Men Vs. Women

Do boys go to Jupiter to vote more stupider?

sandra voyter INNOCENT

After a two week break in posting (I’ve been busy), I was inspired to come back by that Financial Times article about male/female differences in political identity (disclaimer, I’m using male and female to mean “of men” and “of women”, not in a weird conservative way).What do we make of this “battle of the sexes” going on?

Battle of the sexes

The main source of the whole ordeal was an article written by John Burn-Murdoch at the Financial Times (summarized in a thread here). The core of the argument is, according to both ideological and partisan identification, as well as surveys on certain issues, that young women are becoming increasingly progressive while young men are not. This sentence sounds a bit squirelly, because it is: by some measures, young men are more conservative or less liberal than young women, by others, they are more conservative than other, older men, and by others, they are less liberal than expected but not more conservative.

It’s worth pointing out that there is something to the idea that young men are turning (far) right while young women are shifting left: swiss voters show a divide between self identified left wing women and self identified right wing men at the highest levels ever, there is a large divide between spanish men and spanish women, and while polls found that the biggest supporters of Javier Milei were the youth in general, young men supported him at twice the rate of young women. South Korea, the most radically divergent country, has a uniquely vicious and toxic public discourse (as well as rampant, unchecked misogyny).

However, I think a distinction between the US and other countries needs to be made, for reasons that will be clear further down. Using the same data source, the discrepancy does not seem visible unless certain assumptions regarding weighting are made, and even then this is largely due to a one-off outlier (2022) which shows a steep decline in male liberalism that was not present before then.

Partisan affiliation measures (liberal = Democrat; conservative = Republican) have also not shown a significant trend break. And by some measures, men are more liberal than before, just less more liberal than women. Using a different survey, we can find that men have gone from identifying as liberal Democrats to identifying as moderate independents, which doesn’t imply a major change in the same way. Which is why I dislike so heavily the squirrelly nature of the statement: it’s not really disproven by either because the meaning can change so much. One final issue is that men’s and women’s opinions aren’t that different across issues, and while younger generations seem to have a slightly larger difference in opinions and in partisan ID, it doesn’t seem very polarized in any specific direction - the biggest discrepancies are in gun rights, various economic issues, and transgender people.

¡Pare de sufrir!

Why, exactly has this happened? Well, in a piece recommended by both the author of the piece and me, economist Alice Evans has found that it has four main components: a feminized public culture, economic resentment, social segregation, and cultural entrepreneurship. I’m mostly going to ignore the first one.

Does economic resentment breed sexism? Yeah. In Europe, there is a strong association between male job insecurity and sexism. In European regions where unemployment has increased, men are more in agreement that women’s advancement and opportunities came at their expense. In China (another country with uniquely messy gender relations), men who scored higher on measures of economic deprivation also scored higher on measures of hostile sexism. And British men who grew up in high-deprivation, high-unemployment regions report feeling more hostile to feminist and progressive attitudes.

I’ve written before about the decline of marriage and of fertility, and both are largely due to shifting preferences in partners from women - women don’t want to be stuck doing the childcare and housework, largely at the expense of their own careers, while men slack off (even the “feminist” ones). To bring it back to the movies, let’s take Anatomy of A Fall: while much ink has been spilled on the movie’s feminist credentials, it actually portrays a very clear-cut case of sexist resentment. Sandra, the main character, is a moderately successful writer and translator married to Samuel, a middling professor and even more middling writer. Samuel dies under suspicious circumstances, among which is his complicated marriage to Sandra, now accused of doing it. MILD SPOILER AHEAD: A major source of resentment, for Samuel, was how his own career came second to Sandra’s, and how he had to perform most of the domestic work (this was largely imaginary and his own fault, per Sandra).

But this is actually backed by research: straight couples where the woman outearns the man have lower likelihood of marrying, and lower satisfaction (writeup of the research here, in Spanish). The issue here is mostly status: it is in men’s benefit, both material and symbolic, that women take second place - and if they don’t, men lash out. Male resentment is a powerful tool, which is exacerbated by both the rise of women’s economic prospects, and the decline in men’s relative prospects, as well as (in non-US societies) the relative decline of all economic prospects.

Economic resentment motivating prejudiced views is nothing new. In both the United States and Europe, rising economic inequality and slowing growth are linked to support of far-right parties. In Brazil (good Spanish writeup here), economic liberalization led to higher unemployment, which resulted in higher affiliation with pentecostal churches - which, in turn and coupled with tax policy, led to higher vote shares for far-right candidates. Joblessness, as a whole, is leading to economic resentment and to hostile sexism. Of course, the best known example is Nazi Germany: the NDSAP secured a larger vote share in cities more affected by financial failures, and districts more closely harmed by the Weimar austerity programs turned to supporting Hitler in latter years. But also, more interestingly, Protestant regions of Germany showed more antisemitic ideas than Catholic ones, because Protestants directly competed with Jews, while Catholics were barred from doing so.

