By Otis Fulton, PhD
My wife, Katrina, and I were recently talking about two news stories that got under her skin.
The first is relatively light. Comedian Shane Gillis, hosting Saturday Night Live, referred to women wearing revealing workout clothes as “whores.” He went on to complain that men aren’t supposed to look at those women, apparently finding it unreasonable that women might dress however they please without inviting unwanted attention. I’d like to believe he was just playing a character, but I’m not so sure.
The second story concerned Cornell University, where a former student accused seven former fraternity members of drugging and gang-raping her in 2024. The accused men have denied wrongdoing, and the legal process is ongoing.
Katrina was disgusted by the SNL schtick, and I suspect the Cornell news had already put her in no mood to tolerate this kind of crap. After directing a few choice words at the television, she turned to me and asked, “Why do men hate women?”
I’m a social psychologist, which means my wife occasionally expects me to explain why human beings behave so badly. In that moment, I also represented men generally. Unfortunately, graduate school didn’t give me a satisfactory answer to her question. I avoided eye contact, nodded gravely, and muttered, “It’s so bad.”
I’ve been thinking about Katrina’s question ever since. I suspect there’s something about women’s power to accept or reject men’s sexual advances that helps explain why so many men resent them.
What Happens When You Put a Bunch of Men Together?
I played college basketball at the University of Virginia in the late 1970s, including starting at center on the school’s first ACC championship team in 1976. For several years, I was part of a fairly exclusive brotherhood of very tall young men whose lives revolved around basketball.
We bonded through the shared misery of practices, the relentless travel schedule, and the injuries that seemed to be a permanent feature of college basketball. Over a seven-month season, it felt like you were always rehabilitating something or icing your sore joints. There were the vitamin B shots, big syringes of red fluid injected into your butt to keep your energy up.
A basketball team is an interesting social environment. You compete for playing time and status while depending on the very people you’re competing against. Your teammates become an important part of your identity, and their approval matters. You learn the group’s expectations pretty quickly, including the ones nobody bothers to explain.
I learned just how far young men will go to belong when I was a high school senior on a basketball recruiting trip to a Big 10 university. My host, a senior basketball player at the school, took me to an athletic fraternity, where I discovered a wading pool full of small salamanders in the basement. The pledges were eating them alive, sliding them down their throats headfirst. I have no idea what eating live salamanders was supposed to demonstrate, beyond a willingness to do almost anything to be accepted by the other guys. I wasn’t particularly impressed with what that university had to offer.
That experience gave me an appreciation for just how much other men’s approval can matter to young men. And it taught me something important about how misogyny can manifest.
The objectification of women can be a form of male bonding.
Think about men making sexual comments about women in front of other men. They may be talking about women, but they're performing for one another. The real audience is the other men. Consider catcalling: I doubt many men seriously expect a woman to respond favorably to being yelled at from a passing car, but the behavior makes more sense when you consider the possibility that the intended audience is actually the other men in the car.
When crude remarks about women earn the approval of other men, joining in becomes a way to demonstrate that you belong. A man who objects risks being ridiculed for being weak or insufficiently masculine. And in some groups, the pressure to conform may extend to tolerating or even encouraging aggression toward women.
Strengthening group bonds by disparaging outsiders isn’t a particularly male activity. Humans of any group are quite accomplished at that. But women occupy a peculiar position in some male groups. They're treated as outsiders while simultaneously being expected to provide the sexual validation that helps establish a man's standing within the group. When sexual entitlement enters the picture, that contradiction can have ugly consequences.
Men will apparently bond over just about anything, including eating salamanders. Objectifying women is another way men can establish their membership in a group. But that still leaves Katrina’s question unanswered. Why do some men come to resent, even hate, the very women whose attention and affection they desperately want?
The Problem with Women Having a Vote
Some men seem to evaluate virtually every woman they encounter according to whether they find her sexually attractive. Her intelligence, humor, and accomplishments become secondary to a more pressing consideration: Would I want to have sex with her?
That creates a real power problem for men. Even when a man finds a woman desirable, she gets a say in whether a sexual encounter or a relationship happens. In fact, she gets the deciding vote. A man can be wealthy, powerful, handsome, and successful, and a woman can still look at him and think, “No thanks.” She might not feel safe saying it out loud. Throughout history, and still today, women have faced consequences for rejecting men, sometimes including violence. A man may be able to use force or intimidation to override her refusal, but even then, he cannot make her genuinely want him.
