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
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.”