British Social Attitudes Survey - UnHerd

Who’s afraid of the feminists?

Tom Chivers — Wed, 17 Jul 2019 13:18:12 +0000

A new YouGov poll, commissioned by the charity HOPE Not Hate, finds that 33% of people agree with the statement “Feminism is to blame for making some men feel marginalised and demonised in society”.

The actual polling is not online, for some reason, but it’s been covered in the press and the charity sent me their report. It finds that significant percentages of every age group, including 33% of 18- to 24-year-olds, agrees that feminism makes some men feel marginalised. More men (42%) than women agreed, but a quarter of women did too. The charity themselves described it as “staggering”, and linked it to far-right YouTubers.

You might find it surprising, given that – on gender equality, as with almost all measures of social attitudes – Britain has, for decades, been getting more liberal. The 2018 British Social Attitudes survey shows that, in 1984, 43% agreed and just 37% disagreed with the statement “a man’s job is to earn money, a woman’s job is to look after the home and family”. By 2017, those numbers had changed to 8% and 72% respectively. Shifts towards more liberal, feminist attitudes are seen in all groups – older, younger, male, female. Sometimes men have more “feminist” attitudes than women: for instance, men are more likely than women to say that it is “always” or “usually” wrong for men to comment on women’s appearance in the street.

Do men want sex more than women?

By Tom Chivers

You can see how far modern attitudes have come in a major 2016 survey by Survation for the Fawcett Society, which found that 83% of Britons support “equality of opportunity for women” – again, more among men (86%) than women (81%). There were more ‘don’t knows’ among women, which may explain the discrepancy.

A 2015 YouGov poll found very similar results: 81% of Britons polled thought that men and women should be treated “equally in every way” (including 75% of UKIP voters!)

How toxic masculinity is tied to terrorism

By Joan Smith

So how does that fit with the idea that a third of the population thinks that feminism is making men feel demonised? Well: easily, I’d say. That Survation/Fawcett Society poll – which, remember, found that 83% of people support “equality of opportunity for women”, surely the key goal of feminism – found that just 7% of people “describe themselves” as feminist. The 2015 YouGov poll found a higher number, 31%, who would “consider” themselves a feminist, but it’s still a definite minority. Another YouGov one in 2018 found 26%.

If you ask people whether they think that there is probably or definitely still a need for feminism, the numbers are higher, according to YouGov – 53% in 2015, 49% in 2018 (it may look like it’s going down but I’d imagine it’s within the margin for error), compared to 30% and 31% who say there probably or definitely isn’t. But still, there’s a huge gap between the number of people who actively agree with the key aims of feminism and the number who’ll actually call themselves a feminist.

That suggests to me that “feminism”, the label, and “gender equality”, the ideal, have become separated in people’s minds. Might that be because there’s a debate over whether men can really be feminists? It took me all of five seconds to find a feminist magazine declaring that men can be allies but they cannot be feminists.

But while that may be part of the answer, it can’t really be the whole thing, because while more women are significantly more likely than men to call themselves feminist, it’s still very much a minority. According to the Fawcett Society, 9% of women called themselves feminist, compared to 4% of men. The YouGov polls found that 35% (2015) and 34% (2018) of women called themselves “feminist”, compared to 27% and 18% of men.

(I’m just going to stop here and note that the drop from 27% to 18% is large, and I am surprised by it, given the small changes elsewhere and the general positive trend; I still suspect polling artefact to some degree, but it may represent a real change among men.)

The inescapable misogyny of the modern world

By Tanya Gold

My own suspicion, for what it’s worth, is that while “gender equality” is an ideal that is easy to get behind, “feminism” is a label that is attached to specific, identifiable people. And, because any large group of people contains at least some who are stupid and/or unpleasant, some prominent people to whom the label “feminist” is regularly attached will be stupid and/or unpleasant. One hates to call out individuals in this situation, although I will link to this with no further comment.

More generally, even if you’re not mentally associating feminism with the most extreme or unpleasant people who call themselves feminists, you still associate it with individuals, with whom you may or may not want to identify. A comparable, though not exactly analogous, situation might be conservatism vs Conservatism, or environmentalism vs the Green Party. I imagine a large percentage of people might consider themselves both small-c conservative and environmental, but neither Conservative nor Green.

