Why are men and women becoming more politically divided?
The dividing lines in politics used to be between left and right, between organised labour and the owners of capital. Since 2016, many voters have been split between those who support a more open, or more closed vision of the world.
Now we are also seeing a bifurcation in worldviews between the sexes, with women in advanced democracies becoming more progressive while their male counterparts become more conservative:
The gap is widest in the US and Germany, at 30 points, and while British men have become significantly more progressive, their views have not changed as quickly as those of British women.
This trend started in the early 2010s and accelerated in the wake of a global #MeToo movement that saw multiple sexual abuse allegations brought against Harvey Weinstein in October 2017. This moment galvanised millions of women to speak out against long running social injustices and structural misogyny, in a way that changed the political discourse around gender inequality for good.
Measuring the political gender divide
The easiest way to measure it is to record responses to the proposition, “Feminism has gone too far”, where 1 = strongly disagree and 10 = strongly agree. We see that there is a sizeable gap between men and women, especially amongst younger cohorts.
Bringing this back to the American election happening today, the political gender divide translates into Kamala Harris leading Donald Trump by 14 points amongst female voters (55% to 41%), while Trump leads by 17 points among men (56% to 39%), according to a New York Times/Siena College poll.
On tour in the manosphere
This is one of the reasons why Trump and JD Vance were doing the rounds on manosphere podcasts last week, from Full Send to Joe Rogan, and why the Trump campaign has adopted an even more chauvinistic tone at rallies.
But as Antony Scaramucci, Trump’s former communications director pointed out on the The Rest Is Politics US podcast last week, all this chest beating bravado may have been for naught, as young men without college degrees are the least likely of any voting cohort to actually get out and vote.
Maladapted men
A familiar explanation for the the political gender divide amongst feminist writers is that men are bitter about their declining economic fortunes, declining social status and lack of sex. So they retreat to more traditional values and a past where they got their way.
The facts certainly support this framing:
Declining economic fortunes : American working class men’s earnings have not improved since the late 1970s. Working class (WC) women, and non-WC women in particular, have seen much better wage growth. This supports the notion that working class men are being left behind economically. It is the same picture in de-industrialised parts of Europe, and particularly pronounced in former East German states like Saxony and Thuringia.
Declining social status : College degrees are a strong marker for social status and women are outperforming men by now receiving 58% of all BAs in the United States. This marks a reversal in the opposite direction when compared to 1971 (the year Title IX was passed in the USA to promote women’s educational opportunities).
Lack of sex : men under the age of 35 are reporting having less sex than previous generations, and not voluntarily. For anyone who thinks this is an Anglo-Saxon problem, it isn’t. Nearly 40% of Finnish men with low education are now childless by the age of 45, and most have no partners. The same findings were made in Germany by Ansgar Hudde from the University of Cologne.
Insular incels
The modern archetype of the maladjusted male is the incel, who has withdrawn from the real world into the safety of his bedroom. Addicted to video games and online porn, he spends his days stewing in a cesspool of online misogyny, imbibing the toxic masculinity of manosphere influencers like Andrew Tate.
This characterisation is extreme, but not unfounded. The terms 'incel' and 'toxic masculinity' have become part of our lexicon because they give a name to observable trends. The danger is when these extreme characteristics are assumed to be the norm among men. They are not, otherwise the political gender divide would be a chasm.
More likely, what we are observing is that better-educated, more liberal-minded women are an enigma to less educated, more conservative-minded men like Lukasz, a Polish firefighter interviewed for an Economist feature.
It’s hard to say what young women want in a man these days. Previously, they just wanted a man with a stable income, who could fix things in the house and who had a driving licence.
What women want
According to data across OECD countries, when women outperform men at school and university it is the stock of working class men that declines most sharply. Hence the growing number of single, childless men in highly egalitarian places like Finland.
This is why far-right parties are targeting the vulnerabilities and insecurities of this group. See this piece of dating voting advice from the AFD titled, “Echte Männer Sind Rechts (Real men are right wing)”:
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As it turns out, this is terrible relationship advice from Maximilian Krah. If the political gender divide tells us anything, it is that women are looking for less machismo and more compassion in a potential partner, and presumably less ethno-nationalism. Maybe start by getting your shit together, signalling that you're willing to do your share of the housework and childcare, be able to talk about your feelings from time to time, and build from there.
I’m looking for a man in finance
Well educated men on the other hand, doing better than ever. Big Dick Energy (BDE) personified, and definitely the beneficiaries of assortative mating practices i.e. well-educated women seek well-educated men, of which there are now fewer as a total proportion than in the past.
As a man, if you can layer on a career in finance, get your hands on a trust fund, grow to a height of 6’5 whilst beholding the world through blue eyes, you’re made.
If you are a single woman reading this I do feel it's my responsibility to inform you that there is an estimated 1 in 250 million probability of finding this kind of guy, with an even lower probability of you liking this guy if you do find him. Tik Tok viral hits are often light on probability calculations, so here they are:
Beyond zero-sum thinking
There is a crucially important point at the centre of this discussion, and one made by Richard Reeves, author of Of Boys and Men:
Policy-making is not a zero-sum game in which you have to choose between caring about female disadvantage or the socio-economic gap or male underachievement. All three matter.
Since #MeToo the dominant narrative of gender equality has been framed almost exclusively in terms of the disadvantages of girls and women, which means if you want to talk about men’s issues it is assumed you are choosing not to talk about female disadvantage, of which a lot still exists.
I decided to write this piece because I feel that men and women are drifting apart in these discussions, and I often feel that I fall into the trap of zero-sum thinking, for the reasons Reeves describes, and because so many of today’s ills can be traced directly to men:
Male megalomania with a psychopathic disregard for human suffering: Putin's war in Ukraine
Yet another powerful man, insulated by his fame, who has been allowed to physically and sexually abuse victims for decades without anyone saying anything: Sean 'Diddy' Combs.
A man who drugged his wife so he and over 70 men could have sex with her whilst she was unconscious : Dominique Pelicot. The roll call of rapists in this case now includes : a journalist; a prison guard; a civil servant; an agricultural labourer; men happily with children; men described by their partners as “kind”, “attentive”, “respectful”, and “having a heart of gold”. All of them could be found within a few kilometres of a rural town in Provence, proving that it's not just powerful men who are capable of monstrous acts, but any man.
And then we come to Donald J. Trump, a man with a long history of non-consensual behaviour towards women, who by the time you read this may once again be the most powerful person in the world. That this could happen in a post #MeToo world is shocking and shows that we live in an age of impunity.
But if the continued appeal of someone like Trump tells us anything, it’s that impressionable young men need better role models, and that our political discourse needs to bring different cohorts of men inside the tent. As Reeves argues:
(The) failure to address the problems of boys and men creates a dangerous vacuum in our culture, and increasingly in our politics.
A recent study found that young European men are particularly likely to resent women (and feel that feminism has gone too far) if there has been a recent rise in unemployment in their area and if they perceive the institutions of their society to be unfair. If we simply ignore them, or worse, actively vilify them, they will continue to be instrumentalised and radicalised by far-right parties.
We need to address these men head on, with a change in tone, and a reframing of the narrative. The last word belongs to Margaret Mead, whose wisdom is as urgent now as it was when she first shared it in 1975:
Roles are changing for both men and women. Women are being pressured to believe that their past status was brought about by male oppression. At the same time men are being accused of being oppressors—and angry oppressors at that. The whole process of change is taking place in an atmosphere of the greatest bad temper, and a tremendous amount of secondary hostility is being generated that in itself poses a threat to a good outcome.
I couldn’t have mansplained it better if I tried.