The emerging Political Divide between Young Men and Women

John Burn-Murdoch has an interesting article out titled “A new global gender divide is emerging”:

“One of the most well-established patterns in measuring public opinion is that every generation tends to move as one in terms of its politics and general ideology.

Its members share the same formative experiences, reach life’s big milestones at the same time and intermingle in the same spaces. So how should we make sense of reports that Gen Z is hyper-progressive on certain issues, but surprisingly conservative on others?

The answer, in the words of Alice Evans, a visiting fellow at Stanford University and one of the leading researchers on the topic, is that today’s under-30s are undergoing a great gender divergence, with young women in the former camp and young men the latter. Gen Z is two generations, not one.”

Looking at a tweet from John Burn-Murdoch dated January 26, 2024 it shows graphs of the political divide between young men and women aged 18 to 29 years old in the countries of South Korea, United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom.  All show big differences between men and women in their political affiliation accelerating after about the year 2015; the women going more liberal and the men going more conservative except in the United Kingdom where both men and women went more liberal but women went more liberal to a much greater degree than men did.

This is the first time I have heard of this trend of young men becoming more conservative at the same time as young women becoming more liberal being something that was happening internationally, not just in the United States.

This is quite mystifying to me and goes contrary to how I thought societies function; that men and women will think the same because they live in the same social environment.  Not necessarily, it appears.

The concept of a “gender war” goes back a really long time, like back to 1970s feminism.  Men were the oppressors of women and feminism was meant to liberate women and bring about a new world of gender equality.  The thing was, everybody believed in gender equality, gender equality was just common sense and basic decency, both men and women understood that.  The concept of the “gender war” between men and women was not that men and women were against each other and fighting for conflicting goals, it was just feminists attacking men and men sheepishly agreeing that yes men were bad and discriminatory in the past but now we as men will do better and try not to be so discriminatory and misogynist against women anymore.

Men and women actually disagreeing with each other at least to the extent of claiming different overall broad political orientations is new.  It is also interesting of course that women are going liberal while men are going conservative.

I tend to think of liberalism as the status quo and conservatism as the rebellion against the status quo.  Liberalism is the legacy culture while conservatism is the reaction against the dysfunction of the legacy culture.  So this then means that women want a continuation of the prior gender equality based social contract while men are rebelling against the prior existing gender equality based idea.

Looking back on my own history, the reason why I as a man rebelled against the gender equality based idea was because gender equality simply made me too weak and worthless as a man to attract a woman.  Turning to patriarchy instead was my means of increasing my power as a man therefore increasing my value to women to enable me to succeed with women better.

Does a woman want a man who is going along with the system?  Yes, going along with the system implies a reasonable level of social functioning and the ability to succeed in the society.  Does the woman want a man who is rebelling against the system?  Not necessarily, rebelling is scary, going against societal expectations is scary, society will try to smash the rebel into weak submission to the status quo again in order to maintain and perpetuate the status quo.  Rebelling is dysfunctional and not likely to gain rewards from the surrounding society.  Does the woman want a man who is succeeding in a new status and a new position within the society that the man created to elevate himself as a man?  Definitely, such a man is a real winner.

You can think of there being 3 different types of men; the feminist man, the men’s rights man, and the traditionalist man.  The woman wants a feminist man sort of, at least a socially successful feminist man.  The feminist man is the continuation of the status quo.  Does a woman want a men’s rights man?  Hell no, he is angry and bitter, opting out of society, going his own way, and is very hostile towards ideas of taking care of women and is mostly pre-occupied with defending himself against the bad things he thinks the woman is going to do to him.  The men’s rights man is focused on his rebellion against the prior existing gender equality status quo.  Does a woman want a traditionalist man?  Hell yes, the traditionalist man is the best man of all.  He is stronger than the feminist man and he is more geared towards serving the woman’s interests than the feminist man is.  The traditionalist man is the man who has succeeded in creating a new role and a new identity for himself within the wider society that is higher functioning than what the previous gender equality status quo had to offer.

The feminist world is about equal parts men and women, 50% men and 50% women; the men’s rights world is almost all men, maybe as high as 90% men; the traditionalist world is mostly women, maybe 75% women.

The feminist man is an average value man, the men’s rights man is an extra low value man, the traditionalist man is an extra high value man; this is why the feminist man has an average amount of women around him, the men’s rights man has very few women around him, and the traditionalist man has an especially high number of women around him.

Men turning conservative means men rebelling against the prior existing liberal status quo.  The thing you have to be aware of though is that going against the status quo means going from being feminist to being men’s rights; it means decreasing in desirability to women, so that if a man turns men’s rights the woman will want to go towards feminism stronger to protect herself against the hostile extra low value men’s rights man.  This would explain women becoming more liberal in reaction against men becoming more conservative.

However one may ask, if the man is simply punished by women for moving away from feminism towards men’s rights then why would men go towards men’s rights in the first place?  The answer is that the man is seeking traditionalism; the man is seeking success and value as a man greater than what feminism has to offer him and so to move towards the man’s goal of becoming a traditionalist man the man has to go through being a men’s rights man first.

This is my theory of what is causing the political divide between young men and young women; young men are rebelling against liberalism because liberalism, the feminist part of liberalism, makes men weak and less desirable in the eyes of women.  In order to rebel against feminism the man has to rebel against the status quo and rebelling against the status quo makes the man weaker and more dysfunctional and more undesirable as a man at first driving women further away from him, driving the women further into feminism and liberalism.  That is the situation as it currently stands, men rebelling against liberalism becoming more conservative and women in response clinging to the liberal status quo even more strongly.

When men later on reach the stage of traditionalism, advance from being an extra low-value men’s rights man to being an extra high-value traditionalist man then the women will flock to the traditionalist men that are now available to them and the women will become more conservative in order to appeal to and be able to get with the traditionalist man.

So is the political divide between the sexes some kind of disaster that will prevent men and women from being able to get together, to get married and have children and such?  I would say no in the sense that the political divide is the result of men and women not being able to get together rather than the cause of men and women not being able to get together.  The young woman is becoming more liberal in order to keep the newly conservative man away from her.  The young man is becoming more conservative in order to be able to get the woman at a later date.  Once the man becomes high functioning conservative, a traditionalist man, then the woman will become conservative in order to please and get with the traditionalist man that she now wants.  Problem solved.

Related article: The Deserved Downfall of the Modern Man