Attitudinal Antecedents of Rape Myth Acceptance: A Theoretical and Empirical Reexamination.

M. R. Burt (1980) concluded that acceptance of rape myths was strongly related to adversarial sexual beliefs, tolerance of interpersonal violence, and gender role stereotyping. However, the scales designed to assess these variables appear to share an emphasis on hostile attitudes toward women. Using alternative measures and 3 samples of undergraduates (N = 429; 199 men and 230 women), the authors demonstrated that hostility toward women can partially account for the relation of the various Butt constructs with rape myth acceptance. In addition, a direct measure of hostility toward women exhibits considerably more predictive power among men than women, suggesting that rape myths may function differently for men and women and that there is significant utility in exploring a more broadly defined construct of misogyny for understanding the acceptance of sexual violence toward women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]