Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez hit out at Fox News host Tucker Carlson after he blasted scientific research performed by "feminists" on Thursday's episode of Tonight.
Responding to a tweet from behavioral scientist Caroline Orr, who shared a clip of the segment, Ocasio-Cortez wrote: "Democracy and civil rights is how we got a country where 'feminists do science.'"
It "tells you a lot," she added, that Carlson was "drumming up fear around women's rights to create suspicion around climate change policy."
Democracy and civil rights is how we got a country where “feminists do science.”
— Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (@AOC) April 5, 2019
(Also, note how he’s drumming up fear around women’s rights to create suspicion around climate change policy. Tells you a lot.) https://t.co/yquFeP7vYp
Carlson made the comments during a segment about a "new" research paper he claimed blamed "toxic masculinity" for global warming.
Published in Journal of Consumer Research, the 2016 behavioral science paper asked the question: "Why are men less likely than women to embrace environmentally friendly products and behaviors?"
The paper's authors suggested stereotypes linking "green behavior" to femininity might be a factor in this discrepancy.
The team performed a series of experiments to test their hypothesis, Forbes noted in a recent interview with study author and Utah State University marketing scholar Aaron Brough. In one, they tracked which products men purchased at Walmart when given either a pink, floral gift card or one designed not to threaten masculine stereotypes. Men with the pink card bought more non-environmentally friendly products than those using the other.
"We argue that this green-feminine stereotype may motivate men to avoid green behaviors in order to preserve a macho image," the researchers wrote in their paper.
Brough told Forbes: "We need to overcome our unhealthy judgments of gender incongruence. And men need to be confident in their self-identity and decide to live a sustainable lifestyle without caring what other people think." The researcher did not immediately respond to Newsweek's request for comment.
But Carlson had a different take on the research. He claimed it argued men "deliberately [destroy] the environment and [hog] the remote," to avoid the stereotypically feminine green "trait."
"That's what men do. If we want to save the environment, we have to suppress men," Carlson said.
The host went on to ask guest Mark Steyn: "How did we wind up with a country in which feminists do science? Isn't that [why] you're sort of bound to get a study like that?"
Steyn then criticized broad swathes of scientific research: "It's very difficult to tell with social science, as with climate science, whether or not it's an ingenious parody. It's almost impossible to tell in fact."
Steyn's comments are in stark contrast to advice from many scientists, governments and international agencies. The U.N., for example, describes "basic well-established scientific links" between rising levels of greenhouse gases—driven in large part by the burning of fossil fuels—and rising global temperatures.
"From shifting weather patterns that threaten food production, to rising sea levels that increase the risk of catastrophic flooding, the impacts of climate change are global in scope and unprecedented in scale," the intergovernmental organization reports on its website. "Without drastic action today, adapting to these impacts in the future will be more difficult and costly."
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Katherine Hignett is a reporter based in London. She currently covers current affairs, health and science. Prior to joining Newsweek ... Read more
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