Fear and anger have found ways to displace themselves onto other targets, above all women and their unprecedented outspokenness. The most obvious is anger — at women making demands, speaking up, in general standing in the way of unearned male privilege. Women were once good mothers and good wives, props and supports for male ambition, the idea goes –but here they are asserting themselves in the workplace. But in every culture male disgust targets women, as emblems of bodily nature, symbolic animals by contrast to males, almost angels with pure minds. Disgust is often more deeply buried than envy and anger, but it compounds and intensifies the other negative emotions.

Source: Washington Post September 29, 2018 18:00 UTC