Yeah that's not true.
You're going off the 18% number and making the false assumption that, because only 18% of people openly state they are feminists when asked means that some vast vast majority "reject feminism" which is false. In those same polls, a slim majority are "not" feminists, with a large number of folks simply answering "I don't know."
Again, here is what I wrote in my last post on this topic:
"What I take from that is that a slim majority of all respondents (52%) say they aren't feminists; 18% say they are; 26% say they're not sure. If you assume 1/2 of all respondents are male; and 2/3rds of feminists are women, then those numbers are nowhere near as bad as one might think."
Moreover, it is widely accepted that, from a sociological standpoint, if you actually do a typology/ideological taxonomy test on people to interrogate their actual views rather than their views with respect to various labels, you will find far different answers than if you asked a person to label themselves.
We've seen this phenomena for years with respect to the word "liberal;" which for decades, was a dirty word. This is where the notion that America is/was a center-right country comes from; even though, if you ask people, an outright majority would support a liberal and populist platform.
So with respect to "feminism" it isn't enough to say "do you call yourself a feminist, yes/no/not sure?" And from that extrapolate that some "vast vast majority" openly "reject feminism." That's a false conclusion based on a false narrative.
I actually think you'd find something much more like the Washington Post poll, which found that about 1 in 2 people held actual feminist views (which is really what we're hoping to measure, the prevalence of said ideology); with a majority of women in favor and a minority of men in favor.
Again, to reiterate this point; here's a snippet from the project poll at WaPo that discusses the cause of such a wide survey variance:
"HOW MANY FEMINISTS ARE THERE? Polls have found that the number of Americans who identify as a feminist depends on how the question is asked. The Post-Kaiser survey’s question, first asked in a 1986 poll by Newsweek and Gallup, found 47 percent of Americans identifying as a “strong feminist” or “feminist,” while 44 percent identified as “not a feminist” or “anti-feminist.” Surveys asking yes-or-no about identifying as a feminist have found far fewer identifying with the movement, about 20 percent since the 1990s. The gap likely reflects the public’s conflicting feelings about the movement, with many seeing themselves somewhere in the middle. Fourteen percent in the Post-Kaiser survey called themselves “strong feminists,” while 4 percent identified as “anti-feminists.”"
