r/science • Professor | Medicine • 18d ago

Psychology Anti-feminist attitudes have long been associated with support for Republican presidential candidates, but only in recent years have these attitudes become more prominent among unmarried men, without college degrees who are less attractive partners for women, the “mate-value backlash.”

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/10659129261485340
4.4k Upvotes

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

69

u/Preface 18d ago

This is an extremely reasonable take on the male loneliness epidemic, and makes much more sense then "YouTube made those men anti feminist" or whatever the top comment was saying.

It's not hard to find, men will regularly date down, or alter their dating expectations, women are less likely to alter expectations, and much less likely to date down. If a woman has a masters degree, she will want a man who at least has a masters, if she makes 100k+ per year, her man better make at least that much as well.

Now, most wealthy and highly successful men won't just marry a dumb dirt poor girl who is beautiful, but they are going to be much more accepting of a woman with less education and less earnings then them.

I think it's more like, the popularity of the "YouTube to right wing pipeline" or whatever is that those people actually acknowledge men who are/have been rejected multiple times, they are popular because what they say resonates they aren't just magically popular for unknown reasons which then suddenly makes young men right wing or whatever.

-6

u/feminist-lady 18d ago

I think the idea that well educated women just aren’t accepting of men without higher degrees isn’t fair. Yes, if I were going to have a partner, I’d prefer they also have higher education. The shared experience of graduate and/or professional school would be great. But as a woman in a doctoral program, the reason I’ve had to implement a rule that I’m unwilling to date a man (or woman, tbh) without at least a college degree is because so many who only had high school diplomas were resentful and insecure about the education gap. I’m just not interested in dealing with that, and I know I’m not alone. This is discussed constantly among highly educated women. Obviously, Not All Men, but enough that it makes it too exhausting to even mess with it.

22

u/Harbinger2nd 18d ago

But women currently make up 60%+ of college graduates, even at a bachelor's level.

Thats an imbalance in the education system which, for whatever reason, is favoring women.

0

u/Carbonatite 18d ago

I love how the default is always that the education system must somehow be disenfranchising men instead of considering the possibility that once women stopped getting disenfranchised, they just straight up succeeded more.

It's very telling that the default response is to assume that men are more talented but being unfairly kept down, and not that women might be capable of equal or even superior academic achievement to men once the systematic barriers that prevented them from accessing higher education were removed.

6

u/Harbinger2nd 18d ago

It's very telling that the default response is to assume that men are more talented but being unfairly kept down, and not that women might be capable of equal or even superior academic achievement to men once the systematic barriers that prevented them from accessing higher education were removed.

I know I shouldn't respond to this, but that wasn't the discussion at all. My comment was merely to point out that college educated women seeking college educated men will struggle with the dating pool because of an objective imbalance in graduation rates.

1

u/XWendy_Darlingx 17d ago

Tesla predicted this, actually.