#gender divide

[commonsensecommentary]

“ . . . the testosterone inherent in mostly male, often shirtless, and sometimes belligerent football fans gathering at tailgate parties and inside massive stadiums—where they pound beers, eat meat, and bond in ways that seem primitive and insulting to the prim and easily insulted—sets the teeth of America’s political and cultural Leftists on edge.”

Chicago Bears: The Politics of a Potential Move to Indiana

Explore the Chicago Bears' potential move to Indiana and the cultural divide shaping football's future amidst politics and profit.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

Hating Men Isn't Improving Your Life

Focusing on women and celebrating what makes them so unique, Evie Magazine helps women seek truth and find beauty...the kind that really mat

By: Lisa Britton

Published: Apr 23, 2026

Nearly ten years ago, I stood in the crowd at the first Women’s March, my phone camera in my hand and my notebook ready to document the historic day.

Ihad spent years advocating for girls and women, traveling to Africa, helping run workshops on self-worth, and cheering on every female milestone in boardrooms and classrooms. I believed in lifting women up.

But that day, something shifted.

I saw a little girl, no more than three years old, sitting perched on her father’s shoulders, wearing a tiny pink hat. She wasn’t old enough to understand the slogans or the chants, yet there she was, absorbing the message: the world is stacked against you, sweetheart. Society doesn’t value girls and to matter, you’ll have to fight like a man.

In that moment, I realized we were teaching the youngest among us to see themselves as victims before they could even spell the word. We were teaching them to be angry. I didn’t blame the dad, though. He thought he was doing the right thing: protecting his daughter, showing his solidarity. After my awakening, I left the march convinced that female victimhood was the most disempowering force imaginable. It was a cancer spreading through our culture, one that robs girls and women of agency, joy, empathy and real connections. I made it my mission to call it out. ‘This could truly help women!’ I thought.

Boy, was I naïve.

The backlash was swift. Women I had been friends with for years, who were supporters of girls’ education and mentors in STEM programs, laughed in my face. Some in DC literally walked me out of meetings. “You’re internalizing the patriarchy,” a woman told me. Another accused me of “gaslighting survivors.” I realized then that the very institutions meant to empower women had become factories for grievance. We were radicalizing girls to view every setback as systemic oppression and every man as the enemy rather than building confidence.

Fast-forward a decade, and the problem hasn’t improved. It’s on overdrive. Young men, sensing the hypocrisy of pop feminism, are shifting rightward in droves. They’ve watched boys get pushed to the back of the line for decades while girls received every resource, most of the scholarships, every “you go, girl” motivational talk, and all the attention for their issues. Now they’re tired of the constant blaming and shaming. As an advocate for boys and men as well for the past 8 years, I’ve watched the very real rise in misogyny closely. Online spaces have filled up with resentment on both sides, but while the “manosphere” gets endless negative coverage, the other side flies under the radar.

Female-led misandry is mainstream, and it’s in our schools, our media, our Hollywood blockbusters, and our university lecture halls. Podcasts hosted by women casually trash men as toxic, incompetent, sexist or irredeemable. TikTok feeds overflow with videos declaring “men are the problem” or “why I’m done with dating.” The hatred isn’t just on the fringes. It’s everywhere.

Look at the 4B movement exploding out of South Korea and now reaching corners of the West. Women there, and increasingly here, are swearing off romance, and they’re also rejecting fathers, brothers, and male friends entirely. No dating, no marriage, no sex and no children with men. It’s framed as liberation, but it’s really a full-scale withdrawal from half the human race.

We’ve all been drinking the Kool-Aid since elementary school: boys are bad, boys are privileged, boys must step aside so girls can shine and, don’t forget, “the future is female!” I grew up with it myself. We then wonder why, years later, young women look around and declare there are “no good men left.”

The divide between men and women is growing in all areas. A NBC News poll of Gen Z Americans revealed a concerning reality. Young men who supported Donald Trump in 2024 ranked “having children” as their top marker of personal success. For young women who backed Kamala Harris, it ranked near the bottom—12th out of 13 options. Instead, they prioritized careers, financial independence, and “doing the things you want.” High school girls today, according to Pew Research, are less likely than boys to list family as a life goal. Article after article in magazines and online outlets reinforces the message: being single is the ultimate power move! Who needs men? You can have it all—travel, promotions, and self-care—without the “burden” of boyfriends or husbands.

Women gobble it up, then double down: the reason they hate men is because “there are no good ones!”

