Justice

Data Says Looking at Ryan Gosling Makes Men More Feminist

February 8th 2015

We always assumed Ryan Gosling's face had magical powers, but this we hardly expected. According to new research, looking at Ryan Gosling might make men more feminist

In a study done by University of Saskatchewan's Sarah Sangster and Linzi Williamson, at least. The two PhD graduate students in psychology were gung ho to know just how big of an effect the Goose has on people, so the decided to figure it out, scientifically speaking. So together they polled 99 students — one-third of which were men — and showed them photos of Gosling. For both the control and non-control groups, Sangster and Williamson started off with a non-feminist "Hey Girl" meme first.

Ryan Gosling

From there, things diverged for the non-control group; they were offered up the more feminist iterations from Danielle Henderson's Tumblr-turned-book "Feminist Ryan Gosling," featuring memes varying from satirical to more academic feminist ideals. The control group itself was shown the same images of Gosling, just with the feminist text removed. Afterwards, participants were asked to fill out a questionnaire.

And as it turned out? The men who viewed the "Feminist Ryan Gosling" memes were about 10 percent more likely to agree with statements like "men use abortion laws and reproductive technology to control women's lives" compared to the other men in the study. (Women’s beliefs remained unchanged — either because most of us are already feminists, or we learned young to be wary of such a beautiful face.)

"With the men, when we looked at the control group, they had pretty mid-range scores," explained the women in an interview with The Huffington Post, "they were very much in the middle of our scale, but then looking at the experimental group, having seen the meme, they scored actually quite high."

Feminist Ryan Gosling

Mansplaining equality: hey girl — at least it looks better when Ryan Gosling does it.

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