And from there, it’s a small step to understanding why a lot of people – who might agree with the stated aims of feminism, and think that feminism still has an important role to play – might agree that feminism makes some men feel “marginalised and demonised in society”. They might think that “gender equality” is a noble ideal with which they agree, but that specific people who describe themselves as feminist behave in ways that unfairly single out individuals or attack men as a group.

I don’t particularly think feminists as a group are significantly more prone than many others to doing that. The internet lets us group together and attack each other en masse far more easily. We can unite under a banner of video games, or trans rights, or Remain, or Jeremy Corbyn, and go in our great squads and tear pieces off some random internet person who said some disobliging thing about whatever it is we have written on our banner.

On Twitter, I too become an arse

By Giles Fraser

It is, I think, part of a wider need to signal membership of a group: publicly denouncing someone for heresy is a clear signal that you are pure. I’ve heard some feminists complain that working for gender equality has been partly displaced by this call-out culture, policing public spaces for incorrect language or bad opinions, and that this puts people off feminism as a label. I can entirely believe that that’s the case, although I don’t imagine that it’s unique to feminism; I think it’s probably more common on the Left, but you definitely see it in, say, Trump voters and Brexiters.

In this framework it doesn’t seem all that surprising, or even controversial, that lots of people think that feminism marginalises and demonises some men. Of course, it doesn’t explain all of it – there definitely is an appreciable minority of the British population which consists of good old-fashioned sexists (both among men and women! Some 11% of women, compared to 13% of men, told Survation that gender equality has “gone too far”). And maybe MRA YouTubers are behind a real change. But I don’t think we need worry that we’re backsliding into the Fifties quite yet. Give it until Boris comes in at least.

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Why Polly Toynbee is wrong about God

Freddie Sayers — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 12:10:33 +0000

The trouble with writing anything about religion is that if you’re not religious, like me, you’re not a legitimate voice (what’s it got to do with you?); if you are religious, you’re not a legitimate voice either (you would say that, wouldn’t you?). It’s easier to steer well clear. So this huge, foundational aspect of life is often absent from – or misrepresented in – the media.

The British Social Attitudes survey is the big annual state-of-the-nation report, and this year the headline finding was that for the first time ever, more than half of the country (52%) now sees themselves as totally unreligious. The Church of England has collapsed most spectacularly (only 1% of 18-24 year olds now identify as Anglican, compared to 33% of over-75s) and hard atheism is on the rise, with 26% of the population now saying with confidence that they don’t believe in God, up from 10% 20 years ago.[1. It is worth noting that Britain, and the West more widely, are going against the global trend. Overall, religion is on the rise, with both Christianity and Islam recording bumper increases in recent years.]

This wasn’t the area most newspapers focused on, though. They led with the juicier findings about gender identity and acceptance of gay relationships. The religion stuff was reported neutrally, matter-of-factly, as yet another confirmation of a trend we can’t do anything about. The decline of the Church now sits alongside Capitalism, Globalisation and Technology in the ‘too big to spend time fretting about’ category.

Further reading

Could homophobia be on the rise?

By Douglas Murray

There was one commentator, however, who did find something to say about the report. The Guardian’s Polly Toynbee was delighted with the findings and devoted her column to calling for any remaining role for the Church of England in public decision-making to be finally extinguished. She neatly managed to bring her political views into line with the good forces of rational correctness. “This visceral Brexit war between old and young,” she concluded, “has often felt like a conflict between reason and unreason, between economic fact and emotional national identity. But the BSA report reassuringly finds that beneath the surface of our present turmoil, superstition and unreason are on the retreat.” There was something of the grand inquisitor in her tone, chasing out the last vestiges of the forbidden faiths.

Nor do the authors of the BSA report itself, distinguished social scientists, attempt to hide their conclusion that the collapse in religious belief is a positive development in favour of a more scientific world view. They write that “scientific rationalism and liberal individualism” are taking the space left by religion, and that science and technology offer “an alternative way of interpreting and understanding the world”. The chapter on trust in science and scientists (it’s high) directly follows the chapter on declining religious belief – structurally cementing the idea that the one has been succeeded by the other.

Yet when you look at the questions posed in the survey, they don’t seem to be the most important ones. They are focused on organised religion and its structural role in society – and as such are tilted towards the obvious.

