An increasingly large proportion of young men support parties that espouse sexist views towards women and challenge recent and hard-fought advances in gender equality. A frequent-cited explanation for this gender gap, particularly among the young, is grounded in men’s perceived relative deprivation vis-à-vis women: men who perceive greater threats to their former dominant status — e.g. in labour markets — are often more inclined to question further gender equality measures or sympathise with far-right actors that advance illiberal views on gender. This paper builds on the framework of relative threat to investigate a less-explored dimension: threats to (fragile) masculinity. A popular assumption posits that men with fragile masculinity are more inclined to endorse misogynistic and sexist views. Does undermining one’s feeling of masculinity therefore change one’s views towards these issues?

Using an original, pre-registered experimental design fielded among a well-powered sample of online survey respondents in Britain, we manipulate feelings of masculinity through provocative cues related to penis size. Taking the symbolic importance that men place on performative masculinity via the physical size of their "manhood" as an instrument to manipulate feelings of masculine dominance, we randomly expose men to information about their relative position among peers. We theorize that perceived threats to masculinity – primed via exposure to a significant over- or under-estimation of the population penis size mean – activate a psychological and emotionally negative response that can engender heightened levels of benevolent sexism and an increased openness to far-right political actors who defend traditional gender hierarchies.