Playing to Win: Male–Male Sex‐Based Harassment and the Masculinity Contest

Abstract Workplaces characterized by masculinity contests equate masculinity with status, making it especially critical to prove masculinity and defend against threats to this identity. Past scholarship has explained male–female sex‐based harassment (MF‐SBH) as a strategy for defending threatened masculinity and the gender hierarchy more broadly. The current research examines whether male–male SBH (MM‐SBH) is also triggered by a desire to reassert a threatened sense of masculinity. Specifically, I explore the effects of two forms of masculinity threat on men's propensity to harass another man: prototypicality threat (suggesting one is gender atypical) and distinctiveness threat (suggesting the sexes are more similar than they are different). An online experiment and a lab study indicated that prototypicality threat, but not distinctiveness threat, leads to greater MM‐SBH. I suggest that masculinity contest workplaces, which especially highly prize masculinity, likely exacerbate this effect.