The hypocrisy is frustrating. We spent decades telling boys to shrink themselves, to hand over the spotlight, that they’re inherently oppressive, and to apologize for their very existence. We designed schools to favor girls’ learning styles, poured funding into women’s programs, and celebrated every female first while boys’ issues like suicide rates and declining college enrollment barely registered. How exactly were “good marriageable men” supposed to emerge from that environment? An environment that demonized them and pushed them down? Once you recognize it like I have, you can’t unsee it.

More research drives the point home even harder. Privileged women with college degrees, professional jobs, and economic security drink the victimhood Kool-Aid the most. Studies from Harvard show they’re more likely than their working-class counterparts to believe the world is rigged against them. It makes a perverse kind of sense. When you’ve been handed every opportunity, ordinary struggles feel like injustice. Working-class women, who’ve more likely faced real barriers, tend to be more pragmatic. They know life is hard for everyone. But the elite narrative that I discuss in a recent piece for the Institute for Family Studies dominates our culture, and it’s poisoning all women, as we can see in the marriage rates of working-class women. At least the college-educated and professionally successful still have a pretty steady marriage rate by the time they're 45. Working-class women’s rate has dropped dramatically.

The most visible symptom of this disease is anger. A lot of women today are furious, and they don’t always know why. So they aim it at the nearest target: men. I hear my friends complaining all the time. Scroll through social media or tune into a campus protest, and the rage is there. There’s disappointment in dating, but it’s also a worldview that frames every male success as theft from women, every disagreement as misogyny or mansplaining, and even compliments as sexual harassment.

The New Statesman’s recent cover story, “Meet the Angry Young Women,” highlights this phenomenon. In it, British women in their twenties describe refusing to date or even befriend men with differing politics because “they don’t see you as human.” One student calls young men emotionally stunted for not weeping over global crises the way she does. The piece details how educated, middle-class women (despite their advantages) feel more pessimistic and alienated than ever. They prioritize activism over family and view motherhood as a threat to their identity. The article’s polling mirrors what we’re seeing in the think tanks I collaborate with: young women are twice as likely as young men not to want children, and far less likely to believe the system works for them.

The vast majority of young men have a positive view of women. The vast majority of young women under 25 have a negative/neutral view of men. Do you think this stems from experiences or from being taught since they were young that “men are bad”?

This isn’t empowerment. If you truly open your eyes, you recognize all we do is support women in the West.

Girls and women in the West are not victims. We have more opportunities, more resources, more legal protections and more social support than at any point in human history. Universities bend over backward for female students, corporations chase diversity quotas, and the media celebrates women in every field. 

Meanwhile, boys face a rigged game. They have barely any support or resources, they’re punished for normal boy behavior, and they live in a culture that treats masculinity itself as suspect. The data from the American Institute for Boys and Men on male disadvantage in education, mental health, custody battles, and workplace fatalities is overwhelming, yet we’re still teaching girls the opposite. We’re teaching them they’re victims, and they’re becoming radicalized because of it.

The women absorbed in this victimhood can’t see it. The cultural messages are too loud and too constant. From children’s books that cast boys as bullies to university Title IX offices that assume male guilt, the story is the same: women are fragile and men are dangerous. No wonder young women are angry. No wonder they’re opting out of relationships, families, friendships and even basic civility toward the opposite sex.

If we want safer communities, stronger families, and a less divided society, we have to treat female victimhood like the cancer it is. That starts with honesty. We must stop institutionalizing the blame game in schools, stop letting Hollywood and academia teach girls that men are the enemy, and stop rewarding grievance with likes, book deals, and speaking gigs. What we should be doing is teaching resilience. Teach girls that setbacks are normal, that men are not monsters, and that building a life with a good husband is one of the greatest sources of meaning and happiness for human beings. We should celebrate strong families instead of scorning and devaluing them. And we must all acknowledge that boys and men deserve support too, that their struggles don’t cancel out ours.

Mending the divide won’t be easy. It means women need to look in the mirror and admit we’ve been sold a lie, which is admittedly hard to do. Victimhood feels powerful in the moment, but it leaves you bitter. The data and trends all point to the same conclusion: young men are checking out, young women are doubling down on their anger, birth rates are plummeting, and disconnection and loneliness are epidemic. We can keep feeding the cancer, or we can cut it out now and start repairing what’s broken.

Female victimhood is a poison. And if we don’t name it, we’ll all pay the price—men and women. The little girl in the pink hat I saw at the women’s march and all the girls like her need to hear a new narrative. One that unites us and truly empowers us, not one that leaves her angry for life.

[pigmandude]

I think some men need to realize that women also feel lonely, women also yearn for someone to love, and women also have warped perceptions of what they think the opposite gender is due to the internet.