“Looking around the world, religions bring more conflict than peace.” Do you agree? It would be hard for even the most ardent believer to make the case, in this context, that religion had brought more peace than conflict around the world. Or “Do you think that churches and religious organisations in this country have too much power or too little power?” Again, even die-hard Christians are not arguing for a theocracy, or that the Church should be granted new formal constitutional ‘powers’. I’m amazed that as many as 5% chose that option.

Further reading

Charisma will only get you so far

By Elizabeth Oldfield

If we wanted to be good social scientists, we would really be looking past the now-loaded word ‘religion’ to try to understand how these young, almost totally secular generations feel about the existential questions and their place in the universe. Is the picture painted by Polly Toynbee and the BSA authors, of a new generation confidently throwing off the last remaining shackles of religious superstition and marching cheerfully towards their rational futures, borne out by other evidence?

Three months ago, YouGov conducted a survey of 16-24 year olds for the children’s charity, Barnardo’s. In it the young respondents were asked whether they felt, in different ways, life was better or worse for them than it was for their parents’ generation. Overall, they were optimistic, understandably positive about what the modern world offers them in terms of physical health and life expectancy, education opportunities and overall prospects.

The survey didn’t mention the R word, but instead probed a number of aspects of life that religion traditionally had a role in. In this meaning-of-life department they weren’t so sanguine. Only 14% of British young people feel that they are better off than their parents in terms of “having a sense of purpose” (50% think they are worse off); only 13% feel they are better off than their parents in terms of “having a sense of belonging in your community” (59% think they are worse off); and only 11% feel they are better off than their parents in terms of “overall levels of happiness/good mental health” (69% think they are worse off).

Further reading

The truth about Gen Z

By Liza Philby

Now I’m not saying that the decline in religious faith causes these bleak numbers in any simple way, but it seems fair enough to bring them into the same conversation. The “scientific rationalism and liberal individualism” that the BSA report authors celebrate doesn’t seem to be doing such a great job of providing purpose, belonging or peace to young people.

In pure public policy terms, in terms of how we organise our society, it would be hard to think of a more fundamental change in all human history than the collapse of religion over the past 50-odd years. These recent generations are perhaps the first generations ever to be brought up without a meaning-of-life story, without respected elders outside the family to turn to for moral or existential matters, without common sacred rituals that situate them in their community. They are coming of age in a world without part of the architecture that has supported meaningful and fulfilled human lives for millennia. We now ask every young person, essentially, to devise their own moral and spiritual framework; no wonder they are anxious.

It doesn’t mean you want to turn the clock back if you acknowledge the absences left by religion; you don’t have to have faith yourself to recognise the wisdom and beauty of the traditions and the central role they played in our culture. This shouldn’t be an awkward topic that we leave to secular activists and evangelical Christians to battle out; finding ways to mitigate the absence of religion should be a public policy issue. The meaning of life is not a niche subject.

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Could homophobia be on the rise?

Douglas Murray — Fri, 12 Jul 2019 11:57:21 +0000

Liberal-minded people carry around as many presumptions as anyone. But among the most striking is the idea that history goes in one direction; that tomorrow is likely to be better than today; that history is a linear path upwards; and that politics is largely a matter of accruing more and more human rights until such a time as everyone is happy.

The critique of this position is easy to make. It is true that in the period since the 19th century, Western societies in particular have seen a steady increase in standards of living and an increase in the accumulation of personal freedoms. Of course there were at least two very serious interregnums in that steady march – namely World Wars One and Two. And in many non-Western societies (not least central and Eastern Europe during the twentieth century), the idea that history moves in one direction might look especially fanciful.

Still, a version of the progressive fallacy seems almost embedded in the modern Western mind. For such people when a piece of territory is conquered and occupied by liberal attitudes it is then held for all time. It is not hard to see the idea’s attraction. What is hard to see is why it is so little refuted. Or rather, why when evidence emerges for its possible refutation, it is reacted to as though it is no evidence at all.

Further reading

Our illiberal empire of rights

By John Gray

Take the example of gay rights. In the last half a century the situation for gay people in western democracies improved immeasurably. From relations between people of the same sex being illegal in countries such as Britain, we have arrived at a position where gay people are able to marry, where the visibility of gay people in public life has never been greater and where corporations and arms of government positively fall over themselves to demonstrate their commitment to gay rights.