That there is a close link between widespread economic deprivation and/or low socioeconomic mobility and conservative beliefs in men is both unsurprising, a major piece of the puzzle, and also why the US data has to be qualified: the US has, currently, a stronger economy than basically any of the other places mentioned, as well as socioeconomic mobility that is below some of them but above others. Socioeconomic mobility is a whole ordeal on its own (shameless plug included), but it’s clearly linked to zero-sum beliefs (as in, beliefs that the world is zero-sum, or “dog eat dog”) - which, in turn, entail closed-mindedness. Actually, the author of the FT piece wrote a separate piece on this exact issue, showing that close-minded beliefs are intimately tied with declining economic dynamism.

Bowling with Shy Boys IRL

There’s an interesting thread to pull here: interpersonal connectiveness across a variety of groups and dimensions is tied to socioeconomic mobility - meaning that (as per Alice Evans’s take) the disintegration of diverse social groups has led to right-wing radicalization. Friendships, especially diverse ones, have political power.

Diversity is the first key variable: for example, banning cousin marriage in the US, as well as similar policies in medieval Europe, resulted in growing dynamism and higher GDP over time, as tight-knit but homogenous groups were replaced by more diverse ones (write up here). Similarly, antisemitism in Germany was linked to more homogenous and less dynamic regions since the Medieval period, but interestingly enough, Catholicism acted as a deterrent of NDSAP support, since high-ranking Catholics opposed Hitler. Thus, a lack of intermingling also results in more prejudice: inter-group prejudice diminishes as contact increases (as shown by evidence from India and Iraq). For young people, a shift to online education for the better part of three years might have moderated the anti-prejudice effects of schooling¹.

This collapse in youth socialization has largely been attributed to social media: young people, as everyone else, are in a bit of a loneliness crisis right now: COVID, social media (the social media-depression link, however, is somewhat overstated), and scholarly and parenting practices have led to two thirds of teenagers describing themselves as lonely. A common theory, known as the “Bowling Alone” thesis, states that the disintegration of social groups and civil society organizations led people to become extremists: the first such example given is Nazi Germany, but most importantly, the modern United States, where the decline in unions, churches, and other groups was associated with right-wing extremism. In the US, cooperation is down, and one such example is bowling: while people used to bowl with coworkers or friends, and even form leagues, they started doing so alone, increasingly.

However, the “Bowling Alone” theory isn’t really true: while Trumpism is strongly associated with people who used to attend church but now don’t, the truth is that Trump performed much better in areas with dense civil society networks than in areas without them. Besides church, there are many social groups and organizations that are centered on homogenous, antipluralistic mindsets : homeowners associations; country clubs; golf teams. Rather than “no civic society”, the problem appears to be “bad civil society”: areas with high density of civic organizations saw much faster enrollment into the Nazi Party, leading to a collapse of the Weimar Republic.

What this all comes down to is that the radicalization of young men in online spaces isn’t caused by social media and “no connections”, but rather, social media and bad connections: being an Andrew Tate fan has become a catch-all identity, that sits at the fulcrum of the social lives of Tate’s fans. Much like Donald Trump diehards replaced hanging out at church with hanging out at rallies, or chatting on Truth Social, Tate-ists (who are, by and large, a small minority of young men) replaced hanging out with friends, many of which may be women, with chatting with incels about how misogyny is based. To take the exact opposite of this sort of sphere, why are Swifties so more unhinged than a few years ago? Well, because the rapid shift towards online socialization since the pandemic has created algorithmically-narrowed friends groups (online and IRL) that have one niche interest in common. I have a few friends that like Talyor Swift, and I’d have gone to the concert if I liked her as much as I do now, but nothing crazy - the shift is in the online spaces we inhabit.

I used to be fascinated with incels (the involuntarily celibate, a group of far-right men who can’t get laid), and the strangest thing about the space is how it turned from “how can I meet women” (the term was created by a lesbian!) to “how can I meet and fuck women” to “how to fuck women” to “fuck women”.

Conclusion

Why are young men and young women diverging politically? Well, it’s not particularly clear how much they are, but if they are, it’s a combination of economic imbalances (women are more educated and advantaged in today’s interpersonal economy), cultural resentments, and the replacement of the IRL social sphere with an online social sphere. It’s largely in men’s best interest that women be placed in an economically and socially submissive role, and when they aren’t, largely by long-term, macro-level economic forces, men lash out.

I don’t really think there’s a lot at the individual level, besides hang out with people in person more, and join some social clubs, as long as they’re not the fascist kind. People tend to not want to be around others with different political ideologies, but also, the crisis in marriage is caused by men’s bad vibes as partners so like, your move.

1. You can find writeups about Indian caste prejudice and Indian education in Spanish