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-thirties 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. In countries on every continent, an ideological gap has opened up between young men and women. Tens of millions of people who occupy the same cities, workplaces, classrooms and even homes no longer see eye-to-eye. In the US, Gallup data shows that after decades where the sexes were each spread roughly equally across liberal and conservative world views, women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percentage points more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up
What does this mean for capitalist social reproduction?
Also, what are the material causes of this trend?
The article claims that this shift is mostly (although not exclusively) driven by young women moving leftwards. The article also claims this was originally sparked by things like the metoo debate and stances on consent and SA and then has spread to other issues like immigration (the article doesn’t go into economic policies, working conditions etc and how these may differ between young men and young women). The trend is also a lot more pronounced in occupied Korea and in China than in Western countries.
Places like Germany also see some rightward radicalization of men, but not to the same degree as women are moving leftwards. Men’s attitudes mostly remain the same as among dudes over 30 years of age.
Edit: Forgot to add what this means for capitalist social reproduction. The article cites occupied Korea as the main example:
Its marriage rate has plummeted, and birth rate has fallen precipitously, dropping to 0.78 births per woman in 2022, the lowest of any country in the world.
No expert, please dunk on anything I say, this is just a vibes based answer… but I would guess it’s got to be something to do with Gen Z facing a hopeless future and being alienated by it, but getting different media narrative fed to them to cope with it.
Boys are being told by the algorithm, don’t be a soy boy cuck leftie (insert whatever alt right insult they’re using today), be an alt right alpha; fight people, fuck hot women and treat them like shit, drive fast super cars and have loads of money like your all your Alpha hero’s like Andrew Tate or whoever the latest chud is. To many an immature teenage boy’s perception of masculinity and power etc that’s a pretty intoxicating reactionary rabbit hole.
I would guess girls are fed less of that toxic alt right shit, or if they are fed it, to be a girl on the wrong side of the patriarchal power structure must make that alt right shit less compelling. And so with either less experience of alt right media and/or just less compelling alt right media, it will have a diminished effect on their outlooks so they must come to different conclusions to deal with their alienation. Hence the diverging gender gap.
Or something completely different idk.
I haven’t looked at the original poll data, but the article claims that the shift is mostly due to women moving left compared to older generations and men staying politically in the same place as older dudes.
So if gendered media consumption is an issue, there’s either highly effective feminist propaganda that blows Andrew Tate out of the water, or the onslaught of reactionary garbage merely manages to prevent that men make the same leftward move as women. Which would honestly make sense, if you ask me the entire rightwing rabbit hole stuff is ultimately built around capital trying to violently maintain the status quo, especially with issues like climate change threatening the old order of wealth distribution. That kind of stuff is always at the core of outlets like Daily Wire, with the anti-feminist, racist, queerphobic stuff being used to reel people in after they’ve bitten the most surface level “SJWs are ruining your favorite movie franchises” bait.
This means that rightwing agitation aimed at women, such as tradwife discourse or terfism, is particularly concerning, because it attacks the left’s most promising avenue for growth. It also means that we need more “feminism is for everyone” kinds of attacks on patriarchy to expand the leftward shift to young men, explaining to them how toxic masculinity sets them up for a life of drudgery, a failed marriage or a life of inceldom and an early grave in the service of capital. I mean, if you look at manosphere discourse, none of that is making men live happy and fulfilled lives, it means not only that they get stuck in a constant doom loop of having to prove how alpha they are, it also means that a lot of them become permanently undateable to an increasing number of women. Like, seriously, the amount of being fed up with dating men i see among young women is completely off the charts. Granted, all of the young women i know are queer and already involved in leftist spaces, straight women do not have the same freedom in just not dating guys that the bi/pan women i run into enjoy, but feminist climate protest pansexuals seem to be much more representative of where women in general are headed than the Tate crowd, and the data seems to back it up. It honeslty makes sense, too, “You shouldn’t date dudes that do not care about your consent” is a much more believable and easier to follow advice than “pay 5000$ for my online class and you, too, can drive 30 sports cars before you end up in a Romanian jail.”
That makes sense to me. As conditions deteriorate, there is a turn towards and source providing answers and a heightened awareness of one’s own interests. The alt-right is characterized by violent hyper-patriarchy and it is necessary for women’s safety to be alienated from that movement. If someone is advocating for the end of your bodily autonomy, you are not going to be on their side!
I don’t think this is surprising. The Western left has not presented an attractive, or even a coherent and well-articulated vision of what further leftwards social progress would look like for non-LGBT men as a group. I don’t think it’s irrational for someone to favor a defined present or past over an unknown future.
Speaking with some of the younger and unmarried members of my male peer group, many of them are confused and disillusioned with the rules and expectations around social interactions shifting arbitrarily around them and being forced to navigate them without much guidance or support. Moreover, we’ve now identified many social ills that men are victims of but those seem to be slower to be addressed. For example, men are something like 1/3rd of domestic violence victims but the vast majority of support structures and discourse around domestic violence address female victims.
I think we as leftists need to at least present some sort of coherent and well thought out idea of what it will mean to be a man in a socialist future. We don’t have to pander to them, or promise them concessionary preservation of patriarchal elements, but we’d win a lot more men over to our cause if we could tell them what their lives would look like in a socialist future.
like… what western left…
and like what do cishet men want that other people don’t want? a big tiddy dommy mommy goth gf? their childish fixations to be validated? sorry gavin, there’s a new hot free to play game on steam and it’s called Being an Adult. how about you form your politics around hope for the future existence of this planet, a decent standard of living for all, building power in your workplace, and an ecstatic liberation of desire unmediated by the spectacle?
my real, compassionate advice to Men writ large is stop conceiving of yourself as someone who is destined to suffer. no one was meant to live like this, not even you. and paint your fucking nails for once in your life.
like… what western left…
Schrodinger’s left. We exist when we argue that people and politicians should listen to us, but don’t exist when it’s time to hear criticism.
and like what do cishet men want that other people don’t want?
Well I’m an Asian cis man living in the West so from my own experience it’d be really nice if media and pop culture stopped portraying us as inflexible patriarchal traditionalists on the one hand and desexualized enuchs on the other. It’d also be really cool if “no Asians” (in relation to Asian men exclusively) was not apparently an acceptable thing for women and gay men to write on their dating profiles and express in public. I’m sure other cis men also have some issues specific to them and their existence as men that they would like to be addressed which I’m not privy to because I’m not them.
I’m not saying that addressing women’s issues and LGBT issues isn’t a priority but the kind of pointless hostility that you expressed in your post is likely a material reason why some young men reject leftist political and social thought.
Edit:
sorry gavin, there’s a new hot free to play game on steam and it’s called Being an Adult.
I just want to add that “grow the fuck up” and “man up and deal with it” are expressions of toxic masculinity which are used to crush men trying to express their feelings and develop actual emotional maturity that isn’t just bottling it up until it explodes. If we are against toxic masculinity (as we all should be) I don’t think it’s good to turn around and use it’s tools and language when it happens to suit us.
like i understand how the default neurosis now is “oooh, men are trash so everyone is gonna hate more for being one” but like that is not rational and isn’t something that you will actually encounter. you can just talk to women. be nice to them. that’s the main thing. you can talk to other men too. practice doing that, and not just in a way where you’re trying to impress them with how you are also a man.
i’ve asked this a couple times and have yet to get a straight answer but WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING IN SOUTH KOREA?? like assuming this data means anything, for an economically prosperous vassal state of the US empire that seems like huge shift.