Just letting you know so the next time there is a single woman who you want to talk to (and your in an environment that is ment to build connections aka: social events) go ahead, she is probably as lonely as you are.

[hello-delicious-tea]

[snowgall]

Men Shout, and Women Scream—at Least in Fiction

A statistical analysis shows a clear gender divide in the words that novelists use to describe their characters

Our fictional universe also turns out to contain words that male authors use to describe female characters but which a woman would rarely use to describe herself or another woman. These words seem to highlight the biggest differences in how male and female authors view the world.

One key word here: interrupted. In each of our three categories (classics, popular fiction and literary fiction), male writers are at least 75% more likely to have their female characters interrupt than their male ones. Meanwhile, female authors didn’t discernibly differ in the frequency with which they have their characters of both genders interrupt.

Similarly, female authors use sob at about the same rate for their male and female characters—but male writers hardly ever use it to describe their own male characters. Male authors seem, consciously or not, to hold that if “real men don’t cry,” then “fictional men don’t sob.”

Really interesting article. If the link doesn’t work for you, try clinking through this twitter post: https://twitter.com/jessesheidlower/status/842400218922508288

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

If young men want ‘traditional’ gender roles, we need to know why

Gen Z women and men are growing further apart in their political outlook and aspirations. It is vital the root causes are understood so we c

By: Kathleen Stock

Published: Apr 10, 2024

A few months ago, alongside other proud parents, I sat watching my teenager’s GCSE drama class showcase: a dozen short plays, devised and performed with gusto by small groups of pupils. In terms of theme, there was a definite attraction to the darker side of life; indeed, in nearly every play there was a hair-raising death. Another repetitive strand — at least, in pieces written partly or wholly by the girls — was the shoddiness of men’s behaviour.

One character struggled to find the kettle after his wife had died, having never used it before; another was violent to his family; and what viewer could forget the fiendish theatre manager, forcing dancers to take stimulants so that they could work longer hours? Worst of all, though, was the policeman who was also a serial killer, dramatically strangling his detective wife on stage after she discovered he was the culprit. There were also quite a few impassioned speeches about the prevalence of patriarchy and misogyny in society.

At the final curtain, I looked around at the mild-mannered, supportive fathers in the audience, many of whom had cut work short to be there. What could these men have done to their children, I wondered. Or, more seriously: was it possible to give young women today some awareness of male violence without causing them to write all men off?

I remembered this moment as the topic of political polarisation among young people hit the news last week. Across the world, Gen Z is fracturing along gametal lines like no generation before it, with females tending to be more progressive and males espousing more conservative positions. In fact, this trend has been noticed by analysts for decades, but it has gained urgency recently in combination with concern about declining birth rates. After all, if many young women are insisting they will never kiss a Tory, while more and more young men are becoming Tories, then in terms of future population figures we may be in more trouble than was first thought.

Various explanations have been offered for the deepening division. Some of them are useful: emphasising the unhelpful role of social media, for instance, or the decline of traditionally male-associated jobs. Other theories give an inadvertent clue to the underlying problem, in that they tend to present young women’s attraction to the modern left as positive-sounding or at least reasonable, while the increased conservatism of young men is couched as stemming from petty resentment and personal insecurities.

So, for instance, we are told that young women tend to be in sympathy with progressive causes because they still shoulder the burden of care work and so better understand the importance of looking out for one another; or because they are more keenly aware of inequalities yet to be eliminated in the sexual arena. Young men, on the other hand, are thought to feel emasculated and inadequate by women’s social empowerment and wish to return to a more traditional setup in which their dominance is more secure. Plus they are watching too many Andrew Tate videos.

In a nutshell, then, young women’s political views are taken seriously but young men’s are framed as a result of maladaptive psychology and an inability to cope with loss of status. If this is the calibre of explanation offered, no wonder the latter are feeling hacked off. There should be parity here: either we psychologise both sides of the ideological divide, or neither.

And explaining female progressivism away psychologically would be easy enough to do. Since today’s left seems largely to be interested in dismantling social norms rather than standing up for any, its allure for young women could be explained in terms of high levels of feminine agreeableness and a confusion between being socially permissive and kind.

An alternative line of inquiry might be those studies suggesting a woman is more likely than a man to make a political stance part of her social image, incentivising her to feel animosity towards opposing positions as part of identity differentiation. If this were true, it would mean that many of her political affiliations were formed reactively in response to those of perceived male opponents — which would make her look somewhat resentment-fuelled too.

