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The political gender divide — 25 Comments

1. All of this can be summed up by the phrase “luxury beliefs”. The globe is now filled with entire cohorts (mostly women as above…) that have them, without having the slightest clue about the herculean efforts it took for their beliefs to become a luxury. Civilization is a facade, an important one, but a facade nonetheless…especially after a week of those around you not being able to get something to eat.

   The holders of luxury beliefs better believe that human history is filled with inflection points where luxury belief holders are confronted with a stark choice: maintain their luxuries or die. You can wise up now at a greatly reduced price, or you can take the chance and wise up later at a price you may be unable to pay with anything but your life.

   The choice, since forever, is yours.

2. Contra “gender”, looks like it’s a plain old sex divide in South Korea, given their reputed 0.68 (non)-reproduction rate.

3. Many years ago I told my Wife that young men were being treated as second class. She disagreed. But now, I think she has a slight shift to my way of thinking.

4. It’s become reflexive to blame the Internet, and esp. smartphones, for the psychological issues that have come to plague our societies, especially in young people. There’s no question that the smartphones have _amplified_ the effect, intensified it, but the issue is not the screens but what is being transmitted through them.

   The governing elite in the West, for decades now, has been pushing a set of social ideals and proposed arrangements that just don’t work for human beings. The effect of this falls especially heavily on the young, because they can’t remember a time before the crap started pumping out. If your whole frame of reference is poisoned, your results will be wrong even if your reasoning processes are fine.

   The biggest single non-workable ideal is probably that the sexes are socially and culturally interchangeable. It’s at the very heart of the modern social-left agenda, and it’s _false_. Gay ‘marriage’ is one expression of it, the trans insanity is the same issue in a new face.

   But young people who try to live in accordance with that idea (and its related falsehoods) find that they just can’t _do_ it. Men and women find themselves expecting the opposite sex to behave as if they were, well, the same, and they’re not. Young men expecting young women to be as sex-for-it-own-sake focused as they are end up frustrated and disappointed. Young women who want their boyfriends and husbands to be like their female best friend, end up freaked out by male aggressiveness and emotional reticence.

   (Obviously this is generalized, there are lots of males who are emotionally outgoing and open and plenty of women who have high sex drives and aggressive personalities, obviously. But equally obviously they are the exception.)

   Attempts to convince the opposite sex to change to fit the ideal that was taught don’t work, because they run against the grain of biology. Modern culture has convinced both sides that they should _try_ to fit these expectations, but they just can’t.

   Eventually, both sides get sick of trying to be something they just can’t be, and begin to resent the expectations.

   Young men are sick of being told they are toxic simply for being who they are. Young women are tired of being expected to think and act like the actresses in porn, (again, speaking very generally). But nobody has told either one what they _should_ expect from the opposite sex, what they shouldn’t expect and what they have the right to demand. What the practical realities of heterosexual relationships actually are, etc.

   Young men have been told to expect limitless sex, limitless fun, young women have been told never to ‘settle’ for less than the best guy they can get. Both must actually settle because not every guy can be a Musk or a Hefner, not every woman can marry a driven but loyal CEO with huge income and high status. In a healthy society, both sexes would be taught that these aren’t even plausible expectations or desirable goals in real life.

   Of course many young people do know that, or quickly learn it, but enough don’t learn it in time to make for misery.

5. “Men were generally more focused on “competition, bravery, and honor.”

   I was always focused on those 3 things. I still am. And I’m happy with that.

6. This all goes back a long way. I remember viewing “Coming Home” (1978) and hating it. All the men in that movie were broken; the main character was literally castrated. The women were all strong and sensitive and nurturing. It was woman’s movie, a feminist movie, a castration fantasy for women.

7. I see the story as a more practical treatment for the problem identified: Young men are becoming more conservative, and that means they now must be treated as potentially dangerous monsters. I think it’s just feminist fear-mongering as policy wish-casting.

8. I suspect that it traces back to politics in at least two ways. First, there has been a loosening of public morals since the 60s, we are no longer a trust society and women are not as safe. Second, convincing people that they have problems that electing the right people will fix is a productive political strategy. It is hard to say if the current political divide is cause or effect, but it is certainly related.

9. Irishotter49 on 1978s Vietnam motion picture, “Coming Home”.
   Castrating and troubling, is how it struck me. Men are bad, women are Saints.

   You describe how I reacted to viewing it.

10. Unwillin’ Barkis
    All of this can be summed up by the phrase “luxury beliefs”.

    For more discussion of luxury beliefs, consult Rob Henderson’s memoir (Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class), or this article from his website:Luxury Beliefs are Status Symbols.

    I have read that young females are more influenced by social media than young males. See Jonathan Haidt. (The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness)

    I am an old geezer who stays away from social media.

11. @ HC68 > “But nobody has told either one what they _should_ expect from the opposite sex, what they shouldn’t expect and what they have the right to demand. What the practical realities of heterosexual relationships actually are, etc. … In a healthy society, both sexes would be taught that these [limitless sex, limitless fun] aren’t even plausible expectations or desirable goals in real life.”

