Sexism is certainly nauseating – the disgusting leers on the street, the discrimination, the violence. But those everyday expressions of misogyny could be seriously impacting our mental health as well.
A study published this month in the journal Sex Roles reveals that some of the sexism women face – from catcalling and sexual harassment to sexual objectification and violence – makes women generally more fearful and anxious. The researchers from the University of Missouri-Kansas and Georgia State University found a substantive “link between physical safety concerns and psychological distress”.
We already know that violence causes trauma, and that people who are bullied and harassed are more likely to be depressed throughout their lives. Research shows that children who live in violent neighborhoods are more prone to developing PTSD, and that the daily fear they experience changes their psychological make-up so drastically that nightmares, flashbacks and disassociation are common. We even know that racism has a demonstrable impact not only on the mental health of people of color, but on their physical health as well.
Yet, despite the preponderance of evidence showing that violent and harassing environments cause emotional distress and can lead to mental illness, we still have no name for what happens to women living in a culture that devalues and allows men to abuse them without consequence.
What does living with the fear of rape do to your mental well-being over time? What diagnosis do you give to the shaking hands you can’t stop after a stranger whispers “pussy” in your ear on your way to work?
And what about those of us who endure the same daily gauntlet of discriminations and threats of gendered violence without really feeling anything because it’s so routine? What hoops did our brains have to jump through to get to ambivalence? Is it really more “normal” not to be anxious?
When I spoke to Dr. Laurel B Watson, an assistant professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and one of the researchers in the study, she told me that one of the hurdles in studying the impact that sexism has on women’s mental health is that women have normalized this fear and anxiety so completely.
For example, she said “I went for a jog recently, and I saw a guy in a van - and if I jogged past him, he could have opened the door and snatched me,” Watson told me. “I had an immediate response to move to the other side of the van or to change my direction, I didn’t think twice about it.”
“It’s normalized, but it has such an effect on your life – women constrain their behaviors every day.”
This fear and anxiety that women experience isn’t simply anecdotal: women are 70% more likely than men to experience depression and we’re twice as likely to have an anxiety disorder, something Watson,who has a degree in counseling psychology, says is “absolutely” related to living with misogyny.
“Over time, existing in a state of hypervigilance has a negative impact, and leads to a higher level of psychological distress,” she explained. Watson also pointed out that the impact is much greater on women of color, who live with a different historical legacy of objectification and sexual violence.
Mental health issues are still widely stigmatized, but remain incredibly serious – they can be debilitating, lead to serious physical symptoms and increase the risk of self-harm.
Watson would like to see more studies done – bigger studies, that pay close attention to the way that sexuality, race and other identities also impact mental health. So would I: we need to identify the link between sexism and mental health with great enough certainty that people can start to see sexism as more than just a cultural and political problem (when they concede that sexism is a problem at all).
There’s no vaccination we can get or drug we can take to lessen the impact that sexism has on women’s everyday lives. But perhaps recognizing just how sick it is making us – and that the damage it causes runs deep – we can start to convince others to take sexism (and the misogyny behind it) more seriously.