In fact, we might even suspect that the mutual animosity between women and men came first and their respective voting patterns second, as a symptom of their rivalry and not a cause. In her 2017 book Kill All Normies, Angela Nagle described how the toxic aggression of the male-dominated online right emerged as a psychic counterpart to the passive aggression and self-righteousness of female-dominated online spheres like Tumblr, full of posters obsessed with identity politics “calling out” behaviour they didn’t like. And there’s still a sense today that each side is locked in a dysfunctional dance with the other, taking extreme cases in the opposite camp as proof of their own suspicions of victimhood, and moving further apart in the process.

But though hypotheses like these may be interesting, if the aim is actually to solve the problem, they won’t get us far. Reducing division requires a charitable understanding of why people on each side feel as they do: empathy, not in the superficial sense of mindless cooing, but looking for what is reasonable in each side’s conclusions and taking their points seriously — even if ultimately you disagree with them. Only that way will we be able to uncover shared goals.

If it is true that young men want a return to more traditional gender roles, then why do they want this? What do they think will be better about the world as a result? Are they right? And the same goes, of course, for the views of young women attracted to the progressive end of the spectrum. Older generations can do their bit by avoiding indulging in caricatures of the opposite sex as a whole, no matter how satisfying it feels in the moment. Like it or not, we are stuck with each other; we may as well try to find common ground.

Always look on the dark side of the asteroid

Back in the late Nineties, friends I knew would rhapsodise about chaos theory between spliff drags, and the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings might accidentally cause a tornado on the other side of the world. This week brought us an updated example of unintended consequences: Nasa has deliberately blown up an asteroid as part of an attempt to protect the Earth from future strikes, and in the process set huge boulders on course to smash into Mars. Who knows what further chains of possibilities will now be disrupted or unexpectedly set in motion? We might have inadvertently wiped out a race of Martians, or perhaps hastened their arrival as our overlords instead.

Only time will tell. In the meantime, it’s a salutary reminder of what seems a trend: those with power to change things focusing optimistically on the best possible outcome and not the worst. Perhaps we can’t stop the effects of butterfly wings, but we could at least pay more attention to predictable negative outcomes of interventions. Lockdowns are a case in point — it wasn’t hard to foresee they would have a horrible effect on kids, and indeed several experts were shouting it from the rooftops at the time. Still, it was as if leaders’ minds could only focus on one or two big problems at once. Equally, as AI now transforms the economic and social landscape, I feel under-confident that its cheerleaders are addressing obvious downsides. Perhaps the Martians will do better when they eventually arrive.

In the 1990s, friends of mine would rhapsodise about chaos theory between spliff drags, and the idea that a butterfly flapping its wings might cause a tornado on the other side of the world. Now we have an updated example of unintended consequences: Nasa deliberately blew up an asteroid as a practice run for protecting Earth from future strikes, and in the process set huge boulders on course to smash into Mars. Who knows what further chains of possibilities will now be set in motion? We may have inadvertently wiped out a race of Martians, or perhaps hastened their arrival as our overlords instead.

Only time will tell. For now, it’s a salutary reminder of what seems a trend: those with power to change things focusing optimistically on the best possible outcome and not the worst. Perhaps we can’t stop the effects of butterfly wings, but we could at least pay more attention to predictable unfavourable outcomes of interventions.

Lockdowns are a case in point — it wasn’t hard to foresee they would have a horrible effect on kids, and indeed several experts were shouting it from the rooftops at the time. But it was as if leaders’ minds could focus on only one or two big problems at once. Equally, as AI now transforms the economic and social landscape, I feel underconfident that its cheerleaders are looking into obvious downsides. Perhaps the Martians will do better when they eventually arrive.

[ Via: https://archive.today/gGXMV ]

==

Imagine if these plays had the sexes switched.

Demonizing men has become so normalized, people think it's actually true. But if you can vilify half the population with complete impunity and normalcy, that half is not "oppressing" you. In fact, it would appear you hold all the societal power. You can't be both "oppressed" and a protected class.

[trendynewsnow]

The Gender Divide in the 2024 Election: A Battle of the Sexes

The Gender Battle in the 2024 Election Typically, I draw political insights from Rahm Emanuel rather than his brother Ari. However, a recent quote from Ari, the Hollywood power broker, to Matthew Belloni of Puck, piqued my interest regarding the prevailing gender divide in the upcoming 2024 election. He stated, “This election is gonna come down to probably 120,000 votes. You probably have 60…

The Gender Divide in the 2024 Election: A Battle of the Sexes

[lamajaoscura]

Young men and young women’s world views are pulling apart. The consequences could be far-reaching