    I agree with most of your analysis but have to give a shout-out to our LDS youth program, which makes a real effort to do what you are advising here.
    Whether all or even most of the kids will internalize those lessons is debatable, but so far the ones we are familiar with from working with them at church (and including our now-40-something kids and their generational cohort) do seem to be getting the point.

    Other than in the blatantly-leftist-coopted Christian churches, I think others are working on this problem as well. I suspect that’s true of Jewish congregations also, but don’t have any personal connections with those.

12. I wonder what happened around 2010? The differences in the US, UK, and Germany all seem to speed up noticeably around that year.

13. ”I wonder what happened around 2010? The differences in the US, UK, and Germany all seem to speed up noticeably around that year.”

    Tinder

14. @mkent, wrong … tinder didn’t start until 2012.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_social_media

    I think in 2010 was simply a point of critical mass in social media, especially smartphone access. Facebook started in 2004 and by 2010 had over 300 million users. Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram were all growing or launching. I think the real big change was smartphones, though. The iPhone had launched in 2007 with sales of about 1 million handsets but exploded by 2010 with around 40 million sold that year. I don’t think it’s just social media that you can check occasionally from your computer (even if you can do it frequently) but the immediacy of reading and posting from almost anywhere.

15. More generally on the topic of a political gender divide, the only thing I’m seeing is a change in emphasis. I remember back in the 1980s and 1990s where stories came up over and over again about the problem *Republicans had attracting women voters*. Nobody ever seemed to ask why Democrats had trouble attracting male voters back then. Of course now that it can be cast as a problematic behavior due to Donald Trump, the question can be asked that way, with extra fervor because Democrats are losing elections rather than believing they are on the cusp of permanent majority.

16. “…immediacy…”

    Exactly right, as in “Instant [Hysteria] Gonna Get You”

    And even if the retractions or corrections ARE printed, who’s gonna read them…when they’re on page 2001?
    (Similarly…even if some balance is provided in an article, who’s gonna read it if it’s HIDDEN in the last paragraph?)

    A lotta dishonesty out there. How does one even find out about it so as to confront it…?

17. GOING, GOING . . . Democrats star down deepest hole in decades – Re-Post

    https://commoncts.blogspot.com/2025/03/going-going-democrats-star-down-deepest.html

18. And there is an excellent reason to promote all this hysteria:
    The Democratic Party’s need to provoke crisis after crisis after crisis…

    https://instapundit.com/710328/

    File under: Hysterical like a fox…

19. I agree with your proposed reasons and will add one of my own…although it’s a multilayered one.

    I’m speaking in generalities here, so of course there are exceptions.

    Women, being the physically weaker (not an insult, just an observation of fact) and more emotionally driven sex, tend to need to feel safe and protected.

    In my experience, women who are in stable, family relationships tend to be conservative. They feel that they are safe and protected but they derive that safety and protection from their husband/family.

    Even in my youth, the women who tended to be more liberal were single, divorced or widowed women who didn’t have that sense of safety and security from family. They tended to seek out other sources of safety and stability…primarily through “the authorities”…i.e Government.

    I believe that’s part of the source of this disparity. Fewer and fewer young people are entering into stable relationships. Young women are told to pursue their career and put off family relationships until later, if at all. And since most marriages these days end in divorce, even the ones who do pursue a family, end up single for protracted periods of their lives. As a result, more and more young women don’t have that stable family relationship from which to garner their sense of safety and security, so they turn toward the government to “take care” of them.

    Young men are more driven by the desire for independence, competition and risk-taking than by safety and security. They don’t need or want the government to take care of them. They want the government to leave them the hell alone. Add that to the fact that the left has been telling them that their entire personality and sense of self is “toxic” their whole lives and I’d be shocked if young men weren’t increasingly leaning toward the party of Trump and Musk.

    You mentioned that this began as far back as the ’80’s.

    I graduated high school in 1982 and was thoroughly indoctrinated by the public schools of the time. They weren’t as bad as they are now of course, and I grew up in a rural, very conservative, very Christian community, so I imagine it was much worse in the cities even back then…but my education still leaned distinctly toward the left and I’d been inculcated with feminist and socialist principles throughout. It took many years of life experience to slowly wean me off those inconsistent and anti-human nature philosophies and mold me into the “patriarchal” “misogynistic” “toxic” masculine man that I am today.

    The leftist indoctrination in public schools isn’t a recent phenomenon…it’s been gaining momentum and may have reached critical mass recently, but it started many generations ago.

20. My brother has a friend who’s a divorced Asian American female. They were visiting with us, and she remarked how important diversity is to her. I thought (but did not say, because it was not the time or place for it) “what kind of diversity do you mean? More people who look like me, and lots of interesting ethnic restaurants? Or do you mean Crips and Bloods and MS-13 diversity?” I think we all know which she’s in favor of.

    She lives in an affluent bubble and works in one of the wealthiest cities in the country. When she votes, I am very sure that she does so with the expectation of never having to actually experience the consequences of her voting habits.

