatherhood is simply not treated with the kind of scorn it deserves. Beat or molest a kid and you're a scumbag who needs to be sodomized with a hot curling iron, but neglect a kid and fuck up his whole life? You're O-TAY!
I also seem to find an attitude that hints toward blaming the female more because she didn't use birth control. There seems to be almost this suggestion that if she wasn't stupid enough to get pregnant, then she "trapped" the boy into this unwanted situation.
Of course it's ridiculous and both are equally responsible, but I swear people tend to hold to the "blame the female" attitude. This probably plays a part in their leniency towards the fathers.
Well to be fair, a woman that knows she doesn't have the resources to properly care for a child does have more opportunities to opt out then a man. Does this excuse deadbeat fathers? Of course not but a woman does get +1 more options then a man does for birth control. She can:
1) Not have sex
2) Use birthcontrol
and 3) Have an abortion.
Only 2/3 of those are available for the man. Deadbeat fathers are scum, but idiot teenage mothers that think "it can't be that hard" are only marginally better.
"If I were two-faced, would I be wearing this one? "
-Abraham Lincoln
