Relations Between Rape Myths, Ambivalent Sexism, Social Dominance Orientation, and Right-Wing Authoritarianism Across Gay and Straight Women and Men: More Similar Than Dissimilar

ABSTRACT

Rape myths support and fuel cultural understandings regarding gender roles and deny the victim’s rights and strengthen those of the instigator. Little research exists examining the invariance of rape myths measures and models used to explain rape myths across gay and straight samples. Examining correlates of rape myths and determining if the pattern of relations between correlates is similar across gay and straight male and female samples provides insights into socially constant factors that are influencing rape myth acceptance. Participants (294 straight women, 282 gay women, 293 straight men, and 234 gay men) were asked to complete measures of social dominance orientation (SDO), right-wing authoritarianism (RWA), ambivalent sexism toward women, ambivalent sexism toward men, and rape myths toward women. We tested four models that highlighted significant, direct paths between SDO, RWA, and rape myth acceptance. Both hostile sexism toward women and benevolent sexism toward men demonstrated significant indirect effects between SDO, RWA, and rape myth acceptance. Benevolent sexism toward women and hostile sexism toward men demonstrated, in most samples, significant indirect effects between SDO, RWA, and rape myth acceptance. However, the strength of those relations differed for gay and heterosexual samples. This provides further understanding of rape myths as SDO, RWA, and benevolent and hostile sexism toward men and women play a role in supporting rape myth acceptance and establishes that, overall, these relations are more similar than dissimilar across straight and gay samples.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author Contributions

Adelheid Nicol conceived the study and its design, prepared the material, collected the data, wrote the introduction, method, discussion, and some of the Supplementary material. István Tóth-Király conducted the data analyses, wrote the results, most of the Supplementary material, and edited the complete manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Data Availability Statement

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are not publicly available due to the nature of this research, participants of this study did not agree for their data to be shared publicly, but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

Supplementary Data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224499.2024.2371951.

Additional information

Funding

This research received funding from the Canadian Defence Academy Research Programme.