21. “I believe that’s part of the source of this disparity. Fewer and fewer young people are entering into stable relationships. Young women are told to pursue their career and put off family relationships until later, if at all. And since most marriages these days end in divorce, even the ones who do pursue a family, end up single for protracted periods of their lives. As a result, more and more young women don’t have that stable family relationship from which to garner their sense of safety and security, so they turn toward the government to “take care” of them.

    Young men are more driven by the desire for independence, competition and risk-taking than by safety and security. They don’t need or want the government to take care of them. They want the government to leave them the hell alone. Add that to the fact that the left has been telling them that their entire personality and sense of self is “toxic” their whole lives and I’d be shocked if young men weren’t increasingly leaning toward the party of Trump and Musk.” — Sailorcurt

    I agree with a lot of this, and the other stuff from Sailorcurt’s post that I did not quote. I esp. agree that married women are more likely to be conservative politically than single. Whether that is cause or result or both is debatable, I would say probably both.

    Though it should be noted that a majority of first marriages _do_ last for life. The majority of all marriages ending in divorce is only true if you count in second, third, and nth- marriages, which are statistically more likely to fail than first marriages.

    A substantial chunk of the total divorce rate is ‘repeat business’.

    An important point too is that _men_ get more cautious and conservative when they get married and esp. when they become fathers. A family man can not and _should not_ have as high a risk tolerance as a single man. Men also get more cautious as they get older (or they generally do if they have any sense). A risk that might be reasonable at 30 may not be at 50, when you’re closer to retirement and have more to lose, and less time to recover from a mistake.

    Which leads into a danger here for the GOP and Trump and Musk, and it’s a major one, because this statement is only conditionally true: _Young men are more driven by the desire for independence, competition and risk-taking than by safety and security. They don’t need or want the government to take care of them. They want the government to leave them the hell alone._

    Yes, males are less security-driven than women on average…but it’s a difference of _degree_ . Males still worry about their old age, about getting sick, about losing their jobs. They have a _higher_ risk tolerance than women on average, but not a limitless one. This drives much of the ‘gender gap’, and has for decades, but it’s still a difference of degree.

    This matters because the agenda of the libertarian right goes way, _way_ past the risk tolerance of most of _both_ sexes. The weakening of the Demcratic media means that Musk and Trump can now safely go after Social Security fraud and Medicare fraud and so forth and not have it be presented to the country as ‘cutting benefits’. Twenty years ago, even as much as they’ve done would have been political suicide because the press would have presented it, almost without opposition, as benefit cuts.

    But there’s still effectively zero appetite among the voters for actual benefit cuts, for raising the retirement age, for privatization of Medicare. There is no appetite to eliminate the minimum wage or phase out unemployment benefits. You can adjust at the edges, but try to remove them entirely and you’re politically _dead_ .

    And males will be almost as adamant on that as females, because males get old too. Males lose their jobs too.

    Even now post-Trump, there are many in the GOP who desperately wish, for various reasons, that they could undo the New Deal. They can’t. If they take on the ghost of FDR head on, the ghost of FDR will crush them, because the voters still approve of the core of the New Deal.

    Think back a month or two: Vivek Ramaswamy stepped into a hornet’s nest with some comments about the need for immigrant workers and Musk seemed to go along with him, though he had to backtrack quickly, because the MAGA contingent exploded. The rank and file of MAGA and the interests of Musk and Ramaswamy and their ilk have inherent fracture lines that could break the Trump coalition if strained.

    It’s a dangerous mistake to overlook the _male_ need for security, just because it’s smaller than the female one.

22. After 50 years of steadily increasing indoctrination, I don’t see how it is possible that young men still retain the need to be “independent”. Do you remember what we had to do to get incompetent female teachers to stop force-feeding young boys into a prescribed chemical life? There was a period there during the late 80’s,and early 90’s when the first reaction of an incompetent female teacher who a young boy had challenged, would be to take him down to the school nurse who would call mommy and get him sent to a “doctor” for chemicals to make him “milder”. It took a while to reduce that response to a level that was nearly invisible to the public. However, the following response was to diminish young boys publicly in every way imaginable. That was done through “Psychology”. You want to see how prevalent Psychology has become in the teaching of teachers? Go to the website of your favorite college, look up the Master in Education degree, and check on the required courses. We have just spent 40 years telling our young men how terrible they are– the question is who is involved in getting them to reconsider?

    The greater question is how will we get women of all ages to back away from their communist handlers–the “feminists” who think that women should rule the world. If women are single and have a nice job, they will blindly obey the local women who got them to that point, and those “handlers” are true communists well trained in indoctrination techniques.

23. Sgt. Joe Friday

    Right on. Women, more than men, affluent more than less well-off, tend to feel, or instinctively expect, to be more protected from, the results of their opinions/beliefs/votes.

24. Even now post-Trump, there are many in the GOP who desperately wish, for various reasons, that they could undo the New Deal. They can’t. If they take on the ghost of FDR head on, the ghost of FDR will crush them, because the voters still approve of the core of the New Deal.
    ==
    Define ‘core’.

25. Apropos:

    That is Why He Won: TOP 10 MEMES

    From a Charlie Kirk clip: “Young men want to be part of a political movement that doesn’t hate them.”

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