Benevolent Sexism

Sexism itself is discrimination against or oppression of one gender, typically by granting certain privileges to one gender but not the other.  But it has different manifestations of differing severity and impact.  Benevolent sexism occurs when people practice a sexism without overt hostility, only one with subtle or seemingly "kind" sexism, and this type usually gets contrasted with hostile sexism.  Denying women (or men) the legal right to vote would be an example of hostile sexism, while an example of benevolent sexism is treating women (or men) with an extra kindness, withheld from the other gender, just because they are women (once again, or men).  Benevolent sexism, just like hostile sexism, is not compatible with gender equality, and I will show why.

It is clear to me based on my recalled experience that benevolent sexism exists, most often manifesting itself in the form of women being regularly praised for certain things for which men are not (at least not on a basis with the same regularity), like physical beauty or tenderness.  There is nothing wrong with men holding doors open for women--it can be a gesture of the love for other humans that Scripture thoroughly demands--but telling men that they have a special obligation to hold doors open for women is illogical and foreign to the Bible.  I have seen one girl from my school (I swear, people at HBU have said some truly irrational things) say that practices like this very one preserve social order, to which I laughed and scoffed, for people like her appeal to emotions, popularity, and tradition in order to keep things as they are instead of pursuing consistency and reason.  I guess society would just collapse if we dropped this practice or applied it consistently!  Something like this becomes benevolent sexism unless it is applied consistently to both genders.  Men and women can open doors for other people simply because they are human beings, not because they belong to a certain gender and therefore deserve preferential treatment.

I would hope that Christians, of all people, would see the error of making extra-Biblical, fallacious judgments about men and women that elevate one over the other in totally arbitrary or false ways.  And yet I unfortunately see many Christians in my life perpetuating stereotypes about men and women that sometimes involve benevolent sexism.  For instance, I have seen Christians agree that women are more beautiful than men and that they deserve special acknowledgment for this, when the Bible itself teaches otherwise [1] and there is no rational basis whatsoever for believing in such a thing (value judgments, including aesthetics, are totally subjective and the result of subjective perceptions or societal conditioning [2]).  In this case, to praise one gender someone who believes this nonsense has to put the other one down by comparison, even if it is presented as a benevolent thing.  The very Bible they believe actually describes the beauty of male and female bodies and never indicates that the beauty of one is intrinsically greater than another (this is also usually attached to the hilariously unsound belief that men are "visual" and women are not, but I've dismantled that absurdity before).

Benevolent sexism can lead to more severe hostile sexism by, once accepted, contributing to an environment where sexism of worse types can appear more easily.  For example, the fact that my society fallaciously judges women as beautiful and men to not possess equal beauty often corresponds greatly to the way my society sexualizes many non-sexual things about women (when the only thing that is truly sexual in and of itself is sexual activity) and encourages the myth that men are helplessly visually attracted to many or all women and cannot control themselves.  This, in turn, often gets accompanied by the generation of false stereotypes that damage both men and women.

Another example will return us to examining the practice of men holding doors open for women.  The atmosphere encouraged by such a practice normalizes the providing of special advantages of this type to women, which in turn can encourage quite a bit of obvious sexism against men--such as the belief that men should always be ready to sacrifice themselves for women by doing things like giving women the lifeboats on a sinking vessel or protect their families by putting themselves in danger.  There is no logical or Biblical basis whatsoever for encouraging inconsistent, sexist, and arbitrary practices like this.  Instead of saying that men and women should all be ready to sacrifice themselves for each other regardless of gender, this embodies sexism.  But it gets advertised as something good and respectful.

Logic ends up not only completely eroding the grounds for belief in these "benevolent" sexist beliefs, but it also demonstrates that many of them are false or at total odds with both the commands and spirit of Christian morality as dictated by the Bible.  No, benevolent sexism is not as severe as "hostile sexism".  But it is still sexism.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2016/12/the-beauty-of-both-genders.html

[2].  I did not say that values are subjective, only that the judgments people often make about them, left to themselves, are.  There is a huge difference between a kind of postmodern skepticism about value claims and relativism or nihilism about value claims.  But even the Bible does not make any value claims except about morality, leaving things like aesthetics unknown to us.