This last element – a positive bragging about a commitment to gay rights (sometimes described as ‘woke capitalism’) – is one that disturbs some of us who do not share the presumptions of inevitable progress. As Pride day has moved into Pride week and now Pride month there has (in the UK at least) emerged a sense of over-reach. This is a personal feeling, obviously, and not one that everybody will share. But I might as well express how it prickles in me.

I was not delighted a couple of years ago when Barclays Bank decided to advertise its commitment to Pride by decking its branches in rainbow colours and adopting the slogan ‘Love happens here’. I don’t especially want ‘Love’ to happen at my bank. I just want them to make it easier to speak to a real person on their phone-lines and employ more people behind the tills in their branches.

Likewise, when stopping at a motorway service station for a sandwich during Pride Month I did not feel my mood massively elevated by seeing that (courtesy of Marks and Spencer) one of the options was an ‘LGBT Sandwich’ (consisting of lettuce, guacamole, bacon and tomato). I got that instinct that I know a number of other gay people feel: something like ‘enough already.’ I don’t need my love life to invade other peoples’ sandwich selection. And I don’t see any remaining homophobes among the heterosexual population being won over by a sandwich whose recipe is concocted by acronym.

The sense of slight over-reach, or over-protesting, in part comes from the sense that some bigger picture may be being missed. And sure enough this year’s newly-released British Social Attitudes Survey gives a good jolt to this instinct.

The dangers of post-truth journalism

By Douglas Murray

For the new BSA report includes an interesting statistic. Over the last 30 years there has been a steady change in attitudes towards gay sex among the majority of the population. In 1987, (when the AIDS crisis was at its height) nine out of 10 people thought that there was something wrong with sexual activity between adults of the same sex. Each year since then the figures have shown an increasing tolerance of same-sex relations.

Until now. At the end of this 30 year movement in one direction, there has been a change. The data suggests acceptance of same-sex relationships has stalled: there has been no significant increase since 2016. The findings this week actually recorded a drop in acceptance levels. While this is within the margin of error, the BSA data does show that the liberalisation of attitudes has, at the very least, decelerated, leaving around a third of the population in some way opposed to gay relationships.

There might be many reasons for this shift. Not all will be caused by an objection to the M+S sandwich counter. But it is striking that in what coverage there has been of this statistic there has been so little desire to go under the stats and look at potential causes.

For instance, in its report, The Guardian decided to cite Ann Widdecombe’s recent comments on science and homosexuality as one potential factor. Which both overstates the likely influence enjoyed by the Brexit Party MEP and ignores the fact that Widdecombe is not some newbie on the British scene.

In the same vein, The Guardian cites Jacob Rees-Mogg of the ERG who has in the past said that he could not support gay marriage for religious reasons (Rees-Mogg is a Catholic).

Of course, it is possible that when Rees-Mogg and Widdecombe make exceedingly infrequent and somewhat reluctant interventions on this subject that they sway a significant and new segment of the British public. But I would think that this overstates things. And in any case, they made these particularly comments after the BSA survey was published. So it’s much more likely is that bigger forces are at play. But what are they?

Further reading

Bigotry dressed as victimhood

By James Bloodworth

Again the press coverage is of little help. But there’s one reason that does spring to mind, which is that the Muslim population of the UK doubled in the last decade and has been expected to double during this one.

Lest this be thought to be the observation of some terrible hater, it is worth mentioning the facts. A poll carried out in the UK 10 years ago found that exactly 0% of British Muslims had ‘tolerance’ for homosexuality. Some research shows that this figure may be shifting. But a survey carried out three years ago for Channel 4 found that a majority of British Muslims wanted being gay to be made illegal in Britain now.

Fully 52% of UK Muslims thought there should be a punishment for homosexuality. Compared with only 5% of the wider population. If one community is growing in size, and that community has 10 times the negative attitudes of the wider community, then it would ordinarily be thought inevitable that there will be some impact on the wider society’s attitudes towards the matter. Either because they influence the views of wider society or because as their proportion among the population increases so the representation of their views increases.

But here we return to that liberal presumption about ground occupied being ground held. Amid the Pride Month celebrations and the woke capitalism and much more, I see no special reason to regard the accumulation of further rights by gay people or any other group in society as being inevitable, even where it is desirable.

Indeed, I can see plenty of reasons to reflect that in the lifetimes of many of us now living, we could see a significant deterioration in public (and eventually political) support for the rights in question. But over the years, I have always been struck by how unnecessarily hard and painful it has been to make this point.

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