Behind The Science: Women’s Generalized Fear Towards Men: A Learned Principle
Interviewee: Anahita Seraji | Authors/Editors: Romina Garcia de leon, Shayda Swann (Blog Co-coordinators)
Published: June 7th, 2024
Can you tell us more about your research?
My research focuses on women’s generalized fear of men. It is meant to address the #NotAllMen and #YesAllWomen debate that was going on a few years ago, where the #NotAllMen debate says that not all men are trying to hurt women. Not all men are a source of fear. The #YesAllWomen debate says, ‘Yes, that’s true. However, women continue to experience a generalized fear towards all men, regardless.’ What I tried to do with my research was to use behavioral learning principles, like fear conditioning and stimulus generalization, as well as operant conditioning to address three main questions. Why do women become fearful of men? Why are women’s fears generalized towards all men? For instance, why is it that when you’re walking down the street and a man walks by, you assume that man to be a threat? And then, how does the patriarchy utilize women’s fears to reinforce a prescribed social role? This question addresses the bigger picture of how, for example, fear reduction strategies that have been implemented in policies today, which are mostly focused on behavioral guidelines for women like “wear this, don’t go out at that time, have like a whistle on you.” They normalize women’s fears instead of actually addressing the root cause.
How did you get involved in this field of research?
I was inspired by my personal experience. I’m a fifth-year biology undergraduate at UBC, and when I started living on campus as an undergraduate student I started hearing a lot more stories of women’s experiences. I was also having more experiences of, for example, getting cat-called. I’ve also always had a really big passion for feminist work, psychology, and women’s health. So one day, I was sitting after a psychology class I was taking, and I felt like everything clicked for me: women have been conditioned throughout time to behave a certain way. And our fears are being used to control us and to force us into this prescribed social role within the patriarchy. And then everything else followed from that. I hope this work can inform both men and women about the power dynamic that’s going on here, help empower women, and help men become more aware of their impact and how they can.
What research projects are you working on now?
I’m currently hoping to do some form of research on IUD pain management. I volunteer with Access BC, which is a campaign that helped us get access to free prescription contraception in British Columbia last April. That’s a huge win for us. I’m really happy to have been part of that, but I realized that although IUDs are available, we still have a lot of women who are hesitant to get an IUD because we don’t have adequate pain management. I hope that my future research can focus on ways to try and implement women’s pain management during the IUD insertion and removal procedures so that we start actually taking women’s pains in healthcare seriously. We need to stop brushing it aside, saying, ‘Oh, it’s 10 minutes, or you’ll be fine’ or ‘You can give birth; this is nothing’. We don’t need to cause any more harm and we have the capacity to administer medications, so that’s exactly what we should be doing.
What impact do you hope to see with your work?
if I can inspire a single person to make a difference through my work, that is a win for me. That’s all I could ask for. Ultimately, I would really love to see my work cause systemic change and inspire policy change. My interest in women’s health has inspired me to pursue medicine. I’m very much interested in women’s health in the sense of pursuing medicine. I would love to have that impact of systemic change because it’s 2024 and the older I get and the more time I spend doing this type of research, the more I get shocked that we’re still not in a place where we need to be when it comes to women’s health. And I think it’s time that we have change at a larger scale so that no woman has to ever worry about dealing with excessive fear, pain, or anything else of that sort. I really hope that my work can contribute to that.
