It has long been the case that American women are generally more liberal than American men. But among young Americans, this gender gap has widened into an enormous rift: According to recent Gallup polling, there is a 30-point differencebetween the number of women age 18–30 who self-identify as liberal and the number of men in that demographic who do the same.
That’s largely because young women have gotten much more liberal, while young men have stayed ideologically more consistent—or, according to other analyses, become more conservative and anti-feminist. (Of course, not every person identifies as a man or woman. But gender roles still play a big part in shaping our lives and politics, and in the context of this column, I am focusing mostly on the vast majority of Americans who identify as one or the other.) It’s not happening just here either; the political divide between the sexes is a trend that researchers are observing in some other countries too.
How do women bridge the divide with men who follow misogynist influencers? How is that even possible? With men who are antifeminist and want to take away our rights?
It’s not on “women”. It’s on all society. Stuff like this does not work like either one or the other. We are one society, men and women. We are the same in more things that matter when forming a society than we are different in.
One could start literally for free by creating successful, positive male role models in media and public discourse alongside women. I don’t mean the two dimensional cutouts like Marvel heroes, but people with real problems tackling real issues. If it has to be Marvel, you can start at Deadpool. Dude was ugly as fuck and still loved.
Celebrate Men’s Day and Father’s Day as well as Women’s Day and Mother’s Day. Create acceptance and celebrate fatherhood and single fathers, fathers as homemakers as well as fathers as breadwinners. Celebrate successful (not wealthy, but societally positive) men as great examples of what a man should and can be.
There are other things that would be more expensive, like unfucking schooling. Other than reversing the underfundedness of it, make teachers be a prestigious profession again, and have more male teachers for male students to look up to. Get a bit more into why current school practices like homework, rote learning and “frontal”, unidirectional lessons disadvantage boys in school. Address the conflict between the societal expectation for boys to be dominant as boys and submissive as students better. Unfuck sports as a subject, take the sole focus away from whatever flavour of profitable “sportsball” your country plays and offer more choice.
You can then go on to work. Tighten up labour safety and wellbeing practices, especially in hard physical labour disproportionately affecting men. Fight overtime as a concept in general, enforce breaks and frequent examinations of both workers’ health and safety regulations. Fight back against “macho” culture not by “telling men not to rape”, but by strengthening mental healthcare, and supporting hobby groups as third places where men can create friend groups to share feelings with. If broke communist countries could support hobby associations like glider airfields, shooting clubs, hiking clubs and so on, with substantial financial and material grants, why can’t the most wealthy societies in history?
Make sure that every third man compared to the life expectancy of women does not die by reaching the age of 60 from the mental and physical hardship of work.
Then there are the hard parts. Like undoing the creation of barriers between people where you are not supposed to interact with other people next to you. Undoing loneliness and the “Tinderization” of relationships, and social media and all the fucked up stuff. Stop having society treat all men as potential predators.
This is just shit off the top of my head, and I’m not even an expert.