Dear activists: everyone hates you.

So says yesterday’s article at Salon summarizing a series of pilot studies assessing popular perceptions of environmentalists and feminists. Unsurprising to probably everyone who has publicly demanded change, Americans aren’t so in love with the rabble-rousers. Tom Jacobs writes:

In one [study], the participants—228 Americans recruited via Amazon’s Mechanical Turk—described both varieties of activists in “overwhelmingly negative” terms. The most frequently mentioned traits describing “typical feminists” included “man-hating” and “unhygienic;” for “typical environmentalists,” they included “tree-hugger” and “hippie.”

Another study, featuring 17 male and 45 female undergraduates, confirmed the pervasiveness of those stereotypes. It further found participants were less interested in befriending activists who participated in stereotypical behavior (such as staging protest rallies), but could ...