The Gender Divide is Global

“And the only sound that’s left after the ambulances go, is Cinderella sweeping up on Desolation Row…” – Bob Dylan

On Friday, January 26th, a columnist for The Financial Times named John Burn-Murdoch posted a chart showing that the much-discussed and growing ideological divide between young men and young women in America is manifesting in a similar way in countries around the world. Anyone who’s been half paying attention for, oh, a decade and a half (or more) could not have been the slightest bit surprised.

I suppose it’s the natural tendency (if not hard-wired instinct) of demographers to look upon surveys or data sets, and pontificate about them in a way that gives even self-evident findings an aura of being groundbreaking. But no amount of hyperbole can mask obliviousness to the obvious.

In the last month, Neil Howe has devoted a great deal of column space to this gender divide, most of it in response to Murdoch’s initial tweet. Long recognized as one of the world’s leading demographers thanks to his work on generations and as one of the authors of The Fourth Turning, Howe continues to carry a certain amount of clout when he dives into a subject to this extent. But the problem with making assertions on the basis of officially-reported data, of course, is that information can always be parsed to affirm whatever conclusion an expert wanted to make in the first place. And such is clearly the case here.

Unpacking all of the reasons young men and women have become so ideologically divided from one another would take all day. Suffice to say, the major factors which have contributed to the divide as it exists are all familiar: feminism, unchecked hypergamy, social media, social isolation, the transformation of education into an indoctrination factory, D.E.I.-mandated misandry in hiring and at work, the fallout from #metoo, and the different orientations men and women have toward the world to start with. But the fact that we’re seeing this gender divide across continents and cultures clearly suggests a deeper division stemming from something not confined to geography – almost certainly a combination of the influence of the pill, the Sexual Revolution, and the ascent of the modern welfare state and corporate technocracy, both of which are poisonous to gender relations and hostile to the family unit by their very nature.

Which brings me back to Neil Howe. Throughout their collaboration, Howe and William Strauss asserted that gender relations, like many other social dynamics, change with the cycle of history they identified. In fourth turning eras, they wrote, a civic crisis reliably pushes gender relations back to the conventional and gender roles back to the traditional. At the root of it all, they claim, is the imperative to survive: people feel free to experiment and live non-traditionally when times are good and a sense of fear, deprivation and uncertainty doesn’t consume their thoughts, and when the pendulum swings the other way, they behave differently. (Perhaps this is why the “weak men create hard times” line got mis-attributed to Strauss and Howe. But I digress.) Of course, anyone with common sense would pick up right away that this connection reads like a self-fulfilling prophecy: if the cycle of history determines human behavior, then the cycle of history is essentially the determinant of everything. And if that’s true, then anything happening in the real world can always be characterized to fit a settled, unchanging conception of how – and why – the world changes.

The changes which came to gender relations in the years in and around the Sixties were different in scope than any which ever came before. We are living, today, through the social, economic, cultural and political fallout of those changes, at the same time our social, economic, cultural and political structures are careening toward collapse. On some level, young men – millions upon millions of whom have been passed over by the professional and managerial class, maligned by woke culture, shut out of the dating scene, and kept in the shadows by the rise of technocratic tyranny -sense that what is happening today is leading toward something genuinely cataclysmic. They see the forces that have made their adult lives so much less fulfilling than their father’s and grandfathers’ as the problem, and they can’t be shamed for speaking their minds anymore. Meanwhile, the Establishment takes a break from the melodramas over Orange Hitler and Senile Joe by talking about Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. If T-Swift finally found her love story (with a Pfizer spokesman!), maybe all the young liberal college-educated single women in the cities can dream, too.

https://www.demographyunplugged.com/p/more-on-the-widening-youth-gender?r=2bh1zm&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

Howe devotes a great deal of space in his latest piece (out February 13th, in the link above) talking about the struggles of young women. Fair enough. But it’s a fine line between acknowledging trends as a demographer, and legitimizing certain trends borne of fear and group solidarity as rational but not others. However one feels about Andrew Tate, he didn’t achieve mass popularity with men under age 30 by accident. The fame and fandom accorded Greta Thunberg might have many origins; rationality is not one of them. Howe attempts to account for her rise with a drawn-out explanation about “emotional pain and political ‘catastrophizing.'” Does that sound believable to you?

The most astonishing conclusion Howe wants us to believe, is that this gender divide (along with all its attendant dysfunctions) reflects what invariably happens in fourth turnings somehow. It doesn’t. Moreover, he’s confident that as events darken and time horizons grow shorter, young men and women will ultimately assume complementary roles to meet the crisis in constructive fashion. That confidence is misplaced. What we are seeing between young men and women today a sign of an irrevocable breach decades in the making. The longer it continues, it will surely lead to a spiral of ever more dysfunctions…and ever greater loneliness, isolation, celibacy, resentment, anger, childlessness, hopelessness, and despair.

The chances that young men will turn more liberal as we proceed down this path as a civilization, are precisely zero percent. Will young women on the liberal end of the spectrum see the light, or will most of them resolutely stick by the outwardly reassuring-but thoroughly rotten bill of goods they’ve been sold? I think that question answers itself.

The gender divide is global, and it is not going away. In the dying stages of neoliberalism, the whole world is becoming something like Dylan’s “Desolation Row.”

In order to use generational theory as a guide to understand what’s happening today, the theory has to be put aside when reality turns out differently. Especially when the difference between the theory and reality augurs the very real possibility of a bleak future.

– Paul Zimmy Finn

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