Re: Article: Men Just Don't Trust Women

[kath]

Anyone know if that sort of data is available / reliable?

(er, but the part about women being biased against themselves is based on my experience / stories of the experiences of many others)

(data about how must straight couples trust eachother would also help if we were trying to make an iron-clad case one way or the other. My point was more that if the phenomenon of men not trusting women is accepted in a "general" sense, there's no particular reason to assume romantic relationships would be an excluded case)

[PintsizeBro]

I don't think such information is available, because until recently nobody cared to study same-sex couples at all. It just struck me as the most straightforward way to test for misogyny while keeping as many other factors as possible consistent. Ideally I'd want to compare straight men to gay men (because they're both men) as well as to lesbian women (because they're both in relationships with women). If you know of any funding grants, let me know.

The documented reason I would give that romantic relationships might be an excluded case is that other kinds of relationships do have an effect. Male CEOs and judges who have daughters treat women better (as a group, not just their own families) than male CEOs and judges who have no children or only sons.

[kath]

Re availability, yeah, but I guess if anyone is likely to have people who know what info is out there, it's here! When I'm less crazy I might see if I can do any digging.

But interestingly, with the example of the documented case you provide, it would seem (though this wasn't one of the variables being evaluated, but drawing from that info you've presented) that romantic relationships aren't likely to have an effect. Because while judges with daughters might treat women better, certainly at least both the judges with daughters and the judges with sons had some type of relationship with some woman at some point, if they have children to show for it. And the judges with only sons apparently treat women somewhat comparably to judges who don't (and therefore quite likely, but possibly not, have had some sort of relationship with a woman).

Obviously, though, I'm talking about a short quote of some research I haven't read, and it's research that isn't actually comparing behavior of men with differing types of relationships with significant others, so it couldn't be taken as "proof" either - I just don't think it's much of a potential refutation.

Especially since, with the sociocultural messages that occur in many different cultures about how men should be heads of their households, and people women are actually likely to experience violence from (often their significant others) ... men not respecting their partners I don't think can be assumed to be down to wanting to be right instead of an impact of social narratives that we're already discussing having an impact on non-romantic-partner relationships. Especially with the social narrative of family dynamics that we may not personally experience on a day to day basis, but that has been considered the 'natural order of things' for so long, and that many of us have likely seen play out in the lives of people we know and our family members, if not in our own.

Actually, funnily - and not to accuse anyone of specifically doing this here and now - but it's sort of interesting ponder the idea of  men doubting that the bias would exist within relationship, because that's an example of distrusting women's accounts of their experience. There are so many personal stories of women's experience where they aren't trusted within a relationship. Generally, in my experience, they're not supplied in a different context / from a different prompt from stories of men not trusting women they aren't in a relationship with, which might actually indicate that women are thinking about this as both being impacts of societal norms, rather than  totally distinct cases.

The potential argument of "I agree that women are not, in general, trusted by men ... but I'm not going to trust women who think this happens in relationships as well, because people like to be right" is pretty comical.

(it's possible that "domestic issues" just meant "who's doing the housework" ... but eh, I still think it's pretty the men-trusting-women dynamic permeates a lot of stuff so that it would be a contributing factor to that disagreement as well, on a general scale, though not to the same extent for all / in all cases)

[PintsizeBro]

That's a good point that judges/CEOs with sons have the same relationships with at least one woman as judges/CEOs with daughters. There certainly isn't a direct connection between that issue and this one, it's more food for thought than anything else. I know parenting changes the brain in some profoundly weird ways, more so than having a romantic relationship does (though there are also brain changes that happen there).

I also think that we should study same-sex relationships for their own sake, not just for the light they can shed on opposite-sex relationships. But comparing and contrasting would definitely be interesting. My brain is spinning off in all the different directions that we could go with this, but that strikes me as a little off-topic.

I would be really interested for any bi women to weigh in on listening and trust in their relationships with women vs their relationships with men, though.

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