And when a man measures his worth by whether the women he desires want him in return, he’s placed something central to his self-esteem entirely outside of his control.
Think about the historical irony. Men have spent centuries controlling governments, businesses, religions, and the laws governing women’s lives. But there’s one thing they’ve never been able to control, no matter how much authority they exercised over women's lives: whether women desired them. I believe that explains much of the hostility men have directed toward women over the centuries.
When Rejection Becomes a Personal Insult
Psychologists Joseph Vandello and Jennifer Bosson have studied precarious manhood, the idea that manhood is a status men must continually prove, and one they can lose.
Sexual success has traditionally been one way men demonstrate that status. Boys learn early that attracting women confers standing among other boys, while rejection can be humiliating. Now imagine a man whose masculine identity depends heavily on being sexually desirable. When a woman rejects him, he may see it as a threat to his identity rather than a simple disappointment. Instead of questioning his expectations, he may decide there’s something wrong with the woman who rejected him. He may think, “Stupid,” “fat,” “whore,” or “probably a gold digger.”
Psychologists Peter Glick and Susan Fiske developed the concept of ambivalent sexism. This distinguishes between “hostile sexism” and “benevolent sexism,” the seemingly positive attitudes toward women who conform to traditional gender expectations. The two frequently coexist. A man who believes women deserve to be cherished and protected may become hostile when they refuse to accept the roles he's assigned them.
We see this at work in Katrina’s extended family in rural southern Virginia. Women who embrace traditional gender roles are admired, while those who challenge them risk being dismissed as “mouthy,” “uppity,” or “thinking they’re all that.”
I remember a family picnic down there when everyone was ready to eat, but my brothers-in-law were still out fishing. My mother-in-law offered to say the blessing. Apparently, that wasn’t an option. The suggestion was met with stunned silence. Then we heard a three-wheeler coming up the driveway. As if in answer to a different prayer, someone exclaimed, “It’s Bobby! Bobby can give the prayer!” So, the matriarch of the family sat down while a male neighbor blessed the meal.
A woman who welcomes a man’s romantic interest may reinforce his masculine identity. But when she rejects him, his admiration can evaporate remarkably quickly. She’s violated the terms of an agreement she never knew she’d entered into.
Psychologists have also studied rejection sensitivity and sexual entitlement, two characteristics that may help explain why some men respond to rejection with hostility. Consider the difference between a man who finds rejection disappointing and one who considers it unfair. Both may feel hurt, but the second believes he’s been denied something he’s entitled to. His disappointment has become a grievance, and grievances can be remarkably useful when you're looking for someone to blame.
Which brings me back to the allegations at Cornell. We don’t know what motivated the accused men, or whether they committed the acts that are alleged. But the case raises a disturbing question about what can happen when a group’s ideas about masculinity, sexual entitlement, and loyalty reinforce each other.
When Resentment Finds an Audience
A man whose sense of masculine worth depends on being desired by women is vulnerable to rejection. He may resent women for having the power to judge him, especially when their judgment isn’t what he hoped for. Now put that man in a group where sexual conquest confers status, and where other men are willing to excuse or even celebrate aggression toward women. His resentment has found a sympathetic audience, and expressing it may actually improve his standing with the very men whose approval he wants.
Most men experience rejection without becoming hostile toward women, and most male groups don’t encourage or condone sexual violence. But I suspect that when sexual entitlement and resentment find encouragement within a group, the consequences can be particularly ugly.
As someone who spent some of the most formative years of my life on a men’s basketball team, I learned how powerful the bonds between men can become. But those same bonds can reinforce some pretty awful behavior, depending on what the group considers permissible.
Men have a responsibility for what they encourage and tolerate among other men. We shouldn’t expect women to solve problems that arise from our own expectations of them. And perhaps the most important thing we can teach boys is that a woman’s freedom to reject them isn’t an injustice.
You can force someone to obey you. You cannot force someone to want you.
Otis Fulton, PhD, is a social psychologist who has spent much of his career exploring how human behavior is shaped by identity, belonging, and the need for approval. He and his wife, Katrina VanHuss, are semi-retired in Richmond, Virginia, where they write about the peculiar things human beings do and why they do them.
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