Besides institutional stands, resistance and opposition to gender equality can assume several forms among individuals, from behaviors and attitudes in the daily interactions in the private life as well as in workplaces and in the public sphere, both offline and online.
Issues concerning gender equality, as for example opinions concerning gender roles, recently became a matter of public opinion polarization. In addition to polarization trends, recent research points out that views challenging the democratic essence of the principle of gender equality or that clearly express antifeminism, started to spread across social groups, especially among young men. How to explain these dynamics?
Such forms of resistance and opposition to gender equality can be interpreted as a response to real or perceived challenges to existing power hierarchies, expressed by members of privileged groups (men) who seek to restore their position of power - and ultimately increase it - desiring and acting for a return to the "good old days" when conditions of inequality were widely approved by society. To better understand this mechanism, this study aims to disentangle, both theoretically and empirically, the role played by gender resentment and ressentiment two connected but different emotional dynamics. For this purpose, ad-hoc survey instruments have been developed.
The contribution addresses the conceptual differences between gender resentment, a specific expression of hostile sexism that foments the idea that women would be undeservedly favored, and ressentiment, an emotional mechanism in which, along with the emotions of envy and shame, the emotion of resentment is also included. The ressentiment mechanism can turn into deep misogyny by fueling the outburst of negative emotions toward women. Building on previous studies, instruments to capture anti-feminist views, gender resentment and ressentiment have been tested in a preliminary survey in the context of the project MEN4DEM (Masculinities for the future of European democracy – Horizon Europe, GA n. 101177356). The contribution presents the assessment of these measurements (e.g., validity, reliability, comparability) and their potential interconnection.
