Admittedly, it’s hard to believe that many Young Men actually think like that. A third find violence against women acceptable? Half do not want to enter into a relationship with a woman “who has had many sexual partners” – and think that provocative behavior by women should be understood as a request? The results of the Survey by the organization Plan International, which was reported by many media (including the RND) on Sunday, are causing a great deal of excitement. A number of social media users were shocked. Others question the method of the survey. Does she really show what young men think?

Some critics have suggested that the survey among 18 to 35-year-old men has a bias. Wrong examination methods would have distorted the results. For example, the CEO of the innovation and digital agency Ida, Martin Hoffmann, cannot imagine that the respondents named men like Andrew Tate as their personal male role model in an unprompted query – i.e. a question with no predefined answer options. “An indication of a bias in the selection of participants could hardly be clearer”, he tweeted. The intensity of the results contradicts those of other surveys, the journalist Olaf Storbeck also wrote on Twitter.

Plan International responded to Twitter to the criticism and assured that the survey was representative. “In our survey, we paid particular attention to the representativeness of the sample so that our results can be transferred to the population.” The basis for this was the 2021 microcensus for age and region and the 2019 microcensus for school education. The organization also emphasized that it was a survey and not a scientific study, as some media incorrectly called the survey. One is pleased that the survey “has already triggered a social debate”.

Violence against women is increasing

In fact – and not only this survey shows – violence against women, toxic masculinity role models like Andrew Tate and an insecurity and crisis of (young) men are real problems. Every third woman in Germany is a victim of physical and/or sexualized violence in her life, every fourth by her current or former partner, stated the Federal Ministry for Family Affairs last year. And according to figures from the victim support organization “Weißer Ring”. Number of cases of domestic violence increased again nationwide in 2022 – a problem that mainly increased during the Corona lockdown period.

“That’s why I don’t find it surprising at all that the survey results are the same,” says the author and journalist Susanne Kaiser about the survey, according to which 34 percent of the 18 to 35-year-old men surveyed said that they had ever violently attacked women to instill respect in them. “But seeing it again in black and white is still pretty hard,” says Kaiser, who has been writing about masculinity and violence against women for years (“Backlash – the new violence against women”) .

“This willingness to commit to such audacious violence is incredibly chilling”

Commonly, in actual studies and surveys, people tend to provide answers to thorny questions based on social desirability. For example, if you ask people if they watch porn, some will answer “no” to match the supposed socially desirable response behavior – even if they are in fact watching porn. “This willingness to commit to such bold violence is incredibly creepy,” says anti-feminism expert Veronika Kracher, an author and journalist specializing in issues such as misogyny and Incels occupied.

So how is it that many of the men interviewed in a survey make such a statement? Another reason could be that the survey was anonymous. From the point of view of the experts, one of the reasons is that rich men like Donald Trump and Andrew Tate reach a lot of people today with misogynist views. As a result, such attitudes would be more strongly represented – sometimes even celebrated on the Internet.

Kracher cites the example of Johnny Depp, who, although his ex-wife Amber Heard accused him of physical and psychological abuse, is still celebrated as a hero, while at the same time an enormous hate campaign was launched against Amber Heard. “This has severely distorted the debate about domestic violence – and has contributed to the fact that violence against women has become socially acceptable again in a frightening way,” says Kracher.

“We experienced a backlash,” Kaiser agrees: men would perceive feminist achievements as a loss of control and consequently reacted with massive misogynist resistance.

Role model Andrew Tate?

Andrew Tate also contributed to this. The influencer was in custody in Romania for three months on suspicion of human trafficking and rape. And the ex-kickboxer had previously received massive criticism because he had repeatedly made misogynistic comments on social media. In 2017, as part of the Me-too movement, he even spread the word on Twitter that women were partly to blame if they were raped. Last year he was blocked from numerous platforms – but before that he reached countless, mainly young men with his videos.

Despite all of this, four percent of the men in the survey named Andrew Tate as a role model – and this was without any predefined choices. While Ida-CEO assumes a bias in the selection of participants, Susanne Kaiser is convinced that many young men actually see well-known men like Tate as idols – after all, despite the allegations against them, they are still rich and powerful. “They give young men a simple solution to being successful: As a man, you have to push the boundaries, take no ‘no’ and be superior to others. To me it’s totally plausible that young men then think they have to be the “doers” in our world,” says Kaiser.

A reaction of defiance?

But while on the one hand men like Andrew Tate exemplify an image of alpha masculinity, on the other hand there is great social pressure to abolish precisely this type of toxic masculinity and “classic” role models. Almost every man (95 percent) in the survey also stated that they felt pressure to change. “I think it’s extremely unsettling for men when full masculinity is questioned,” says Kaiser. However, around 88 percent of those surveyed also stated that they were at peace with themselves and their image of men and believed that they were the way a man should be. For Kaiser, this seems like a kind of “defiant reaction” to the enormous pressure that weighs on men. In other words, they resisted the pressure by clinging to the “classic” image of masculinity.

From the point of view of the experts, the survey – and also the shocked reactions to it – shows one thing above all: “When we talk about feminism and equality, it often seems as if we have long since overcome patriarchy and thus also violence by men against women . But that’s actually not true at all: equality is far from being achieved,” says Kaiser. Women and other political minorities are more equal than ever before, but at the same time there is enormous resistance against them – among other things in the form of domestic violence, hatred on the Internet and restrictions on their rights. “It would be important that not all criticism of men is viewed as a personal attack,” Kracher therefore wishes, “but that work is done to get these problems under control.”