The panic over Tarzan, Jane and Cheetah
by digby
Ronald Reagan apparently had his finger on the pulse of 2013 when he said
“A hippie is someone who looks like Tarzan, walks like Jane, and smells like Cheetah”
People hate women and men who other men think are like women. And they hate them so much they even assume they smell bad. Seriously:
Why don’t people behave in more environmentally friendly ways? New research presents one uncomfortable answer: They don’t want to be associated with environmentalists.
That’s the conclusion of troubling new research from Canada, which similarly finds support for feminist goals is hampered by a dislike of feminists.
Participants held strongly negative stereotypes about such activists, and those feelings reduced their willingness “to adopt the behaviors that these activities promoted,” reports a research team led by University of Toronto psychologist Nadia Bashir. This surprisingly cruel caricaturing, the researchers conclude, plays “a key role in creating resistance to social change.”
Writing in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Bashir and her colleagues describe a series of studies documenting this dynamic. They began with three pilot studies, which found people hold stereotyped views of environmentalists and feminists.
In one, the participants—228 Americans recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—described both varieties of activists in “overwhelmingly negative” terms. The most frequently mentioned traits describing “typical feminists” included “man-hating” and “unhygienic;” for “typical environmentalists,” they included “tree-hugger” and “hippie.”
People who want to change things are often hated. Change isn’t easy. Squeaky wheel and all that.
And anyway judging from the caricatured stereotypes here, which seem to have arrived via comic book, these “feelings” are all about sexual insecurity which is very hard to overcome. Hippies are considered to be effeminate men and feminists are considered to be masculine women. This patriarchal panic is the underlying basis of The Reactionary Mind and they’ve spent a lot of time and energy demonizing this threat to their dominance.
Feminists and hippie environmentalists unite — accept being hated and do what you have to do. Being popular isn’t required.
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